Queering the Archive: Indenture Aesthetics and South African Blackness | Jordache A. Ellapen

Queering the Archive: Indenture Aesthetics and South African Blackness

Jordache A. Ellapen in conversation with Sarah Nuttall and Victoria Collis-Buthelezi

This talk uses Ellapen’s recently published book, Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness (DUP, 2025), to explore three aspects of his research that have informed his academic journey over the last 10 years. These three movements are a) indentureship and race in South Africa, b) African Queer Studies, Femininity, and Deviance, and c) creative research and the labour of knowledge production in post-apartheid South Africa. By using the term movement, his intention is to signal the fluidity between these three categories as well as their malleability. This lecture will introduce a few conceptual terms – indenture aesthetics, Afro-normativity, Afro-Indian, Blackening – and invites the audience to think with and alongside South African Black Feminists as well as Steve Biko, Fatima Meer, Simon Nkoli, and Keguro Macharia. This lecture rethinks what an ethical politics of solidarity and coalitional building can look like in post-apartheid South Africa, a society that continues to live in the afterlife of colonial-apartheid.

Jordache A. Ellapen is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies in Culture and Media at the University of Toronto. He has spent the last two years (2024-2026) as an Associate Professor of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. With graduate training in South Africa and the USA, Ellapen works at the intersections of Global Black Studies, Feminist and Queer Studies, and Visual Culture and Performance Studies. He has a particular interest in the making of race within the Indian Ocean world and genealogies of Blackness outside of the Atlantic World. He is the author of Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness (Duke University Press, 2025), and a number of award-winning articles including, “Siyakaka Feminism: African Anality and the Politics of Deviance in FAKA’s Performance Art Praxis,” published in Feminist Studies.

‘This SARChI Distinguished Lecture is presented by the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies and the Innovation Foundation for Democracy’