Special IssueSites in Contestation: Reading Contemporary Popular Culture in Africa“Sites in Contestation: Reading Contemporary Popular Culture in Africa” is the third and final instalment in a series of special issues of English in Africa produced by the Urban Connections in African Popular Imaginaries (UCAPI) research project. Our last meeting as a research group was set to take place at the biennial Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies (EALCS) conference, in Lalibela, Ethiopia, in August 2019. But that conference did not go according to plan, serving as a direct illustration of how popular culture in Africa is indeed an active, and sometimes disruptive, site of contestation. A day before the conference commenced, event organisers received notification that leaders in the community were offended by the presence of queerness as a topic under discussion in the programme. In response to the community's threat to protest what they assumed to be a pro-gay rights event, the conference organisers made the difficult decision to strip the programme of any explicitly queer content and, determined to still go ahead with the conference, shifted it to Bahir Dar University at the last minute. In many African countries, where the illegality of homosexuality is often affirmed by notions of national, religious and traditional culture, the uneven terrain of who and what gets to constitute the 'popular' is laid bare.