Visual counternarratives: trans-embodiments in Zanele Muholi’s Beulah and Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji

Abstract

This study explores how portraiture and the colonial gaze are reframed by photographer Zanele Muholi and writer/visual artist Akwaeke Emezi as a means of depicting trans-embodiments in South Africa and Nigeria, respectively. I contend that both artists challenge heteronormative notions of the body to create a Black counter-archive that resists the violent regimes of invisibility to which transgender bodies are subjected in Africa. I discuss how Muholi’s Beulah (2006–) adapts old colonial portraiture strategies to subvert narrow constructions of gender and identity. The gender non-conforming images and transgressive representations serve to introduce Emezi’s use of visual elements in The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) for narrative, thematic, and symbolic purposes. Both Muholi and Emezi contribute to creating a language that speaks about gender and sexual diversity in Africa, and to developing visual counternarratives that seek to remove the limitations of established modalities of identity and belonging.

Keywords:

• Akwaeke Emezi
• Zanele Muholi
• African narrative
• decolonial gaze
• trans-embodiment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The Immorality Act of 1957 (later renamed the Sexual Offences Act) criminalized any sexual activity deemed immoral, including same-sex relationships. It was part of the apartheid-era legislation that enforced strict social and racial segregation. The Immorality Act was repealed in the 1996 Constitution, the first in the world to ban discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation (see Cameron and Gevisser 89–99).

2 The photographs from the Beulah series described here were part of the Tate Modern retrospective exhibition shown at the Valencia Institute of Modern Art in 2022.

3 For the need of cultural archives in queer African scholarship see Macharia and Migraine-George and Currier.

4 See the image “Ms Le Sishi II” at https://archive.stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/sishi2.htm.

5 “Melissa Mbambo” is part of Muholi’s series Brave Beauties (2014–), which celebrates empowered non-binary people and trans women, many of whom have won Miss Gay Beauty pageants.

6 Dr. Gustav Fritsch was a German anthropologist who conducted ethnographical research and photographed in South Africa from 1863 to 1866.

7 See the image “Le Sishi I” at http://archive.stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/sishi1.htm.

8 The now-discredited tribal designation paradigm would classify distinct identities as static, monolithic units with shared language and culture, distinguishing one tribe from another. Following this essentializing narrative, “the tribal designation ‘Zulu’ brought together Zulu-speaking groups that had different histories and political structures, creating the impression of a unified tribe in Western thought” (Geary 74).

9 Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, an Irish-born photographer, set out to depict what he considered to be the disappearing indigenous populations of South Africa. His monumental study, titled The Bantu Tribes of South Africa, draws upon thousands of photographs taken during years of travel in the region, classified by what he viewed as tribe and group. He published the images in eleven volumes between 1928 and 1954, paired with descriptive captions and anthropological essays “narrativizing” their content (Garb, “Figures” 21). Duggan-Cronin’s books are “renowned and contested for presenting an ethnographic view of African heritage” (Walther 8).

10 See the image “Stanley I” at https://archive.stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/mabena1.htm.

11 See the image “Stanley Mabena II” at https://www.walthercollection.com/en/collection/artworks/stanley-mabena-ii-braamfontein-johannesburg-november-2006.

12 Emezi borrows the concept of “rememory” from Toni Morrison, who used it in her iconic Pulitzer prize-winning novel Beloved, wherein the author recuperates the unrepresented history of Margaret Garner, a former slave who killed her child to prevent the child’s recapture into slavery, through imagination and archival information. Sethe, the fictional runaway slave, tells her youngest daughter Denver, “If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world” (36, emphasis added). This utterance symbolically connects the visual memory of the past with the present, while addressing the important role of individual and collective recollection.

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Notes on contributors

Rocío Cobo-Piñero

Rocío Cobo-Piñero is an Associate Professor at the University of Seville, Spain, in the Department of English and North American Literatures. Her current research focuses on how contemporary Afrodiasporic writers integrate into their literary works the influence of visual art, music, and popular material culture. She has published in the Journal of Intercultural Studies; Journal of Postcolonial Writing; Cultural Studies and Women: A Cultural Review, among others. Her contributions to edited volumes include African Philosophical and Literary Possibilities: Re-reading the Canon (Lexington, 2020); Afropolitan Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2019), and Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing (Routledge, 2019). Dr. Cobo-Piñero is the author of the book Sounds of the Diaspora: Blues and Jazz in Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones (Arcibel, 2015. Published in Spanish).