Image and Text

“Speak to a community audience”: The Staffrider illustrations of Mzwakhe (Muziwakhe Nhlabatsi) 1979-1987

Deirdre Pretorius — 2023-05-16

The South African literary and arts magazine Staffrider (1978-1993) is known for its Black Consciousness stance and the contribution it made in the struggle against apartheid. From its inception the magazine contained illustrations, photographs, artwork and graphics alongside prose, poetry, plays, essays and reports, and for nearly a decade illustrations signed by ‘Mzwakhe’ appeared frequently. Mzwakhe, the pen-name of Muziwakhe Nhlabatsi, contributed a sizeable number of illustrations to accompany the writing of several notable South African authors. This article offers a discussion of his illustrative contribution to Staffrider in the period from 1979 to 1987 in the context of Black Consciousness as a counter to hegemonic apartheid discourse. I discuss Black Consciousness and the ‘Black Consciousness Aesthetic’ (Hill 2018) in relation to his illustrations, point out the reciprocal relationship between his educational work for the South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED) and his cartoons and comics for Staffrider and describe his portraits and the influence of African masks on his work. Staffrider presented the opportunity for a counter discourse to the official apartheid narratives to be published (Manase 2005:70) and I argue that Nhlabatsi contributed to this counter discourse through his illustrations which visualised Black Consciousness in a variety of styles and techniques and the humanity, beauty and dignity with which he rendered most of his subjects.

Montage in play

John Higgins — 2023-05-19

Montage is commonly identified solely with film-editing. Why this is the case when conceptually it is synonymous with the practice of collage is due largely to the Soviet insistence that Russian editing practices – montage – differed substantially from Hollywood editing practices. In asserting the specificity of a Soviet montage practice which seeks to entirely control the message of film for the spectator, Sergei Eisenstein set himself against the thinking of his rival and contemporary Dziga Vertov. In this dispute, the focus becomes the politics of reading more generally. This dispute around the politics of active reading is later echoed and amplified in Jacques Derrida’s arguments around the postcard, and picked up in South Africa around the understanding of a recent montage text, 40 nights/40 days: from the lockdown. The dynamics of what it is to be a “fearful reader” are here taken further through the question of montage in play and the politics of reading in the moment of Covid-19.

Health, hospital(ity) and hegemony: Artistic agencies of two women weavers at Ceza, 1962

Philippa Hobbs — 2023-05-19

Art history has yet to accord recognition to two women for their pivotal roles at a small tapestry-weaving project at Ceza Mission Hospital in rural South Africa in 1962. As I argue below, it was largely the agencies of Allina Ndebele from rural KwaZulu-Natal and Ulla Gowenius from Sweden that laid the groundwork for what would later evolve into a renowned tapestry centre at Rorke’s Drift. Although representations depicted Ceza as idyllic, the women pursued this venture in what was a coercive environment, in which a rural black community was marginalised not merely by disease, but forms of power that included racial oppression, doctrine, patriarchy, social convention and biomedicine.

This account recovers details of Ndebele and Gowenius’s inventive interactions and accords subjectivity to convalescent weavers disenfranchised by modalities of social control, in turn disrupting homogenising notions of this pedagogic milieu as a duality of empowered trainers and those directed by them. Exposing the conditions in which the project was fostered, I situate the venture in a context of mid-century Swedish philanthropy, interrogating previous representations of Ceza as an outcome of benign modernity and the project as the fruits of foreign expertise.

Conceptions of iconicity and their historical reorientations: Pippa Skotnes’s horse skeletons and the topos of the Annunciation

Suzanne de Villiers-Human — 2023-07-18

How has art practise historically displayed, enhanced and interrogated its contemporaneous definitions of the nature of images? The focus is on the contemporary South African artist, Pippa Skotnes’s horse skeletons, in resonance with a constellation of select Renaissance Annunciation paintings, to highlight the impact of the Eucharist and “real presence” on early modern, modern and post-modern notions of what images have been assumed to be. My comparative interpretation of the diverse works distinguishes their peculiar image functions from systematic and historical perspectives. I show that, with the advent of the most sophisticated type of image, the artistic image, images have been refining their own definitions in performative ways.

I show in my interpretations of these image-aware meta-artworks, that the Incarnation of Christ as the Imago Dei, as well as changing historical understandings of Christ’s image act of the institution of the Eucharist, gradually and radically transformed understandings of the nature of images in the west. I furthermore argue that Skotnes’s knowledge, through performative research of indigenous Southern African image traditions of the Khoisan/|Xam, contributes lost historical image dimensions to her work, and augments current understandings of images and art, at a time when plenary experiences of time, and historical and cultural density, are appreciated.

