2 Literature Review of Black Art Theory

Darby English’s “Beyond Black Representation Space” helps understand the racialization of the lesbian body and the art spectatorship of Africanness. Historically, the lesbian body is associated with white womanhood. It follows in the same hegemon as the Cult of True Womanhood[1]. The cult of true lesbianhood is an aesthetic of white womanhood rebellion. Whereas the heterosexual white woman is fragile, the lesbian white woman is harsh and rugged. I infer this aesthetic from my own archival research in the Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa and the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, that white lesbians have a parallel aesthetic or rebelling against Victorian docility and fragility. But where does this leave the Black lesbian body?

English suggests, “a practice of strategic formalism, one interested in the peculiarity of works within their varied contexts of meaning, responsive to the specific artistic operations that often manifest relations and differences to which culturalist regimes of reception must remain blind” (English 32). Thus rethinking the lesbian body is not only the preoccupation of Muholi discourse, because “Black artists grounded much of their praxis in a fierce resistance to integration,” (English 64). The Black lesbian body is not a discursive shift in how one views the lesbian body in general. Muholi wants the audience to recognize the nuance in the presentation of these images is unique to South Africa. Muholi simply addresses the “erasure of difference in black representation politics,” (English 62). Muholi’s work is a reflection of post-apartheid South African queer visual culture through directly contributing to a new Black South African representational space that goes beyond the Rainbow Nation or Free Mandela imagery.

Historically, Black South Africans were excluded from the art world, unless they were contributing to the gazes of the oppressed Other. “The problem of black representation has long entailed simultaneous negotiation of issues of depiction (how to give form to identity) and delegation (how best to manifest presence in a context committed to denying it)” (English 50). Muholi’s desire for a black pictorial culture (English 49) around Black lesbian social life in South Africa is a recognition of difference and a recognition of expanding notions of authentic representations of blackness in South Africa. The lesbian, particularly the Black Lesbian body, has to exist in narratives of South Africa, specifically because it has not been represented in the visual culture space of South Africa[2]. Thus, Muholi’s insurgence is an insertion of the Black lesbian body instead of integration into already limiting art spectatorship.

Kobena Mercer’s book Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980’s is a meditation on the shifts in Black art as a response to particular cultural and political moments leading into the new millennium. In Mercer’s book, there needs to be a moment to work through the notion of Diaspora. My own inquiry into Muholi’s work is due to my proximity in the African Diaspora as a Black lesbian woman and Muholi’s ability to answer back to misrepresentations (Mercer 180). I see myself in these images, and I also see a new context in which I exist. A context that has been hidden in the discourses of black radical thought. Mercer suggests my hunger is a result of the emergence of Afro-modernism, where “blacks free to wander where they will across the old centers of colonial domination” (Mercer 9). I wandered freely through the apartheid remains of Cape Town, mapping my body on city centers that once excluded my body at the ending of apartheid exactly twenty-one years ago. I wander as a black lesbian body and feel the discontinuities of freedom. I am hunted, problematized, even as an outsider, I am inside the regulation. A key feature among contemporary Black diaspora art practices is the quest to confront past trauma by bringing its violence into the field of representation for the first time (Mercer 277). Zanele Muholi’s art is at tension with the political authority of the state by asking what is the consequence of the gaze on the Black lesbian body? The violence Muholi brings forth in Only Half the Picture is the reconciliation of a past that everyone was forced to move on from after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission[3]. The expectation is that everyone has been healed because they had an opportunity to file their grievances from apartheid. So they are expected to move on. Muholi subtly critiques the lack of reconciliation and positions this as the fault of contemporary issues. “Where historical gaps are ‘buried’ in the gaps and fissures of the state archive as a result of political repression… reveals that individual memories are also irretrievable when normative patterns of physical repression are reconfigured by colonial trauma,” (Mercer 282) according to Mercer, yet Muholi retrieves the memories of the Black lesbian body because they stay with her and impact the quotidian. The physical repression faced today is a reproduction of colonial trauma, a theoretical mantra for her to whisper under her breath.

Mercer does assert, “mourning cannot be initiated because of postcolonial trauma,” (287). Muholi uses Only Half the Picture to provoke national mourning for the loss of Black lesbian lives. This mourning is multi-layered. It is mourning for lost lives, lost lands, lost cultures, lost tribes, languages. Mourning for the old South Africa. The old South Africa, before the borders, before British Africa made itself home.

