Infidel(itie)s of Colour: Unruly Black Bodies, Modernity and Performance in Post-Apartheid South Africa focusses on the ways that queer and feminist artists of colour draw upon their traditional black cultural heritage and spiritual practises as a means of laying claim to cultural citizenship and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. I position this work as a specific response to the neotraditionalist, heteropatriarchal imperatives that have come to increasingly define the populist centre of black post-apartheid nationalism. I read Jacob Zuma’s rape trial in the early 2000s as an exemplary scene of this contestation of cultural and national belonging, where the cisgendered, heterosexual male black body was symbolically centred as the authentic bearer and arbiter of postcolonial black cultural values, citizenship, authenticity and belonging. The artists and everyday interlocutors with whom I engage are positioned as a critical response to this rhetoric, and draw on “traditional” African culture as a potent means of staging queer and feminist refusals of the neo-colonial figure of the black male patriarch instead. In the first chapter of the dissertation, I discuss the queer hauntology of black skin through performance artist Nelisiwe Xaba’s Venus diptych; in the second, I discuss Ashraf Johaardien’s stage adaptation of K. Sello Duiker’s seminal novel, The Quiet Violence of Dreams; and the third and final chapter interrogates the transmodern queer affect and ontopolitics of maskanda musician and traditional healer Ntombethongo’s queer musicking. Across all three cases, I argue that this work serves to not only “queer” what African tradition (and the monolithic black subject that it centres) might mean and do, but that it also uncovers the implicit western metropolitan bias that often sits at the centre of the transnational minority rights discourses that animate contemporary queer and feminist social justice activism in South Africa.

Creator

• Mtshali, Mbongeni N.

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-52qj-ba48

Subject

• Performing arts
• Dance
• African studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_676184
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:14750

Keyword

• Race
• Gender
• Modernity
• Post-Apartheid South Africa
• Postcolonial Studies

Date created

• 2019-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright