Abstract
The aim of this paper is to interrogate and trace the ghosts of heteronormative whiteness - and thus the spectres of queerness and blackness, specifically racial erasure through gendered foregrounding - in two recent motion pictures dealing with white, Afrikaner homosexuality, namely the 2011 film, Skoonheid {Beauty) and the 2018 film Kanarie {Canary). My aim is to look beyond the ostensible strengths of these films in terms of their representations of Afrikaner homosexual masculinities, both during and since the disbandment of apartheid, in order to see whether these films are indeed as politically progressive as they seem to be. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's cinema books and Jacques Derrida's notion of hauntology - a wordplay on 'haunting' and 'ontology' - I investigate here the ways in which subjectivities and geographies (place/space) in Skoonheid and Kanarie produce and reproduce knowledges about race, gender and difference, and map some ways in which these are assimilated into socio-political, geographical and temporal configurations through what I call the spectre-image. Keywords: Counter-enunciations, hauntology, racial erasure, spectre-image, structural absence.
Highlights
The aim of this paper is to interrogate and trace the ghosts of heteronormative whiteness – and the spectres of queerness and blackness, racial erasure through gendered foregrounding – in two recent motion pictures dealing with white, Afrikaner homosexuality, namely the 2011 film, Skoonheid (Beauty) and the 2018 film Kanarie (Canary)
Within the films we find lines of identity intersecting with race, gender and geography; that is, structural racism and structural patriarchy which function to uphold white supremacy4 and compulsory heterosexuality, as well as ‘their attendant geographies’, themselves imbricated in ‘material and metaphorical space’ (McKittrick 2006:xiii) – in this instance, the Free State (Skoonheid) and the military (Kanarie)
I interrogated and traced the ghosts of heteronormative whiteness – and the spectres of queerness and blackness, racial erasure through gendered foregrounding – in two recent motion pictures dealing with white Afrikaner homosexuality, namely the 2011 film, Skoonheid and the 2018 film, Kanarie
Summary
The aim of this paper is to interrogate and trace the ghosts of heteronormative whiteness – and the spectres of queerness and blackness, racial erasure through gendered foregrounding – in two recent motion pictures dealing with white, Afrikaner homosexuality, namely the 2011 film, Skoonheid (Beauty) and the 2018 film Kanarie (Canary). Perhaps one of the most crucial aspects in thinking about African cinema and de-Westernised theorisation is how to incorporate oral histories in film, as ontologies ‘shaped by orality assume that the world consists of interacting forces of cosmological scale and significance rather than of discrete secularised concrete objects’ (Tomaselli, Shepperson & Eke 1999:45). This focus on orality, cosmology and community, argues Clyde Taylor (2000:143), forms the basis of some of the paradoxes of ‘the greater impact of African films on the sensitive observer over their Western alternatives’ as 02 page of 21 the connection to and ‘intuition of communal relatedness’ trouble western ontologies and individualism
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