Coda: Afro-Queer Diasporic Femininities and Emergent Imaginaries of Freedom
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Published:November 2024
2024. "Coda: Afro-Queer Diasporic Femininities and Emergent Imaginaries of Freedom", Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness, Jordache A. Ellapen
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The coda focuses specifically on the multimedia artist Githan Coopoo, a founding member of the Kutti Collective. The Kutti Collective, an emerging art collective consisting of femme, queer, womxn, trans, and gender nonconforming artists, represent a new generation of Afro-Indian artists invested in expanding how we understand race and relationality in South Africa. Their aesthetic practices engage family photoarchives, the indenture experience, queer sexuality and erotics, joy and pleasure, and interracial Afro- Indianness, echoing similar themes and concerns of an earlier generation of Afro-Indian artists. However, unlike earlier generations of Afro-Indian artists, the collective deliberately uses terms like desi and South Asian. In their art practice, Coopoo uses clay as their chosen material/medium to represent fragility, vulnerability, and porousness, a metaphor for femmeness and femme embodiment. Symbolic of the queer black/ened body, the nature of clay reveals the potential to reimagine the body outside of regimes of normativity and mastery.
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