Youlendree Appasamy

This post forms part of the work by our 2020-2021 class of AIAC Fellows.
In South Africa, the past is not yet done with us. For two weeks in July 2021, South Africa was on fire. KwaZulu-Natal province and certain parts of Gauteng saw untold damage, food shortages in certain areas and a level of disaster that has left most in the country speechless.

The history of Mount Edgecombe, as told from above, is of the Mount Edgecombe Country Club Estate with Gateway and Cornubia Mall looming across the highway. But underneath this footprint of late-stage capitalism lies the history of the sugar estates and the people who worked on them — indentured labourers of South Asian descent, Black migrant labourers from Mpondoland, skilled Mauritian workers, workers racialised as Coloured, and white sugarcane plantation owners and managers.

iwalewabooks is a publishing house, art consultancy and online space characterised by the Yoruba dictum iwa lewa, or “character is beauty” in English. Started in 2018, the publishing house is dedicated to aesthetic social discourses, the politics of curation, collecting and debates about archives, as well as exploring varying artistic and academic positions from the Global South.

The Artist Proof Studio (APS) is a printmaking centre that offers holistic printmaking services to artists, and demystifies the printmaking process through interactive workshops and events.
Printmaking has a long and storied history in South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, through work by political parties and artist collectives such as the Medu Ensemble, and the genre was seen a counterforce to the suspicion and division left from the apartheid years.

Reading Nanima’s Chest, Zuleikha Mayat’s ode to the textile and fashion histories of western India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, I was introduced to garments and textiles at once familiar and new. Familiar, because some of the textiles referred to in the book lay mothballed in my mother’s ball-and-claw teak chest she inherited from my grandparents. New, because the textile and garment history into which Mayat delves is different to the Tamil one I know.

Tammy Ballantyne and I worked on curating and sub-editing the My Art Radar project.

My Art Radar is new project by Creative Feel aimed at sharing a more diverse view of the South African arts by a host of emerging and first-time writers, filmmakers, and designers from across the country.

Via Mathaba Media, I worked on the sub-editing, proofreading, graphics creation and layout of this Social Justice Sector Review Report.

In May 2020, we awarded ten fellowships to young, mostly African, writers and since then have been working with the inaugural class of fellows to support the creation and publication of their original work. This week on AIAC talk, we will profile two fellows and their projects: Youlendree Appasamy, a freelance writer and editor from South Africa, whose work explores South African Indian class identities, particularly in Kwazulu-Natal province; and Liam Brickhill, a freelance journalist from Zimbabwe, who unearths unique stories on Zimbabwean cricket.

[This essay was first published in Kajal Magazine Volume 4. You can buy a copy of the delicious magazine here: https://store.kajalmag.com/product/kajal-volume-4]
Indian Delights, a South African cookbook, is a hefty, red-covered kitchen companion created by the Women’s Cultural Group in the 1960s. Edited by Zuleikha Mayat, a founding member of the organisation, the cookery book is still immensely popular, selling more than 500,000 copies, and has gone...

Early in Five Tiger, a short film from South Africa, the audience is confronted with a striking visual: a woman in a car passenger seat accepts a folded R50 (about US$3.50) note (colloquially known as a “five tiger”) from a man in the driver seat. The transaction is almost wordless, but the viewer feels the resigned movements of the film’s lead, played tenderly by Ayanda Seoka.

This post forms part of the work by our 2020-2021 class of AIAC Fellows. Funded by Shuttleworth Foundation, our fellows produce original work. They represent a diversity of regions, backgrounds and are each exploring exciting ideas related to politics, culture, sports or social movements. Siddhartha Mitter is our mentorship coordinator. Our mentors are Aida Alami, Benoît Challand, Grieve Chelwa, Sean Jacobs, Marissa Moorman, Sisonke Msimang, and Bhakti Shringarpure. Caitlin Chandler prepares ...

On the 160th anniversary of the arrival of South Asian indentured labourers to South Africa, artist Kate’Lyn Chetty opened her Masters exhibition, A Place Away, at the University of Johannesburg. In the body of work, she reflects on family history, land, nostalgia and, of course, indenture histories. Kate’Lyn and I are both members of the Kutti Collective, and thought it’d be nice to chat about her work, artistic process and Frozen 2.

MFI: Africa e-zine 2 !

An essay of mine, 'So long, Stables', appears in the final edition of Ja. Magazine.