Imaging an Assisted Evolution: The Environmental Futurity of Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama

Abstract

ABSTRACT As the effects of climate change are felt with increasing violence along its multifarious front lines in the Global South, the futures of human and non-human life on the state-demarcated peripheral are cancelled out by both naturalising Euro-American discourse and the disavowal of what has been termed “climate colonialism”. Speculatively thinking with two photographs from South African visual activist Zanele Muholi’s series Somnyama Ngonyama (2012–ongoing), the article explores the theoretical landscape of the “anthropocene” through the prism of creative and academic work by Black, queer and indigenous practitioners whose works resists its homogenising narrative. Utilising bell hooks’ notion of the “oppositional gaze” and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the article reflects on how Muholi’s seemingly exposing photography in turn exposes the depoliticisation of ecological neocolonialism. The science-fictional and resistant practices of the artist reimagine the agential capacity of queer Black bodies in relation to environmentally changed futures.