For me, Skotnes’s work artistically performs Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical assumption that continuous and persistent historical reorientations of ancient sacred symbolism of the natural world remain at the root of, and infinitely augment, contemporary conceptions of the ‘figurative’ (Ricoeur 1967:10-18) – or by extension, of what images and art are. In the contemporary South African artist’s work, the beauty and complexity of diverse simultaneous cultural and geographical notions of what images are and have been, are staged. Like the Renaissance Annunciation paintings, her “bone books” splendidly contribute to the process of differentiating and articulating discursive definitions of what images have been conceived to be.

Special section editorial

Johan Thom — 2024-03-25

It is our sincere pleasure and privilege to introduce the reader to this special edition of Image & Text—‘Art, Access and Agency - art sites of enabling’. The collection of articles and interviews contained herein serves as the outcome of the three-day conference-event, ‘Art, Access and Agency - art sites of enabling’, presented over two years ago on 7-9 October 2021 by the School of the Arts in collaboration with the Transformation Directorate, University of Pretoria. Since then, it has taken many patient hours to transcribe, edit, peer review and otherwise transform the many varied presentations that formed the basis of the conference-event into its present textual format. We are pleased to present the results to readers and introduce them to the thoughts and ideas that underpin the project as a whole. In what follows, we briefly describe the process of conceptualising the project, outline the overall research question and sub-questions and describe the processes of its implementation and methodologies at stake therein. We also briefly introduce the many varied scholarly responses to the research project and show how they align with the project’s particular vision.

Flowers, sex, labour and loss

Johan Thom — 2024-03-25

Transcript of the keynote conversation between Willem Boshoff and Olu Oguibe at the Art, Access and Agency – Art Sites of Enabling Conference hosted by the University of Pretoria’s School of the Arts and the University of Pretoria’s Transformation Directorate from 7-9 October 2021. The conversation is introduced and moderated by Johan Thom.

How Poetic Language Enacts Agency

Bronwyn Law-Viljoen — 2024-03-25

Transcript of an online creative writing session at the Art, Access and Agency – Art Sites of Enabling Conference.

Co-organised by Dr Adam Levine and Prof Merle Williams (African Centre for the Study of the United States, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa).

Play-able: using play to realise the intent of social design

Fatima Cassim — 2024-03-25

Design – by its relational nature of connecting people, places and things – is an intrinsically social practice. However, the marked shift from prioritising commercial design objectives to creating constructive opportunities for collective engagement and social change has resulted in the emergence of social design. Viewed as a discursive moment and not a discipline, social design embraces different design approaches and participatory processes; as such, it is not defined by a pre-determined design process or outcome, but rather by its intent of engendering responsibility and social behaviour change. Within this context then, the aim of the paper is to reflect on the way in which play enables designers to realise the intent of their social design practice. To address the aim, the paper first contextualises social design and presents a conceptual framework of play. Secondly, the paper presents South African vignettes of the city and the higher-education design classroom to highlight the practical value play affords design to aid the understanding of social problems in general and advancing agency and ownership for sustained social behaviour change, in particular.

Between damage and possibility: Informal Recycling Conceived as Life Raft

Jacki McInnes — 2024-03-25

Contemporary 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

Rory du Plessis — 2024-03-25

In 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.

Exercising agency through embodied research and the making of screendances

Kristina Johnstone — 2024-03-25

This article reflects on a series of embodied research processes to argue that screendance-making as ‘embodied practice’ offers a site to exercise agency. Drawing from the notion of affordances and prosthesis, the article suggests that in screendance, the mover and the camera enter into a relationship where agency is shared. Screendance offers opportunities to experience agency not as subject-centred, but rather in a field of relation – a co-compositional mode (Manning 2016:123). Drawing from Lawrence Halprin’s (1969) RSVP (Resources, Scores, Valuaction, Performance) score cycles and Ben Spatz’s (2020) conceptualisation of research journeys as cyclical and reversible, the article documents a series of online and in-person movement and vocal explorations and tracks how these embodied research instances create possibilities to reflect on, and experience agency in, moments of co-creation. This article suggests that embodied practice and art-making are agentic and epistemic, which may disrupt hegemonic knowledge structures and open a window towards what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014:188) calls an ‘alternative ecology of knowledges’.

