Errant Subjects: ¿Technoqueer Bodies,¿ Racialized Capitalism, and a Decolonial Queer African Reading of an E-Waste Dump in Neoliberal Ghana

Kwame Edwin Otu is currently an Assistant Professor of African-American and African Studies at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He earned his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Syracuse University. Kwame's research, which draws on his own experience as a self-identified black, gender non-conforming man has received several prestigious awards and fellowships. These include, among others, a Wenner Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and the Carter G. Woodson Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. In 2013, Kwame was selected as one of thirty Laureates to participate in the South-South Institute, a tri-continental forum that brings together scholars from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Prior to receiving this award, the American Anthropological Association named him an Emerging Leader in Anthropology for the Association of Queer Anthropology Section. He wrote and acted in the award-winning short film Reluctantly Queer, which was the result of a collaborative project between him and Ghanaian-American Filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu. An epistolary short film chronicling his experiences as a gay man in the United States yearning for the love of his mother in Ghana, the documentary was a finalist in the Short Films segment at the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival. His book, Amphibious Subjects: Sassoi and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana, is under contract with Indiana University Press.