Introduction

The introduction offers a brief history and context of South Africa to understand colonial apartheid forms of racialization and the enduring impact of the racial hierarchy in South Africa. It examines how the category “Indian” emerges and untangles the merchant middleman class from the indenture class. Drawing on Black Consciousness (BC), it examines how blackness has shifted from the apartheid period to the postapartheid period, where blackness now manifests as a nativist formation that intersects with (hetero)normativity to create a class of racialized outsiders. Employing BC as theory and method, the introduction develops a queer-reading practice that troubles the notion that Indianness and blackness are incommensurable racial categories. It develops the concept of Afro-normativity to understand these performances of nativism and black authenticity. While Afro-normativity names normative regimes of race (those inherited from colonial apartheid), indenture aesthetics queers these normative regimes of race. The introduction provides new language to understand Afro-Indianness and its relationship to South African blackness.