UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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JM Coetzee: Photographs from Boyhood
Get PDFThere is a joke I especially like in the US version of The Office: Erin, the receptionist, takes the last photo on a disposable camera at an office party, sees it has reached the end of the roll and throws it in the bin saying, ‘Oh, all done!’. Then in a talking head interview, she explains, ‘Disposable cameras are fun, but it does seem wasteful, and you never get to see your photos’
Contextualisation, part 1: Queer cinema and the global
Get PDFIn the first of two contextualising articles written for this themed issue, the notion of queer cinema is positioned within larger, global narratives of activism, theorymaking and reception, while simultaneously nuancing its functional applicability in ‘world cinema’ contexts – in essence cautioning against the potential pitfalls of deploying it as if with global or universal reach. In reaction to such universalist assumptions, the national is rather conceptualised in/through queer cinema as multiple horizons of belonging, as frameworks of space which speak to interconnecting and overlapping surfaces; turning the focus instead to the process of queering the formations of nations, ethnicities and diasporas as marked by hierarchical (hetero)sexual binaries whose normative effects can be disrupted and undone
‘Shame, Seething, Basic Shame… It’s all About the Cock’ Reading Nakhane Touré’s Piggy boy’s blues (2015) after Inxeba
Get PDFIn the 1991 essay ‘Redefining Relevance’, Njabulo Ndebele traces South African literature as one concerned with protest. Ndebele argues that with the changing political atmosphere of the country, the greatest challenge facing South African artists was to find new ways of thinking
Sonic fingerprints: on the situated use of voice in performative interventions by Donna Kukama, Lerato Shadi and Mbali Khoza
Get PDFThis article focuses on sonic elements in performative interventions by three South African artists: Donna Kukama’s, Chapter F: The Free School for Art and All \u27Fings Necessary (Until Fees fall) (2016), Lerato Shadi’s Matsogo (2013) and Mbali Khoza’s What difference does it make who is speaking? (2014). By observing the details of each artist’s use of voice and its ‘situatedness’ (Goniwe; Mohotowa Thaluki), I have positioned the works within the discipline of sound studies. Beyond the sites chosen for the interventions, their ‘situatedness’ refers to the cultural aspects informing them, including language specificity and the diachronical re-actualitsations of struggle-songs, traditional tales and newspaper journalism. The locations are a hole or negative space in the pavement on Johannesburg’s Beyers Naudé Square, a discarded newspaper page showing the foreign index, and Makhanda Eastern Star Museum. I refer here to sound, time and matter as ‘fingerprint’ (Cassin; Dolar), arguing for each one\u27s right to be heard according to his/her personal means of expression, and that ‘accentedness’ (Coetzee) and situatedness should not lead to the assumption of the existence of an impenetrable ‘epistemic barrier’ (Maharaj). The triad combining use of language (individuated speech), bodily voice, and the time-factor involved allows for a sonic fingerprint to evolve
Persistence of the past and the here-and-now of the Union Buildings
Get PDFIn their presence and continued use as seat of government, the Union Buildings in Pretoria reveal the persistence of the past in a prime space of power and official commemoration in South Africa. The paper focuses on the retention of these segregation-era buildings as the “top” site of government in the context of Tshwane, or Pretoria, in the democratic era from 1994. The paper traces events and actions through several periods since the Buildings were conceived in 1909, to and beyond the inauguration of President Mandela at the site. Some alternative views on continued use of the buildings are explored. The argument of the paper is that urban collective memory in which monuments such as the Union Buildings stand, is constantly remade, and the meanings ascribed to the images evoked by such an edifice shift into sometimes radically different directions from those held in earlier periods
Accounting for the popularity of Black Panther among Black South African women in Soweto township: African Perspectives on Marvel’s Black Panther
No full textIn February 2018, South Africa was hit by the Black Panther (Coogler 2018) fever. Multitudes of people thronged movie houses in their cultural regalia. The movie’s release seemed to have signalled a “cultural moment”. Several scholars have engaged with Black Panther’s cultural significance and thematic engagement. However, extant literature has not fully explored and accounted for the movie’s popularity in audiences’ specific socio-historical contexts of consumption. More so, current studies on Black Panther have mostly relied on text-based approaches and paid scant attention to audiences’ contexts and lived experiences. Premised on a cultural studies approach, this reception analysis sought to explore and account for the popularity of Black Panther among Black South African women in Soweto township. The study’s findings show that the popularity of Black Panther among Black South African women in Soweto is attributable to the meanings associated with resistance and pleasure that subaltern audiences negotiate from the movie. Audiences’ situated discourses and the film’s Afrofuturist orientation combine to unravel a “cultural moment” for Black women in Soweto where they can challenge and subvert localised and global forms of oppression that afflict them. The film opens up symbolic space for subaltern Black South African women to recuperate voice and their agency
Reading gamefully: video gamification as multimodal pedagogy for high school setworks
