One of the things her work, read in relation to Sharlene Khan artwork When the Moon Waxes Red, made me think about is how within the South African imaginary, Indian poverty is unimaginable. Meer has those thick sociological descriptions of those spaces, but she doesn’t just focus on it as a space of lack, poverty, and disenfranchisement, but she focuses on the everyday lived experiences. She focuses on the way they decorate their homes and the way they go to the movies and the way they create community. And there’s life, there’s love, there’s a livingness within these spaces, and we know that, right? My whole book questions the very notion of freedom and what black freedom means in post-apartheid South Africa. And to think about freedom in South Africa, we also have to trouble the very category “black,” because blackness is not homogenous, like Indianness, and blackness has significantly transformed in the post-apartheid period—who is black and who can claim blackness has transformed from the kind of anti-apartheid logics around black solidarity to the post-apartheid logics around the authentic national subject and how blackness becomes attached to a particular kind of nativism and heteronormativity. … And I was interested in those that fall outside of that normative idea of blackness and how we think about solidarity from the margins, from those that are excluded: the feminine, the feminized, the vulnerable, and how that allows us to think differently about nation, about community, about kin, and about race.
Rethinking the boundaries of blackness
