Search

Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term “empty photographs” into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as “‘bad,’ ‘boring,’ or repetitious” in post-apartheid settings (“The Uneven Citizenry,” 189). This article revisits a subset of such images to contest their seeming emptiness—pallbearers escorting dead activists to their graves during political funerals in late-apartheid South Africa. Focusing specifically on Afrapix photographer, Gille de Vlieg’s images of Themba Dlamini’s funeral in Driefontein in 1990, the paper restores their local history to view and unpacks the visual cultural and material cultural circuits of militant mourning in which they were embedded. It then uses various orders of metonymy in the visual field to comment on the “necropolitics” of the apartheid regime (Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”). The paper concludes with a reflection on Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the “civil gaze” (Civil Imagination) and considers what unfolds when a reckoning with the differential distribution of death that characterizes necropower reorients this faculty away from the individual photograph towards series, genre or corpus.

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr's anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths that have shaped influential recent accounts of the city? This article outlines the contours of a “hydrocolonial Johannesburg” though combining Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall's invitation to “read for water” with existing methodologies that read for infrastructure. It sets these strategies to work in the context of Lauren Beukes' second work of speculative fiction, _Zoo City_ (Beukes, Lauren. 2010. _Zoo City_. Johannesburg: Jacana Media). The novel propels its readers into a noiresque fantasy world whose spatial coordinates closely reflect the extra-textual city of Johannesburg. Taking my cue from Beukes' infrastructural allusions, I mobilize her text to provide the struts for my own as I explore the intertextuality of _Zoo City_ with works by William Kentridge and Sarah Gertrude Millin. Alternately foregrounded or barely perceptible until deliberately sought out, water helps to distinguish the various locales of the novel from one another. My essay turns to _Zoo City_ to offer three vignettes that trace the flows of water and the contiguous presence of infrastructures in Johannesburg, pursuing their intersection beyond the boundaries of the novel into a larger expressive cultural archive to reflect on the relations between privilege and forms of anthropogenic degradation in the life of the city.

