In Indenture Aesthetics, Jordache A. Ellapen examines the visual and performance art practices of feminist, queer, femme, and gender-nonconforming Afro-Indian and South African black artists to understand the paradoxes of freedom in contemporary South Africa. Tracing the afterlife of apartheid-era racial categories and revisiting Bantu Stephen Biko's Black Consciousness, Ellapen theorizes South African blackness through the Indian Ocean World, showing how the development of an Afro-Indian identity after generations of indentured labor and segregation troubles persistent racial hierarchies. Staging unexpected encounters between artists such as Sharlene Khan, Mohau Modisakeng, Lebohang Kganye, and Reshma Chhiba, he analyzes how their works challenge these racial categories to create new imaginaries of freedom. Situated in a context in which the authentic (hetero)normative black subject of the post-apartheid state is bracketed from other formulations of blackness, these artists' aesthetic practices, alongside those of other artists like Ellapen himself, disrupt desires for national belonging and catalyze alternative and transgressive politics and subjects. By rethinking the relationship between blackness, Afro-Indianness, and Africanness, Ellapen highlights the role of the aesthetic in crafting a blueprint for coalitional building across difference in contemporary South Africa.
Jordache A. Ellapen is Associate Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester and coeditor of we remember differently: Race, Memory, Imagination.
Preface ix Acknowledgments xix Introduction. Afro-Normativity, Indenture Aesthetics, and South African Blackness 1 1. Afro-Femininities: Maternal Archives as Sites of Queer-Feminist Futures 51 2. Afro-Vulnerabilities and the Aesthetics of Slow Death: Memory, Trauma, and Labor 89 3. Afro-Intimacies: Queer-Kinship Formations and African Rurality 123 4. Afro-Transgressions: Queer Femininities and South African Sex Publics 161 Coda. Afro-Queer Diasporic Femininities and Emergent Imaginaries of Freedom 195 Notes 211 References 223 Index 245
"Indenture Aesthetics is an outstanding contribution to transnational queer studies, African and South Asian diaspora studies, visual culture studies, and the study of race and sexuality in South Africa. Focusing on 'Afro-Indian intimacies' through a queer studies lens, Jordache A. Ellapen's work is a significant addition to African queer studies and the study of South African sexualities specifically as well as to queer diaspora and queer of color scholarship more broadly. Indenture Aesthetics represents the next generation of exciting new scholarship in each of these fields." - Gayatri Gopinath, author of (Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora) "Jordache A. Ellapen shows that by turning to the history of Indian indentureship in South Africa we might find a different vocabulary through which to understand South Africa's Indian population and its relationship to black Africans. This fascinating book's unexpected pairing of black African and Indian artists and Ellapen's critical reading and analytical practice offers a refreshing and needed departure from the way that Indian communities and their cultural practices are currently discussed. A beautiful and timely book." - Xavier Livermon, author of (Kwaito Bodies: Remastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa)
