Browsing by Author "Taylor, Jane"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    �Ag sjeim, siestog, sorry�: Tracing shame�s affect through performance in post-apartheid South Africa
    (University of Western Cape, 2021) Wiese, Abigail; Taylor, Jane; Moolman, Jacobus
    In this study I investigate what performance as a medium can contribute to our understanding of shame's affect. Given the difficulty of defining and concretising affect according to set parameters and outcomes, critical and dynamic debates about its nature continue. Most recently, New Affect theorists such as Brian Massumi have explored the role of the body in affective meaning-making. Our current social context requires a critical engagement with the forms of affect in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the intangible structures of power and oppression, as well as of desire, interest and pleasure. My aim is to determine the ways in which performance � as a medium through which to navigate an often difficult, evasive and deeply subjective experience � can facilitate a knowledge of how bodies experience, relate to and process shame.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Alex la Guma: a literary and political biography of the South African years
    (University of the Western Cape, 2001) Field, Roger Michael; Bundy, Colin; Taylor, Jane; Dept. of English; Faculty of Arts
    The South African years (1925-1966) of Alex la Guma is examined in this thesis. While La Guma's father was an important role model, most critics have overlooked his mother's contribution to his literary and political development. Throughout the thesis the same point is made about Blanche, La Guma's wife, who supported him in many ways. The researcher describes La Guma's infancy, childhood and adolescence, his father's political profile, how notions of race and writing, coloured identity and family and political experiences created the conditions that enabled him to become a story teller and political activist .
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Contemporary black African curatorial practice: Three biographic studies in strategy
    (University of the Western Cape, 2024) Setai, Phokeng Tshepo; Gillespie, Kelly; Taylor, Jane
    This doctoral thesis is an interpretive study of the emergence of contemporary curatorial practice on the African continent. The inquiry charts the rise of the practice of curating in postcolonial Africa, casting a biographical lens on the curatorial strategies of three pre-eminent contemporary Black-African curators — Koyo Kouoh, Ntone Edjabe and Gabi Ngcobo. It pays particular attention to the conceptual and methodological approaches these individuals have utilised in their negotiation of the emergent genre of curatorial practice on the African continent; in the context of a neoliberalising landscape in the global contemporary art-world. This thesis is an exploration of the present-day expanded role of contemporary curatorial practice, and the nascent formations of cultural production emerging from the rise of the curator — models of which have helped to situate the role of the curatorial practitioner at the political centre of our contemporary moment in the African and global art-world. This thesis problematises the function of contemporary curatorial practitioners in Africa by leading an examination into how three contemporary Black African curators are reconfiguring the historical and contemporary epistemic articulations of the practice in the present. Central to this research’s inquiry is understanding the thinking implemented by Black African curators in their curatorial practices and discovering what influence their pedagogies have on existing modes of cultural production on the African continent.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    �Newes from the Dead� An Unnatural Moment in the History of Natural Philosophy
    (Taylor & Francis, 2019) Taylor, Jane
    This chapter is about the problem of writing what has already been written. Several years ago I was approached by Renaissance Scholar Stephen Greenblatt to write a so-called �missing� Shakespeare play, a work titled Cardenio that has come down through the tradition as a play by the Bard, though no copy of the original play-text has ever come to light. The strongest clue to the play�s possible plot arises from the fact that the title is the name given to a character, Cardenio, a melancholy hero from Cervantes�s celebrated novel, Don Quixote. In that novel, Cardenio has lost his mind and lives disguised in the mountains because he believes that his beloved has been seduced by the local overlord. Greenblatt�s purpose was surely, at least in part, to consolidate the full extent of the Shakespeare oeuvre and identify any works that might make a claim to belong inside rather than outside the canon. He began to explore literary fragments, and ambiguous works, plays of doubtful attribution, or written as collaborations, and thus at the edge of the fixed authentic Shakespearean writings.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    On uncertainty
    (University of the Western Cape, Centre for Humanities, 2018) Taylor, Jane
    There is some uncertainty written into the form of this paper because, while it seeks to use scholarly procedures in engaging with the philosophical questions provoked by Ludwig Wittgenstein's late speculative essay On Certainty, it arose out of my research toward a theatrical interpretation of that work. The article is an attempt to stage the mode of thought, as well as the state of mind, of this most complex thinker in his last years. My thoughts pay particular attention to philosophical traditions, while considering dramatic forms, spatial meanings, constellations of persons, histories, ideas, events, and designs. Moreover, I am locating the text in the context of the workshop, 'Missing and Missed: The Subject, Politics and Memorialisation of South Africa's Colonial and Apartheid Dead' at which it was presented in early 2018. The workshop generated papers and conversations enquiring into the grief, abjection, rage, and discouragement that have marked so much of the violent histories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and their legacies of colonialism, genocide, and geographic dislocation. The anguish of these materials requires a certain gravitas, and there might seem some waywardness in my exploring the arcane philosophical thought of a young man born into staggering wealth and privilege in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, it seems to me that Wittgenstein made a compelling and genuinely traumatised attempt to use intellectual means to come to terms with the precarious-ness and uncertainty of life in the twentieth century. The depth of his enquiry is read in the following pages alongside some of the details of his 'family romance'.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Signal To Noise: sonic reflections on the South African transition period (1984-1998)
    (University of the Western Cape, 2023) Swinney, Warrick; Taylor, Jane; Moolman, Jacobus
    Background: This dissertation is set against the backdrop of my involvement with Shifty Studios, a small independent mobile recording studio based in Johannesburg, between 1983 and 1997. Most of this content is drawn from a wide range of reading across subjects generated from anecdotal discussions with involved musicians and friends; some alive, some barely alive and some spectral. The flimsy nature of some of these memories are sources for the creative nonfictional strands that help bind everything together; the aura of the absences contributing, almost metaphysically, to the overall ambience. “Rhizomic assemblage,” a term my supervisors and I bandied about during my MA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, perhaps best describes my (de)constructive methodologies employed here. Early chapters address this together with the psychological self-searching that involved finding solutions to life-long learning disorders and taking strength from others with similar predicaments. David Byrne, in Chapter One, helps in reconfiguring my disorder into a ‘superpower’, while Osip Mandelstam’s advice to “make a wry face in remembering the past” (109) situates, for me, the human in the humanities.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Under the Hibiscus: An eco-critical reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s postcolonial novels
    (University of the Western Cape, 2019) Khumalo, Sibongile; Taylor, Jane
    literature, music and culture”. As this statement suggests, ecocriticism is concerned with more than the representation of environmental questions in literature. It provides a way of examining the intersections and interconnections between the natural and human worlds. An ecocritical approach can examine the ways in which these interconnections are produced aesthetically in literature of different kinds, and not just literature that is overtly about the environment. I will argue in this thesis that the novels of one of the rising stars of African and world literature, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, are underpinned by an ecological aesthetic in this broad sense, and can, therefore, be read from an ecocritical perspective in the manner implied by Morton. This thesis will show that Adichie’s preoccupation with intersectionalities, interconnections and relationships lend her narratives to an eco-critical inquiry of this kind.