Literary historical scholarship credits the coloured South African writer Peter Abrahams’s mediation of the literature of the Harlem Renaissance as foundational for black literary production in apartheid South Africa in a manner that underlies its transnational inception. Abrahams’ exilic trajectories have also been widely noted, with particular reference to his pan-Africanist, socialist and communist associations during his sojourn in England and France, as well as his engagement with the legacies of black radicalism in the Caribbean following his relocation to Jamaica. Yet Abrahams’s transnational involvement with pan-Africanism and communism (without being a formal Communist Party member) would also prove crucial to the extensive mediation of his work in the Soviet Union—a dimension of his career that remains largely unknown. Peter Abrahams’s The Path of Thunder (1948) commands renewed attention by virtue of its extraordinary trail of dissemination in Soviet space. One of the first works by a black South African to reach Soviet readers, the novel circulated on an unprecedented scale beginning with its initial Russian translation in 1949, and was steadily republished in multiple languages until the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. The novel inspired a film, an opera, several dramatic plays, as well as a ballet adaptation staged to great acclaim at the Kirov State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet in Leningrad in 1958 and at the State Academic Bolshoi Theater in Moscow in 1959. This adaptation on the part of librettist Yuri Slonimsky who initiated the project; Gara Garaev, a major Soviet composer of Azerbaijani nationality; and Konstantin Sergeev, an influential choreographer and dancer at the Kirov Ballet; stands at the center of our investigation. Soviet ballet as a form is itself an appropriation and repurposing of an Imperial tradition by a militant socialist realism, as Christina Ezrachi points out (2012). This offers a particularly dense “site of contest” in the terminology of this collection for an investigation of the tangled and often contradictory representations of apartheid South Africa in the Soviet imaginary. Building on Louise Bethlehem’s paradigm of the “restlessness” of apartheid which holds that the transnational circulation of anti-apartheid expressive culture offers rich historiographic leverage over sites of reception outside of South Africa, and engaging with an extensive archive of Russian-language sources, our chapter closely maps various processes of ideological appropriation focused on Cold War geopolitics which downplay and sometimes fully erase the South African specificity of Peter Abrahams’s original narrative. References Bethlehem, Louise. In press. “Restless Itineraries: Antiapartheid Expressive Culture and Transnational Historiography,” 36 (3). Ezrahi, C., 2012. Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Continuing the investigation of networked cultural responses in the Global South construed as “cultural solidarities” that was embarked upon in the first special issue of this two-part series, “Cultural Solidarities: Apartheid and the anti-colonial commons of world literature,”SafundiVol. 19, no.3, the introduction to this, its second volume, investigates how the cultural imagination animates transnational solidarities across a variety of media, and against the backdrop of the Cold War. Taking the interplay between the local and the global in apartheid South Africa of the 1950s and 1960s as its point of departure, this special issue is particularly attuned to diasporic or exilic arenas of South African cultural production. As they consider figures including Mary Benson, Johnny Dyani, Mongezi Feza, Chris McGregor, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Dudu Pukwana, Oliver Tambo, and Trevor Huddleston, our contributors, Louise Bethlehem, Lindelwa Dalamba, and Tal Zalmanovich, draw attention to the imbrication of local histories with global movements engendered by the itineracy of these figures. Transnationalism figures differently in two additional contributions. Sarika Talve-Goodman explores the carceral imaginary of Alan Paton’s writing to sketch out intersections between racialized carceral state-building in South Africa and the United Sates, while Gautam Chakrabarti’s reflections on the Soviet-Indian axis in the formation of “committed” networks of theater practitioners in India lends additional impetus to the interrogation of the conditions of possibility underlying the establishment of long-distance solidarity that was broached in the previous special issue in this series.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Critical Arts on 4 March 2020, available online:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02560046.2020.1725775 Introduction to Special Issue This special issue proposes to juxtapose accounts of anti-apartheid protest and solidarity efforts with the field of celebrity studies in order to deepen our understanding of both through their conjunction. As our contributors show, opponents of apartheid in South Africa and beyond were cognisant of the importance of cultivating ties with local and global media, as well as with individuals who enjoyed easy access to the media as a consequence of their “celebrity capital” (Olivier Driessens, “Celebrity Capital: Redefining Celebrity using Field Theory,”Theory and Society42 (2013)). This introduction to the special issue revisits the notion of “networked celebrity” (F. Turner and C. Larson, “Network Celebrity: Entrepreneurship and the New Public Intellectuals,”Public Culture27, 1 (75) (2015)) in order to set the stage for the case histories that follow. Rather than considering the actions of individual women and men of renown with respect either to their individual “consecration” as celebrities in Pierre Bourdieu's well-known sense, or their capacity to extract individual benefit from it, the emphasis falls on understanding various manifestations of celebrity culture that take their bearings from the collaborative and decentred nature of the global protest against apartheid. The special issue challenges the individualising emphasis of celebrity studies and its predominantly metropolitan orientation, while offering a new set of perspectives on the transnational dimensions of the global anti-apartheid struggle.

The contemporary mobilization of the apartheid-Israel analogy on the part of activists and academics alike obscures the fact that it has a long history of use on the part of Hebrew-speaking writers and intellectuals. Some of the earliest comparative references to apartheid arose from the Hebrew translation and stage adaptation of Alan Paton’s celebrated 1948 novelCry, the Beloved Country. Departing from the performative focus of Eitan Bar-Yosef who uses blackface in the stage adaptation to reflect on Jewish whiteness in the nascent state of Israel, we analyse critical intellectual responses to the prose translation on the part of figures who were very differently positioned in relation to the hegemonic Zionist ideology of the period. Analysis of the commentary by the socialist Rivka Gurfein, the liberal Ezriel Carlebach, and the revisionist Yohannan Pogrebinsky, allows us to position apartheid as a heuristic device through which to chart debatesinternalto Israeli politics in the early years of the Zionist state. These help to expose the constitutive ambivalence of Israel as a “colonial post-colony” in Joseph Massad’s reckoning, thus touching on the very self-definition of the Jewish state.

