HOMOEROTICISM OF THE "BLACK BODY" IN THE INVERSELY QUEER VIEW: AFRICA BY RASTKO PETROVIC

In the literature about Rastko Petrovic, the fact of homoerotic contents in his texts was only recently observed. In this sense, the travelogue Africa is the most indicative. The narrator's delight towards the naked, "black body" - more male than feminine - provokes the question whether such a view, from today's epoch, can be interpreted as colonial or anti-colonial. The policy of looking at the "black body" is the policy of analyzing anatomic Otherness which is strange (queer) in relation to the dominant, Eurocentric discoursive order. This could be one of the definitions of "queer" in the social sense. However, the travel writer at the same time "colonizes the queer" by observing him in his optics simultaneously as the Otherness that might show one of the possibilities of a stable identity and a stable social organization. Queer theories prove to be the most appropriate in interpreting the ambivalent ideology of the narrator of Africa in encountering the boundary areas of sexuality, but also in detecting a kind of civilization travesty that is taking place in the travelogue written by Rastko Petrovic.