UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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From graphic passing to witnessing the graphic: racial identity and public self-fashioning in Incognegro
Get PDFThis article studies Mat Johnson and Walter Pleece’s graphic novel about lynching, Incognegro (2008). It demonstrates how “passing” is central to the public self-fashioning, for public consumption, of the African-American, but it is a passing that enables the transgression into spaces of horrific racism, such as lynching. It then moves on to the portrayal of improvisation by the two main protagonists via the use of the erotic (Carl) and the acquisition of a dual cultural citizenship (Zane). The essay concludes with Zane’s fashioning himself as a crusader-witness by continuing to be ‘Incognegro’
Towards local identity in South African architecture
Get PDFIn 1965, Paul Ricoeur (2007:42), referring to globalisation, highlighted the following paradox: ‘The encroachment of universal civilization, while improving some qualities of life, erodes those that are most vital and creative – one’s attachment to and knowledge of self in relation to place’. Ricoeur (2007:52) believes that ‘we have to go back to our own origins’ in order to deal with the expanding universal culture. He states that in order to confront a foreign culture, one must first have a culture and identity of one’s own. Part of this need is for an architecture that will express local identity. Since then globalisation as a phenomenon has established itself as a dominant economic and cultural reality. This has greatly increased the need for groups and countries to express their distinct cultural identities in the face of the threat of universalisation. South Africa is no different as far as this is concerned and the changes that have taken place since 1994 have dramatically increased the need the country has in this regard
The collector’s asylum:The politics of disposability in the work of Julia Rosa Clark
Get PDFThe South African artist Julia Rosa Clark’s (2015) collage-based practice is driven by what she terms ‘traditions of improvised practice’ — haruspex or soothsaying for example — that enable the practitioner to conceptualise new connections between past and present. Tracing these traditions across Clark’s oeuvre in this article, I compare them with the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s (2006) philosophy of history. Benjamin’s commitment to the destruction of tradition unearths a politics within Clark’s practice, just as her work opens avenues to consider Benjamin’s work as haunted by colonialism. I conclude the discussion by considering the implication of colonialism’s haunting for Clark’s post-apartheid practice
Die Antwoord gooi zef liminality: of monsters, carnivals and affects
Get PDFTraditionally considered to be the breeding ground of the monstrous, the limen is the non-place where hybrids congeal and mutate into extraordinary amalgamations. The latest cultural phenomenon of zef as embodied in the rap rave band Die Antwoord reveals precisely such a monstrous hybridity. Zef – a term describing white (predominantly Afrikaans) trash – automatically situates Die Antwoord as liminal outsiders and interlopers. In many ways, Die Antwoord resembles a circus troupe of freaks: front man Ninja is golem-like with his tattooed torso, Yo-landi Vier resembles an acidic nymph and DJ High Tek plods along in the flanks.
My analysis builds and expands on recognised correspondences between the monstrous, the liminal and the carnival. I show how liminal aspects (both monstrous and carnivalesque) are cleverly co-opted by Die Antwoord into a monstrous carnivalesque extravaganza, whereby the liminal is converted into a suspended moment of consumption. The extent to which liminality is suspended and advanced as a consumable entity by Die Antwoord forms the primary focus of this investigation, after which the possibility of understanding the liminal in terms of affects is briefly explored. I argue that even that which is supposedly outside consumerist instrumentality, namely the limen, with its life-altering and transformative possibilities, can, to some degree, be aligned and made subservient to consumerist ideals
Editorial
Get PDFThe previous issue of Image & Text was dedicated to thematic concerns with the liminal in South African visual culture. This issue is again an open issue that features current research. In keeping with the wider ambit of the journal as a visual culture publication, the six articles reflect a diversity of disciplines or fields, and embrace a historical dimension as well as focussing on current topics. The first two articles focus expressly on the South African domain; the next two articles deal mainly with the aesthetics and ethics of visual information and the manner in which information is visualised and framed. The last two articles turn their attention to the moving image, and particularly thematic discussions of the grotesque and vampiric imagery in cinema. Although the articles appear divergent, they have many commonalities, one of which is the interrogation of the status of the visual image in terms of its ability to enchant, fascinate, edify, persuade, disgust, urge reflection, or call to action.
