UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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Mandela in/and Pretoria
Get PDFThis article is a reflection on how Pretoria as a political, social and cultural space could be re-envisioned post-apartheid. The angle of approach is critical, general jurisprudence as advocated by Douzinas and Gearey (2005), with an emphasis on law’s consciousness, its conscience, and its justice. The reflection takes place against the framework of spatiality, spatial justice and the notion of genius loci, spirit or sense of place. Using John Hyslop’s discussion on the Afro-modern Mandela in Johannesburg as point of departure, a discussion on Mandela in/and Pretoria follows, with specific reference to the Treason Trial staged in the Old Synagogue between 1958 and 1961 and the Rivonia Trial played out in the Palace of Justice on Church Square in 1964. The question is asked how the influence of Johannesburg as metropolis differs from the influence of Pretoria as centre of nationalism, bureaucracy and governmentality. Another, more recent, Pretoria trial, on the Schubart Park evictions, is invoked. Linking up with Sarah Nuttall’s musing on the \u27Johannesburg text\u27, it is stated that, in the same vein, the Pretoria text, as a certain instantiation of the lawscape, is still finding its form
Loose your warts, become sublime:: South African paper currency as instruction in the making of a nation
Get PDFAt the time of the introduction of the euro, Eric Helleiner (2002:3) – a political economist – voiced the growing realisation amongst policymakers that forms of money are ‘invested with social meaning intricately connected to the intensely political project of constructing unique and distinct national identities.’ Responding to Helleiner’s further observation that a gap exists in contemporary scholarship with regard to the relationship between national currencies and national identities, the present article examines the expression of national identity manifest in the 1992 South African banknote series that was commissioned in 1989 by the Reserve Bank of South Africa under the auspices of the then ruling National Party (Moneymaking 1991:41)
Sightseeing in art and visual culture
Get PDFDeceptively straightforward, the contemporary visual terrain in westernised, post-industrial cultures is increasingly developing into a complex smorgasbord of visual spectacles available to potential viewers. Discourse dealing with issues arising from this field of the visual, or ‘visual culture’, is evidence of an intellectual acknowledgment that present-day (post-industrial) social, political and cultural life is undeniably entangled with (and complicated by) images. As a result, over the past two decades or so, institutions worldwide have adapted their teaching programmes to accommodate the field of visual culture as a site that requires serious academic attention. Recent enquiry into the ideological underpinnings of images in general, as well as the assumption that vision is a learnt activity, has led to new questions being asked in (and of) art history. In response to the disciplinary challenges that have now been lodged against the subject art history, the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Pretoria has significantly modified its theoretical subjects to ‘deal’ with the visual with a view to affording students opportunities to develop critical thinking skills in the present image-laden world. In response to the tone of the University’s centenary celebrations – based on retrospection, evaluation and looking to the future – this article considers the rising production, reproduction and consumption of images that have dominoed into academic unease over the most suitable way/s in which images should be dealt with as both sights and sites in art history and/or visual culture studies by briefly contextualising the programme offered by the Department of Visual Arts within these debates
Eco fashion: fashion fad or future trend?
Get PDFAwareness of the impact current practices have on the environment is applicable to all spheres of life, industries, and countries, with emphasis placed on the wise and sparing use of resources. Similarly, eco fashion has become one of the lifestyle issues of the twenty-first century with some designers in the global and local fashion arenas, developing their collections around this concept. Yet, as pointed out by Lee and Sevier (2008) in discussions and debates on eco fashion, differing interpretations and endorsements of eco practices emerge. Does eco fashion refer to organic products, recycling, re-use, restoration? There are questions as to whether the concept could even be considered compatible with the idea of fashion. Breds, Hjort and Kruger (2002:27) maintain that many in the textile and apparel industry ‘… believe that there is a contradiction in working with sustainability [eco] and fashion’. This quote seems to be a true reflection of the fashion world where the consumer is constantly presented with seasonal and inter-seasonal changes. That consumers have an innate desire to have the next best thing is an idiom widely embraced in the fashion industry. How then, would it be possible to ensure, instil or develop eco-awareness and acceptance in the current consumer-based culture
Refocusing the traumatic past (an essay in two parts)
Get PDFIn the greater landscape of South Africa’s traumatic past, the South African War of 1899-1902 is arguably “old history”, surpassed in time and importance by more pressing traumas. Moreover, because it was usurped by Afrikaner nationalism as a myth of national origin and used to justify claims of Afrikaner sovereignty, it is also often seen as “old Afrikaner history”: at best, an episode of limited relevance to the many South Africans effectively written out of this narrative; at worst, a platform for nostalgic hankering by a conservative few.
