The question of “the black lesbian”: monstrous,ideal and fictitious postapartheid citizen

This paper calls attention to how “the black lesbian”—as a figure and an idea—is emerging as a model of the ideal postapartheid citizen. I argue that this figure is both instituted and undermined at the point at which the nation becomes vexed by its own limits. Within this symbolic politics, “the black lesbian” is staged as a traumatized victim. To track how black lesbians have become enmeshed in debates about defining citizenship, I revisit the rape trial that was initiated when the pseudonymous “Khwezi” made a rape complaint against Jacob Zuma. I examine how “Khwezi” and Zuma came to represent competing ideas about citizenship. Drawing on Berlant’s analysis of the crucial role that “official sexual underclasses” play in the production of “national symbolic and political coherence,” I argue that the trial evidences how “the black lesbian,” a simultaneously abjected and idealized figure, is produced and mobilized as a political resource in South Africa’s citizenship politics.     

Manufacturing Black-on-Black Violence in Africa: A Decolonial Perspective on Mfecane and Afrophobia/Xenophobia in South Africa

The phenomenon of “black-on-black” violence among the people of Africa has, ever since the advent of modernity/coloniality, been articulated in such a way that it presents victims as perpetrators. Thus, from the Mfecane violence of the “pre-colonial” era to the xenophobic/Afrophobic violence of the “post-colonial” era in Africa, incidents of black-on-black violence have always attracted explanations that cast doubt on the humanity of the black subject, through the colonial strategy of inventing and inverting causation. This colonial strategy entails both mis-presenting the epochal history of coloniality by representing it in terms of rupture instead of continuity, as well as representing the indigenous African subject as inherently violent. I argue in this article that black-on-black violence is a product of coloniality—a racist global power structure that makes incidents of “non-revolutionary violence” among the oppressed black subject inevitable. Thus, I deploy the case of the Mfecane violence of the “pre-colonial” era in southern Africa, and the Afro-phobic attacks on foreign nationals in “post-apartheid” South Africa to unmask the longue durée of coloniality, and its role of manufacturing blackon-black violence among the black people of Africa.     

At the Verge

This essay responds to the idea of “living the boundary” that Stephen Clingman develops in “A Story of Identity for our Times” and The Grammar of Identity. In mythical and wisdom traditions, revolutionary tricksters are often associated with thresholds, because travel across spatial, perceptual, or political limits is what allows cultural transformation to take place. In South Africa and elsewhere, boundaries are where culture is re-made.     

Anti-Apartheid Solidarity Networks and the Production of Come Back,Africa

In 1957, American filmmaker Lionel Rogosin arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, determined to make a film about apartheid. “Anti-apartheid Solidarity Networks and the Production of Come Back, Africa” discusses the film’s historical and cultural significance, and— a topic which deserves more attention— the film’s production. The article examines the interconnected and international nature of early anti-apartheid activism. International movements against apartheid may have been relatively small between 1957 and up until March of 1960, but Come Back Africa’s production shows that anti-apartheid activists and artists were becoming increasingly connected in a transnational web spanning the Atlantic with hubs in South Africa, Europe, and the United States. In the case of Come Back, Africa, relationships forged between Rogosin, black South African artists-activists (such as Lewis Nkosi, William “Bloke” Modisane, and Miriam Makeba) and white liberal anti-apartheid activists (including Father Trevor Huddleston, Reverend Michael Scott, and Mary Benson) proved mutually beneficial.     

On Music,Censorship, and Globalization

Malik Bendjelloul’s music documentary, Searching for Sugar Man (2012), uses the narrative of its central figure, American rock “n” roll musician Sixto Rodriguez, to allegorize South Africa’s emergence from censorship and isolationism to a post-apartheid and increasingly transnational dispensation. I look at the cultural politics of apartheid-era censorship in attempt to account for Rodriguez’s cult appeal in South Africa, despite his artistic shortcomings and his obscurity in the USA. I then focus on the film’s final concert sequence, featuring Rodriguez’s first South African performance, which Bendjelloul subtly positions as a moment of celebration over the new possibilities enabled by the demise of apartheid and the rise of an increasingly integrated global culture.     

