That’s so true, right? I felt like that disruption had to occur simultaneously because I was very conscious of the fact that I wanted to tell a kind of story of Indianness that did not fall back on the normative logics of sexuality, of race. I also mark that indenture aesthetics is different from indenture history. And this [book] is not a history of indenture. And I think that’s what I was trying to do with the book because one of the things—and you’re talking about the Guptas and this different class of Indians—and one of the things that I always kind of struggled with is that, and I only found the language later on, but within the South African imaginary, all Indians occupy the positionality of the merchant class. And I think that was a strategic construction by the colonial apartheid state, and that was how they managed the racial hierarchy. The Indian was positioned as a buffer community between the settler population and between local black African communities. And they used it as a way to manage black African anxieties around settler colonialism and white supremacy. All the evil, the dangers, the problems become kind of transferred onto this imagination of what the Indian is. To disrupt this, I had to make that critique of the merchant trader class in that we are not the same in terms of language, community, caste.

The very histories of slavery and indentureship and indigenous forms of indentureship and African forms of indentureship in southern Africa are so significantly different that we need different frameworks to think about race, particularly blackness, than the Atlantic world offers us. Because even if you think about what slavery looked like in the Cape in the early years of slavery, it was people who were from South Asian countries that were enslaved and then it started shifting to people from Mozambique and other parts of East and West Africa but mixing with indigenous communities and indentured communities. Indigenous communities couldn’t be enslaved, but they could be indentured, and what a lot of the literature reveals of that era is that it was hard to make distinctions between enslaved, indentured, and other forms of indentured peoples, so the very categories of slavery and indentureship as one being associated with the contract and then one being associated with coercive labor falls apart. Even within the Americas, the notion of the contract doesn’t secure autonomy over one’s labor relations so the contract has been fetishized in literature of indenture, and it doesn’t exist within transatlantic slavery, but the distinction between the two is shaky. I think it’s in Coolie Woman [by Gauitra Bahadur] where she talks about how the same ships that enslaved Africans were used with for indentured laborers. Britain saw India as a replacement for Africa, and they saw Indian bodies as a replacement for African bodies. … I’m interested in the afterlife of indentureship, and indentureship is the afterlife for slavery.

And also the category Indian was part of the category Coloured until 1960, but we’ve kind of cleaved ourselves into the separate racial identities—oh, you know, we’ve been made to believe that we are so distinct, but it was violently policed in Cape Town and urban areas, whereas before the Glen Gray Act it was pretty porous.

A lot of the [historical] work I’ve encountered on indentureship [has been from] Betty Govinden, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Ashwin Desai, Goolam Vahed, Surendra Bhana. Fatima Meer is very important to my work actually. Like Fatima, I am trained in black studies so I was always very interested in thinking about Indianness in South Africa as part of the black experience. I was interested in returning to Steve Biko’s work, because I think he offers us a kind of framework around rubbing around these different racial groups and thinking about blackness more capaciously, not just as a kind of identity formation or categories, because I feel like they actually function as sites of capture and containment. Although we know that the boundaries between these different racial categories have always been porous, but I was interested in what happens when we start thinking outside of these categories and what kinds of knowledge gets produced about Indianness or about blackness when we kind of release ourselves from these categories. That’s where I found Steve Biko’s work useful, even though he’s been heavily criticized for his gender and sexual politics. Thinking about vulnerability, I went back to Fatima Meer’s work and Shireen Hassim’s book on Fatima Meer, and also her work in relationship to Steve Biko, which is in conversation with Keguro Macharia, and then other person that’s really important in my work is actually Frantz Fanon.

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.

I wanted to complicate the ways in which we understood or thought about Indian South African histories, because a lot of it is so straight it doesn’t leave space for anything else. The historical record may not show ABC’ [queerness during indentureship], but number one, we have an imagination, and number two, we need different kinds of histories, we need different kinds of queered experiences.

It’s like the carnivalesque subversion of everything, and you can trace the grotesque throughout the book—I think that could be a framework to actually think about some of these incursions that are happening. When you think about the grotesque, you think about the body, and I think that’s a chapter that takes us to the body in a different way, like Chhiba’s huge sculpture of a walk-in vagina or works of Kali’s gushing blood out of the head, and FAKA’s focus on the anal erotic, pleasure, and bodily fluids from semen to sweat to feces. Body as archive, the body is the site through which we need to decolonize. With FAKA’s work, I’m very interested in the body as a site of sex and pleasure, like there’s something pleasurable about their photography and live artwork, and it’s not that pleasure is disconnected from labor, but pleasure is routed through labor instead of leisure.

It was so lovely, and I was nervous, but this was amazing. Thank you so much!