A Combustible Object: The Suppression and Recovery of Ernest Cole’s photobook House of Bondage

Sean O’Toole — 2024-03-25

Ernest 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?

Exhibition Review

Teboho Lebakeng — 2024-03-25

The group exhibition You don’t say, is based around a third-year Fine Arts project completed at the University of Pretoria under the guidance and teachings of Johan Thom in collaboration with the South African conceptual artist Willem Boshoff. The works of other year groups, ranging from second-year to Master’s level, also form part of the exhibition as a way to broaden the conversation across different levels of students and their relative perspectives. The exhibition included more than twenty selected individual young artists' works shown alongside three related works of art by Boshoff: Ash (2018), Elm (2021), and Oak (2021).

Book launch exhibition: Light for Art’s Sake

Carla Crafford — 2024-03-25

The book Light for Art’s Sake (2021)1 was launched with a related exhibition at the University of Pretoria in October 2021. The way in which pinhole photography was practised for more than two decades at the University has allowed students to benefit from their practice of the medium in more ways than only producing photographs. Prescribed limited budgets provided accessible means to learn basic skills related to such an old and widespread medium. Ways of working by hand in the darkroom also proved enabling when considered in other fields of life.

Special section editorial

Brenda Schmahmann — 2024-03-25

The 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.

Material worlds: Domestic objects and the question of auto/biography in contemporary art

Clara Zarza — 2024-03-26

At the turn of the twenty-first century, due to the expansion of postcolonial consciousness, artists identified as “non-western” gained a new visibility in the Euro-American art world that was far from unproblematic. Installations and multimedia practices revolving around domestic space and daily objects were internationally celebrated as a novel source for reflections on the notion of home. Based on the assumption that artists’ lived experiences of migration, separation, or loss made their use of the domestic inherently transgressive, these disparate works were framed as autobiographical or self-representational. With this, the institutional landscape seemed to undergo a total transformation in reevaluating the use of personal materials in art practices. Dismissed as confessional or narcissistic when articulated as a key critical strategy by feminist Euro-American artists just a decade earlier, it was precisely this personal and domestic quality that seemed to be seen as valuable and relevant in the context of an art world with newfound pretensions of inclusion and globalisation. Focusing on Ishiuchi Miyako's work Mother’s 2000-2005: Traces of the Future as a case study, I argue that the reasons behind this notable shift were twofold: first, the shift in artistic language, from the political explicitness of earlier feminist artworks to the use of material subtlety and conceptual ambivalence, allowed for these works to travel well from national to international exhibitions; at the same time, the use of personal and domestic objects seemed to justify their framing through biographical narratives that, in turn, served to comfortably categorise them, while also offering grounds for viewer engagement.

Home is where the art is? Reflections on changing notions of home and contemporary art practices in the wake of the pandemic

Jacqueline Millner — 2024-03-26

How has the pandemic changed ideas of home, and how have artists responded to these changes? This article considers the implications of Covid-19’s impact on notions of home for contemporary art practices, with a focus on the experience of woman-identifying artists, given the gendered politics of home. Many artists have been forced to rethink how they work in response to the pandemic’s effects on freedom of movement, financial security, and exhibition opportunities. In the broader community, ‘working from home’ has resurged with added legitimacy. To the more optimistic social analysts, Covid-19 has offered an opportunity for a major reset of work practices, but evidence suggests that the pandemic has doubled down on the unpaid care burden of women. For some woman-identifying artists, such developments have become the tipping point for exiting the industry; others have rendered their work almost entirely digital; for yet others it has provided the official imprimatur for long-developed sustaining strategies. I analyse how notions of home have been explored in contemporary art, reflect on how Covid-19 has challenged conventional experiences of home, and discuss examples of artistic practice that have adapted to these changes to examine what ‘working from home’ might entail in the wake of Covid-19.

Being (not) at home: Exiled women artists in postwar New York

Virginia Marano — 2024-03-26

In postwar art, the question of exile is the question of home. House defines a space as a locative concept. Home represents a place with a symbolic value of belonging and refers to objects, people, and ideas. Home does not designate a fixed state but rather a relational and transformative site in which individual and collective acts of remembering are embedded. In this article, the author explores the aesthetics of exile in the artistic production of exiled women artists in postwar New York, most notably Ruth Vollmer, Louise Nevelson, and Eva Hesse, who have often been excluded from the discourse around 1960s sculptural practice. The author casts the mode of construction and the viewing experience of their artworks through the notions of home and body. This contribution focuses on the intricate interrelations between women, domesticity, and artmaking associated with the aesthetics of exile and displacement, which significantly challenges any stable and absolute conception of home and place. By drawing on the works of feminist scholars and theorists, such as Sarah Ahmed, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Iris Marion Young—in their argument that the idea of home and the practices of homemaking support relational identities—the author sheds light on how women artists in exile investigate notions of home, borders (both physical and psychological), diasporic longing, habitation, and uprootedness in a constant state of exchange.

