A poetics of sensuality: Xenophobia and same-sex intimacy in cane/cain

Abstract

This article offers a reading of the ways in which the short film, cane/cain (directed by Jordache Ellapen, adopts a poetics of sensuality to both unsettle and undergird its themes of South Asian migration, sexual intimacy and xenophobia in South Africa. While both homosexuality and xenophobia are not uncommon sites of public discourses in South Africa, cane/cain unearths the less visible faces of both by centring Brown bodies in corporeal collisions of sexual intimacy and of xenophobic violence to disrupt normative and binary categories of sex, race and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa. Utilizing the symbolic currency of sugarcane as an aesthetic and narrative pivot, cane/cain constructs a tension between the cinematic pleasure elicited by its poetics of sensuality and its discomfiting themes of homosexual intimacy and xenophobic intolerance to insert the South Asian subject into the discourses of race, sexuality and nationality in South Africa.