Fraught Starts, Fragmented Twists, and Forged Endings: (Re)Imagining and (Re)Imaging Black Womanhood in Zulu Love Letter and Yesterday

This article explores the representations of black womanhood in the postapartheid films Zulu Love Letter (dir. Ramdan Suleman, 2004) and Yesterday (dir. Darrell Roodt, 2004). Drawing on African feminist theories, I examine how both films grapple with the complexities of visualizing race and gender against the backdrop of a changing South Africa. I also consider the ways in which Zulu Love Letter and Yesterday negotiate a language and gaze to represent black female subjectivity, as well as their focus on the female body as the embodiment of experience. Thus, I read the two films as feminist countercinema texts, because of their practices of challenging and subverting constructions and representations of black women in mainstream South African cinema and, by extension, their countering of the politics of exclusion, more broadly.