{"title":"A Pariah Among Parvenus: Anne Fischer and the Politics of South Africa's New Realism(s)∗","authors":"Jessica R. Williams","doi":"10.1162/OCTO_A_00406","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"While scholars have begun to explore the complex afterlives of “new realism” in Europe and the Americas following the collapse of Weimar democracy, its reception on the African continent has received far less attention. Looking to the unheralded documentary work that Anne Fischer, a German- Jewish refugee to Cape Town, produced in the early years of the Second World War, this essay examines how she and South African contemporary Constance Stuart Larrabee variously employed German modernist photographic aesthetics to both critique and uphold public fictions of race in the decade leading up to the advent of apartheid. In considering these women's work, the text sheds light on how issues of race, class, and gender inflected Fischer's experience of exile and, in turn, how she mobilized her lens in her new colonial context as a young pariah among parvenus","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1162/OCTO_A_00406","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"OCTOBER","FirstCategoryId":"1092","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_A_00406","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
While scholars have begun to explore the complex afterlives of “new realism” in Europe and the Americas following the collapse of Weimar democracy, its reception on the African continent has received far less attention. Looking to the unheralded documentary work that Anne Fischer, a German- Jewish refugee to Cape Town, produced in the early years of the Second World War, this essay examines how she and South African contemporary Constance Stuart Larrabee variously employed German modernist photographic aesthetics to both critique and uphold public fictions of race in the decade leading up to the advent of apartheid. In considering these women's work, the text sheds light on how issues of race, class, and gender inflected Fischer's experience of exile and, in turn, how she mobilized her lens in her new colonial context as a young pariah among parvenus
期刊介绍:
At the forefront of art criticism and theory, October focuses critical attention on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of interpretation: film, painting, music, media, photography, performance, sculpture, and literature. Examining relationships between the arts and their critical and social contexts, October addresses a broad range of readers. Original, innovative, provocative, each issue presents the best, most current texts by and about today"s artistic, intellectual, and critical vanguard.