UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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Hidden Pretoria
No full textWhat an experience it was to have reviewed this book during lockdown – being lured to so many Pretoria places, some which I know and others which would have been quite inaccessible to the local tourist even if there had not been health-related restric-tions on our movements. On the other hand, none of the places in this book are, in fact, ‘visitable’ at all, except in the imagination, because these images are not “the real”. They are too poised and delectably mediated to be matched by any embodied experience in actual time. The forgone past which so many of them invoke, only exists in the historical consciousness of those they entice to wonder. To wonder – in every semantic sense of the word … that is indeed what this book accomplishes. It pierces our visuality, or established world-view, and infuses it with new ways of seeing. In a sense, this book is a guide to reconfiguring a visual landscape – a decolonial one, if one wishes, because the reconfiguration entails the de-assembling of staid and fixed impressions and the rearrangement of old beliefs based on newly revealed and newly-considered (old) information
Themed Section Editorial
No full textThe diversity of the articles included in this special issue attests to the ongoing relevance of gender as a crucial determinant of individual and social identity, a key component of political engagement, and a multidimensional field of scholarship. Gender is also a core aspect of dis/positionality, by which we mean the intersections of gender, race, class, human and physical geographies, and any other aspects of identities that are ‘markers of relational positions rather than essential qualities’ (Maher & Tetreault 1993:118; see also Alcoff 1988; Benard 2016; Darling-Wolf 1998). By emphasising gender as productive, plural and constitutive of the dis/positionality of a subject, rather than a quintessential, intrinsic and static constituent of the subject per se, these articles aim to dispel the notion that subjectivity is ‛universal’, and that gender is in any sense binary
A deep mapping prospect: : the grounds of the Fort England Psychiatric Hospital as an urban greenspace
Get PDFUrbanisation in South Africa is expanding at an alarming rate. With the ever-expanding growth of urban areas, it is essential to understand how urban sites can function as greenspaces that provide wildlife habitats, biodiversity hotspots, as well as act as movement corridors for birds and mammals. In this study, I investigate the grounds of the Fort England Psychiatric Hospital as a small-scale greenspace. The hospital is located in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. I propose an investigation of the site that is informed by a branch of digital environmental humanities that uses digital technologies to mobilise collective action in the conservation and stewardship of a greenspace. To this end, the article calls for a deep mapping of the site to achieve a twofold research objective. First, to study the biodiversity of the site and explore the possibility that it could offer a refuge for threatened species. Second, to call for an inclusive management plan for the greening and conservation of the site. To substantiate, the site is of importance for human use, environmental history, as well as for fauna and flora species. Accordingly, the site’s management plan must engage, accommodate and negotiate a diverse set of interests, as well as mobilise action from various members of the community
AMAPASI ASWAFUNI! TO HELL WITH PASS LAWS: Class, Race and Gender Identities in the Anti-Pass Laws Cartoons Published in UMSEBENZI / South African Worker 1933-1936
No full textThe Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) was founded in 1921 and dissolved in 1950 in anticipation of being banned under the Suppression of Communism Act.It was relaunched as an underground party in 1953, renamed the South African Communist Party (SACP) and eventually unbanned in 1990. The important role played by the Communist Party in the liberation struggle of South Africa is generally acknowledged. Despite this role, and the fact that the Party had used printed propaganda since its inception, the printed graphic propaganda of the CPSA has not yet received critical attention. Propaganda was important to the CPSA, and a sizeable volume of printed material produced by the Party survives in archives locally and abroad
Constructure: 100 years of the JAG building and its evolution of space and meaning
Get PDFOne of the most topical debates in South Africa is the country’s colonial past and specifically, the relevance of its colonial memorials, monuments, and institutions. One such institution is the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), which in 2010 celebrated the centenary of its Foundation Collection and in 2015, celebrated the centenary of its original Edwin Lutyens-designed building
Editorial
