El. knyga: Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness

"In Indenture Aesthetics, Jordache A. Ellapen theorizes the affective relational terrain of indentureship as a site to reimagine South African Blackness and Afro-Indian intimacies. Ellapen curates an archive of aesthetic practices by feminist, queer, femme and gender non-conforming Afro-Indian and Black South African artists in order to offer a different understanding of the categories Indian, African, and Black in South Africa. Theorizing South African blackness through the Indian Ocean world, Ellapen turns to the aesthetic realm to grapple with the afterlives of indentureship and colonial apartheid. Indentureship disrupts the spatial and temporal logics of the post-apartheid and necessitates an engaging with overlapping regimes of racialized labor-slavery in the Cape, indigenous and Indian indentureship, as well as African migrant labor schemes-that confounds the colonial apartheid racial hierarchy and the very categories of race in South Africa. Ellapen shows how Afro-Indian and black African women and queer artists examine post-apartheid limits of freedom and intimacies that disrupt the desire for belonging to the nation. These feminine aesthetic practices question a linear progressive narrative of freedom and agitate for alternative and transgressive politics and subjects"--

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 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.