Self-portrait as Epistemic Disobedience: Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama

Abstract

This article looks at South African photographer and visual activist Zanele Muholi’s ongoing project Somnyama Ngonyama and argues that it continues Muholi’s lifework of decolonizing the canon of representations of Black bodies, especially Black female bodies. In this series of self-portraits, Muholi challenges conventional representations of Black bodies as they appear in Western art history, in ethnographic photography or in the conventional mass media. Repurposing familiar objects, the pictures also encode sophisticated puzzles that express a sense of stifling under the pressure of racist misrepresentations. However, they also counter this epistemic violence by performing ambiguous gestures of appearing or disappearing, challenging the racist norms that would confine black bodies in certain spaces while barring them from others.