Black Fear: African LGBTQIA Refugees and Resettlement in Europe

At the end of World War II having witnessed the atrocities of the Nazi Concentration camps, countries around the world banded together and created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This declaration, with its thirty articles laid out the rights that every human being in the world was entitled to. Beginning with this declaration, this paper has three aims. First, to interrogate how colonial ideas surrounding Black bodies and Black sexuality come into and continue to affect modern day conversations on when, where, and how to resettle African LGBTQIA refugees in Europe. We do this by drawing from the work of African Feminist scholars such as Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí and Sylvia Tamale about Black bodies and who is considered human versus sub-human, as well as European Feminist scholars such as Judith Butler and Ann Stoler, and their work on the intersections of colonialism and sexuality. Second, we aim to examine the geopolitical spaces that Black LGBTQ refugees are forced to live in and the consequences they face when they push back against these predefined and limiting physical spaces. Using United Nations documents, refugee personal accounts, news stories, and the works of theorists Alexander G. Weheliye and Achille Mbembe, we analyze how refugees “assemble” themselves and their lives to fit the ever-changing model of a “worthy refugee”. And third, in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human rights this paper aims to explore how African refugees can be resettled in a way that recognizes their humanity.