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A native from South Africa, Jordache A. Ellapen is an anti-disciplinary Black studies scholar with expertise in the visual and performing arts cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Feminist Studies Claire G. Moses award for Most Theoretically Innovative article published in 2021 for “SiyakakaFeminism: African Anality and the Politics of Deviance in FAKA’s Art Praxis.” He is the author of Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness (Duke University Press, 2025). Ellapen is Associate Professor of Black Studies and Associate Chair of the Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester.
This talk, titled Indenture Aesthetics: Family photo-archives and South African Blackness, examines the photographic practices of two South African artists, Lebohang Kganye and Ellapen’s own creative work, which are influenced by family photoarchives. The talk delves into the dynamics of the black and Afro-Indian home-space in the afterlife of colonial-indenture-apartheid. Both artists draw on their mother’s photoarchives playing with gender and sexuality as critical aesthetic commentaries on the making of memory, and its relationship to race, history, migration, diaspora, and space, in post-apartheid South Africa. This talk reads Ellapen’s curatorial and creative work—Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy and The Brown Photo Album: An Archive of Feminist Futurity—in relation to Kganye’s projects Ke Lefa Laka: Her-Story and Ke Lefa Laka: Heir-Story. By juxtaposing the aesthetic practices of an Afro-Indian artist with a black African artist, the talk gestures towards the emergence of an Afro-Indian aesthetic informed by the maternal feminine. This talk situates maternal photoarchives as sites of queer and feminist worldmaking that trouble the very parameters of South African blackness.