The following is an attempt to reconsider the South African War in a manner that addresses both the assumptions pervading this history and the prevalence of its residues and traces in a present-day, “decolonising” South Africa. My premise is that the War, like all traumatic pasts, is neither stable nor resolved – less a closed chapter than an open book, subject to perpetual rereading. Precisely because this past is unfinished, looking again has the potential to focus past and present relationally, illuminating not only the vicissitudes of what has been, but also the co-ordinates of the seer, here and now.
I first encountered this history (in a resonant way) through the eyes of a witness: my great-grandmother, Maria, who was captured by British soldiers in 1901 and interned in the Winburg Concentration Camp. Shortly before her death (in 1946), Maria distilled her experiences into a handwritten, 56-page memoir, which was passed down through subsequent generations. I recall immersing myself in this document, with its brittle pages and fading ink, a vicarious spectator inserted into the space behind Maria’s eyes.
Later, I came to see Maria’s narrative differently: refracted through other archives and narratives; through critical accounts of the War; through the agendas and ideologies pervading the time of its writing (some four decades after “the fact”). I saw it as a belated “memory log”, where memory is a pliant repository shaped by the context of remembrance and, in Maria’s case, necessarily occluded by trauma. What her narrative evinces is not the unequivocal “truth” of experience, but the visage generated by her own sense-making, mediated by time and language, to be mediated again and again by the reader’s interpretative lenses.
In taking the motif of “refocusing” as a starting point, this article – essentially a reflection, in two parts, on my own ambivalent apprehensions of the War – considers the literal and figurative technologies of looking that both enable and imperil access to the elusive past. I suggest that “doing history” is a mediated, subjective, embodied experience, one that both locates and dis-locates the researcher. For the very act of looking back (and looking again) shifts the vantage point from whence one looks, reciprocally. In this sense, “refocusing” could be seen as productively estranging, transforming both seer and seen. It does not “return” the researcher to a stable and familiar past (and its illusory “home truths”), but opens up mutable, multiple sightlines to (and from) a precarious present
Becoming animal: liminal rhetorical strategies in contemporary South African art
Get PDFIn this article, I address the liminal therianthropic body in contemporary art that employs hybridity (performed and represented), as a mode of rhetorical potency in the expression of marginal subjectivity. The Derridian position that postulates human identity in a metaphoric relation to the animal (animetaphor), and Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of becoming animal, are instrumentally applied within the scope of this article.
By way of situating these theoretical positions in the South African art and social context, I discuss specific works by two contemporary South African artists whose methodological approach invokes the hybrid animal/ human body. The chimerical sculptural work of Jane Alexander, where human form seamlessly meets animal façade, is referred to as an example of a representational mode of this therianthropic tendency. I thereafter discuss artworks in which the artist has created the sense that the human body is being performed in animal likeness and gesture. In doing so, I look at Nandipha Mntambo’s performed animal transformations, in which she paradoxically critiques and embraces the figurative animality of the African body in colonial discourse. In analysing these artistic instances, I employ a dialectical approach that manifests in two textual voices. The “academic” voice highlights symbolic meaning, while a voice speaking in “intuitive prose” draws attention to elements of the artworks that are aligned with the notion of a human/animal “becoming”. Through this off-set dialogue, I foreground the anthropocentric motives of symbolic representation, whilst also gesturing towards the agency enhancing properties of this trope in artworks wherein the artist courts disenfranchised human identity. The deterritorialising effect of “becomings”, where fixed subjectivity becomes dissoluble and mutable is highlighted, as well as the less colonising ends of such strategies in terms of the project of non-human agency. By way of stretching the discussion of artists who employ hybrid therianthropic strategies to a global context, I also discuss the performative artwork of the British contemporary artist Marcus Coates
Of metaphor and machine Some nuts and bolts behind Modern times as philosophy