This special issue considers networked cultural responses loosely figured as “cultural solidarities” in the Global South, on the understanding that mid-twentieth century struggles to end colonialis...

From the mid-1960s onward, compilations of the speeches and trial addresses of South African opponents of apartheid focused attention on the apartheid regime despite intensified repression in the wake of the Rivonia Trial. Mary Benson’s novel, At the Still Point, transposes the political trial into fiction. Its “stenographic” codes of representation open Benson’s text to what Paul Gready, following Foucault, has analyzed as the state’s “power of writing”: one that entangles the political trialist in a coercive intertextual negotiation with the legal apparatus of the apartheid regime. Through a form of metaleptic rupture, however, the novel is also opened to constructs of Holocaust memory. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s paradigm of “multidirectional memory,” the article investigates how the novel stages other contestations over racialized suffering at the end of a decade that began with the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann.

This chapter explores the strange intimacies of dis/avowal that obtain between Holocaust studies and postcolonial theory, with particular reference to writing by Aimé Césaire and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. For all that the Jewish body remains, by and large, unmourned in the canonical texts of postcolonial theory, the Holocaust has, I seek to argue, made an engagement with the ascendancy of witness compelling for postcolonialism precisely because it, too, comes after; it, too, inhabits the traumatic belatedness of catastrophe

This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers historiographic traction over other Cold War settings. Throughout the international antiapartheid struggle, South African expressive culture was channeled through local paradigms of reception in the world beyond, in taut negotiation with aesthetic, institutional, linguistic, and political considerations. Instances of cultural translation, catachresis, and slippage resulting from the deterritorialization of South African cultural formations can thus be contextualized, historicized, and turned back reflexively on other conjunctures, to defamiliarize existing scholarship. Makeba’s long exile in Ahmed Sékou Touré’s Guinea between 1969 and 1986 is examined in the light of these claims. Here, Makeba crosses a theater of intense ideological contestation following Touré’s 1968 socialist cultural revolution, illuminating some of its constitutive features. The article concludes with a consideration of Makeba’s agency as performer at the interface between militant cultural nationalism and state prohibition in revolutionary Guinea.

A tribute to the legendary Hugh Ramapolo Masekela who died on 23 January 2018.

Michael Titlestad has suggested that jazz serves “to mediate, manage and contest” what he terms a “staggered, but also cruel and unusual South African modernity.” His volume Making the Changes (2004) uses the “pedestrian” as a chronotope to describe the “local peripatetic appropriations of global symbolic possibilities” that jazz affords there. This paper proposes a different “chronotope”: that of the train. This substitution facilitates the reading of jazz history in South Africa in tandem with histories of labour migration and other forms of displacement – including trajectories of exile that intersect my account elsewhere of the “global itinerary” of South African cultural formations under apartheid. The deterritorialisation of South African works of expressive culture and social actors associated with anti-apartheid resistance, I have argued, affords the cultural historian strong historiographic purchase over conjunctures outside of South Africa. The present discussion explores this claim in relation to Miriam Makeba’s memoir Makeba, My Story (1988), written during her stay in Guinea. Makeba’s life-writing shows the strategies of the black South African performer in exile to be embedded in the conviviality that shaped jazz performance culture during its emergence in urban South African. Conviviality can be shown to offer an implicit critique of nativist imaginaries in decolonising Africa – including in this instance, the doctrine of authenticité promulgated by Guinea’s controversial leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré.

This article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes’s first novel, Moxyland (2008) set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner’s notion of “citiness”-- or how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South African city. This article charts Beukes’s resolutely mobile focalizers as they negotiate the spatial itineraries and technologies of governance in which they are embedded. It explores how Beukes’s futuristic urban setting fuses punitive forms of digital technology with the biopolitical regulation of social relations in an unsettling reprise of the apartheid groundplan. My reading positions Moxyand in relation to discussions of African city textualities--a critical rubric introduced by Ranka Primorac in this journal--the better to explore how the novel makes history of dystopia.