Re-claiming the lost home: The politics of nostalgia and belonging in women's art practices in the Middle East

Maria Photiou — 2024-03-26

In recent years, discourses on migration and movement have been featured prominently in contemporary art and curatorial practices. For example, during the past decade, the migration crisis was a central theme for several pavilions at the Venice Biennale. Considering current developments, understanding critical issues regarding the migratory experience is a matter of urgency. This article addresses the issue of how the migratory experience is articulated in the works of women artists who use domestic objects to create uncanny environments that represent their contested homelands. This article also emphasises women’s experiences, as women have frequently been marginalised from official histories. Through visual analysis of the works, a new perspective is gained in understanding women artists’ strategies when representing their home in exile, and their homeland (both ‘lost’ and existing). The discussion unpacks projects that use ‘un-homely devices’ to re-construct the experience of ‘home’: home as a site of personal and family histories, and home as the place of danger and distress. It will specifically examine the work of Klitsa Antoniou, Lia Lapithi, Raeda Saadeh, and Andrea Shaker, all of whom have challenged in their practice the concepts of ‘home’, ‘exile’, and ‘belonging’.

Joanna Rajkowska’s Rhizopolis (2021): A rhizomatic refugium for caring commons

Basia Sliwinska — 2024-03-26

Thinking with Joanna Rajkowska’s project Rhizopolis (2021), conceived as an underground habitat for species that survived a series of cataclysms, this essay reimagines the home as a collective space for communities of care, generative of accountability, co-dependencies, and co-responsibilities. The installation created from tree stumps and their roots is a futuristic scenography for a non-existent science fiction film. It invites reflection on if and how interspecies symbiotic bonds can be fostered to account for co-nutrition, co-growth and co-existence for all bodies—human, non-human and other-than-human. Within the overarching framework of ethics of care and feminist new mater i a list discourse foregrounding co-existence and making entanglements, the essay engages with Rhizopolis to interrogate an alternative domestic space. Does Rajkowska offer us a model for a communal transspecies refugium guided by love, care, and respect? The artist’s hypothetical scenario has transformative potential, imagining a home hospitable to all bodies post Anthropocene.

Inside The Red Mansion: Füsun Onur’s world of objects, care relations, and art

Nergis Abıyeva — 2024-03-26

The Red Mansion, or Hayri Onur Yalısı, acquired by the artist’s family in the 1930s, has been home to the Turkish sculptor and installation artist Füsun Onur and her sister İlhan for almost her entire life. It has a significant place in the artist’s career as it houses not only her life, studio, and archive, but also the affectionately preserved mementoes of her mother. In this article, we explore the role of the Red Mansion and its concentrated materiality in Füsun’s art and her relations with objects, her family, and her sister İlhan. We examine four of her artworks, which we argue are based on collaborative creativity and mutual care: Dollhouse (1970s), Counterpoint with Flowers (1982), The Dream of Abandoned Furniture (1985), and Once Upon a Time (2022). The interdisciplinary theoretical framework of our analysis draws upon care studies, family sociology, object-oriented ontology, and psychoanalysis. We propose that the Red Mansion and the objects therein are deeply connected to the artist’s unique understanding of home and family, which defines her work, evoking a c aring world that values humans and nonhumans alike.

At home in Harlem: The politics of domesticity in Faith Ringgold's The Bitter Nest

Debra Hanson — 2024-03-26

The 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's 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' 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's powerful reimagining of the Black home and family in this series and throughout her oeuvre. Drawing on the artist's 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.

