(Re)Turn to the Rural Queer Anti-Pastorals and Usable Traditions in John Trengrove’s Inxeba and Nakhane Touré’s Piggy Boy’s Blues

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.