The Brown Photo Album: An Archive of Feminist Futurity

Abstract

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.

Brown femininities and the queer erotics of indentureship

“…In my essay based on The Brown Photo Album I trace the ways in which the colonial apartheid state used photography to construct a very specific narrative of the Indian South African experience, which conflates the Indian with the figure of the trader/merchant colonial middleman class (Ellapen 2020). Thus, within the South African imaginary, the figure of the Indian has been flattened out, strategically invisibilizing the complexities of indenture history, experience and its afterlives.…”

Tanty feminisms

“…My reading of erotics here is greatly influenced and shaped by transnational feminist and critical gender and sexuality scholars who work through the erotic as an ontological 'catalyst for the creation of community' (Allen 2011, 97). These include Audre Lorde (1984), Jordache Ellapen (2018Ellapen ( , 2020, Juana Maria Rodriguez (2011), Lyndon Gill (2018, M. Jacqui Alexander (2005), Marlon Bailey (2016), Jafari S. Allen (2011), Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman ( 2012), Mirelle Miller Young (2014) and Kim TallBear (2016, among others. Moving beyond dominant discourses that consistently lock and bind sexual practice/behaviour with identificatory practices, provocations of the erotic -most famously offered by Audre Lorde (1984) -call us to theorize different ideological terrains of non-normative gender and sexuality.…”

Sensuous movements

“…This multiplicity of number and type of photograph challenges the use of any one genre to tell the story of indentureship, desire, race and diaspora, and highlights the uses of specific genres to tell variations of these themes and the conditions that produce these uses. Family photograph albums and erotic studio photography may provide archives that resist and challenge political, historical and cultural public erasures of inter-racial and cross-continental intimacies (Campt 2012(Campt , 2017Jay and Ramaswamy 2014;Miller-Young 2014;Goffe 2018;Ellapen 2020).…”

“…Thus, the edges of these photographs have Journal of Indentureship 2.1 June 2022 sunk into one another, that is, have merged and disappeared somewhere in and through their relation to one another so that you cannot quite tell what the relation is or the linear sequence of photographs. This is a crafting of a particular nature of relation: multiplicity of presence without invisibility, without hierarchy and with difference, but a difference that does not depend on, and is not produced through, binding and sealing into separatenessesepistemological, ontological, cartographic -and does not require any of the processes and histories embedded within these photographs to be dislocated outside the frame, that is, the frame of memory, history, relation or place (Campt 2012(Campt , 2017Goffe 2018;Wahab 2019;Ellapen 2020;Landau and Kaspin 2002;Lowe 2015;Sharpe 2016).…”

“…Offering a complicated and dense challenge to the politics of brownness at the intersections of queer diaspora studies, Indian Ocean studies and studies of indenture, Ellapen's art becomes an urgent site for thinking about Afro-Asian and Afro-Indian intimacies (Rastogi 2008;Ellapen 2017Ellapen , 2020Goffe 2020). His art challenges the erasure of Indian indentureship in considerations of Indian diasporas.…”