Confronting disillusionment: on the rediscovery of socialist archives in recent South African cultural production

In recent years, South African literature, art, and cultural criticism have been registering the feelings of disappointment, nostalgia, and of a general impasse that signify a crisis of postapartheid imaginations. At the same time, we can observe a turn in cultural production toward reexamining South Africa’s socialist archives and reconnecting them to the present-day predicaments and emerging social movements. Reading these processes in Imraan Coovadia’s latest novel, artworks by Haroon Gunn-Salie, and an exhibition by the Stellenbosch Open Forum, this article argues that they confront the feelings of postapartheid disillusionment by critically re-invoking memories of the 1970–80s socialist practices in South Africa and the transnational frameworks they involved. It argues that these changing approaches to the socialist archives can be read as a decolonial critique, which links the described trends in South African culture to other “post-dependence” (and specifically, post-socialist) contexts worldwide.     

Youth and generation in South African history*

In recent years, “the youth” have captured (or perhaps recaptured) public attention in South Africa. This paper reflects on South Africa’s experience of generational conflict and places it in the broader context of South African history. After attempting to define “youth,” this paper makes two key points. First, far from being a recent development, generational tension has been a continuous feature of Southern African history since at least the late nineteenth century. Second, organized political mobilization is not the way this tension usually manifests itself. Mass youth politics is a specific phenomenon, which needs to be explained historically rather than assumed. The paper focuses on three historical examples to illustrate this: early migrant labor in South Africa, the formation of urban youth gangs, and the sustained youth uprising from 1976 until the early 1990s. It concludes with a tentative attempt to draw some parallels between that phase of rebellion and recent student upheavals.     

The Karoo and eco-inflections of fracking: preliminary notes on literary imagination

The awareness of the “planet in peril” has never been more acute in a South African context than today, when the imminent extraction of shale gas through the process of hydraulic fracturing (known as “fracking”) in the Karoo has gained traction in the public mind. At least two broad dimensions are involved. The first, based on the logic of petro-modernity and its profligate culture, is framed within a seductive, neoliberal narrative of industrial progress and economic development. The second is framed as outright resistance to the inevitable environmental damage caused by this petro-industrial venture. This study reflects on how literature might intervene in this bipolar debate. Alfred Jackson’s Manna in the Desert, Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo, and Etienne van Heerden’s “Poison Karoo” employ the trope of water to stimulate an ethical vision. Materially, water is imagined in its apparent scarcity as a feature of the delicate ecosystem of the Karoo, a vast arid landscape of drudgery, where life forms compete for the limited resource. Allegorically, water signifies as safely concealed, subterranean abundance. The Karoo, possessing more than its external features account for, is a place of beauty and mystical presence where life is sustained and preserved. It is within these significations that the environmental and social repercussion of fracking is inflected. Literature can bridge the divide between the narrative of progress and the counternarrative of ecological consciousness by way of highlighting their contradictions. But it also complicates these contradictions by valorizing their ethical potentiality.     

Against the law: Arthur Maimane’s pioneering hard-boiled black detective fiction in Drum Magazine

ABSTRACT

This article sets out to re-examine, and recover, South Africa’s first hard-boiled crime fiction created by a black writer: Arthur Maimane’s crime stories published in Drum magazine in 1953. Maimane wrote a series of stories about a black PI, styled on the American hard-boiled genre for Drum, a popular South African magazine aimed at a black audience, known for its borrowing from American popular culture. Mamaine’s fiction has been widely dismissed by generations of Drum critics, as “derivative” “imitation.” Repositioning the stories within the broader context of crime fiction suggests quite a different reading. Maimane’s stories reveal how tensions between the genre and laws in apartheid South Africa resulted in radical alterations to the hard boiled formula. Since Maimane’s stories precede Chester Himes’s African-American novels, they should be recognized as a pioneering example of black crime fiction that demonstrates the relationship between race and genre.     

