Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies最新文献

{"title":"Contradictory excessiveness: abandoned trolleys in post-apartheid South Africa","authors":"David Reiersgord","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2021.2001927","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2021.2001927","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay explores the significance of abandoned trolleys in South Africa. As an international student who later settled in South Africa, I did not initially notice abandoned trolleys. However, as I became more familiar with the senses of South African society, I began to spot trolleys abandoned in seemingly random locations throughout the country. Using Jacob Dlamini’s charge that studies of South African urban history should foreground the senses, I take up the sight of abandoned trolleys as symbols of the contradictory excessiveness of post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing from my own experiences and photos, and the work of Ivan Vladislavić’s emphasis on “tomasons,” I illustrate their centrality within South Africa, albeit from the margins of society. By zeroing in on an object that tends to be overlooked, the polarizing contradictions that exist between people can be distilled from the abstract into the human.","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"280 - 296"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76786368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Matching shadows: remembering the Plant Conservation Unit","authors":"Hedley Twidle","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2021.2013642","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2021.2013642","url":null,"abstract":"The campus where I work is built around a central concourse of stairs leading up the slopes of Table Mountain. On one side of this bisecting line are mostly arts and humanities buildings; on the other are mostly sciences. Seen from above, the two halves of campus mirror each other like a Rorschach test. Literature has its symmetrical twin in Mathematics; Architecture is echoed by Astronomy, History by Biology. When a mountain fire swept down from the slopes on Sunday 18 April 2021, embers carried by a hot, dry wind randomly picked out buildings for destruction. The cypresses and creepers outside my office were set alight, but the building survived (just, and with heat-induced cracks in the glass of our windows). But the roof of the Jagger Reading Room just opposite began to burn, perhaps because embers flew into the gaps between the roof tiles. Firefighters were concentrating on buildings with gas cylinders and stockpiles more flammable than books. By Sunday evening, pictures of the African Studies Library burning were on news sites around the world: its arched windows filled with red flames, its teak desks, open shelves, and artworks utterly destroyed, the damage to the collections in the vaults unknown. Before and after pictures were soon circulated: a beautiful reading room; a charred wreck. In the wake of the fire, there was an enormous salvage operation that relied on thousands of volunteers. You would get your plastic hard hat and safety briefing, then go down into the dim, waterlogged stacks of Special Collections. Here you would fill up plastic crates (donated by local supermarkets) with rare books and boxes of manuscripts, maps, photographs, drawings—all carefully labeled. The key thing was to maintain the archival order as the crates came out and were stacked on big flatbed trucks, then taken to other locations, unloaded again, stacked again: it was labor intensive work. For over two weeks, a long human chain stretched out of the building. Staff, students, and volunteers passed along the crates, mostly too quick for you to see what was in them. Occasionally someone would shout “Triage!” and skip the line, rushing a box of water-affected items to a marquee pitched outside, where conservators and curators assessed the damage. I watched as they picked through soggy photo albums with tweezers or flash-froze wet texts—this bought some time in combating mold, which was now the big threat. It turned out that many of the most important holdings had survived, among them the nineteenth-century records of |Xam and !Kung oratures (commonly known as the Bleek and Lloyd Collection) that are part of the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. So there was some good news; it wasn’t quite as bad as it had","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":"201 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75392450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reflections on the death of an archive","authors":"Sara G. Byala","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2021.2013584","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2021.2013584","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"223 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78220851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The jagged past","authors":"Daniel Herwitz","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2021.2013640","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2021.2013640","url":null,"abstract":"There is a special melancholy when African heritage is lost, especially on a scale of the Jagger Reading Room at the University of Cape Town. African heritage has always been fragile – liable to condescension, extraction, and elimination by European powers keen to “devalue the colonial past,” as Frantz Fanon put it in “On National Culture.” Devaluation of tradition robs people of their pride, purpose, and sense of uniqueness, and turns them in the direction of becoming inert subjects. It eliminates their sense of difference from the colonizer, of not belonging to him. Heritage stolen from one group is heritage gained by another. What Africa lost became Europe’s property. Africa lost a past, while Europe gained a patrimony, stashed in its museums and overflowing its libraries, which, by a vast irony, then served to shore up its sense of power and authority over the very cultures from which the goods were plundered. African objects, now French or English, served as part of the bulwark of heritage by which Europe claimed its superiority over native populations. African objects became instruments for the belittling of Africa, thanks to their second lives as European heritage. There is thus a special demand for the cultivation of archives in African museums and universities, libraries, and national institutions. The past is wanted back, so that the modern nation state may empower itself with heritage. An emergent nation requires pride in its past, and a sense (mythic