Sensuous movements :  Beauty, power and memory in Jordache Ellapen’s <i>Queering the Archive</i> (2018)

Minai, Naveen

doi:10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.1.0037

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Journal of Indentureship and its Legacies

Volume 2, Issue 1

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Sensuous movements : Beauty, power and memory in Jordache Ellapen’s Queering the Archive (2018)

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research-article

Author(s): Naveen Minai

Publication date Pub: 08 July 2022

Journal: Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies

Publisher: Pluto Journals

Keywords: Afro-Asia, sexuality (or queer), brown, beauty, intimacy, femininity, masculinity, ocean, desire, diaspora

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Abstract

Jordache Ellapen’s Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy (2018) is a visual art project that explores erotics as an epistemological 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, including 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 beautiful, 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 different brown bodies in relation to one another through erotic feeling and touching is embedded within these histories and memories, 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 desiring and joyful movement and relation, re-imagined and re-imaged as elegant, beautiful and sensual towards different futurities.

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Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (doi): 10.13169/jofstudindentleg

Title: Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies

Abbreviated Title: JIL

Publisher: Pluto Journals

ISSN (Electronic): 2634-2006

Publication date Pub: 08 July 2022

Publication date Collection: 2022

Volume: 2

Issue: 1

Pages: 37-58

Article

DOI: 10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.1.0037

SO-VID: 9862e7f8-68c4-44af-9290-c1486b24e890

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All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

History

Page count

Pages: 22

References

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Clare Anderson. 2009. ‘Convicts and Coolies: Rethinking Indentured Labour in the Nineteenth Century’, Slavery & Abolition, 30: 1, 93–109.
Gaiutra Bahadur. 2018. ‘Conjure Women and Coolie Women’, Small Axe, 22(2 (56)): 244–253.
Gaiutra Bahadur. 2014. Coolie Woman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press).
Marlon Bailey. 2013. Butch Queens up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).
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Hershini Bhana Young. 2017. Illegible Will: Coercive Spectacles of Labor in South Africa and the Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press).
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T. B. Hansen 2012. Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life in an Indian Township in South Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Saidiya Hartman. 1997. Scenes of Subjection (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press).
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Patricia Hayes. 2007. ‘Power, Secrecy, Proximity: A Short History of South Africa Photography’, Kronos, 33: 139–162.
Radha Sarma HegdeKumar Sahoo Ajaya (eds). 2017. Routledge Handbook of the Indian Diaspora (Abingdon: Routledge).
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Lisa Lowe. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press).
Keguro Macharia. 2019. Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora (New York: New York University Press).
Martin Manalansan. 2003. Global Divas (Durham and London: Duke University Press).
Anne McClintock. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London and New York: Routledge).
Mireille Miller-Young. 2014. A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Durham and London: Duke University Press).
Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.). 2000. Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews (London: Routledge).
Jose Esteban Munoz. 1999. Disidentifications (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Parvati Nair. 2020. ‘The Family Photo: Inventing Time, Place, and Memory’, PIX, Personal Paradigms issue: 28.
Sarah Nuttall. 2009. Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press).
Tan Hoang Nguyen. 2014. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Durham: Duke University Press).
Suzanne C. Persard 2020. ‘Coconut/Cane & Cutlass: Queer Visuality in the Indo-Caribbean Lesbian Archive’, Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, 4(2): 40–55.
Mariam Pirbhai. 2009. Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia Pacific (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
Pallavi Rastogi. 2008. Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa (Columbus: Ohio State University Press).
Vanita Reddy. 2016. Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture (Philadelphia, Rome, Tokyo: Temple University Press).
Nandita Sharma. 2020. Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Durham: Duke University Press).
Christina Sharpe. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press).
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Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. 2021. Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Durham: Duke University Press).
Goolam Vahed. 2005. ‘Indentured Masculinity in Colonial Natal, 1860–1910’, in L. OuzganeR. Morell (eds), African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (Scottsville: Palgrave MacMillan and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press), pp. 241–242.
Amar Wahab. 2019. ‘(Re)tracing Queerness: Archiving Indentureship’s “Coolie Homo/erotic”’, Visual Studies, 34(4): 388–394.
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Cynthia Wu. 2018. Sticky Rice (Philadelphia: Temple University Press).

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] Sara Ahmed. 2004. Cultural Politics of Emotion (London: Routledge).

[2] Sara Ahmed. 2006. Queer Phenomenology (Durham and London: Duke University Press).

[3] Clare Anderson. 2009. ‘Convicts and Coolies: Rethinking Indentured Labour in the Nineteenth Century’, Slavery & Abolition, 30: 1, 93–109.

[4] Gaiutra Bahadur. 2018. ‘Conjure Women and Coolie Women’, Small Axe, 22(2 (56)): 244–253.

[5] Gaiutra Bahadur. 2014. Coolie Woman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press).

[6] Marlon Bailey. 2013. Butch Queens up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

[7] Jennifer Bajorek. 2020. Unfixed, Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa (Durham: Duke University Press).

[8] Hershini Bhana Young. 2017. Illegible Will: Coercive Spectacles of Labor in South Africa and the Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press).

[9] Tina Campt. 2012. Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham: Duke University Press).

[10] Tina Campt. 2017. Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press).

[11] Marina Carter. 1994. Lakshmi’s Legacy: The Testimonies of Indian Women in 19th Century Mauritius (Port Louis: Editions de l’Ocean Indien).

[12] Marina Carter. 1995. Servants, Sirdars, and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–1874 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

[13] Joya ChatterjiDavid Washbrook (eds). 2013. Routledge Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora (London: Routledge).

