Indentured Masculinity in Colonial Natal, 1860–1910

Vahed, Goolam

doi:10.1057/9781403979605_15

Cited by 15 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…The labourers worked under harrowing conditions-they were overworked, poorly housed in crowded quarters, and experienced physical violence from white colonial authorities. Vahed (2005) demonstrated how these experiences were crucial to the formation of Indian masculinities. The failure of Indian indentured labourers to oppose colonial authorities, and their use of non-violent means of resistance, marginalised Indian masculinity and gave rise to homogenising stereotypes of Indian men as timid and unmanly.…”

Section: Contextualising Masculinities In South Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The sense of weakness experienced in the broader colonial setting often manifested in expressions of aggression and power in the home, where men were regarded as heads of households. Violence against women and children became a means to validating their self-worth (Vahed 2005).…”

Section: Contextualising Masculinities In South Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While studies on race in South Africa have often focused on Black–white relations or Indian–white relations, analyses of racial and ethnic conflict within Black–Indian relations is often missing (Vahed 2005). Vahed argues that, overall, contact between Indian and Black people during colonisation resulted in racial tension.…”

Section: Contextualising Masculinities In South Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Race, Class, and Masculinities in a South African Primary School

Govender

Bhana

2022

Men and Masculinities

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Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how 8–9-year-old South African boys construct and negotiate heterosexual masculinities in the primary school. Situated within a racially diverse schooling context comprised of a mixed class of middle and low income Indian and Black boys, we offer insights into how race and class structures intersect with masculinities to create hierarchies of power as boys navigate the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality. Boys’ investment in the male provider role and in aspiring to material shows of wealth—such as wearing expensive clothing—as key ways to engender heterosexual relationships, was also nuanced by race and class. While such practices defined boys’ masculinities, failure to conform to normative masculine behaviour subjected them to homophobic teasing thus pointing to the regulatory mechanisms through which heterosexual masculinity was policed. The study contributes to the growing field of young masculinities in South Africa as we consider its local manifestations and gendered performances.

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Section: Contextualising Masculinities In South Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contextualising Masculinities In South Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contextualising Masculinities In South Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Race, Class, and Masculinities in a South African Primary School

Govender

Bhana

2022

Men and Masculinities

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“…Situated at the interstices of colonial and postcolonial politics of indentureship, archive, sexuality and raciality, Ellapen crafts beauty through a precision of detail, interruption, gradient, the discomfort and difficulty of multiple genres, and striking contrast. Ellapen makes the queer brown male body beautiful Journal of Indentureship 2.1 June 2022 through studio photography, complicating dense meanings of both beauty and masculinity, and challenging the visual politics of legacies of indentureship (Vahed 2005;Hansen 2012;Campt 2012 andDhupelia-Mesthrie 2000;Desai and Vahed 2010;Nair 2020;Carter 1995;Landau and Kaspin 2002).…”

Section: Unbinding Beautymentioning

confidence: 99%

Sensuous movements

Minai¹

2022

JIL

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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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“…30 According to historian Goolam Vahed, Indian indentured men did not fit neatly into the blackwhite or indigenous-settler binary formations and found themselves in a liminal position. 31 This positionality was exacerbated by the restrictions on their movements, the exploitation of their bodies and labour, their exile from natal families and communities, contamination of caste structures, and the corruption of the family, placing any claim to normative gender and sexual regimes in crisis.…”

Section: Visual Production Of the Indian South African: A Brief Surveymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Brown Photo Album: An Archive of Feminist Futurity

Ellapen¹

2020

Kronos.

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This photo-essay considers the other lives of family photographs by offering an analysis of my mother's collection of professional studio portraits and other vernacular photographs shot between the mid 1950s and late 1960s. How do we read the photo-archive of an 'Indian' woman born in 1941 to parents who were wards of the colonial state? A woman who was one generation removed from the sugar-cane plantations and coal mines where Indians were indentured as a coercive labour force? Influenced by Santu Mofokeng's project The Black Photo Album and Tina Campt's method of 'listening to' rather than 'looking at' photos, I refigure the family photo-archive to produce The Brown Photo Album, which is an experiment in seeing and being seen. In a context where the institutional visual archives of colonialism and apartheid have trained South African publics to see and thus know the Indian in very specific ways, this article redirects us away from the violence of the visual to the relationship between race, aesthetics and affect. It positions the family photo album not only as an alternative archive of the Indian experience but also as an archive through which we can begin to comprehend the Indian experience otherwise. This project probes the making of Indianness in the Natal Midlands, shifting the lens from urban centres like Durban and Johannesburg. As a work in progress, I present The Brown Photo Album as an experiment, an iteration of a project, a praxis of refiguring family photos in order to understand what this archive can reveal about our past, presents and futures.

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Indentured Masculinity in Colonial Natal, 1860–1910

Cited by 15 publications

References 7 publications

Race, Class, and Masculinities in a South African Primary School

Race, Class, and Masculinities in a South African Primary School

Sensuous movements

The Brown Photo Album: An Archive of Feminist Futurity

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