John Akomfrah’s notion of “black necrophilia” is present in Muholi’s depiction of mourning and melancholia (Mercer 278). Akomfrah states, “I think necrophilia is at the heart of Black film-making…It has to do with getting to the heart of something that is intangible, a memory of ourselves…there is an act of feeding off the dead,” (Mercer 284). One can tell that spirit of the dead is what is feeding Muholi’s urgency in creating an archive of Black lesbian life in South Africa. In a sense, Muholi captures the context in which inevitable murder could happen. In Only Half the Picture, she repeatedly places herself as a subject of a hate crime, as someone who is being violated by these homonormative structures. This, I believe, is the art of creating a memory of ourselves, before we cease to exist. Black necrophilia defines the visual representation of the Black Lesbian body in the African Diaspora. Whether it is an archive of murder (think Sakia Gunn) or narratives of confinement, (think Out in the Night) the Black lesbian body can’t escape the inevitable depiction of her demise. Murder at the hands of an angry Black man, a repressed Black woman, the violating and occupying white body. The Black lesbian is not safe, and she knows that. Muholi rediscovers portraiture and divorces it from its apartheid past[4]. Portraiture is redefined, by focusing beyond the subject to the very landscape in which the Black lesbian body emerges from. The hyper-blackness of Muholi’s image is to calls attention to a paradoxical Black South Africa belonging. To extend, “hyperblackness… is characterized by an escalating reflexivity generating excessive parody and irony,” (Mercer 246). The art Muholi produces is seductive to consumers. It feeds the hunger of gazing into unknown Africa, thus disturbing one’s sensibilities of the Rainbow Nation. Though we want hyper-blackness to confirm that everything is okay, the reality is never, in fact, confirmed. Our black radical dream deferred[5].

In Kimberly Juanita Brown’s book The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary, there is a very strong metaphorical mapping of the body and ruins. For example, “Broken black women cover the literature of the African diaspora like skin over the flesh. They beg to be seen… hanging loosely off the textual bone, they are beaten, bruised scabbed over, burnt, and scarred; they enable myth and imagery, and are fueled by historical erasure.” (Brown 96). In the imagery of anti-apartheid activism, there is the mother of the nation, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. In her image is the militant Black woman, necklacing traitors of the nation’s fight for freedom. But we also find her beaten, burnt, and scarred. Her erasure is perpetuated because when Mandela was freed from prison, he remarried and her legacy as the first lady of South Africa was disposed of. This disposability of the Black woman in the imagery of a free South Africa must be interrogated.

In Sabine Marschall’s article “How to Honour a Woman: Gendered Memorialisation in post­ apartheid South Africa,” the author explores themes of patriarchy, memory, and feminist

Art making. Marschall’s analysis is rooted in understanding post apartheid South Africa’s

efforts to create an all-inclusive society within the public sphere. The author problematizes the narrative that post apartheid symbolic representations were actually about extending the narrative

of resistance and argues that the memorialization of resistance was only reserved for men. To

extend, as a nation that claims to want to promote the “previously neglected perspectives on the

past,” it still fails at fully integrating women (Marschal 260). This is a larger understanding of the issues of gendered memorialization. The genre of public commemorative art is a tool to facilitate a collective understanding of culture, identity and citizenship. When women are not included in the discourse of heritage and memory, this becomes an extended critique of the hegemony of patriarchy. In post-apartheid South Africa, one can interpret the official memory landscape as one that wishes to restore what has been lost, yet risks becoming a field dominated by the African male narrative of resistance, thus further marginalizing women and their histories. This practice of erasure through denying women the position in heritage significance is an extension of patriarchal hegemony in public discourse. The woman in the public sphere is taboo, and the subject to whom the woman is attached is also taboo. Muholi remembers women.

To return back to Brown’s work on Black women’s erasure, it is important to note what Muholi’s exact critique is against post-apartheid visual culture. Muholi disrupts a celebration of heteronormative resistance narratives against apartheid that renders Black women abject. When thinking of anti-apartheid resistances, there were many Black queer individuals who put their bodies on the line. I am referring to Simon Nkoli who was incarcerated and a part of the Delmas treason trial, and Bev Ditsie, who shifted the representation of Black lesbians during apartheid and articulated a Black lesbian politic in disrupting the 1995 Beijing UN Women’s conference. Muholi is centering the Black lesbian body as an act of restoring the erasure that has been perpetuated by the national imaginary.