or not) that it has emerged from that past. Whatever many problems Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance had – including its egregious misuse in justifying a grotesque HIV/ AIDS policy – it was responding to an inner requirement of the nation state. That requirement mandates that it claim longevity and identity partly through recourse to its deep past, relevantly re-scripted for the present. This has been the formula of the nation state since its inauguration, thanks to the Treaties of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War that had wracked Europe, leaving every capital vulnerable to attack by every other, and populations – Catholic v. Protestant – at violent odds across fragile borders. Thanks to those treaties, the newly arising nation state could no longer define itself on transnational religious authority, so it had to find other ways to unite its populations. Thus, the modern European form of heritage was created – and with it, the birth of the museum in the eighteenth century.","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"218 - 220"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90868136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fahrenheit 451 in the era of 36 °C","authors":"B. Nasson","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2021.2013641","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2021.2013641","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"210 - 212"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74297689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A conversation with Jacob Dlamini","authors":"K. Shapiro","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2021.2007595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2021.2007595","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"36 1","pages":"189 - 200"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91177453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Durban–Cape Town–Abeokuta–Austin","authors":"D. Attwell","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2021.2013598","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2021.2013598","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"77 1","pages":"213 - 217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73798680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Affective photographs: Alice Mann’s series Domestic Bliss","authors":"Marie Meyerding","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2021.1984679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2021.1984679","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In 2014, the South African photographer Alice Mann made the series Domestic Bliss which portrays domestic workers in her home country. Only a few years later Mann took these photographs down from her website due to strong criticism leveled at her work. In order to explain the portraits’ canceling, this paper undertakes a close visual reading of the series looking at the ideas of agency and affect. It considers the circumstances that determined the making of the photographs, including the sitters’ living conditions, and highlights the role of uniforms as signifiers of social meaning, juxtaposing the artist’s intentions with the spectators’ responses. Considering the causes and consequences of the series’ disappearance, this paper concludes that a critique of the visual should rather make space for a more substantial critique of the underlying colonial structures, market logic, and politics that create the sitters’ living conditions in the first place.","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"18 1","pages":"245 - 261"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78821149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rodriguez, apartheid, and censorship: cold facts, and fiction","authors":"M. Drewett","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2021.1939950","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2021.1939950","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the narrative and post-release aftermath of the film Searching for Sugar Man various claims have been made about the relationship between Rodriguez’s album Cold Fact (in particular) and the development of an anti-apartheid rebelliousness among white South African youth in the 1970s and 1980s. These claims have ranged from the unlikely to the incredible. This is a critical investigative article based on interviews, archival research, and exploration of primary and secondary sources. It provides a critique of the anti-apartheid narrative presented in the film, and in particular focuses on the section of the film in which claims about the censorship of Rodriguez’s music are made. It is revealed that serious manipulation and distortion of events were used to present a fabricated version of the Rodriguez story.","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"130 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85730597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Examining the tensions between queer desire, non-normative gendered identities, and pseudo-traditional cultural practices in Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2016) and Mohale Mashigo’s The Yearning (2017)","authors":"A. Duvenage","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2021.1933353","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2021.1933353","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2016) and Mohale Mashigo’s The Yearning (2017) explore the tensions between queer desire, non-normative gendered identities, and pseudo-traditional cultural practices. Queer desire in The Reactive subverts binary oppositions to celebrate non-normative sexualities as a part of tradition. Luthando disrupts hetero-patriarchal masculinist traditionalism. Yet, Lindanathi’s traditionalist performance of Xhosa male circumcision (ulwaluko) is also the site of “righting” sexuality in the novel. The Yearning similarly addresses the negative tenets of traditionalist masculinity but, through female initiation rituals into womanhood (lebollo) and the call to become a traditional healer or sangoma (ukuthwasa). Mashigo’s novel presents silence as subversion to show how matriarchal structures exist and flourish within patriarchy co-existing in a relationship committed to continuity and community. These subversions suggest that the collective is embedded in the individual and offer a way to reframe “manhood” premised on notions of personhood as community.","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"147 - 161"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83005338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}