Kwame Edwin Otu is an Associate Professor in the African Studies Program at the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Otu is a cultural anthropologist with interests ranging from the politics of sexual, environmental, and technological citizenships, public health, to their intersections with shifting racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa and the African Diaspora.
Otu’s first book monograph, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana, is part of the New Sexual Worlds Series published by the University of California Press. The book is an ethnography on queer self-fashioning among a community of self-identified effeminate men, known in local parlance as sasso. In the monograph, he draws on African philosophy, African/Black feminisms, and African and African Diasporic literature to explore how sasso navigate homophobia and the increased visibility of LGBT human rights politics in neoliberal Ghana.
Otu’s current/ongoing project investigates the global politics of e-waste in particular, and the undulations of global environmental transitions, in general, and their impacts on African and African-descended bodies. Entitled The Salvage Slot: Technology and the Ecologies of the After-Afterlife, it is an ethnography on waste workers on an e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, that investigates Africa’s paradoxical location as a site of extraction and deposition.