Sensuous movements

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.1.0037
• Pages: 37-58
• Published date: 08 July 2022
• Date: 08 July 2022
• Author: Naveen Minai
• Subject Matter: Afro-Asia,sexuality (or queer),brown,beauty,intimacy,femininity,masculinity,ocean,desire,diaspora

Journal of Indentureship 2.1 June 2022

Sensuous movements

Beauty, power and memory in Jordache

Ellapen’s Queering the Archive (2018)

Naveen Minai

Naveen Minai is an assistant professor (limited term) at the Mark

S. Bonham Center for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of

Toronto, Canada.

ABSTRACT

Jordache Ellapen’s Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy

(2018) is a visual art project that explores erotics as an epistemo-

logical and methodological frame to think through race, diaspora,

memory, history and desire in/of contemporary South Africa.

I argue that Queering the Archive is invested in beauty as a project

of sensuous memory, pleasure, movement and relation that works

through and against geohistorical logics and conditions of race,

diaspora and coloniality. Through a photo essay based on a close

reading of the visual art, and a companion piece of an interview

with the artist, I argue that Queering the Archive challenges our

logics of the legacies of indentureship by centring those bodies

who were used as labour and raw matter for global racial sexual

capital. Ellapen re-imagines and re-images brown bodies as alive

and beautiful in motion and in relation with erotic energy, playful

desire and intimate joy. Ellapen crafts relations between colours,

textures, forms and genres through mixed media practices, in-

cluding layering and juxtaposing family photographs with staged

photographs. These relations put the photographs in intimate

tension and contradiction with one another as much as in beauti-

ful, sensuous motion together, the edges of each highlighted as

much as blurred through these relations. I read these relations as

evocations and provocations of the histories and memories the

photographs are dense with and made fragile by. These histories

and memories include indentureship, colonialism and migration

as structures and processes of power that shape intimate relations

between peoples in South Africa. Ellapen’s focus in this project on

DOI:10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.1.0037

38 NAVEEN MINAI

Journal of Indentureship 2.1 June 2022

different brown bodies in relation to one another through erotic

feeling and touching is embedded within these histories and mem-

ories, but these erotics are not determined, bound or regulated by

the colonial and imperial infrastructures of power. In Queering the

Archive, hegemonic colonial and postcolonial aesthetic regimes

are disrupted and the brown body becomes a brown body in desir-

ing and joyful movement and relation, re-imagined and re-imaged

as elegant, beautiful and sensual towards different futurities.

KEYWORDS

Afro-Asia, sexuality (or queer), brown, beauty, intimacy, femininity,

masculinity, ocean, desire, diaspora

INTRODUCTION

Jordache Ellapen’s Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy

(2018) is a visual art project that explores erotics as an epistemo-

logical and methodological frame to think through race,

diaspora, memory, history and desire in contemporary South

Africa. Through a close reading of Family Portrait I: Chennai/

Tongaat and Family Portrait II: Sugarcane Coolies, I explore how

Ellapen unbinds and rebinds legacies of indentureship, queer

pleasures and intimacies, and formations of diaspora, race and

nation.

Ellapen centres lives and bodies which were used as inden-

tured labour and raw matter for global racial capital and

re-imagines the bodies, lives and memories of indentured Indians

and their descendants as vivid and beautiful. The brown male

body of his erotic studio photography moves through, compli-

cates and is made beautiful by multiple relations: legacies of

indentureship, the racial politics of postcolonial nationalism,

and the frame of family and kinship (Gqola 2010; Hofmeyr and

Williams 2011; Hofmeyr 2013; Livermon 2020).

Ellapen’s art intervenes in dominant discourses of Blackness,

Indianness and Africanness in contemporary South Africa and