Intersections of Queer art and African Indigenous Culture: The Case of Inxeba (The Wound)

ABSTRACT

This article assesses some recurrent criticisms based on respect for traditional culture levelled at artworks that thematise non-heteronormative gender positionalities in South Africa. More specifically, it reconsiders the stormy, local reception of the South African movie Inxeba (The Wound), a queer love story set in the context of the male initiation rites of the Xhosa community. The article focuses on criticisms of the movie based on the alleged misrepresentation and misappropriation of indigenous cultural practices. It aims to reflect on the complicated knot of problems that queer artists and activists have to navigate in South Africa, including entrenched heteronormative traditions, but also multiculturality and racial privilege. New ways of negotiating these problems are proposed through the development of a more complex topographical account of the intersections of multiple forms of marginality, as well as through the application of multiculturalist theories regarding ways to assist oppressed minorities in traditional cultures.     

Children of the Nile: Archeology and the Coptic Church

Abstract

The contribution of archaeology to religious history has often been one of providing verification and clarification of accepted textual statements (if available) and expanding the knowledge of the physical forms of a specific branch of a major belief system. While the place of archaeological researches within the development of Biblical studies is somewhat familiar to scholars of Christian history, its association with the history of eastern Christianity is less well-known. This article will focus on one of the more unique denominations within the eastern Christian community, the Coptic Orthodox Church, and the varied ways in which archaeologyaeology and its allied disciplines have illuminated its past.