Get PDFIn this article, I examine numerous figurative manifestations of “the machine” in Modern times (1936), directed by Charles Chaplin. I focus in particular on the film’s varied expressions of the HUMAN IS A MACHINE conceptual metaphor, tracing its presence from the first quarter of the film, which I label “Life in the factory”, to what follows thereafter in “Life beyond the factory”. The role of this conceptual metaphor in Modern times is identified in r esponse t o Thomas Wartenberg’s (2007) influential analysis, in which he argues that the film provides a valuable illustration of Karl Marx’s theory of worker mechanisation. While not denying the philosophical value that he attributes to Modern times, I question Wartenberg’s assumption that the film illustrates a theory in itself. Instead, I propose that the film mobilises a more general and fundamental concept – the conceptual metaphor that the film and Marx’s philosophy happen to share – and that it is only by means of this underlying concept that Wartenberg can identify Modern times as a cinematic illustration of the philosophical theory. I conclude with a few implications that my analysis and assessment of Wartenberg hold for the broader film as philosophy debate
Identity in interaction Sub-cultural intersubjectivities in popular radio conversation on Inxeba
Get PDFQueerness undergoes multiple treatments in South African society, oscillating between site of cultural un/acceptability, religious im/morality and of embodied resistance. Conversation of the film Inxeba indicates that claiming or talking about the queer position amongst cultural identities becomes a social act, which must be accounted for within interaction. Through adopting an ethnomethodological position, it can be noted that within instances of radio talk, speakers design their utterances to employ identities as actions, which align orientations to norms regarding sexuality. By deploying a conversation analysis to the collected data, the interrelation between queerness and emotive talk is shown through the ways in which speech features, such as pause and emphasis, are employed strategically. In tandem, an analysis of discursive connotation offers a balance between the local situation and broader context of talk in order to show how queer identities are deployed within other discursive formations. Through tethering these styles of analyses, it will appear that the cascading use of social identities within talk of Inxeba presents as a particular stock of interactional knowledge regarding queerness (based on the three extracts analysed). By reflecting on how the identity of the researchers may have influenced this analysis, managing the reflexive process should not be seen as a final step but rather an instrumental part of any qualitative analysis of identity
Re-forming Hollywood’s imagination: beyond the box office and into the boardroom: African Perspectives on Marvel’s Black Panther
No full textDespite the commercial success of Black Panther (Coogler 2018) and its ostensible achievement of making Hollywood more representative of black people and “their” narratives, the film is limited in terms of the progress on inclusion it can achieve. This is because, as a Hollywood superhero film, its success is predicated upon perpetuating the colonisation of the imagination of its (still largely white) spectators and it does not represent black people on their own terms. A close focus on form exposes the film as retaining the spectacular and action-orientated visual language of Hollywood that engenders cinema as fundamentally voyeuristic and imperial. In this way, a close examination of Black Panther supports the examination of limits of what the commercial structure of an industry established upon the colonial gaze of spectacle is currently able to produce. This paper goes further and also argues that decolonisation in cinema should involve a more radical confrontation of Hollywood aesthetics and the formal language of Hollywood’s gaze itself, so that the embodied visual languages of global cinema and New Black cinema may be more widely employed to reveal the world of those colonised by Hollywood as materially different, on their own terms. It is only by going beyond the success of films like Black Panther in the box office and through a radical investigation of form and haptic visuality that the considerably unequal structure of the Hollywood boardroom − which produces such films in the first place − may be transformed
The ‟in-between” element of the Europa and the Bull myth: responses by contemporary Greek artists (2002- 2018) to the myth’s politicisation by the EU: Challenging Legacies in Post-Colonial and Post-Socialist Notions of Place
No full textThis paper presents a tripartite analysis of the political use of the Europa and the Bull myth in pro-European and Eurosceptical representations using the “in-between” concept. The “in-between” has long been used in philosophy and architecture and has been presented by Elizabeth Grosz (2001) within a broader context as an insightful tool for analysis. Here I use it to reveal the inner meanings of the myth and its political uses. First, I analyse how this concept of the “in-between” unfolds in two fundamental ideas of the myth, transformation (or metamorphosis) and transition (or transportation), signifying on a symbolic and political level a passage from one place/state of being to another, thus making it instrumental in shaping the political dynamic of the myth in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Secondly, I examine the role of this “in-between” concept in the process of the transformation of the myth from a cultural to a political one and in the use of the myth as such during times of European Union (EU) conflicts. Finally, I present artworks created by contemporary Greek artists in the years 2002-2018 as evidence of the above, setting their work on the international stage of artistic responses within the political arena