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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ellapen, Jordache A.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Art, South African--Social aspects.

Art, South African.

Black people--Race identity--South Africa.

Black people.

East Indians--Race identity--South Africa.

East Indians.

Feminist theory.

Indentured servants--South Africa--History.

Indentured servants.

Post-apartheid era--South Africa.

Post-apartheid era.

Queer theory.

South Africa--Race relations.

South Africa.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (313 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2025.

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Afro-normativity, indenture aesthetics, and South African blackness

Afro-femininities : maternal archives as sites of queer-feminist futurities

Afro-vulnerabilities and the aesthetics of slow death : memory, trauma, labor

Afro-intimacies : queer-kinship formations and African rurality

Afro-transgressions

Queer femininities and South African sex publics

Afro-queer diasporic femininities and emergent imaginaries of freedom.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781478060321

1478060328

OCLC:

1493013769