Get PDFThe second issue of Image & Text for 2016 is again an open issue, that is, it is not built around a specific them, but contains five articles that deal with current work by researchers. Two articles deal with the issue of the representation and consumption of African-American and Afrikaner cultural identity respectively in popular visual culture. Thereafter, one article focuses on the experiential properties of type, and the issue of design for sustainability is tackled in the next article. The last research article deals with an investigation of material conceptualism in the work of the fine artist Alan Alborough. In addition to the research articles, there is a conference report on People, images, a world. Images of human beings in missionary magazines during the time of the German Empire, held in Mainz. As always, there are common areas between the articles that indicate the richness of current research into visual culture
Victorian Respectability and Gendered Domestic Space
Get PDFThe ideology of respectability, the essential objective of Victorian existence, was a complex combination of moral, religious, economic and cultural systems. Respectability dictated specific gender definitions and was organised around an involved set of practices and representations that covered every aspect of an individual’s life. In the Victorian commitment to an imperative moral code, respectability spun a persuasive web that wove the disparate elements of the middle class together. The core of this refined behavioural code was common to both men and women; yet in every nuance, close attention to gender definitions was essential to gentility. Moreover, respectability became inseparable from the home, the site of complementary masculinity and femininity
The sound of a book: sound as generator of narrative in the reception of selected new media objects as books
No full textMy article examines the phenomenon of sound as a narrative creating device in selected new media objects commissioned for the exhibition Navigating the Bookscape: Artists’ Books and the Digital Interface.1 In this article, I propose that the aural, far from being simply an expected convention, facilitated by the digital nature of the work, fundamentally enhances the reading and reception of these works within the conventions and experience of the book
Zanele Muholi’s “Reading Room”
Get PDFIn 2016, Stevenson Gallery (Cape Town) published 5,000 copies of a tabloid newspaper featuring the South African artist, Zanele Muholi’s self-portraits. The magazine – lo-fi, lightweight, loose-leafed, portable and free – was accompanied by an essay by M Neelika Jayawardane (2016). I was immediately struck by the democratic nature of this venture, for here was a product not only relevant to those who attended Muholi’s globally circulated exhibition – entitled Somnyama Ngonyama, and shown at the Stedelijk Museum, LUMA Arles, in the Netherlands, France, United Kingdom, United States, and elsewhere – but also of great relevance to those in schools, local communities and township libraries. This realisation has prompted me to share the magazine with my film, photography and journalism students at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, and to ensure its distribution in schools in the Western Cape.
Central to Muholi’s images and Jayawardane’s text are matters of race, sexuality, and, all importantly, the need to redefine and re-imagine the black body. Against the reactionary return to black essentialism, the further aggravation of “black pain”, and the concomitant racial divisiveness which this declamatory, spectacularised, and even nihilistic return to black self-determination has fostered, Muholi’s project brokered a more reflective, immersive and exploratory approach.
Her ongoing body of work – in which she theatricalises and re-imagines her identity in photographs recorded daily – is a vital alternative to a programmatic and reductive identity politics. At every turn her photographs make one aware of the criticality and dailiness of self-fashioning.
That Muholi expressly devised a “Reading Room” – as a context through which to read race and as a parallel space for her travelling exhibition – reminds one of the artist’s resolute and long-standing activism. She, in effect, is asking her readers/viewers to re-evaluate the assumptions and prejudices which inform understandings of race and its representation within the art world. Through her Reading Room, she is asking one to reconsider how one reads oneself and others.
This deeply intimate yet pedagogic venture serves as an inspired mirror for concerns with and around race and racism inside South African educational institutions. It challenges the commodification of blackness in visual culture, and, I argue, proffers a credible “emancipatory possibility”. Muholi’s Reading Room, in brief, is a striking answer to, and fulfilment of, Stefan Collini’s (2012:8) vision of what the purpose of an education or the role of a university should be – a world, a place, in which future scholars are not shaped by ‘an instrumental necessity’, but by an education ‘intrinsic to their character’; a realm in which one can pursue ‘the open-ended search for deeper understanding’ which fosters ‘autonomy’