UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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Treating the body of witness: medical understanding in William Kentridge’s History of the Main Complaint
Get PDFWilliam Kentridge’s History of the Main Complaint (1996) renders its main character, the industrialist Soho Eckstein, in a comatose state as doctors labour to diagnose him. This article reads Kentridge’s use of CT Scans and X-rays in the film as a metaphor for the diagnosis of apartheid narrated through South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Using Barry Saunder’s (2008) reading of the ambiguity in radiological diagnosis, this essay argues that the diagnostic tools in History of the Main Complaint locate a similar state of ambiguity in the TRC. Throughout the film several red X’s are marked upon the surface of these diagnostic images, denoting spaces of uncertainty, leading the viewer to flashbacks whose narratives of guilt and complicity are uncertain. To read through these ambiguities undermines what Mark Sanders (2007) termed the ‘quasi-legal’ domain of the TRC while uncovering narratives of apartheid that fall outside of the TRC’s scope. Like the X-ray’s stark black and white format, which serves as a legal document of bodily harm, the TRC encodes a juridical and singular narrative of the TRC. Instead these ambiguities narrate spaces outside of the main complaint that in themselves may be more illuminating of the legacies of apartheid in South Africa.
Recomposing Werther
Get PDFIn this article, I use a new materialist methodology to analyse two full-length nude portraits in Ralph Werther’s memoir, The Female–Impersonators (1922). I show how Werther either cooperates with the sexological diagnosis of his “pathological” condition of androgyny or, more provocatively, resists it to make a visual argument for the beauty of his variant body. My theoretical framework presents an alternative to social constructionist assumptions by asserting that agency, as Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and others have suggested, is distributed across networks of human and nonhuman objects, exerting a mutually constitutive force to change and be changed by contiguous objects. Objects, from this viewpoint, have power beyond what humans assign them. In this light, I argue that Werther is made by the objects that his body engages within and beyond the photographical frame, but, more importantly, that he also exercises his agency on them, via a series of visual relays, in order to maximise their value for his own rhetorical purposes. I conclude that Werther, as an actant in a complex visual negotiation, ultimately persuades us that his body is not to be pitied, but rather is a form to be aspired to, both culturally and aesthetically
Critical addresses: the archive-in-practice.
Get PDFIn the same year that the TRC hearings commenced, Jacques Derrida’s Archive fever: a Freudian impression (1996) was translated into English from French.1 The work offers a rich and inclusive analysis which proffers the notion that the relationship between the archive and its contents is fluid – the structure, formulation and functioning of the archive are informed by its contents as well as external bodies of knowledge. To this end, the archive’s objectivity, authorship and authenticity are in doubt. Nearly two decades on, the archive is still a primary source of investigation across various fields of inquiry including archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, literary studies and visual art
On Oyèrónké Oyèwùmí, colonial Afro-masculinities and the subjection of African cultural praxis in Inxeba
Get PDFThe understudied work of Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyèwùmí has pointed to the incommensurability of the westernised phenomenon of gender with African conceptions of personhood and social identity. Oyèwùmí’s work has challenged the idea of gender as a universal identity and subject position, not by arguing for a distinct form of gender embodiment that is African in its phenomenology, but by historically and conceptually demonstrating that gender is a product of western social constructs not universally related or applicable to African social schemas. Oyèwùmí presents the argument that the presence of gender as a social signifier of African peoples’ identity (whom prior to colonialism inhabited a cultural order without gender as a primary organising principle) occurs at the co-instance of western cultural domination and colonialisation of Africa. Relying on such a view toward African society’s historically non-gendered social organisation schemas, this paper offers a critique of the film Inxeba (Trengove 2017), arguing that, contrary to the popular reception of the film as a gender progressive representation of African queer identity and its attendant liberation from a purportedly hetero-patriarchal African culture, the film in effect constitutes the inverse. In essence, the reception around Inxeba inadvertently re-inscribes colonial gender grammars into an African cultural praxis and in the process undercuts African cultural autonomy for self-progression on its own terms. I further argue that the film’s thematic treatment of both a purported “African hetero-patriarchal masculinity” and an “African Queer masculinity” could be read as merely mimicking western/colonial gender embodiment discourse
Minna Keene: a neglected pioneer
Get PDFBorn in Germany in 1861, Minna Keene lived in Cape Town during a prolific phase of her photographic career. Whilst at the Cape (1903-1913), she achieved international acclaim as a pictorialist photographer. Her photographs of South African subject matter were shown at exhibitions across the world. She was quick to recognise opportunities to translate her photographic success into financial profit and was one of very few women to operate a photographic studio in early-twentieth century South Africa. Keene actively circulated reproductions of her photographs as self-published postcards and in popular publications. Through these interventions, she made a substantial contribution to popular visual culture at the Cape and was celebrated by local and international audiences. Despite her pioneering status, she has been overlooked in the existing literature on South African photography, and, although she has received limited attention in Euro-American histories of photography, much remains unknown about her life and work, especially in relation to her time in Cape Town. Drawing on multisited research, I present a biographical account of Keene which analyses the ambivalent gender politics in her photographs as well as her uncritical adoption of colonial categories of race
Black mirrors and zombies: The antinomy of distance in participatory spectatorship of smart phones