The art of labour: Representations of childbirth by Reshada Crouse and Christine Dixie

Brenda Schmahmann — 2024-03-26

Since the mid-1980s, there have been numerous instances of South African women ar tists representing pregnancy or making works reflecting on motherhood. A representation of the birth process itself is, however, unusual. In this article, the focus is placed on two women artists who have used this atypical subject matter. Reshada Crouse represented the birth of her first child in Danielle and Me and Danielle in 1975, returning to the theme many years later in Homo Sapien – Spiritual Animal (2021). Christine Dixie represented childbirth in a large body of art entitled Parturient Prospects, which she started in 2005 while pregnant with her second child and completed after the birth in 2006. She, too, returned to the theme later, using the matrices of her Birthing Tray works from the Parturient Prospects project to make The Harbingers in 2016 and adding varnish, colour, and cotton stitches to one of the sets of prints making up the Birthing Tray series in 2022. It is suggested that, for both artists, the theme enabled feminist responses to practices of childbirth as well as other formative moments in their lives. It is also suggested that both artists respond to discourses from the West, but in different ways. While Crouse positions her art as offering a parallel but female point of view to male ‘masters’ whose works have had an impact on her, Dixie suggests a commonality between early modern discourses about childbirth and those to do with the colonisation of Africa.

"Sweep the yard girl": Brooms, wifely duties and the subversive art of Usha Seejarim

Shonisani Netshia — 2024-03-26

Jumping over the broom in African and African-American contexts symbolises the bride’s commitment to clean the house and yard of the new home she is joining—to perform service through labour. In South Africa, a popular cultural song, Fiela Ngwanyana (sweep [the yard] girl), is often sung at traditional wedding ceremonies to usher the makoti (bride) into the groom’s family and is laden with meanings. Through singing, dancing, and sweeping the path clean for their new makoti, the groom’s family subtly inform her of the politics of household labour to come. I focus on a specific stanza in the song and make connections between the broom, the makoti and mamazala (mother-in-law)’s relationships, and the themes of femininity and domesticity.

I argue how brooms are used as symbolic tools of othering and suppression within the marital home. I discuss how the broom—a docile, mundane, handmade object—transcends its original, functional use and becomes highly charged with meaning as a signifier of femininity, domesticity, and subservience. In order to unpack the broom’s nuanced meanings, I refer to a selection of Usha Seejarim’s works, in which she features brooms and transforms them into objects of transgression and reclaiming power.

Breaking the ‘Law of the Father’: Linda Rademan’s transgressive engagements with Afrikaner patriarchy in the home

Karen von Veh — 2024-03-26

Artist, Linda Rademan, was born in the mid-1950s in an Afrikaans home where ‘the law of the father’ pertained in all matters. She has professed ambivalence about her upbringing, which was circumscribed by an Afrikaner Nationalist ideology, underpinned by patriarchal dominance, and strictly conformed to the narrow Calvinistic precepts of the Dutch Reformed Church. In her work, memories of childhood and family dynamics are employed to expose the stranglehold of religious expectations, the permeation of male privilege, and the suppression of women’s voices in Afrikaner culture.

In this paper, I analyse selected works in which Rademan has intervened in photographic memorabilia by embroidering and sewing or ‘suturing’ areas of her work. The use of sewing and embroidery has been employed as a feminist strategy since the early 1970s, and I argue that its use here not only aims to overturn the patriarchal hierarchy of artmaking but is an attempt to visually mend (suture) the psychologically damaging aspects of Rademan’s childhood upbringing. In this way, her approach becomes a therapeutic means to engage with the painful process of self-integration, as well as a vehicle to redress the exclusion of women’s voices in her family and culture by presenting an alternative image of Afrikaans womanhood.

Labour, love, or violence? Farieda Nazier’s Don’t Make Me Over (2021)

Roxanne Do Rego — 2024-03-26

Don’t Make Me Over (2021) is a videographic piece by South African artist Farieda Nazier comprising performance, music, poetry, curated settings, and sculptural assemblages, which forms part of her Post(erity) Project. The title—Don’t Make Me Over—is based on the 1962 song of the same name originally recorded by Dionne Warwick and later covered by Sybil in 1987. While an integral and fundamental component of the work, the artist emphasises that her interpretation of the popular hit is not a music video. Throughout this article, I discuss how Nazier enacts scenes of both compliance and defiance against the conflation of femininity and the domestic milieu, and the embodied violence of patriarchal norms dictating feminine ‘beauty’ and behaviours—the former exasperated by a history of racialised oppression and unequal power relationships in South Africa, which further conflate blackness with labour, but particularly domestic labour. Moreover, I examine how the video implies an abusive relationship dynamic in which the female subject appears entangled, set against the backdrop of The Forge theatre in Johannesburg, thereby implying the masquerade of gender identity and emphasising the narrative quality of the work as a whole.

