Brown femininities and the queer erotics of indentureship

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.1.0098
• Pages: 98-124
• Published date: 08 July 2022
• Date: 08 July 2022
• Author: Jordache A. Ellapen
• Subject Matter: South Africa,indenture,Afro-Indian,intimacies,archive,queer,erotic,sex,embodiment

Journal of Indentureship 2.1 June 2022

Brown femininities and the

queer erotics of indentureship

Jordache A. Ellapen

Jordache A. Ellapen is assistant professor of Feminist Studies in

Culture and Media at the University of Toronto, Canada.

ABSTRACT

This photo essay curates two interrelated bodies of creative work,

Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy (2013-ongoing) and The

Brown Photo Album: An Archive of Feminist Futurities (2020), to explore the

queer afterlives of indentureship in South Africa through the aesthetic

realm. Queering the Archive and The Brown Photo Album are inuenced

by the photo archive of an Afro-Indian family from rural Kwa Zulu Natal.

The curation of these two interrelated projects as this photo essay,

Brown Femininities and the Queer Erotics of Indentureship, positions the

maternal-feminine as central to the making of Afro-Indianness and to

my own understanding of sexuality, beauty, pleasure and the erotic as

informed by the home-space of the Afro-Indian family. This project maps

my mother’s desire to create a visual archive of the Afro-Indian woman

in the immediate afterlife of indentureship onto my own desire to create

a visual archive of the Afro-Indian queer experience in contemporary

South Africa. The images translate the violence associate with the sug-

arcane plantations and indentureship into an aesthetic of pleasure where

the past, present, and future as well as Black, Brown, and white bodies

rub against and touch each other as an ongoing practice dedicated to

re-imagining Afro-Indian intimacies and South African Blackness.

KEYWORDS

South Africa, indenture, Afro-Indian, intimacies, archive, queer,

erotic, sex, embodiment

This photo essay curates two bodies of interrelated projects, Queering

the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy and The Brown Photo Album: An

DOI:10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.1.0098

BROWN FEMININITIES AND THE QUEER EROTICS 99

Journal of Indentureship 2.1 June 2022

Archive of Feminist Futurity, as an ongoing practice invested in under-

standing the queer afterlives of indentureship in South Africa. The

first project, Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy, consists of vis-

ual assemblages created digitally by layering, cutting and juxtapos ing

old photographs from my family photo albums with digital photos

shot in a studio environment. Queering the Archive is my ongoing

at tempt to grapple with the family photo archive as a counterintuitive

site for understanding the relationship between race and sexuality as

informed by the home space of the Afro-Indian family, steeped within

the history and experience of Indian indentureship.1 Over the years,

I have come to understand that my queerness, queer Afro-Indianness,

continues to be shaped by the violent history of indentureship and the

non-normative lives that were created in its wake. Similarly, to other

South African artists of indenture origin, like Sharlene Khan and

Riason Naidoo, my creative work responds to the colonial archive of

visuality and the construction of the Indian within the ‘visual regimes

of colonial [apartheid] modernity’ (Gopinath 2018, p. 7).

In my essay based on The Brown Photo Album I trace the ways in

which the colonial apartheid state used photography to construct

a very specific narrative of the Indian South African experience,

which conflates the Indian with the figure of the trader/merchant

colonial middleman class (Ellapen 2020). Thus, within the South

African imaginary, the figure of the Indian has been flattened out,

strategically invisibilizing the complexities of indenture history,

experience and its afterlives. The Brown Photo Album is a curatorial

project that seeks to make sense of my mother’s extensive archive

of studio and vernacular photographs from the mid 1950s to the

late 1960s. How do we read, and make sense, of a photo archive of

an Afro-Indian woman one generation removed from the system

of indentureship? What do her performances and her attention

to fashion and beauty reveal about the immediate afterlife of

Indian indentureship and Afro-Indian femininity?

Most historical, sociological, anthropological and aesthetic

work concerning Indian South Africans focuses on urban areas