“The black female body is central to the discourse on physical pain,” (Brown 97). The black lesbian body’s relationship to pain is worked through in Only Half the Picture. To extend, “Black female bodies are often rendered as invisible armor… that have the ability to emerge from the horrors of slavery physiologically intact” (Brown 102). Muholi shows that even when the Black lesbian body is brutalized, they are still expected to persist and move forward in life. In the photo series What you don’t see when you look at me there is an element of resilience in the expression of their Black lesbian stature. “The desire has been consistently articulated that Black women’s bodies be sacrificed in the service of black world consciousness” (Brown 110). This quote relates to Muholi’s What you don’t see when you look at me as a meditation on the process of looking at the Black woman’s body as a sacrifice for the emergence of black radical consciousness while negating her pain. Now that one is aware of the brutalized Black lesbian body, how does this mobilize them? Will they now make a critique of the state, patriarchy or religious doctrine?

Brown helps the reader work through the utility of Black women’s pain. To extend, “this body represents a conflation of temporality and space, the after image of slavery, and the elongation of the residue of empire” (Brown 179). The Black lesbian body represents a realization that the historical moment of “post apartheid” is false. That in the afterlife of apartheid, the Black body is still fugitive, the black body still dwells in the informal settlements[6] that their oppressors placed them in. That the Black body is still dispossessed from knowledge of thyself. “There is no true space for her subjectivity. She has images, but no portraits that portray the self she wants to offer the world” (Brown 111). Muholi’s authority to produce this project is a reflection of her mission to create a black queer visibility politic. This visibility is less about Black lesbian visuality and more so about making landscapes of Black dispossession legible. Brown writes, “the flesh of the landscape can be seen to contain the divergent inheritances of the past” (179). The Black lesbian body has inherited a past of subjugation and fugitive even in her supposed emancipation.

Muholi’s epistemic intervention is rooted in rearticulating the lesbian body outside the confines of one-dimensional representations of Black female sexuality. Brown states, “the body she presents to the viewer is there to both witness and instruct leading the eye into the framework of history’s impact against specific people, and specific structures against individual histories” (Brown 187). Muholi instructs on how to process the history of apartheid. She gives an opportunity to revisit a moment in history that was dominated by the Christ-like narrative of Mandela[7]. 1994 was more than a moment of establishing democracy for dispossessed Blacks. “The past cannot be recovered… yet the history of the captive emerges precisely at this site of loss and rupture” (Brown 191). Muholi’s Only Half the Picture is a history of the lesbian body as a captive subject in the post-apartheid structure of the township. This panopticon space of the township has the Black lesbian body under constant watch and self-contained in her own body. This containment and surveillance influence the reality of authentic subject-making for the Black lesbian body. But this is a historical tension. She emerges at the site of her loss, at the site of her existence, and at her claim to self-determination. The masculine colonial imagination is rejected in the images of Muholi and releases the Black lesbian body from shame and exhibition.

Jacques Derrida’s framework of “the right of inspection” is useful to consider what the constitution of black lesbian visuality is. Derrida asserts that the other is invented in the act of looking. One who asserts the right to look at the other thus becomes the authority of this subject’s constitution. Nicholas Mirzoeff’s article “The Right to Look” extends this theory by concluding that the authority of visuality thus opposes the autonomy claimed by the right to look. Thus visuality is a sort of self-making project. Muholi’s creation of self is evident in these images. The self-making project of Black lesbian identity is a sensitive project of security. The black lesbian must secure self-conceptualization to counter harassment such as let me show you what you are missing or you could be a pretty woman if you wanted to. How the lesbian makes self is largely determined and influenced by the complexity of her existence in her environment of the township. “The authority of coloniality has consistently required visuality to supplement its deployment of force” (Mirzoeff 6). The Black lesbian must be found and inspected. The authority of patriarchy and white monopoly capital looks at the black lesbian. She has to look back and guard herself. “Claiming the right to look has come to mean moving past such spontaneous oppositional undoing toward an autonomy based on one of its first principles: the right to existence” (Mirzoeff 4). Looking back, responding back. I have the right to look back, I exist. This is who I am.

