Hearing the Difference: Sexuality, Xenophobia, and South African Melodrama

This essay demonstrates the political exigency of melodramatic cinema in twenty-first-century South Africa, focusing on the short film cane/cain (dir. Jordache A. Ellapen, 2011) and the feature film Zulu Love Letter (dir. Ramadan Suleman, 2004). I argue that the displacement of speech in these films—signaled in cane/cain’s homonymic title and in Zulu Love Letter’s seemingly logocentric one—suggests a powerful challenge to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s model of producing national truth through spoken testimony. Building on this insight, I examine how cane/cain narrativizes the problem of xenophobic violence in democratic South Africa by conjoining the experiences of minority ethnicity and minority sexuality. Connecting this filmic vision with the scholarship on xenophobic violence, I argue that the deployment of male-male sexual desire across a divide of national origin enables the characters of cane/cain to encourage more complex audience relations to those perceived as foreigners. Whereas a singular focus on decrying xenophobia might suggest that the solution would be a xenophilic position, cane/cain points to the interplay of identification and desire, even if disavowed, across politicized lines of national difference.