Jordache A. Ellapen

Undergraduate Appointment: Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Department of Historical Studies, UTM
Graduate Appointment: Women and Gender Studies Institute (St. George)
Affiliations: Bonham Center for Sexual Diversity Studies (St. George)
Cross-appointments: Department of Visual Studies, UTM

Biography:

Jordache A. Ellapen is an associate professor of Feminist Studies in Culture and Media. A native from South Africa, Ellapen is an anti-disciplinary Black Studies scholar with expertise in a) the visual and performance art cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora, b) race and indentureship in the Indian Ocean World, and c) Black and African Sexual Cultures. His research and teaching interests include Black queer performance and aesthetic practices; Afro-Indian cultural production; Afro-queer-diasporic film and photography; aesthetics, archives, and affect; and race, pleasure, and pornography. He has also published on South African cinema and Nigerian video-films. 

Professor Ellapen is the author of Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness (Duke University Press, January 2025). Indenture Aesthetics reimagines Bantu Stephen Biko’s notion of Black Consciousness, as theory and method, through a radical African queer imaginary to re-imagine the entangled pasts, presents, and futures of South African Black and Afro-Indian communities. Indenture Aesthetics examines artists like Sharlene Khan, Reshma Chhiba, Lebohang Kganye, Sabelo Mlangeni, Mohau Modisakeng, FAKA, and the Kutti Collective, as well as the author’s own creative practice, to grapple with the paradoxes of freedom in post-apartheid South Africa. The book argues for the importance of crafting non-state-ist forms of solidarity that trouble nationalist desires for belonging. Instead, Indenture Aesthetics prioritizes vulnerability, femininity, and femme-ness and highlights the role of the aesthetic in crafting a blueprint to re-imagine coalitional building across regimes of difference in contemporary South Africa. Indenture Aesthetics focuses on the specificities of race, particularly Blackness and Afro-Indian relationalities, in South Africa and the Indian Ocean World from a feminist and queer studies approach. 

His next research projects grapple with the relationship between pleasure and Black freedom and seeks to understand how pleasure –messy, sticky, deviant, and chaotic—may open possibilities to think through a radical decolonial politic.

His research and teaching eschew disciplinary boundaries in the quest to produce new frameworks and methods to understand culture and society from the perspectives of those most marginalized and vulnerable.

Professor Ellapen has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowship, including:

• Feminist Studies Journal Claire G. Moses Award for Most Theoretically Innovative article published in 2021 for “Siyakaka Feminism: African Anality and the Politics of Deviance in FAKA’s Art Praxis.” (2022)
• Queer African Studies Association Price for best published essay by a junior scholar for “Performing Blackness as Transgressive Erotics: African Futurities and Black Queer Sex in South African Live Art.” (2022)
• Martha McCain Faculty Fellowship (QTRL, University of Toronto, 2021-2022)
• Ford Foundation International Fellowship Program (NYU, 2006-2008)

Research Interests/Specialization:

• Visual Culture and Performance Studies
• Indian Ocean Studies 
• Afro-Indian Studies
• Sexuality Studies
• Indentureship and Slavery Studies
• Black/African Feminist Thought
• Black/African Queer Studies 
• Black Sexual Cultures
• Porn Studies 
• Pleasure
• Queer Diaspora Studies
• Queer of Color Critique 
• African Fashion 

Education:

PhD in American Studies (Indiana University, Bloomington)
MA in Cinema Studies (New York University, Tisch School of the Arts)
MA in Film Studies (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)
BA in Dramatic Art (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)

Publications:

Books and Edited collections:

• Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness (Duke University Press, January 2025)
  • Available OPEN ACCESS
• “Perspectives on South African Cinema.” Special Issue of Black Camera: An International Film Journal, 9.2 (Spring, 2018)

• we remember differently: Race, Memory, Imagination (co-edited, UNISA Press, 2012)

Select Articles and Book Chapters:

• “Porn in/and Africa: A Critical Review,” in The Handbook of Adult Film and Media, edited by Peter Alilunas, Darshana Mini and Patrick Keilty. Intellect.

• 2026    “Indentured Vulnerability: Fatima Meer, Visual Culture and the South African Indian,” in Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, 1-23. 

• Ellapen, Jordache A. “Brown Femininities and the Queer Erotics of Indentureship,” in Journal for the study of Indentureship and its Legacies, 2, no. 1 (2022): 98-124. 

• Ellapen, Jordache A. “Performing Blackness as Transgressive Erotics: African Futurities and Black Queer Sex in South African Live Art,” in Feminist Formations, 33, no. 2.  (2021): 52-78.

• Ellapen, Jordache A. “Siyakaka Feminism: African Anality and the Politics of Deviance in FAKA’s Performance Art Praxis,” in Feminist Studies, 47, no 1 (2021): 114-146. 

• Ellapen, Jordache A. “The Brown Photo-Album: An Archive of Feminist Futurity” in Kronos: Southern African Histories, SI titled “The Other Life of the Image,” 42, no. 1 (2020): 94-128.

Teaching:

Undergraduate:

• Theories in Women and Gender Studies
• Introduction to Sexuality Studies
• Political Aesthetics and Feminist Representation
• Diasporic Sexualities
• Global Blackness and the African Diaspora

Graduate:

• Race, Sex, Pleasure
• Feminist Grammars of Togetherness

Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness by J. Ellapen (2025)