Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. The Erotics of History challenges long-standing notions of sexuality as stable and context-free--as something that individuals discover about themselves. Rather, Donald L. Donham argues that historical circumstance, local social pressure, and the cultural construction of much beyond sex condition the erotic. Donham makes this argument in relation to the centuries-old conversation on the fetish, applied to a highly unusual neighborhood in Atlantic Africa.

Donham visited this anonymous West African community multiple times in order to conduct fieldwork for one year on the hybridized culture of the region, exploring the economic, social and sexual history of its particular erotic practices. The Erotics of History , therefore, is largely devoid of ethnographic details, instead seeking answers to a larger complex of questions concerning colonialism, slavery, technology, capitalism, and erotic identity This approach allows Donham to critique the universality of sexuality by focalizing one particular cultural erotic practice.

The uses of the Erotic inspired us to think how we, African Diaspora students, exercise eroticism in our ideologies, values, physicality, and our entire sense of being. For our final presentation, we individually registered our own insights about the erotic and incorporated a video montage that coalesced all of our knowledge about popular culture displays of eroticism and what they mean to us. We also explained what gender, sexuality, and dance meant to us and how it all ties in together to perpetuate the uses of the erotic. There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise.