Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2020.1724806
G. Marchais, Paulin Bazuzi, Aimable Amani Lameke
The boom of the humanitarian and development industry in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the demand for qualitative and quantitative research that has accompanied it have created a novel political economy of academic research in the region. An array of research associations and private data collection firms have emerged to respond to the international demand by Western universities and research projects. Like many industries operating on the continent, academic research has a racial dimension, which is rarely reflected upon, in part because it is often invisible to white Western researchers. This paper reflects on the creation and evolution of a non-profit association specialized in the collection of data in conflict-affected areas of eastern DRC. The research association was conceived by its Congolese and European founders as an enclave against the racism that pervades professional relations in the region, an experiment upheld by a collective commitment to academic research and an egalitarian ethos. Written from the perspective of three of its founding members, this paper analyses how racialized discursive repertoires and cognitive biases (re)appeared within the organization. We argue that these repertoires and biases serve to activate a particular mode of production, based on racial and geographic inequalities in working conditions and prospects. We interrogate the relationship between race and the system of production underpinning contemporary research, and show that, far from solely being a remnant of the colonial era, race constitutes a resource that can be tapped into, particularly in a context where empirical data, competition for funding, and ‘value for money’ are increasingly becoming the norm.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2020.1788401
Simukai Chigudu
Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) announced its presence in the University of Oxford through rigorous calls to tackle ‘the plague of colonial iconography (in the form of statues, plaques and paintings) that seeks to whitewash and distort history’ throughout the university and beyond. In addition, RMF aimed to reform the Eurocentric curricula that dominate the university’s pedagogy across diverse fields of study and to address the under-representation and inadequate welfare provision for black and minority ethnic staff and students at Oxford. The first of these major aims soon concentrated on the removal of a statue of the British colonialist, Cecil John Rhodes, and set the stage for a national controversy as public debates erupted in Britain about the complex relationships between history, racial injustice and the role of elite universities in the modern world. In this article, I revisit some of these debates from the vantage point of my own involvement in RMF. By delineating the origins and trajectory of RMF in Oxford and critically analysing the admiration and admonition the movement evinced, I show how a particularly potent British national imaginary has memorialized the country’s imperial past and is unable to deal with racism in the present.
Rhodes Must Fall (RMF)通过严格的呼吁来解决牛津大学内外“试图粉饰和扭曲历史的殖民图像(以雕像、牌匾和绘画的形式)的瘟疫”，宣布其在牛津大学的存在。此外，RMF的目标是改革以欧洲为中心的课程，这些课程在牛津大学各个研究领域的教学中占主导地位，并解决牛津大学黑人和少数民族教职员工和学生的代表性不足和福利供应不足的问题。这些主要目标中的第一个很快集中在拆除英国殖民主义者塞西尔·约翰·罗兹(Cecil John Rhodes)的雕像上，并为一场全国性的争议奠定了基础，英国爆发了关于历史、种族不公正和精英大学在现代世界中的作用之间复杂关系的公开辩论。在本文中，我将从我自己参与RMF的有利位置重新审视其中的一些争论。通过描绘牛津大学RMF的起源和轨迹，并批判性地分析该运动所表现出的钦佩和告诫，我展示了一个特别强大的英国民族想象是如何纪念这个国家的帝国历史，而无法处理当前的种族主义问题的。
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2020.1724807
L. Madsen, H. Adriansen
This essay explores transnational capacity building projects to highlight some of the structural and processual challenges in decolonizing institutional spaces and power structures. We offer a view from the Global North by drawing on our own experiences of such projects and argue that issues of coloniality in research capacity-building projects must be understood together with the concepts of dependency and universality of knowledge. Two examples are used to question who defines excellence and relevance at African universities. We conclude that many collaborative projects regard scientific knowledge and notions of excellence and standards as universal and therefore transferable without considering an African academic context. Moreover, the mobility of scholars leads to the mobility of knowledge and norms, which may emphasise the notion of universality. More research from the Global South is needed to illustrate how the paradoxes and dilemmas of international research collaboration and capacity building are experienced and understood.
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Pub Date : 2020-05-03DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2020.1753547
N. Murray, J. Weintroub
This is a special issue of Critical African Studies, entitled ‘Urban archives and Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project’. It is followed by an individual article, authored by Julia Viebach. The special issue, guest edited by Noëleen Murray and Jill Weintroub, emerged through their involvement in the scholarly meeting Secret Affinities, a workshop in critical reading and an interrogation of the city in Africa via Walter Benjamin’s Das Passagen-Werk. The collection of essays presented in this volume is one of the outcomes of the workshop, which took place in Johannesburg in 2017. As Walter Benjamin turned his attention to the Paris of the nineteenth century, and to the space of Naples in the 1920s, to begin gathering lingering traces that would contribute to his ‘other’ history, so workshop participants sought to examine architectures, urbanisms and heritage spaces across the city and beyond. This special issue extends the concerns of the workshop, invoking creative modes of research and innovative and experimental forms of writing to construct alternative forms of archiving the urban and the social. Viebach’s article draws on a four-year study of Rwandan survivors’ meaning-making practices. In the paper, she argues that caretaking is critical to understanding genocide memorials. Every day, voluntary practices of care at the memorials, including the cleaning and preserving of human remains, work both to rebuild the self of the caretaker, and to maintain relationships with those who died. These ‘deathscapes’ are important spaces that fulfil multiple and diverse aims, both personal and political.
