Philosophiae Doctor - PhD (Women and Gender Studies)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/10217

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Browsing by Author "Lewis, Desiree"

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    Decentering nationalism: Representing and contesting Chimurenga in Zimbabwean popular culture
    (University of the Western Cape, 2015) Mawere, Tinashe; Lewis, Desiree; Raftopoulos, Brian
    This study seeks to uncover the non-coercive, intricate and insidious ways which have generated both the 'willing' acceptance of and resistance to the rule of Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe. I consider how popular culture is a site that produces complex and persuasive meanings and enactments of citizenship and belonging in contemporary Zimbabwe and focus on 'agency,' 'subversion' and their interconnectedness or blurring. The study argues that understanding nationalism's impact in Zimbabwe necessitates an analysis of the complex ways in which dominant articulations of nationalism are both imbibed and contested, with its contestation often demonstrating the tremendous power of covert forms of resistance. The focus on the politics of popular culture in Zimbabwe called for eclectic and critical engagements with different social constructionist traditions, including postcolonial feminism, aspects of the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. My eclectic borrowing is aimed at enlisting theory to analyse ways in which co-optation, subversion and compromise often coexist in the meanings generated by various popular and public culture forms. These include revered national figures and symbols, sacrosanct dead bodies and retrievals, slogans and campaign material, sport, public speeches, the mass media and music. The study therefore explores political sites and responses that existing disciplinary studies, especially politics and history, tend to side-line. A central thesis of the study is that Zimbabwe, in dominant articulations of the nation, is often constituted in a discourse of anti-colonial war, and its present and future are imagined as a defence of what has already been gained from previous wars in the form of "chimurenga." I argue that formal sites of political contestation often reinforce forms of patriarchal, heterosexist, ethnic, neo-imperial and class authoritarianism often associated only with the ZANU PF as the overtly autocratic ruling party. In turning to diverse forms of popular culture and their reception, I identify and analyze sites and texts that, rather than constituting mere entertainment or reflecting organized and party political struggles, testify to the complexity and intensity of current forms of domination and resistance in the country. Contrary to the view that Zimbabwe has been witnessing a steady paralysis of popular protest, the study argues that slogans, satire, jokes, metaphor, music and general performance arts by the ordinary people are spaces on which "even the highly spectacular deployment of gender and sexuality to naturalize a nationalism informed by the 'efficacy' of a phallocentric power 'cult' is full of contestations and ruptures."
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    Public eating, food spaces and social identities in South Africa’s spur family restaurant
    (University of the Western Cape, 2023) Bongwana, Thembelihle; Lewis, Desiree
    Within the broad body of scholarship on critical approaches to the cultural politics of eating, food tastes and food branding, an increasing amount of work is being done on the social and cultural functioning of restaurants. This study contributes to a global body of work on the semiotics, social history and politics of popular restaurant culture by exploring a steakhouse franchise that emerged in apartheid-era South Africa, but that has gone on to become a beacon of convivial South African eating among black and white South Africans from different social classes. One aim of the study, building on a provocative MA thesis at UP several years ago, is to explore how this chain of restaurants, influenced by the American steakhouse model, embeds and reproduces apartheid-era forms of identity formation in a post-apartheid South Africa. Key to this study’s preoccupations therefore are the mechanisms that reinforce relations and ideologies based on “race” in the everyday context of fast-food consumption. This is explored both in the restaurant chain’s employment patterns and in its ideas and standards for service, productivity and leadership. Also important to this study is how the Spur, as a particular kind of fast-food franchise perpetuates and draws on national and globalised myths and meanings. Attention is therefore paid to the iconography it uses in branding, its distinctive advertising images, tropes and strategies, and its evolving efforts to offer South African food consumers the promise of familial experiences of eating. Here, attention is paid to the Spur’s reliance on post-apartheid mythmaking: it is shown how the Spur’s marketing content and strategy draws on popularised ideas about South Africa as a rainbow nation. On one hand, then, the restaurant is explored as a public site of democratic South African conviviality, play, pleasure and entertainment in titillating different senses in relation to food. On the other hand, the Spur’s pleasures are shown to rest on legacies and images of racial and gendered violence, othering and an oddly “nostalgic” imagining of coloniality.
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    Radical possibilities at the crossroads of African feminism and digital activism
    (University of the Western Cape, 2022) Hussen, Tigist Shewarega; Lewis, Desiree
    Studies abound that deal with digital activism and social movements worldwide. Many African scholars continue to dwell on how the effects of technological advancement and access to social media are ingrained in class and other structural inequalities. Certain scholars (Mutsvairo, 2016; Bosch, 2017; Wasserman, 2018; Okech, 2020) are also invested in unpacking the possibilities that social media platforms are offering to social movements, and the shift occurring in many African countries� social and political structures. A central political current here is the tension in the relationship between masculinist nationalist movements and feminist digital activisms in Africa.