Interested in submitting your work to the archive? Click here to access the form.
Please note that submissions to the archive are not monetarily compensated. But we do hope you will still want to contribute and aid in the creation of a space where queer Africans and South Asians gather to witness one another, share together, commiserate and – hopefully – start to see in one another, a map to a better world than the one we have inherited.
Who can submit to the archive: The values and principles we work by necessitate that contributors to the archive are of an overwhelming majority queer Africans and South Asians.
What does Tapestory mean by Queer: Tapestory understands queer as a political frameworks that is not limited to the definition that solely pertains to sexual orientation. As noted by Michael Warner’s in Fear of a Queer Planet – ‘queer politics are connected to issues as disparate and widespread as family and kinship, public discourse and language, consumerism and advertising, desire and sensuality, nature, reproduction and parenting, race and ethnicity, nation-states, censorship and the arts, intimacy and friendship, terrorism, violence, racism, colonialism, disability, health and health care, elder care, cultural norms, TV and film programs, news media, the legal system, the military, schools and universities, the body in everyday life, and many others’
What kind of work can be submitted to the archive: There are no hard and fast rules or guidelines as to what you can and can’t submit. We accept various modalities, including but not limited to journal entries, academic musings, audiovisual content, photography, music, poetry, doodles, etc. We also accept work in its various stages. We are big believers in the values and importance of queer thoughts and expression in all its stages, not just the ‘ready for publishing’ stage. So yes, we will also accept: work that is ‘not yet done’ [but in your heart feels done enough to be shared]; work that has been published elsewhere, mind maps; questions; ramblings; musings etc.
What happens once my work has been submitted: The Tapestory team will review the work submitted and then get in touch with you about whether or not the archive can host your work. The ‘review’ is done to determine if you and your work are in alignment with the values and principles of The Tapestory Project, namely: overwhelmingly queer African and South Asian, centrality of all life, equality, love, freedom and anti-colonialism and anti-white supremacy.
What happens once my work is on the archive: Tapestory is both an archive and a community space. We do not wish for the work submitted to the archive to collect proverbial internet dust, so please share work that you are willing to engage others on or have others engage you on. This engagement will be determined by the size of the archive and the capabilities of the website at the time to allow visitors to be able to submit comments/musings to Tapestory, which we will then share with the authors.
Please note that submissions to the archive are not monetarily compensated. But we do hope you will still want to contribute and aid in the creation of a space where queer Africans and South Asians gather to witness one another, share together, commiserate and – hopefully – start to see in one another, a map to a better world than the one we have inherited.
More about the Archive
Tapestory [pronounced Tapestry] is the vision of queer Black feminists and queer Indian feminists to build an online archive and cartography of African and South Asian queer feminist thought, practice, experience, art, love and resistance in their most liberated forms.
We who have sought, fought for and queered freedom and liberation, work really hard to seed and water frameworks that can produce and sustain our liberation. In the age of social media and globalisation, these initial seedings and seedlings [essentially the roadmaps that lead to some of the ideas that make it to the mainstream], are very easily lost and\or co-opted. We have seen, multiple times, big and revolutionary ideas and concepts – feminism, queerness etc – become watered down, become less bold and beautiful versions of what we intended for them. Tapestory aims to serve as an archive and thus map – so that what we mean and what we intend [with our art, our words, our work] cannot easily be replaced, lost or misconstrued. A land to return to when we need a reminder of our direction, our purpose, our selves. A land that belongs solely to us.
Tapestory is a seed bank for our intellectual and artistic pursuits and questions; collecting, storing and preserving. A garden where those seeds get planted and nurtured, sometimes next to others to cross pollinate and become wild new creations. And a map to trace, study and learn from what’s growing, what’s missing and what thrives from the company of another.
Interested in submitting your work to the archive? Click here to access the form.
