This special edition of Hummingbirds celebrates the publication of Indenture Aesthetics by Jordache A. Ellapen.

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.

In a time of widespread censorship and distortion, how can poetry cut through the silence that lingers in the wake of catastrophe? ‘Survival was so funny and incantatory’, writes Harmony Holiday in MAAFA, a rousing epic poem that examines the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and ‘undoes the erasure of Black femininity’.

In this generative workshop, we’ll explore the ideas in Holiday’s latest collection: its invocations of musical theory, American culture, Black radical thought and African mythology to forge a freedom song and recall the words lost to history. The session will also feature responses to work by Nathaniel Mackey, Christina Sharpe and Achille Mbembe, and opportunities for writing and feedback.