The black servant in portrait, genre and still-life painting in the Spanish Netherlands
Get PDFThis article investigates the cultural significance of the motif of the black servant in portraits, genre scenes and still-life paintings made between 1640 and 1660 in the Spanish Netherlands. Framing the research in Peter Burke’s (2010) theory of the cultural history of images, I use the images as testimony about the past. The relevant context is the social and cultural history of the black African in the cities of Brussels and Antwerp. The artists active in the various categories are Jacob Jordaens, Thomas Willeboirts (called Bosschaert), David II Teniers and Gonzales Coques. I propose that these artists formed part of an elite network with contacts in the Northern Netherlands that informed their artistic choices. By analysing the surviving artworks certain iconographic patterns are identified which allow interpretation of the motif of black servants as class-related, and of blackness as a marker of the patron’s wealth. Considering all available evidence, this article attempts to explain the lack of popularity of the motif in secular painting, and thus contributes to a broader understanding of the history of blackness in the Spanish Netherlands
Race and “the Animal” in the Post-Apartheid ‘National Symbolic’
Get PDFThis article addresses cultural formations of race and “the animal” within the contemporary post/apartheid setting. In opening up this question, we have in our sights the domain of the nationscape that Lauren Berlant (1997:26) terms the ‘National Symbolic’: namely, ‘an imaginary, chimerical, and affect-laden screen projection through which citizens venture to “grasp the nation in its totality”’ (de Robillard 2014:84). Our contention is that anti-racist politics in South Africa must confront the primal scene of the constitution of race through species and the ‘zoologo-racial order’ it installs (Kim 2016:17). By putting what is called the “animal” into question, we outline how the politics of animalisation intersects with what Claire Jean Kim (2016:20) terms ‘race-species meanings’. We draw on scholars whose work has shown that what is construed as “human” and what the human constructs as “animal” produces a ‘necropolitical’ (Mbembe 2003:14) zone with fatal consequences for those who are animalised (Mbembe 2001:2; Wolfe 2012; Derrida 1988; Haraway 2007; Braidotti 2013). Our paper is predicated on Jacques Derrida’s observation that a distinction is made in law between criminal forms of ‘putting to death’ and ‘non-criminal putting to death’ (Derrida 1988:278). Species difference, as we show, conditions this distinction. This process effects a politics of animalisation that functions as a racialising technology that can be transferred to any species, as the examples from the post/apartheid setting that we analyse attest. We conclude by using Donna Haraway’s and Rosi Braidotti’s interventions to speculate on a futureoriented path for rethinking the question of race in its relation to “the animal”
In/On the Bones: species meanings and the racialising discourse of animality in the Homo naledi controversy
Get PDFIn this article, I address a controversy about species meanings and a racialising discourse of animality surrounding the Homo naledi fossils that were discovered in 2013 at the Cradle of Humankind; a fossil-rich area located just outside of Johannesburg. Nothing less than the origins, and definition, of humanity were said to be at stake in the fossils. This claim issued from the co-presence within the specimens of so-called “human” and “animal” features. In South Africa, the fossils provoked what Claire Jean Kim (2015) would call an ‘impassioned dispute’ about the perceived relationships between animals – particularly primates – and persons who are socially marked, and who identify, as black. Situating the naledi event within the long history of the ‘interconstitution’ (Kim 2015) of blackness and animality, I argue that the controversy surfaced anxieties about the untethering of racialising species meanings from prevailing ideas about the ontological foundations of “the human”. By approaching the cultural politics of the dispute, I explore how it provided an opening onto the conjugation of race and species within South Africa and conclude that the naledi event attests to the perils of eliding the history of race science as well as the difficulty of retaining within anti-racist politics “the animal” as a device to secure “the human”
The becoming-flower of video games: a Deleuzoguattarian analysis of Thatgamecompany’s Flower (2009)
Get PDFCurrent prominent theoretical approaches within the field of video game studies tend to engage with video games in terms of narrative and gameplay because of the legacy of narratology and ludology. However, these approaches are potentially ill-equipped to adequately account for the specificity of certain video games that involve digital interactive experiences that are not primarily, or solely, focused on narrative or gameplay, but can rather be understood as video game multiplicities that consist of percepts and affects. A pertinent example of a game that functions as a video game multiplicity is Thatgamecompany’s Flower (2009), which is analysed through a Deleuzoguattarian lens in order to highlight the unique aesthetic and play elements, or ‘percepts’ and ‘affects’, that enable the potentially transformative experiences offered by the game. Theorisation of these elements is arguably important because they entail a movement beyond the essence-based representational models of video games that are generally advanced through narratology and ludology, toward a model of multiplicity and becoming. In particular, the article explores how the percepts and affects of Flower can potentially open the player to a form of “transversal becoming” known as “becoming-imperceptible”