Cleansing shame: Airing South Africa’s ‘Dirty Laundry’

Dineke Orton — 2024-03-26

The experience of rape is intensely shaming, particularly because of the humiliation that stems from being violated by another person and the loss of control endured because of it. Survivors often feel stained or contaminated in the aftermath of rape and fear the disclosure of this seemingly ‘negative information’ about themselves. In this study, I examine the exhibition, SA’s Dirty Laundry (2016), by Jenny Nijenhuis and Nondimiso Msimanga that was installed in the streets of Johannesburg’s Maboneng precinct. Used panties donated by rape survivors were installed on a washing line to act as placeholders for individual self-narratives. In this way, the presence of survivors was staged without explicitly referring to them. By unpacking associations linked to panties, I illustrate how these small pieces of clothing could reference the shaming survivors often face. So-called ‘dirty laundry’ is referenced as a conceptual tactic through the curatorial display mechanisms: panties are displayed on a washing line—a common domestic device used when cleaning. Apart from this interplay, I emphasise the value of collaboration in this project and the advantages of braving vulnerability.

Special section editorial

Deirdre C. Byrne — 2024-03-26

Decolonisation is a group of critical theories aimed at negating colonialism by eradicating its multifaceted effects on the life of the colonised. According to Olufemi Táíwò (2022:xvi), it is an all-encompassing theory that has become a catch-all idea to tackle anything with any, even minor, association with the ‘West’. Decolonial scholars such as Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Achille Mbembe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Sabelo J Ndlovu- Gatsheni argue that colonialism did not end with the political independence of colonised nations as the effects have extended beyond independence and have continued to permeate all aspects of the lives of the colonised. The continuing power of colonialism, according to these scholars, is manifested in the coloniality of power, coloniality of being and coloniality of knowledge (Mignolo & Walsh 2018:10). They advocate for a decolonial turn from the dominant hierarchical, white, male, and Christian supremacy of Western hegemony and universalism to a dynamic pluriversal recognition and acceptance of knowledges from the Global South.

Exploring Nnedi Okorafor’s decolonial turn in the Binti Trilogy

Josephine Olufunmilayo Alexander — 2024-03-26

Nnedi Okorafor is one of the best-known speculative fiction writers who has centred African perspectives and delinked from Western models. In her trilogy, Binti (2015), Binti Home (2017) and Binti the Night Masquerade (2017a), Okorafor disrupts the dominant white-masculine supremacist convention and traditions for a more diverse and inclusive narrative. In this article, I use decolonial thinking and the lens of Sankofa, a decolonial and African knowledge philosophy and wor ldview, to explore how Okorafor uses set tings, characterisation, and ancient African traditional knowledge to achieve a decolonial turn in speculative fiction. By centring Sankofa, Okorafor sets her fantastic stories in Namibia among the indigenous and marginalised Himba people. She creates strong female characters who embody a multiplicity of beings operating intricately in a complex earthly, spatial and spirit world, and she exploits ancient African traditional culture and knowledge systems to create her ‘organic fantasy’ and a world of speculative fiction that transforms Western understandings of the genre.

Future Frontiers: Ontological Osmosis and Africanfuturist Cyborgs in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon

Brett Banks — 2024-03-26

This article will examine Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) — a tale of shapeshifting aliens arriving off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria — as a quintessential Africanfuturist novel replete with disruptions of traditional science fiction tropes, transcorporeal mutations and endogenous African epistemologies. Our theoretical framework brings together two seemingly disparate thinkers whose work challenges essentialist identity politics: American ecocritical feminist, Donna Haraway, and Cameroonian anthropologist, Francis Nyamnjoh. Haraway’s (1985) myth of the cyborg resonates with Okorafor’s aliens and their dissolution of the boundaries separating human/machine, man/woman, and self/other. Nyamnjoh (2015:6-7) presents a similarly liminal figure in the ‘frontier African’ to whom ‘everyone and everything is malleable, flexible and blendable, from humans and their anatomies , to animals and plants, gods, ghosts and spirits’. Okorafor’s counter-hegemonic representations of gender and selfhood are inextricably interwoven into a decolonising literary project of ‘ ontological osmosis’ that transforms superficially ‘fixed’ markers of difference into permeable thresholds of becoming. These concepts reflect Okorafor ’s Africanfuturist goals, as we show through a detailed analysis of the alien ambassador, Ayodele, and other key characters. This article will also consider Okorafor’s allusions to Mami Wata (a feminine west African water deity or witch) in relation to the protean Ayodele. This analysis will underline Okorafor’s thematic concerns with the question of gender and its relationship with the broader ecological and cultural forces of this society.