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Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2020.1751669
Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, J. Weintroub
The domestic dwelling known as The Kraal, inhabited briefly by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and his closest friend in South Africa, Hermann Kallenbach, in the early twentieth century, and remade a century later as a boutique guesthouse and museum named Satyagraha House, is the point of reference for a set of critical engagements with the work of heritage and historical narrative, questions of time and space, family legacies, photographs and letters. Two historians are invested in telling the smaller stories that are often hidden, and here they argue for a narrative of interaction that goes beyond Gandhi’s relationship with Kallenbach. Through reflections on the exhibits and rooms at Satyagraha House as well as the heritage site’s location within the surrounding space of Johannesburg, they argue for extending the Kallenbach story to his relationships to Gandhi’s sons. The conversation is interspersed with extracts of epistolary relationships that then establish a series of links across time, space and archives, radiating beyond Johannesburg, to the Inanda countryside, to ashrams in India, internment camps in wartime England, and to Israel.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-23DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2020.1750968
George Mahashe
The paper is located within the wider field of decolonial practice where those of us who were previously marginalized from ‘mainstream’ knowledge production by colonialism and its structures address the question of how we navigate ways of knowing from our own point of view. The paper places the concept of ‘walking about’ in relation to the Khelobedu saying ‘go sepela ke go bona’, both of which have parallels with the methodologies that Walter Benjamin espoused through the figure of the flâneur. The paper tracks my walkabouts as I follow the travels of several Balobedu from north-eastern South Africa to Berlin in 1897, by travelling to Berlin and other contemporary art centres myself. The practice of travelling offered opportunities in the form of dream as a khelobedu text, introduced me to installation art and led me to experiment with the idea and practice of the camera obscura, allowing me to confront some of the limits of photographic documentation. Overall, the paper argues that ‘walking about’ as a methodology resolves some of the difficulties with ideas of visuality associated with khelobedu and with mediating a text that demands a critical awareness of the relationship between the senses. The camera obscura, as a space that houses a body, becomes this medium and the text.
这篇论文位于非殖民实践的更广泛领域，我们这些以前被殖民主义及其结构从“主流”知识生产中边缘化的人解决了我们如何从我们自己的角度出发的问题。这篇论文将“行走”的概念与Khelobedu所说的“go sepela ke go bona”联系起来，这两者都与沃尔特·本雅明(Walter Benjamin)通过fl neur的形象所支持的方法有相似之处。这篇论文记录了我在1897年跟随几个Balobedu人从南非东北部到柏林的旅行，我自己也去了柏林和其他当代艺术中心。旅行的实践提供了以梦的形式作为khelobedu文本的机会，向我介绍了装置艺术，并引导我尝试使用暗箱的想法和实践，让我面对摄影记录的一些局限性。总的来说，这篇论文认为“行走”作为一种方法论解决了与khelobedu相关的视觉观念和调解文本的一些困难，这些文本要求对感官之间的关系有批判性的认识。暗箱作为一个容纳身体的空间，成为了这种媒介和文本。
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Pub Date : 2020-04-21DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2020.1750967
L. Witz
This article joins the excursion in which the ‘Secret Affinities’ workshop organizers took participants on through the city of Johannesburg in March 2017 as the precursor to its deliberations. Given the intent of the workshop to follow the ‘endeavour’ of Walter Benjamin’s construction of a world of ‘secret affinities’ ‘in unpredictable, undisciplined ways’ this tour with its predetermined sites and routes seemed to be an anomaly. My intent on taking part in this excursion in the article is to offer the reader some notes, or what Susan Buck-Morss in referring to Benjamin’s Arcades project invokes as half a text; observations, images, reflections and guides to the city, traversing spaces of the excursion in a defined, regulated and incessantly punctuated temporal encounter, sometimes called an itinerary. On the imaginative journey in this article these fragments are at hand not so much as to guide the reader from the workshop venue – a themed guest house and museum, restored and renamed Satyagraha House in 2011, where the lawyer Mohandas Gandhi and the architect Hermann Kallenbach lived at the beginning of the twentieth century – through the city, but rather as a means to both orient and disorient the reader to their own historical and political associations of place. Accompanying the reader on this journey contained in this article is Mr. Benjamin – inserted as a creative, discursive character in my writing – who has written extensively on cities, their spatial configurations and social connotations. He sometimes intervenes and makes comments. But he is determined not to appear as the bearer of expertise. His intention is to establish a point of vision between being of the crowd and standing apart on the street corner, to become, as he wrote in an essay reflecting ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, ‘already out of place’.
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Pub Date : 2020-03-30DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2020.1743191
Amanda Källstig, C. Death
This article explores how to understand stand-up comedy as a form of resistance in global politics, combining discussion of Homi Bhabha’s concepts of ambivalence and mimicry with an examination of Trevor Noah’s stand-up performances, in particular his material on race, disease and poverty. The article builds upon approaches which have interpreted comedy in terms of hidden transcripts, counter-discourses, and counter-conducts to argue that stand-up is serious politics. Notwithstanding his prominence and success, Noah’s performances are an alternative to dominant, white, western and Eurocentric discourses of global politics, and can be understood as a form of ‘ambivalent mockery’ which both inhabit and subvert dominant power relations and discourses from within. In his routines race is reified and deconstructed; disease is tragic and laughable; poverty is lamentable, valorized, and misunderstood. Noah invokes, inhabits and challenges racist and racialized assumptions, performing a racial ‘in-between-ness’ ranging across black, mixed, coloured and white identities which subverts assumptions about stable categories of race and identity. Taking this comedy seriously enables important contradictions in assumptions about race, disease and poverty to be seen more vividly, and demonstrates how global politics is performed and resisted in diverse ways.
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Pub Date : 2020-03-23DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2020.1743190
M. Nielsen, Paul Jenkins
Based on ethnographic data from Maputo, Mozambique, this article explores middle-classness as an often-utopic aspiration articulated through particular forms of divides, that assert themselves by continuously deferring the stabilization of a supposedly growing middle-class population. As we argue, however, it is precisely by way of this deferral that new forms of urban citizenship are produced – that are available to the assumed members of the ‘middle-class’, as well as potentially to other residents enacting middle-classness as an urban ideal. After a brief review of how middle-class areas can be identified, the paper discusses the above argument through a comparison between two of the largest state-sponsored urban planning initiatives to be implemented in Mozambique in recent years. The first is in the Intaka Community on the northern periphery of Maputo, where residents re-configure the material aesthetics of the area in order to separate themselves from a collective that is based on supposed state-sanctioned middle-class values – but to which they do not want to remain attached. The second is in the KaTembe peninsula, where squatters have invaded the building site for the ‘New City’ and commenced building reed huts and laying foundations for cement-block houses in order to be resettled elsewhere. Strikingly, in both instances, middle-classness seems to be actualized by groups of urbanites that do not desire typical spatially envisioned middle-class status. However, the surprising effect is that this still articulates a particular conceptualization of middle-classness with a dominant utopian ideology for urban living.
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Pub Date : 2020-03-09DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2020.1727346
Svea Josephy
This photographic essay traces the collaboration between an historian and a photographer in a collaborative ‘conversation’ – both visual and textual – as part of a broader project to reimage urban space in Johannesburg, South Africa. Titled JoziQuest, the project locates a series of architectures and heritage sites in the space of the city, and uses digital methods as a critical tool to explore both: through time and space, historical narrative and imagery, text and context. In this pilot phase, structures associated with the architect Hermann Kallenbach have been creatively ‘mapped’ through site visits and photographic recordings of the actual buildings, which exist in variety of conditions and contexts – some restored, others in ruin. Photographing Kallenbach's Johannesburg enabled us to discursively and visually trace these architectures and locations to a time of the city's extraordinary growth into the leading metropolis of the African continent. In drawing on Kallenbach's design work in relation to Walter Benjamin, and as a way of framing my photographic intervention, this visual essay seeks to show that Kallenbach's work can be made to act as a lens of sorts, enabling sets of understandings of the relationship between early Johannesburg and the post-apartheid city in 2018, to emerge.
{"title":"Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris: reflections on photographing Hermann Kallenbach's Johannesburg through the lens of Walter Benjamin's Arcades in the age of digital reproduction","authors":"Svea Josephy","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2020.1727346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2020.1727346","url":null,"abstract":"This photographic essay traces the collaboration between an historian and a photographer in a collaborative ‘conversation’ – both visual and textual – as part of a broader project to reimage urban space in Johannesburg, South Africa. Titled JoziQuest, the project locates a series of architectures and heritage sites in the space of the city, and uses digital methods as a critical tool to explore both: through time and space, historical narrative and imagery, text and context. In this pilot phase, structures associated with the architect Hermann Kallenbach have been creatively ‘mapped’ through site visits and photographic recordings of the actual buildings, which exist in variety of conditions and contexts – some restored, others in ruin. Photographing Kallenbach's Johannesburg enabled us to discursively and visually trace these architectures and locations to a time of the city's extraordinary growth into the leading metropolis of the African continent. In drawing on Kallenbach's design work in relation to Walter Benjamin, and as a way of framing my photographic intervention, this visual essay seeks to show that Kallenbach's work can be made to act as a lens of sorts, enabling sets of understandings of the relationship between early Johannesburg and the post-apartheid city in 2018, to emerge.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"54 1","pages":"186 - 202"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75111714","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}
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