For the Gays… We had Jazz: Making New Worlds with the Kewpie Photographic Collection
In apartheid South Africa, a group of self-described gays and girls lived and worked as hairdressers and on-stage performers in Cape Town’s bustling and multicultural District Six. By the early 1980s, they were among the 60,000 residents who had been forcibly displaced, on the basis of their legal classification as “coloured,” while the built landscape was almost completely demolished.
With reference to a unique archival resource known as the Kewpie Photographic Collection, this public lecture will tell an as-yet unexplored part of this story: the central role that gays and girls played, during the 1960s, in the flourishing of the defiant musical style and movement that would later come to be marketed as Cape Jazz.
Rereading the gays and girls of District Six as part of a history of jazz, and vice versa, suggests new ways of thinking with photography in terms of syncopation and swing. It illustrates how disenfranchised groups have collaborated to build new possible worlds in which their lives could be more liveable—and suggests how those of us engaging with the materials they produced could better honour this worldmaking work.
* This event will be both in-person and live streamed. A link to the live stream will be sent to attendees by email closer to the date of the event.
About the Speaker
Ruth Ramsden-Karelse is the Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, an Associate of the Stuart Hall Foundation, and an organising member of the queer South African collective Salon Kewpie. She is currently completing her first monograph, about queer of colour worldmaking in apartheid South Africa, titled Gays and Girls Make Worlds. Her writing has appeared in publications including GLQ and Gender, Place & Culture.