Afro-Vulnerabilities and the Aesthetics of Slow Death

This chapter examines overlapping regimes of racialized labor by reading Sharlene Khan’s project when the moon waxes red in relationship to Mohau Modisakeng’s performance art and aesthetic practices. Whereas Khan takes us on a visual and affective journey through the sugarcane fields, emphasizing the experience of the Afro-Indian female subject in the afterlife of indentureship, Modisakeng focuses on the figure of the African migrant laborer in relationship to the coal mining industry. This chapter situates vulnerability as a feminine and feminized orientation toward the world and examines the making and unmaking of black/ened life within the death worlds of the sugarcane plantation and the coal mine, two geographical spaces indicative of slow death. The queer aesthetic of slow death brings time to a halt as an urgent call to deal with the colonial apartheid past and the ongoing violence that continues to shape black/ened life in postapartheid South Africa.