place in the contemporary moment. Although there are societal rules that young people obey, there are many ways in which individuals break the rules – or rather bend them to suit their contemporary needs. There is a rearranging of what it means to be a woman, and of how to enjoy sexuality. This is not to say that gendered sexual power does not exist. Women have to worry about being seen as promiscuous, whereas men do not have such worries – a mainstay issue of patriarchal power even in ‘modern’ African relations. In the postcolony, belonging is troubled by life in cosmopolitan areas such as Nairobi as young people, assisted by new print media and technologies, carve out identities for themselves that do not necessarily align with their cultural background. Language is one of the ways in which identity contestations display themselves. The demand for African languages and the supposed authentication that speaking an African language represents are strong forces. The language conundrum unveils deeper questions about the use of ‘foreign’ languages in Africa. Can, say, English and French be thought of as ‘foreign’ languages, given that they are widely spoken on the continent? Surely an argument can be made that the English and French languages belong to Africans as much as they do to the English and the French. Furthermore, it can be argued that people who cannot speak vernacular languages challenge simplistic ideas of ‘purity’ or ‘authenticity’ of Africanness in many ways, unveiling that ‘African’ as a category is itself somewhat fictional if we consider how the continent historically came to be. There are two more questions that remain with me after reading Spronk’s book, and I think they warrant attention. First is the importance of religion and the relationship young professionals have towards it, demonstrated by the ‘respect for the church’ (p. 75) ethos, and how the church is not seen as a ‘foreign’ institution, unlike speaking English. However, the church is an institution that came to Kenya through missionaries – and therefore the colonial – just like the English language itself. How do young professionals navigate these murky waters of praying to what some would call a white Jesus yet rejecting black people who speak non-local languages? Second, I was surprised by the silence on homosexuality in the book. The narratives of the young professional heterosexuals inNairobi contained no reference to the sexual diversity of Nairobi, even in passing, or, for that matter, the rejection of sexual diversity. I wonder about this silence, because the silence seems, indeed, queer.

中文翻译：

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Rachel Spronk，暧昧的快乐：内罗毕的性欲和中产阶级的自我认知。纽约纽约和牛津：Berghahn Books（135 美元/99 英镑 – 978 0 85745 478 2；34.95 美元/27.95 英镑 – 978 1 78238 530 1）。2012/2014，xi + 310 页。

置于当代。尽管年轻人要遵守一些社会规则，但个人可以通过多种方式打破规则——或者更确切地说，是为了适应他们当代的需要而改变规则。成为一个女人意味着什么，以及如何享受性生活，都发生了重新排列。这并不是说性别化的性权力不存在。女性不得不担心被视为滥交，而男性则没有这样的担忧——即使在“现代”非洲关系中，这也是父权制的主要问题。在后殖民时代，内罗毕等国际大都市的生活困扰着年轻人的归属感，在新的印刷媒体和技术的帮助下，他们为自己创造了不一定符合他们文化背景的身份。语言是身份争论的一种展示方式。对非洲语言的需求和说非洲语言所代表的所谓认证是强大的力量。语言难题揭示了有关在非洲使用“外语”的更深层次的问题。比如说，英语和法语可以被认为是“外语”吗，因为它们在非洲大陆被广泛使用？当然可以提出一个论点，即英语和法语属于非洲人，就像它们属于英语和法语一样。此外，可以说，不会说白话的人在许多方面挑战了非洲人“纯洁”或“真实性”的简单观念，如果我们考虑非洲大陆历史上是如何形成的，那么揭示“非洲人”作为一个类别本身就有些虚构。成为。读完斯普朗克的书后，我还有两个问题，我认为它们值得关注。首先是宗教的重要性以及年轻专业人士与宗教的关系，体现在“尊重教会”（第 75 页）的精神，以及教会如何不被视为“外国”机构，不像说英语。然而，教会是一个通过传教士来到肯尼亚的机构——因此是殖民者——就像英语本身一样。年轻的专业人​​士如何在这些向一些人称之为白人耶稣祈祷但拒绝说非当地语言的黑人的浑水中航行？其次，我对书中对同性恋的沉默感到惊讶。内罗毕年轻的职业异性恋者的叙述中没有提及内罗毕的性多样性，即使是顺便说一句，或者就此而言，拒绝性多样性。