My reflections take as their point of departure, the act of public disrobing as a mode of conflict management, which multiple actors and social movements, including Black Lives Matter protesters, have mobilized. In lodging grievances in the current climate, conventional models of the Enlightenment-inflected and bourgeois-informed channels of participatory democracy—voting, participating in political parties, lobbying, and writing letters to politicians—no longer seem to suffice. Defiant disrobing or genital cursing, the last resort for some, however, offers mixed results with the deleterious and salutatory effects of the Internet. Here I meditate on how digitality disrupts the postcolonial reading framework that scholars offer in the name of the empire writing back. Departing from that cosmological framework, I suggest another way of reading, which I call naked agency and that highlights the ever unstable and unfolding nature of power relations, thus contributing to the ongoing debates on notions of subjectivity and agency.

For further reading:

Naminata Diabate (2022) Going a piece of the way with Carole Boyce Davies’s migrating subject: on open reading, naked agency, and Naked Athena, Journal of the African Literature Association, 16:2, 286-301, https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2022.2071594