The (un)promised land: queer identity and South Africa’s post-apartheid urban landscape

Abstract

In this article, I explore the intersection of photography and contemporary urban topographies in the production of queer identity in post-apartheid South Africa. To do so I examine Thebeautifulonesarehere, a contemporary photo-collage portrait series by Kelebogile Ntladi, which attempts to queer representations of South African cityscapes to reveal the entrenched homophobia and the systematic rejection of queer subjects. Ntladi, inspired by their own experiences of counter-normativity and the omnipresent threat of violence they face as a result, took to the streets to walk through their home city of Johannesburg to photograph the urban and cultural landscape; these photographic prints were then used as the building blocks in the assembly and fabrication of imagined spaces in which they and their fellow queer citizens would be able to live without fear of violence, where they could move freely and without repercussion. Using the trope of the flâneur as a starting point, I draw on Walter Benjamin’s paradoxical experience of Paris: his writing of Paris as the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ and ‘the promised land’ of the flâneur exists in stark juxtaposition with his own complex experience of anxiety, dislocation and impending doom while living in the city while in exile during World War II. Ntladi’s personal experience of post-1994 Johannesburg echoes the paradoxical experience.