Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I examine a small set of vernacular photographs that document South African anti-apartheid, LBGT rights, and AIDS activist Simon Nkoli in community with Black Diaspora queer activists to raise questions about African queer pasts, futures, in/visibilities, and the limit of the archive.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, “South Africa's Simon Nkoli in/and Diaspora Vibrations: Photographs, Archive, AIDS, and Listening to the Frequencies of a Black Queer Internationalism,” I cull and explore a small set of photographs (and adjacent texts) that document South African anti-apartheid, gay and lesbian rights, and AIDS activist Simon Nkoli in community with Black Diaspora queer activists working and gathering in the United States and Western Europe. Following Tina M. Campt’s method of listening to images and Santu Mofokeng's invocation to seek the significance of Black life in image beyond the frame, I attend to how these vernacular snapshots of and by Black queers taken during the early decades of the AIDS crisis hum with shadows, absences, and ambivalent forms of presence that echo with loss, compounded grief, and at times sing joy into the fissures. As I strain against reifying a historical narrative that set the terms of Nkoli’s activist and intimate internationalism within a majority white gay Anglo-European transnational community, I attempt to trace an alternative reading–one that specifically attends to the Black Diaspora connections and conversations in which Nkoli participated, and at times, precipitated, and perhaps, unsuccessfully attempted. Lastly, I pose questions about African queer futurities that might challenge visibility and archive as central modes of registering Black queer pasts.