Post‐War Reconstruction and the New World Order: The Origins Of Gough Whitlam's Democratic Citizen*

Gough Whitlam's father was one of Australia's most significant public servants. Deputy Crown Solicitor and Crown Solicitor at a time of great constitutional and international change, Frederick Whitlam maintained an unusually advanced perspective on the use of international instruments to protect rights and to expand powers of nationhood. Gough Whitlam's war‐time experiences in the Air Force, in particular during the referendum campaign to expand Commonwealth Powers to aid post‐war reconstruction, cemented these aspects as central to his developing notions of democratic citizenship. In his 1973 Sir Robert Garran Memorial lecture, fourteen years after his father had delivered the inaugural oration, Gough Whitlam acknowledged the influence of his father as a “great public servant” committed to public service and the developing institutions of internationalism: “I am Australia's first Prime Minister with that particular background”. This paper explores “that particular background”. I have never wavered from my fundamental belief that until the national government became involved in great matters like schools and cities, this nation would never fulfil its real capabilities. ¹ 1 E.G. Whitlam, Sir Robert Garran Memorial Oration, “Australian Public Administration under a Labor Government”, Royal Australian Institute of Public Administration, 12 November 1973, < http://www.whitlam.org/collection/1973/ > accessed 31 October 2006.
     

“Zones of indistinction” and visions of post-reconciliation South Africa in District 9

In this article, I explore the ways in which District 9 reflects South Africa’s current socio-political transition through the problematical representation of the film’s eponymous slum and its impoverished inhabitants as well as its protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s influential ideas of biopolitics, I demonstrate the ways in which the film provides a compelling critique of the effects of neoliberal capitalism on post-apartheid transition and South Africa’s complex geopolitical landscape. In this regard, I analyze how the slum figures as a “zone of indistinction” where political and economic forces combine to produce the paradoxical conditions in which impoverished South Africans are included in a democratic social contract, but are simultaneously excluded from the socioeconomic benefits that it promises.     

The Politics of Conditional Citizenship in South Korea: An Analysis of the Print Media

This article shows how the meaning of citizenship has changed in South Korea since the partial emergence of a multicultural society in the past two decades. It does so by analysing how newspaper editorials have discussed multiculturalism, which is a multifaceted concept but one which weighs heavily on notions of citizenship. There is often a consensus about citizenship in mono-ethnic and homogeneous societies, even if it is not always clearly articulated or expressed. Societal and demographic change, however, require such societies to change or at least revisit notions of citizenship. The article shows that the print media places the onus on migrants to adapt to society, but also on Koreans to accept the “inevitable reality” of multiculturalism. Editorials advocate a form of conditional citizenship, whereby migrants are incorporated into society without disrupting current notions of what it means to be a South Korean.     

“Putting Food back on the table”: Decolonising towards a Sustainable University that Feeds Us in South Africa

Abstract

The higher education landscape in South African (SA) has recently experienced a wave of student movement organised under the #MustFall campaign, where students demanded quality and accessible higher education. This movement spoke against the colonial character of the curriculum, demographic representation, institutional cultures, and architecture of the university in South Africa today, which excludes the majority of the students who cannot access higher education in South Africa. It is in this context that the high cost of higher education was questioned, with some questioning the very “idea of the university”, and the role of the university in a society contending with income inequalities, unemployment, and poverty. This article seeks to position food at the centre of decolonising tools towards a sustainable African university of the future. Looking at growing levels of hunger, and the lack of access to food among our students, I argue that in putting food at the centre, regarding our understanding of the curriculum, shape, size, and future of the university in South Africa, we might begin to transform the exclusivist, uncaring and elitist spaces that define a university. In trying to rethink the ‘‘idea of the university’’ in South Africa I look at one of the enduring institutions of knowledge in African societies—uMakhulu (“Senior Mother/Grandmother”) as a body that can reconnect the African university to its matriarchal heritage, in order to define a university that can feed itself beyond the narrow neoliberal understanding of sustainability.     

