About this Event
Indenture Aesthetics examines the visual and performance art practices of feminist, queer, femme, and gender-nonconforming Afro-Indian and South African black artists to understand the paradoxes of freedom in contemporary South Africa. Tracing the afterlife of apartheid-era racial categories and revisiting Bantu Stephen Biko’s Black Consciousness, Ellapen theorizes South African blackness through the Indian Ocean World, showing how the development of an Afro-Indian identity after generations of indentured labor and segregation troubles persistent racial hierarchies.
Doors at 7 for a 7:30pm start. Close: 9pm
Location: 10-11 Granville Arcade, Coldharbour Ln, London SW9 8PR
The event will begin with a short reading from Azad Ashim Sharma's new poetic work in progress which traces his Afro-Indian lineage through his family history and archive up to the disaster of the present amidst resurgent nationalism in the UK. Following this short reading, Jordache A. Ellapen will read extracts from Indenture Aesthetics after which there will be a panel discussion chaired by Jonathan Cane (University of Warwick) with time allocated for audience participation.
Ticket price is redeemable against a curated selection of books made available for this event
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Jordache A. Ellapen is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies in Culture and Media at the University of Toronto. He has spent the last two years (2024-2026) as an Associate Professor of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. With graduate training in South Africa and the USA, Ellapen works at the intersections of Global Black Studies, Feminist and Queer Studies, and Visual Culture and Performance Studies. He has a particular interest in the making of race within the Indian Ocean world and genealogies of Blackness outside of the Atlantic World. He is the author of Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness (Duke University Press, 2025), and a few award-winning articles including, “Siyakaka Feminism: African Anality and the Politics of Deviance in FAKA’s Performance Art Praxis,” published in Feminist Studies. He is currently working on a new book titled Black Pleasure Politics, which seeks to understand the political and aesthetic dimension of pleasure as it relates to the art practices of South African and Black British artists, including Ajamu X, Lady Skollie, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Zanele Muholi, as well as the photo-archives of Kewpie (District 6, Cape Town) and Ronald Ngilima (Benoni, Johannesburg).
Jonathan Cane is Assistant Professor in History of Art at the University of Warwick. He holds a PhD in Art History from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and is the author of ‘Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld’ (2019), a queer and decolonial study of gardening. His present work is concerned with the poetics of struggle against ecological oppression in 1980s South Africa and Brazil. His analysis centers landscape, in the photographic records from the anti-apartheid People’s Parks movement, and the natural history archives of deforestation caused by the BR-174 highway construction through the Brazilian Amazon.
Azad Ashim Sharma is the director of the87press and serves as poetry editor at Philosophy and Global Affairs and the CLR James Journal; he is also the commissioning editor of The Hythe Review. He is a PhD Candidate in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Boiled Owls (Nightboat Books / Out-Spoken Press, 2024) which was shortlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize. His second collection Ergastulum: Vignettes of Lost Time (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) was the recipient of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award. In July 2025, Azad was inaugurated as the Poet Laureate of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He lives in South London and is currently working on a novel and his fourth collection of poetry.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Round Table Books, Coldharbour Lane, London, United Kingdom
GBP 11.55
