Title Pending 16504

This paper analyzes black queer engagements with the South African rural in the film Inxeba (2017) and the novel Piggy Boy’s Blues (2015). As I will argue, both the film and the novel revolve around a return to the rural that features the black queer protagonists’ struggles for connection with each other, their communities and the natural environment. I read the fraught affect of these returns to the rural through ulwaluko, the male circumcision rite of the amaXhosa, as a crucial pastoral frame that makes visible what forms of engagement are made possible in the tensions between black queer and environmental politics. I will show how the film and novel each set up queer anti-pastorals in which the protagonists struggle to survive rural patriarchal spaces, but in which the rural is also always already queered and changing. In this capacity, I argue, the film and novel foreground the rural as an indispensable but often overlooked site of cultural regeneration, in which anti-pastoral queering, although at great cost to the protagonists and their surroundings, nonetheless works towards possibilities for queer futurity forged in the reshaping of tradition. Reorienting oneself towards a hostile rural environment, it turns out, is crucial in answering this largely open-ended question.