Afro-Femininities: Maternal Archives as Sites of Queer-Feminist Futurities

This chapter examines the aesthetic practices of Lebohang Kganye and Jordache A. Ellapen, who reimagine their mother’s photoarchives to grapple with the afterlives of indentureship and colonial apartheid as they inform the making of black/ened Afro-femininities. Engaging notions of temporality and space, this chapter focuses on the “maternal feminine” and the home-space as sites of queer-feminist possibility. It engages with the genre of “memory-work” and examines the artists’ affective and haptic relationship to family photoarchives. Contextualizing his mother’s photoarchive within the immediate afterlife of indentureship, Ellapen grapples with what his mother’s attention to beauty and sensuality—embodied praxes of resistance—mean for his own understanding of sexuality, erotics, and the queer Afro-Indian body. Ellapen’s aesthetic practice rubs against Kganye’s, which employs performances of gender subversion to attend to the afterlife of African migrant labor and its impact on the making of black womanhood and femininities.