Get PDFSpectatorship has been investigated in film and media studies, aesthetics and art history, and has gained prominence from the 1990s with the focus on digital media. In this article, I investigate the implications of two notions of contemporary spectatorship for viewing moving images on smart phones, by studying how they are depicted in popular representations: television series, an advertisement and social media. The first notion is participation, with new technologies such as smart phones linked to supposedly more empowered participatory practices than those that preceded these technologies. The second notion is the cinema dispositive, which in current theory is often dismissed as leading to passive spectatorship. I aim to interrogate the complexity and contradictions inherent in both concepts and how they have recently been theorised in film and media studies, by focusing on two aspects that seem to facilitate participation through smart phones. The first is distance, where I investigate whether and how it is reconfigured as a factor that may feature in participatory spectator practices. The second is mobility, where I consider some limitations of the physical bodyscreen relationship between spectators and smart phones
The future of the past: imagi(ni)ng black womanhood, Africana womanism and Afrofuturism in Black Panther
Get PDFSince its release, Black Panther (Coogler 2018) has proven to be a phenomenal black cultural text on so many levels. The film has revitalised discourses on Afrofuturism, owing to the fact that the black themes it raises reconfigure representations of black lives and history that have mainly been steeped in normative western categorisations. Black Panther) has also proven to be phenomenal in its representation of black womanhood which, I would like to argue, engenders intimate convergences with the film’s Afrofuturistic thrust. In other words, Black Panther’s Afrofuturistic re-imagi(ni)ng of black womanhood is Africana womanist-centric. Black women from Africa and the African diaspora are presented as an imagined community – they have a shared history of imperial and patriarchal domination among other forms of othering. Their representation is a return to the source of sorts which recalls African women warriors who have been celebrated in the African past but seem to have lost the significance of their prowess over time but still have prospects in a re-invented Africa. Thus, in this paper I seek to make a theoretical case for Africana womanism in the Afrofuturistic context presented by Black Panther.
Between damage and possibility: Informal Recycling Conceived as Life Raft: Art, access and agency - art sites of enabling
No full textContemporary South African society is deeply inequitable, thrusting the consumerist waste of those who have the means into the sphere of those whose most basic needs for survival are not adequately met. Much of this waste is recyclable, however, and is now recognised to have substantial monetary value. The collecting and selling of the discards of the wealthy thus offers a viable source of income for the country’s poor. This essay appraises Johannesburg in terms of its complex socio-economic systems and problems, particularly as these pertain to waste and its handlers. Specifically, it examines two conceptually related art interventions involving the City’s informal recyclers. The first, House 38: Hazardous Objects, commenced in 2009. Various iterations followed, culminating in the second – Sleeps with the fishes in 2016. In both, the intention was to articulate questions of value – material and, more especially, human.
House 38: Hazardous Objects comprised an installation of hand-beaten lead trash-objects and became a conceptual device to interrogate the following themes: the artwork as actant; labour, skill and materiality; and permanence versus disposability. Sleeps with the fishes re-purposed Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819) by staging a group of recyclers crammed into a floundering skiff atop one of Johannesburg’s infamous mine dumps. Just as Géricault had sought to illustrate the inherent danger of governing bodies putting their interests above those of their citizens, giving power to political favourites, and abandoning the poor, so too did I wish to caution that civilcsociety as a whole cannot expect to escape unscathed when governmentalvand societal structures turn a blind eye to burgeoning consumption and its fallout – and to the circumstances of the poor who attend to the predicament.
But this essay also proposes that, since a physical shipwreck can be survived, it can therefore also symbolise innovation, endurance, spiritual and ethical resilience, and rebellion against authoritarian structures. And furthermore, just as the recycler’s trolleys are likened to sea-going vessels and their drivers to seafarers, so too, the pallet/raft can be suggested as a potent allegory for the self-reliant mariner who must use what little is available to survive in openbwaters. It will be seen that this essay persistently mediates between thebdiametrical themes of hardship and of opportunity, thereby articulating and sustaining the titular reference to damage and possibility
The Curation of To Be(Hold) in Revere: An Exhibition of Historical Photographs of People with Intellectual Disability: Art, access and agency - art sites of enabling
No full textIn this article, I discuss my curation of a photographic exhibition of people with intellectual disability (PWID) who were institutionalised at the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, from 1890 to 1920. The exhibition titled, To Be(Hold) in Revere, aimed to display affirmative photographs and humanising stories of PWID obtained from the Asylum’s casebooks. The Sites of Conscience movement influenced the exhibition’s aim. The movement seeks to recover the agency and personhood of those who lived at a site of human suffering in order to establish a collective memory of their voices and experiences. This article details my curatorial approach; it provides a telling of the life stories of seven patients and outlines how I adopted the principles of the Sites of Conscience movement in facilitating exhibition walkabouts with the public. A key facet of the walkabouts was encouraging the public to witness the personhood of the Asylum’s PWID, as well as to explore the current issues faced by today’s PWID and advocate for their human rights
The Black Female Messiah in Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix: Decolonising Speculative Fiction
No full textThe Africanfuturist novel The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor (2015) centres on a paradoxical black female messiah, whose story embodies the contemporary woman’s ofo (a sacred Igbo symbol of worship and conjuration that establishes her cause as just). In this prequel to the award-winning Who Fears Death (2010), Phoenix is the redemptive creator-destroyer who leaves the page blank for a womanist rewriting in the sequel. Phoenix, who precipitates the apocalyptic event, is represented as a beacon and a purifying fire. Through Phoenix’s recording, The Book of Phoenix is transcribed and becomes the Great Book. Applying African/Afrofuturist and womanist theory as an etic observer, I establish how the text performs the work of recovering an occluded history by creatively re-visioning theological frameworks