“Visuality supplemented the violence of authority…forming a complex that came to seem natural by virtue of its investment in ‘history’” (Mirzoeff 3). Visuality is the visualization of history; thus, “the ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer” (Mirzoeff 2). Visibility added to the violence of authority, which over time seemed to have been a normal manifestation about the projections on the black lesbian body. Since black lesbians have always been a problem in history[8] because of the visibility they take on, they remain vulnerable to the authority of the visualizer who can problematize her. There is an aesthetic value to Muholi’s work that speaks to a parallel aesthetic in diasporic Black lesbian expression. It is the same visuality in South Africa that can be seen here in the Bay Area, Brooklyn, Barbados, and other countries in the diaspora that render the black lesbian body a problem to be dealt with. Derrida’s “the right to inspection” is essentially a right to perpetuate violence without any grounds but the ground or law of opposition[9] itself, which manifests as violent masculinities and heteronormative nationalisms in post-apartheid South Africa. The “authority of visuality” is a result of taking agency in the self-making process void of affirming external projections onto the Black lesbian body. Muholi reminds that the lesbian has this authority of visuality that contributes to the social life of Black lesbianhood.

Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the surveillance of blackness has been a critical theoretical intervention in understanding Muholi’s commentary on the anxieties of surveillance of the Black lesbian body. Browne asserts a critical interpretation of dark matter[10], which she suggests situates “blackness, the archive of slavery and its afterlife as a way to trouble, and expand understandings of surveillance” (Browne 63). Expanding the understanding of surveillance via Black lesbians in post apartheid South Africa can shift contemporary discourses to account more for regimes rooted in repressing difference for the sake of perpetuating Black dispossession.

In the chapter “What It’s Like, What It Is: Controlling Images and Black Looks,” surveillance is understood as highlighting “individuality by making the individual hypervisible and on display” (Browne 59). To extend, “Surveillance…was a way of ensuring that Blacks would stay in their designated subordinate places in white-controlled public and private spheres” (Browne 59). The commentary on surveillance in Only Half the Picture is a reminder of the legacy of apartheid. Apartheid was a structure built on denying the humanity of Black people and perpetuating land dispossession by exploiting black labor and containing them in informal settlements. The 1976 Soweto Uprisings is a reminder of the extremities of surveillance in the township. Native languages were banned in the education curriculum during apartheid; Bantustan education perpetuated African inferiority to Afrikaner and Western influences. The government surveilled teachers to assure that they were not spreading ideas of radicalism or self-determination[11]. They were surveilling Blacks in the township to maintain order. The Soweto Uprising cannot be dismissed in the motivations to critique the surveillance state of South Africa. Muholi’s emphasis on rejecting surveillance is conceptualized as disruptive staring (Browne 59). The disruptive stare of the subject contributes to a necessary reminder that “Black people learned to appear before whites as though they were zombies” (Browne 59). For the Black lesbian, to disruptively stare is to assert I know that you see me and I do not fear your wrath. Muholi constantly unpacks controlling images of Black women. “Ideologies of black womanhood that seek to position black women as the faithful, obedient domestic servant” have been disrupted in Muholi’s depictions (Browne 59). In my analysis, the focus of desire portrays the agency to resist heteronormative nationalisms within Black lesbian sexuality.

            Muholi tells the story of women finding escape, joy and pleasure in their sexualities while navigating the afterlife of apartheid. To extend, “by approaching surveillance technologies through stories of black escape… the brutalities of slavery are not subject to erasure, rather such a renarration makes known the stakes of surveillance, emancipation, and freedom” (Browne 63). Throughout Only Half the Picture there is a renarration of post-apartheid survival that is missing when we see images of Shakira dancing at the World Cup or live body viewings of Mandela’s deceased body. The images Muholi puts forth are a renarration about the consequences and the reliance of asserting an authority of visuality that render the black lesbian body abject. I am what you think I am. I am what you know I am.

Racializing surveillance is a project of understanding how the historical formation of surveillance is not outside of the historical formation of slavery. Muholi and Browne’s intervention of Foucault’s panopticon[12] takes place in the archive of slavery and apartheid. Muholi asserts that socialization of Black lesbianism is by way of surveillance; Browne affirms the surveillance of black sexuality as an otherization process. To extend, “the presumption of guilt is assigned to some based on their membership within a particular category or grouping” (Browne 26). The Black lesbian is perpetually guilty, a problem to be dealt with.