Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2021.2001927
David Reiersgord
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.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2021.2013642
Hedley Twidle
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
{"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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2021.2013584
Sara G. Byala
{"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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2021.2013640
Daniel Herwitz
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.
当非洲文化遗产消失时，尤其是在开普敦大学贾格尔阅览室的规模上，会有一种特别的悲伤。非洲的遗产一直是脆弱的——容易被热衷于“贬低殖民历史”的欧洲列强屈尊、榨取和消灭，正如弗朗茨·法农(franz Fanon)在《民族文化》(On National Culture)中所说的那样。传统的贬值剥夺了人们的自豪感、使命感和独特性，使他们朝着成为惰性主体的方向发展。它消除了他们与殖民者的差异感，消除了他们不属于殖民者的感觉。从一个群体窃取的遗产是另一个群体获得的遗产。非洲失去的东西成了欧洲的财产。非洲失去了一段过去，而欧洲则获得了一笔遗产，这些遗产被藏在它的博物馆里，塞满了它的图书馆，具有极大讽刺意味的是，这些遗产后来被用来支撑它对那些被掠夺了商品的文化的权力和权威感。非洲的物品，现在是法国或英国的，作为遗产堡垒的一部分，欧洲人以此宣称自己比当地人优越。非洲的物品成为了贬低非洲的工具，多亏了它们作为欧洲遗产的第二次生命。因此，非洲的博物馆、大学、图书馆和国家机构对档案的培养有着特殊的需求。人们想要回到过去，这样现代民族国家就可以用遗产赋予自己力量。一个新兴的国家需要对自己的过去感到自豪，以及一种从过去中崛起的感觉(不管是不是神话)。不管塔博·姆贝基的非洲复兴有多少问题——包括为一项怪诞的艾滋病毒/艾滋病政策辩护时令人吃惊的滥用——它都是对民族国家内在需求的回应。这一要求要求它在一定程度上通过求助于其深厚的过去来获得长寿和身份认同，并相应地为现在重新编写脚本。自1648年《威斯特伐利亚条约》(treaty of Westphalia)成立以来，这一直是民族国家的模式，它结束了破坏欧洲的三十年战争(Thirty Years War)，使每个首都都容易受到其他国家的攻击，而人口——天主教徒与新教徒——在脆弱的边界上发生暴力冲突。多亏了这些条约，新兴的民族国家不能再用跨国宗教权威来定义自己，所以它必须找到其他方法来团结它的人口。因此，现代欧洲形式的遗产被创造出来了，随之而来的是18世纪博物馆的诞生。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2021.2013641
B. Nasson
{"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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2021.2007595
K. Shapiro
{"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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2021.2013598
D. Attwell
{"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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2021.1984679
Marie Meyerding
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.
{"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}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2021.1939950
M. Drewett
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.
{"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}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2021.1933353
A. Duvenage
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.
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