Book Launch: Indenture Aesthetics

Join the WGSI for the launch of Jordache Ellapen’s book, Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness

Friday, March 28, 2025 | 4:00pm – 6:00pm | William Doo Auditorium, 45 Willcocks Street

Panelists:

Rinaldo Walcott, Professor and Chair of Africana and American Studies, University at Buffalo (UB) Department of Africana and American Studies

Christopher G. Smith, Research Associate, Program Coordinator, The Queer and Trans Research Lab, Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies

Sheetal Magan, Writer – Director – Creative Producer, and PhD candidate, York University

The panel will be moderated by Ryan Persadie, WGSI PhD Student and Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectionality Studies at Connecticut College

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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.