[14] Ashwin DesaiGoolam Vahed. 2010. Inside Indian Indenture: A South African Story, 1860–1914 (Cape Town: HSRC Press).

[15] Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie. 2000. From Canefields to Freedom (Cape Town: Kwela Books).

[16] Haseenah Ebrahim. 2018. ‘Bittersweet: The Aesthetics of Intolerance and Intimacy in cane/cain ’, Re-membering: Memory, Intimacy, Archive Catalogue, Michaelis Galleries, 22 June–25 July 2018.

[17] Jordache Ellapen. 2020. ‘The Brown Photo Album: An Archive of Feminist Futurity’, Kronos, 46(1), 94–128.

[18] Jordache Ellapen. 2018. Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy, Michaelis Galleries, Cape Town, South Africa, 22 June–25 July 2018.

[19] Jordache Ellapen. 2017. ‘When the Moon Waxes Red: Afro-Asian Feminist Intimacies and the Aesthetics of Indenture’, Small Axe, 21(2 (53)): 94–111.

[20] David Eng. 2001. Racial Castration (Durham and London: Duke University Press).

[21] Frantz Fanon. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press).

[22] Édouard Glissant (trans. Besty Wing). 1997. Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

[23] Tao Leigh Goffe. 2018. ‘Albums of Inclusion: The Photographic Poetics of Caribbean Chinese Visual Kinship’, Small Axe, 22(2 (56)): 35–56.

[24] Tao Leigh Goffe. 2020. ‘Chop Suey Surplus: Chinese Food, Sex, and the Political Economy of Afro-Asia’, Women & Performance, 30(1): 20–47.

[25] Pamila GuptaIsabel HofmeyrMichael Pearson (eds). 2010. Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (1st ed. Pretoria: Unisa Press).

[26] P. D. Gqola 2010. What Is Slavery to Me? Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press).

[27] T. B. Hansen 2012. Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life in an Indian Township in South Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

[28] Saidiya Hartman. 1997. Scenes of Subjection (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press).

[29] Saidiya Hartman. 2008. ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe, 12(2): 1–14.

[30] Patricia Hayes. 2007. ‘Power, Secrecy, Proximity: A Short History of South Africa Photography’, Kronos, 33: 139–162.

[31] Radha Sarma HegdeKumar Sahoo Ajaya (eds). 2017. Routledge Handbook of the Indian Diaspora (Abingdon: Routledge).

[32] Isabel HofmeyrMichelle Williams (eds). 2011. South Africa and India: Shaping the Global South (Johannesburg: Wits University Press).

[33] Isabel Hofmeyr. 2013. Gandhi’s Printing Press Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press).

[34] Martin JaySumathi Ramaswamy (eds). 2014. Empires of Vision: A Reader (Durham: Duke University Press).

[35] E. Patrick Johnson. 2008. Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).

[36] Aliyah Khan. 2016. ‘Voyages Across Indenture: From Ship Sister to Mannish Woman’, GLQ 22(2): 249–280.

[37] Paul LandauDeborah Kaspin. 2002. Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press).

[38] S. Lee 2019. ‘Beauty between Empires: Global Feminisms, Plastic Surgery, and the Trouble with Self-Esteem’, in S. LeeC. MoonT. Tu (eds) Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia (New York: New York University Press), pp. 69–102.

[39] S. Heijin LeeChristina H. MoonThuy Linh Nguyen Tu. 2019. Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia (New York: New York University Press).

[40] Xavier Livermon. 2020. Kwaito Bodies: Remastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Durham and London: Duke University Press).

[41] Lisa Lowe. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press).

[42] Keguro Macharia. 2019. Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora (New York: New York University Press).

[43] Martin Manalansan. 2003. Global Divas (Durham and London: Duke University Press).

[44] Anne McClintock. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London and New York: Routledge).

[45] Mireille Miller-Young. 2014. A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Durham and London: Duke University Press).

[46] Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.). 2000. Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews (London: Routledge).

[47] Jose Esteban Munoz. 1999. Disidentifications (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

[48] Parvati Nair. 2020. ‘The Family Photo: Inventing Time, Place, and Memory’, PIX, Personal Paradigms issue: 28.

[49] Sarah Nuttall. 2009. Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press).

[50] Tan Hoang Nguyen. 2014. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Durham: Duke University Press).

[51] Suzanne C. Persard 2020. ‘Coconut/Cane & Cutlass: Queer Visuality in the Indo-Caribbean Lesbian Archive’, Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, 4(2): 40–55.

[52] Mariam Pirbhai. 2009. Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia Pacific (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

[53] Pallavi Rastogi. 2008. Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa (Columbus: Ohio State University Press).

[54] Vanita Reddy. 2016. Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture (Philadelphia, Rome, Tokyo: Temple University Press).

[55] Nandita Sharma. 2020. Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Durham: Duke University Press).

[56] Christina Sharpe. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press).

[57] Christina. Sharpe 2019. ‘Beauty Is a Method’, e-flux journal, (105), December 2019. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/105/303916/beauty-is-a-method

[58] Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. 2021. Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Durham: Duke University Press).

[59] Goolam Vahed. 2005. ‘Indentured Masculinity in Colonial Natal, 1860–1910’, in L. OuzganeR. Morell (eds), African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (Scottsville: Palgrave MacMillan and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press), pp. 241–242.

[60] Amar Wahab. 2019. ‘(Re)tracing Queerness: Archiving Indentureship’s “Coolie Homo/erotic”’, Visual Studies, 34(4): 388–394.

[61] Amar Wahab. 2018. ‘Indentureship’s Ghostworld: Re-imagining the Coolie Archive’, Visual Ethnography, 7(1).

[62] Cynthia Wu. 2018. Sticky Rice (Philadelphia: Temple University Press).