Deliberately derivative: levels of decolonisation in Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch

Dorothea Boshoff — 2024-03-26

Having written science fiction works such as Zahrah the Windseeker and Binti, Nnedi Okorafor is at the forefront of Africanfuturism. Akata Witch falls within the realm of Africanfuturism in offering a version of Africa outside of the stereotypical Western imagination. However, being set in present day Nigeria (and the spirit world), it is more fantasy than it is futuristic. While Okorafor takes umbrage at Akata Witch being branded the ‘Nigerian Harry Potter’, the parallels in plot and fantastical setting between the two stories are undeniable and go far deeper than is initially apparent (2020b). The level of correlation might even lead to Akata Witch being perceived as derivative of a Western literary phenomenon; nothing more than Harry Potter in an African setting. This article sets out to prove the opposite by exploring how, and more importantly, why, Okorafor made the familiar strange, and the strange familiar, by using the Harry Potter universe as starting point to tap deeply into Nigerian folklore and African indigenous knowledges. I further posit that Akata Witch can be divided into two distinct parts: the first, a mild but very effective form of decolonisation where Okorafor showcases Nigerian folklore and makes what is Western accessible to an African audience; and the other, a direct challenge in the face of the coloniser, touting not only the uniqueness, but also the superiority of Africa and African myth unchained.

The Black Female Messiah in Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix

Bernice Borain — 2024-03-26

The 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.

Spectre and Speculation: Haunting and Uncanniness in Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree by Niq Mhlongo

Eugene de Klerk — 2024-03-26

Niq Mhlongo’s collection of short stories, Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree (2018), does not perhaps immediately present itself as speculative fiction. The collection, however, gives the supernatural world of African indigenous knowledge as much weight in shaping characters’ lives and experiences as it does contemporary socio-political realities. It troubles established genre distinctions in that it can be seen as a work simultaneously belonging to magical realism, social realism, and horror. This article contends that it is precisely owing to the work’s use of supernatural and uncanny aspects that this collection can be viewed as a form of social or sociological realism, which aims at depicting the peculiar contemporary and subjective (sur)realities of many young black South Africans. It is faithful to the contradictory worlds of tradition and globalisation that many South Africans straddle, as well as to the spectres of colonialism and Apartheid, that impinge on the present in both material and immaterial forms. In many ways the collection stages the difficulty of decolonisation and the subjective spectres and doppelgängers that such a process unleashes. This paper will make use of the work of Sigmund Freud, Avery F. Gordon, Eve Tuck and C. Ree to explore instances of haunting and the uncanny in Mhlongo’s collection.

Whose city? (De)colonising the bodies of speculative fiction in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

Natasha Lyle Weston — 2024-03-26

This article explores the (de)colonisation of the body and body boundaries in contemporary South African speculative fiction, paying particular attention to award-wining author, Lauren Beukes’s, second novel, Zoo City (2010). I will apply Lara Cox’s (2018:317) argument that ‘Haraway’s cyborg resembles the liminal view of identity presented by queer theory, which seeks to blur strict divisions between sexual and gender categories, dissolving binary oppositions such as woman/man and heterosexual/homosexual’, to my reading of Zoo City. By centring the novel around Zinzi December, a resident of ‘Zoo City’ (the marginalised underbelly of Johannesburg), and situating the novel in the cradle of humankind, Beukes reacts against South Africa’s colonial history and its colonisation of the body by blurring the animal-human boundary and challenging the colonial construct of body binaries. The novel can be read as a decolonial feminist text as it re-writes South Africa’s apartheid history and critiques its division, separation and bodily segregation. Furthermore, I explore how fictional bodies are imagined and constructed in the text; I ask what kinds of boundary-breaking bodies predominate; and consider their thematic, narrative, and political significance in the post-apartheid imaginary in relation to speculative fiction. I examine how new boundaries (particularly between ‘normative’ society and ‘Zoo City’) are formulated. Zoo City pulls into focus Kristeva’s (1982) notion of the abject body as a central to its concerns, while also bringing attention to Foucault’s (1992) notion of the ‘disciplined’ body. It foregrounds questions about the formulation and destabilisation of identity, with a particular focus on the construction of female identity. This article builds on the critical literature on the dystopian post-apartheid state by examining Zoo City’s depictions of marginalised people and its construction of the body and body boundaries, as well as by extending the examination of representations of the body in speculative fiction.