Get PDFThis paper draws from multiple publications in the Literacy Studies, Game Studies and Multimodal fields to foreground the affordances of using modern video game aesthetics – particularly their user interfaces or screens – as learning scaffolds in the under-resourced English classroom context. Though this may be seen as a well-worn terrain for research today (nearly 30 years after the advent of Game Studies), it is argued that video games remain somewhat underrepresented in literacy education, with the Covid-19 pandemic and recurrent lockdowns even further cementing games technologies from learners’ home domains as the new frontier in teaching and learning. The benefits of importing such technologies into the classroom is nothing new to the field. Yet, this study innovates by optimising the most accessible of graphological media (pencils, pens, paints and paper) during participants’ transmodalisations of prescribed English literature – particularly Shakespeare’s plays – into a range of video game screenshots, including character menus, maps, and heads-up-displays. The research site is a public high school in Johannesburg, South Africa, with five Grade 10-12 learners drawing the screenshots in response to an extracurricular, multimodal enrichment programme. The author contends that this programme (or similar pedagogies) may encourage future groups to delve further into the complexities of their school setworks, which may then be connected meaningfully to their own, increasingly digital life-worlds. Recognising game-making as an extraordinarily complex undertaking, the researcher then offers a fine-grained analysis of each participant’s text-to-game re-genrefication. In this way, the powerful representational properties of the video game medium can come to light, reaffirming its importance as a semiotic resource and pedagogic tool
A Combustible Object: The Suppression and Recovery of Ernest Cole’s photobook House of Bondage: Art, access and agency - art sites of enabling
No full textErnest Cole’s (1940-1990) much-admired photobook House of Bondage (1967) is considered a landmark event in South African photography. Composed of 183 photos organised into 14 chapters, House of Bondage punctured the tropes of primitivism, pictorialism and ethnography that had for long rendered black subjects as imaginative props for white photographers. It presents a dispassionate visual account of the miseries and insults of black urban life in 1960s South Africa. First published in New York in late 1967 and London in early 1968, it was banned from distribution in South Africa for 22 years. Drawing on primary research for a 2022 exhibition about the South African photobook, this paper looks at the historical context of book censorship, emphasising the under-researched chronology of events between House of Bondage’s initial publication in October 1967 and banning in May 1968. It also discusses House of Bondage’s post-apartheid recovery. An important leitmotif throughout is the subject of risk. What risk did Cole face in making his photobook? And, how did this risk further manifest after his book’s publication
Special section editorial: Hitting home: representations of the domestic milieu in feminist art
Get PDFThe politics of the home was often a focus in second-wave feminist art in the West. Influenced by Betty Friedan’s The feminist mystique (1963), which challenged the notion that women were content to be wives, mothers, and homemakers, artists often represented the domestic milieu as a space of oppression. Friedan’s ideas would, however, be challenged by bell hooks, who indicated that such perceptions assumed a woman who was middle-class and white. As hooks observed in Feminist theory: from margin to center (1984:2), Friedan ‘did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute, than to be a leisure class housewife’. It should also be noted that Friedan’s views were shaped by a US-specific context and that the politics of home, domesticity, marriage, or parenthood may be perceived very differently in geographies outside the United States or the West, more generally, including South Africa
At home in Harlem: The politics of domesticity in Faith Ringgold\u27s The Bitter Nest: Hitting home: representations of the domestic milieu in feminist art
No full textThe Bitter Nest, a sequence of five large-scale story quilts created in 1988 by Faith Ringgold (American, b. 1930), probes the dynamics of an imagined Black middle-class family, their home in Harlem, and the connections they forge within it. Originally conceived as a performance piece, the quilted series likewise expands on its themes of home, family, mother-daughter relations, and Black female creativity. Bringing together storytelling and quilting traditions prominent in the artist\u27s family, the African American community, and across the African diaspora, The Bitter Nest extends the concept of home to encompass Harlem itself, connecting its residents and neighbourhoods across multiple generations.
Celebrated as a visual artist, author, educator, and lifelong advocate for social justice, Faith Ringgold, is among the most influential cultural figures of her generation. While major exhibitions showcasing the scope of her achievements have recently generated a welcome outpouring of new scholarship, The Bitter Nest remains surprisingly overlooked in literature on the artist. In examining the series\u27 representation of the politics of domesticity, home, and family, this article aims to remedy this oversight as it expands the scope of critical discourse on the work of a major American artist, and directs renewed attention to Ringgold\u27s powerful reimagining of the Black home and family in this series and throughout her oeuvre. Drawing on the artist\u27s commentary on The Bitter Nest and related topics, the visual evidence of the quilts, and late twentieth-century and more recent feminist theory, this essay provides a foundation for further research into The Bitter Nest and its many contributions to the evolving story of Black women and families in America