The Body as Site, Movement and Migration

The South African Indian Diaspora in Dance and Archive

Authors

Abstract

This visual essay questions what constitutes an ‘archive’. Drawing on autoethnography as a method, it frames the relationality between my family’s sixty-five-year-old dance archive and embodiment as co-constitutive and relational dynamics, foregrounding minor histories as a tactic for resisting hegemony, in the face of homogenisation and operations of control, and situates dance as a counter-archive: a site where memory, resistance, and cultural knowledge are preserved through embodied movement when material traces have been erased or lost. In South Africa, issues of citizenry, xenophobia, genocide and poor living conditions persist.  Moving, against this genealogy of oppression, the essay spans from indenture and migration, through apartheid to the present, and aligns personal archive, diasporic history, and contemporary practices to examine how dancing bodies rehearse and reconfigure the often misunderstood and/or under-represented. It presents minor socio-political narratives of the ‘Other’, across generations,  and offers new modes for understanding citizenship and belonging.

Author Biography

Anusia Govender-Elshove, University of the Witwatersrand

Anusia Govender-Elshove is the progeny of her pioneering Indian
classical dancer mother, the late Rani (Nydoo) Govender (1944
2005). In addition to Indian and African dance styles, Anusia’s
interests include dances of the world, interwoven dance cultures,
dance theatre, paper engineering, and digital arts. She obtained her
MA and PhD Degrees in theatre and performance at Wits University
School of the Arts, around the curation of her sixty-five-year-old
family dance archive and developing ‘paper choreography’ and
‘unarchival’ as decolonial methodology around liminal spaces in the
documentation and re-storying of the Other. A former Centennial
Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand, she is
currently a lecturer in writing and interactivity at the Wits School of
Arts Digital Arts Division.

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Published

2026-09-30

Issue

Vol. 20 No. 1 (2026): Issue # 38 | African Dreams: Re-Enchantment Through Relational Ontologies

Section

Visual Essay

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Copyright (c) 2026 Anusia Govender-Elshove

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