Revisiting Colonial Dismemberment in South Africa: On Cultural Text and the Mandela Nuclear Family

Abstract

For many years, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela—in a number of his public statements and writings—frankly expressed his regrets regarding the strain that his anti-apartheid activism put on his immediate and nuclear family. From his marriage to Evelyn Mase, and later to his second marriage to Nomzamo “Winnie” Madikizela, one central thread that permeates both is the impact of colonial-apartheid dismemberment on the Mandela nuclear family. Thus, the focus of this article is on the critical analysis of a cultural text that was authored by the late former statesman to reflect on various aspects of his life. Relying on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, the objective of the article is to understand how such a cultural text registers the idea of colonial-apartheid dismemberment as lived by the Mandela nuclear family under colonial-apartheid oppression. Besides the 27 years spent at Robben Island prison, much of Mandela's life was characterised by his neglect of family responsibilities, as a result of the lived realities of his activism against colonial-apartheid South Africa. Thus, using the case of Mandela's nuclear family structure, the article critically analyses the role of cultural texts such as autobiographies in registering colonial-apartheid dismemberment in South Africa.     

“Yours for Socialism”: Communist Cultural Discourse in Early Apartheid South Africa

This paper explores the diversity of cultural debates which constellated around the Communist Party in South Africa in the late segregationist and early apartheid periods. It traces the textual remains of an itinerant public debate––dispersed in periodical reviews, magazine articles, journalistic tit-bits and other ephemeral public sphere activities such as debating societies, theater groups and discussion clubs––with a view to complicating and expanding the South African literary-cultural archive. Of particular importance are the practices and protocols of reading, cultural critique and interpretation that characterized the intellectual-political field––or public sphere––which we name the Communist Party. In this way, a fragmented cultural discussion is provisionally reconstituted or “invented” as an important South African tradition and reclaimed as a significant intellectual inheritance. The project thus bears on broader question of reading the past and attempts to negotiate an historical split between uncritical nostalgia and the will to transcend.     

Defining the nation in Russia’s buffer zone: the politics of citizenship by birth on territory (jus soli) in Moldova,Azerbaijan, and Georgia

Citizenship by birth on territory (jus soli), versus by blood (jus sanguinis), is associated with liberal democracies and the Americas. Yet Azerbaijan and Moldova, part of the “buffer zone” between Russia and the West, have used unconditional jus soli. No such law exists in Europe or elsewhere in the post-Soviet space, including in Georgia, a third country that is part of this “buffer zone.” The three countries cannot forge closer links to the West due to Russia’s support of “frozen” separatist conflicts on their territories. The article finds that territorial citizenship in Azerbaijan and Moldova, as well as its absence in Georgia, are linked to territorial integrity concerns, a multi-century historical context that had thwarted or facilitated ethnic collective identity, and geopolitical fears of dual citizenship. Both authoritarian (Azerbaijan) and liberal-democratic (Moldova) states have used the resulting territorial concept of national identity to combat ethnic separatism, whereas Georgia remains an ethnocracy with difficulties integrating ethnic minorities.     

The Ethics of Waste in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town

Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) uses bodily and material waste to figure larger social processes of marginalization, dispossession, and racial abjection during the apartheid era. As the apartheid regime sought to devalue the lives of those categorized as “Black” and “Coloured,” while simultaneously profiting from their land and labor, it pushed non-white South Africans into dangerous proximity to hazardous and unseemly waste. Waste, in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, becomes both metonymy and metaphor. Wicomb not only uses it to index the historical and material processes of abjection that obtained in twentieth-century South Africa; she also takes up garbage, feces, vomit, and other refuse as an ethical lens for the consideration of how individual and collective subjectivities are formed by what is thrown away. In its relationship to waste of all kinds, the individual body becomes a site in which social processes of acceptance and disavowal play out.