Faculty

Biography

Jordache A. Ellapen is an associate professor of Black Studies. A native from South Africa, Ellapen is an anti-disciplinary Black Studies scholar with expertise in the visual and performance art cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora. Ellapen’s current research focuses on the specificities of blackness and Afro-Indian relationalities in South Africa and the Indian Ocean World from a feminist and queer studies approach. Prioritizing the aesthetic, Ellapen seeks to understand how the visual culture and performance art practices of women and LGBTIQ+ artists in South Africa trouble persistent racial categories and hierarchies as an urgent practice of imagining otherwise. His next research project grapples with the relationship between pleasure and black freedom and will seek to understand how pleasure –messy, sticky, deviant, and chaotic—may open possibilities to think through a radical decolonial politic.

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.

In 2022, Ellapen was the recipient of the 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.” In 2022 he was also the recipient of the Queer African Studies Association Award 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.” Ellapen has published in numerous journals including Journal For African Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, Feminist Formations, Journal for the Study of Indentureship and its Legacies, Black Camera: An International Film Journal. He is also the co-editor of we remember differently: Race, Memory, Imagination (2012) and a Special Issue of Black Camera titled “Perspectives on South African Cinema.”

Ellapen has also being the recipient of numerous fellowships including the inaugural Martha McCain Faculty Fellowship (University of Toronto), the Ford Foundation International Fellowship Program, Social Science Research Council Dissertation Development Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Mentorship Program Award (Wits University, South Africa), and a National Research Foundation Fellowship (Wits University). He is the curator of The Pleasure Project, and his research creation has been supported by the National Arts Council of South Africa.

Dr. Ellapen earned a Bachelor of Arts and an MA in Dramatic Art from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (Wits), South Africa, an MA in Cinema Studies from the Tisch School of Arts at New York University, and a PhD in American Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington with a minor in Visual Culture Studies.

Selected Publications

Books

• Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness (Duke University Press, January 2025)
• We remember differently: Race, Memory, Imagination (co-edited, UNISA Press, 2012)

Select Peer-reviewed Articles

• 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.

Book Chapter

• Ellapen, Jordache A. “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. (2025)