African Queer, African Digital: Reflections on Zanele Muholi's Films4peace & Other Works

Summary

‘Without a visual identity we have no community, no support network, no movement. Making ourselves visible is a continual process’ (2008, emphasis added). This quote by Joan E. Biren is the epigraph of Zanele Muholi's 2008 MFA thesis titled ‘Mapping Our Histories: A Visual History of Black Lesbians in Post-Apartheid South Africa’. Bringing an empowering visibility to LGBTQ people, building a support network, and constructing an archive through the visual are central goals in Muholi's vision and work. As a black lesbian from humble beginnings, Muholi hails from the country with the most progressive constitution regarding gender and sexual identities, and where, paradoxically, black lesbians and other racialised sexual minorities are more likely to suffer homophobic violence such as ‘curative rape’ and massacres.

All too often, these homophobic attacks against black lesbians are subsumed under the categories of enclosure, and even of erasure in a utopian yet doomed project of creating a radical sexual homogeneity. For a category of individuals whose sexual practices and gender identities suffer relentless attacks, both systemic and personal, survival can often and simply take the powerful form of signalling one's presence. Though problematic, visibility through the digital becomes an appealing mode of survival, and even of permanence and ex-sistence (Lacan Ecrits) – the privilege of stepping outside of one's condition in an act of examination. It is this battle against enclosure and the constant threat of erasure that Muholi is waging with her digitally accessible photography, short documentaries, and video installations.

I explore the extent to which the formulation of digitality as a mode of symbolic capture, and as a form of conversion of bodies into data for the global accumulation of capital, manifests itself in the African art context. As a way of contextualising my claim, I provide a brief political and cultural history of how African visual and digital arts depict the development of dissenting genders and sexualities. This longstanding investment in visibility, first through the visual and now through the digital, becomes more urgent with the promise of democratised inclusion and freedom in the information age. Colin Koopman calls the age ‘infopower’, which he argues has displaced the current biopolitical era. In the second part of the essay, an exploration of digitality as a continuation of control society as formulated by Seb Franklin and other thinkers shows the limits of certain dissemination processes of artistic creations.