South African experiences in a restructured post-apocalyptic geo-political future as depicted in speculative fiction

Irikidzayi Manase — 2024-03-26

This article draws on science fiction’s aesthetics of instability and multiple perspectives that disrupt the dominance of a Euro-American narrative voice (Langer 2011), as well as decolonial concepts such as coloniality, decentring and epistemic freedom (Ngũgĩ 1986, 1992; Quijano 2007; Grosfoguel 2011; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018), to analyse the human condition and geopolitical patterns reflected in post-disaster worlds as depicted in Gillian Armstrong’s “Elton” (2011), Abigail Godsell’s (2011) “Taal” and Sarah Lotz’s “Marine Drive, Durban Beachfront” (2014). The notion of multiple perspectives and contexts, and Smith’s (2012) disruptive view that science fiction occurs everywhere, are used as lenses to examine the decolonised literary imagination. Ngũgĩ argues (1986, 1992), that such an imagination moves the literary setting and vision from the Euro-American centre to another centre, in this case to a speculative post-apocalyptic South African future. The article argues that the depicted literary future and unfolding human experiences enable the constitution of decolonised literary imaginings and a cultural geography that restructure the current domination of geo-political and spatial mappings by the Global North. This restructured imagining places South Africa, and by extension Africa, at the centre of a speculative vision of humanity’s sense of itself, knowledge production and agency, which are needed for the future survival of both the environment and other global inhabitants.

Give the Black Girl the Remote: Decolonising and Depatriarchalising1 Knowledge and Art in Black Panther and Colour Me Melanin

Deirdre C. Byrne — 2024-03-26

This article explores two texts set in Africa to determine to what extent they exhibit decolonial and anti-patriarchal impulses. They are Ryan Coogler’s 2018 film, Black Panther, and the adult colouring book, Colour Me Melanin (Kekana 2019), which features 27 portraits of African women paired with 27 poems inspiring pride in women’s African heritage. Black Panther features a Black superhero: the hypermasculine T’Challa, although its technological genius is not T’Challa (the eponymous Black Panther), but his sister Shuri, disparaged by traditionalists in Wakanda as ‘a child’. Despite her irreverent and iconoclastic approach to tradition, sixteen-year-old Shuri is ‘the smartest person in the world, smarter than Tony Stark [Iron Man]’ (Malik 2023). Despite these promising features, the film’s portrayal of Shuri – a Black girl nerd who is manifestly her brother’s equal in the arts of war and technology – stops short of a complete depatriarchalisation of the norm that reserves superhero status for men. Further, Black Panther contains a number of concerning representations that reinforce, rather than disrupting, the colonial view of Africa. Colour Me Melanin may be called speculative fiction in that it points to a future that is yet to come as it shifts the locus of women’s beauty away from whiteness and places it firmly in the domain of Black African women’s embodiment. All the same, some aspects of this multimodal text signal its affinity for colonial taxonomies and ways of thinking about ethnicity.

Being (in)formed by indigenous voices: First steps to using graphic narratives to decolonise speculative fiction

Jeanne-Marie Viljoen — 2024-03-26

The Greenlandic visual artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen and his literary and scientific collaborators have produced a series of four graphic narratives to represent distinct moments in Greenland’s history, spanning the pre-colonised and colonial period. These narratives employ aspects of magic realism and adopt an approach to narrative that focuses on the supernatural and presents modes of being that contrast with their audiences’ understanding of realities that are ordinarily (only) visible. I argue that these graphic narratives use strategies from speculative fiction that frame the modern European presence in Greenland and the narrative of colonialism as one of several multiple realities in the Arctic, rather than its central axis, leaving open the possibility for indigenous Greenlanders to speak on their own terms. This enables these graphic narratives to illuminate aspects of knowledge (including features of oral legend and supernatural encounters) that were previously discredited in colonial discourse. Furthermore, I show that attending to how embodied aspects of Greenlandic Inuit storytelling traditions can be captured in the graphic narrative medium may be an effective decolonial strategy, which could be employed by speculative fiction. I thus advocate methodologies for speculative fiction that strategically broaden its boundaries in order to address its intractable colonial legacy. Informed by approaches that focus attention on form — such as Marks’s haptic visuality (2000) and visual theories of the power of hand-drawn comics (Groensteen 2010, Chute 2008) to engage the reader/viewer in both an embodied and reflective way — I assert that including graphic narratives which employ strategies of speculative fiction may present a unique opportunity for the genre to mount a powerful challenge to a colonial knowledge production.