Research Articles

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Since its inception in 2006, the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape has emerged as a crucial meeting point for researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences throughout Southern Africa. The Centre strives to develop unifying and interdisciplinary themes in the humanities that will enable a renewal of its study in Africa.

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 41

Africa�s living rivers: Managing for sustainability
(MIT Press, 2021) King, Jackie; Brown, Cate
Africa�s human population is growing rapidly and is set to account for 40 percent of global numbers by 2100. Further development of its inland waters, to enhance water and energy security, is inevitable. Will it follow the development pathway of industrialized countries, often destructive of ecosystems, biodiversity, and riverdependent social structures, or can it chart a new way into the future based on global lessons of equity and sustainability? This essay tracks the global and African growth of the benefits and costs of water resource developments, explores the reasons for the costs, and offers insights on new scientific thinking that can help guide Africa to a more sustainable future.
Aftershocks: Psychotechnics in the wake of apartheid
(Taylor & Francis, 2016) Truscott, Ross; Smith, Michelle
What we at first found intriguing about Simon Gush�s Red, what the documentary and the installation seemed to mutually conjure, was the Mandela car as a body to be mourned.2 Mourning recurred as a latent theme through the documentary in the interviews with the workers at the Mercedes Benz factory � as Phillip Groom described Mandela�s words on receiving the car, he stressed that its colour �represented the many people that have spilled blood in this country to liberate it, to bring it to liberation�, a notion the workers seemingly anticipated, as at the factory the Mandela car was, as Groom put it, �literally carried�, like a coffin, not simply a �labour of love�, but a work of mourning.3 Attuned to this, the shell of Gush�s reconstruction of the car body installed within the Goethe-Institut gallery in Johannesburg and then outside the Ann Bryant gallery in East London seemed to lie like a cadaver on an autopsy trolley (see image in the editor�s introduction to this issue).
Anxious urbanity: xenophobia, the native subject and the refugee camp
(Routledge Taylor Francis Group, 2013) Pillay, Suren
Could we think of the black subject under apartheid as a refugee, and might this condition be the paradigmatic metaphor for thinking about the postcolonial African predicament of citizenship? This paper considers the xenophobic violence that occurred in South Africa in 2008 and recasts that event by thinking about the plight of the refugee as part of what it argues is a genealogy of �anxious urbanity.� This, the paper suggests, has defined the urban subject of colonial and apartheid modes of governmentality and has consequences for how we think about the postcolonial present of citizenship.
Apartheid and the unconscious: An introduction
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Truscott, Ross; van Bever Donker, Maurits; Hook, Derek
This special issue invited contributors to revisit J.M. Coetzee�s �The Mind of Apartheid,� first published in Social Dynamics in 1991. Here, Coetzee asks what it might mean to come to terms with apartheid:It is not inconceivable that in the not too distant future, the era of apartheid will be proclaimed to be over. The unlovely creature will be laid to rest, and joy among nations will be unconfined. But what exactly is it that will be buried? (Coetzee 1991, 1)Responding to his own question, Coetzee reads the texts of sociologist and Broederbond intellectual, Geoffrey Cronj�. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Coetzee diagnoses the version of apartheid Cronj� set out during the period between 1945 and 1948 as an obsessional neurotic �counterattack upon desire� (18). What so disturbed Cronj�, Coetzee argues, was the �blunting [afstomping]� of psychological resistances to �race-mixing� (18). But Cronj�s texts, as Coetzee reads them, also betray a psychic investment in precisely �the dissolution of difference� against which he set himself, a �fascination� with �the mixed� (21�22). Railing against miscegenation, it was always on Cronj�s mind.
Apartheid's university: Notes on the renewal of the Enlightenment
(CODESRIA, 2007) Lalu, Premesh
This paper sets to work on strategies for forging new and critical humanities at the institutional site of the university that appears to be trapped in the legacies of apartheid. The paper suggests that the university's responses to apartheid might hold the key for the realignment of its critical commitments in the post-apartheid present. Rather than merely invoking the Enlightenment traditions of the modern university as sufficient grounds for proclaiming a post-apartheid reorientation, I track the career of notions of academic freedom and university autonomy in the outlines of complicity. I show how the concepts of academic freedom and autonomy obscured a prior contract with the state and how that complicity extended a process of subjection. By deploying the postcolonial strategy of abusing the Enlightenment, the paper outlines the failure of opposing apartheid in the name of academic freedom and autonomy. That failure, I argue, resulted in an inability to investigate the relationship be�tween the university and the state and blinded the university to its role in the creation of racial subjects. Rather than merely casting the university in terms of the foundational concepts of academic freedom and university autonomy, I suggest that it might be more productive to consider the epistemological and political potential of a renewed reference to the Enlightenment. Apartheid's University, cast as continuity of the Enlightenment legacy, might allow us to rewrite its abject script in the direction of resisting the forms of subjection supported by that process of normalisation.
An archive of the future
(Jos� Frantz, 2020) Lalu, Premesh
The University of the Western Cape (UWC) recently entered into a partnership with photographer Rashid Lombard to house his substantial archival collection, which promises to offer expanded perspectives on the everyday cultural and political life of the Cape Flats. Consisting of a vast photographic record of Cape Flats history from the 1960s onwards, as well as an equally vast documentation of the history of jazz in South Africa, the Rashid Lombard Collection brings into view a hitherto repressed and often neglected feature of life under apartheid.
Auditing and the unconscious: Managerialism�s memory traces
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Truscott, Ross
This paper takes J.M. Coetzee�s �The Mind of Apartheid� as a point of departure in thinking about audits in universities. Using the psychoanalytic framing of apartheid that Coetzee puts in place, audit is likened here to a form of obsessional neurosis. If this is indeed a plausible diagnosis of audits � and this should remain a question for deliberation � then a set of questions emerges for post-apartheid universities, which the paper seeks to develop. By what scenes from the past are audits haunted? What memory traces do audits reactivate? What phantoms do audits seek to exorcise? Can we speak of the demons by which auditing is possessed? And what sort of working through the past would this call for?
Between racial madness and neoliberal reason: Metonymic contagion in apartheid biopower
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Naidoo, Kiasha
I will seek to consider the simultaneous workings of race and capital in apartheid biopower. J.M. Coetzee offers a reading of apartheid racism as racial madness which is imbricated with economic reason. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed instances of the biopolitical making live and letting die. The Strandfontein homeless camp set up just outside Cape Town in 2020 is an instantiation of a particular normative order, wherein contagion was used to justify the movement of black, homeless people outside of the city�s cordon sanitaire. This is resonant of apartheid racial segregation in which the fear of race mixing is sometimes described in terms of contagion where whiteness repre-sents that which is pure while blackness that which is dirty and infectious.
Breaking the mold of disciplinary area studies
(Indiana University Press, 2016) Lalu, Premesh
At the outset of an edited volume on Intellectuals and African Development, the question is posed about what went wrong.1 The call for self-reflection perhaps anticipates a further question�about how to account for the effects of area studies on scholarship in Africa in the era of independence and development. Much of this reflection has of course been occasioned by the work of scholars initially educated in African universities but later located in the American academy. Many have argued saliently about the perils of proceeding without significant and substantial overhauls to prevailing orthodoxies derived from area studies as they were constituted in the American academy. Perhaps one way to think about the anxieties produced by area studies for scholars of African studies relates to the manner in which the consolidation of institutions of higher learning in the West after the Second World War was buoyed by knowledge from elsewhere. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his musings on American area studies in South Asia, identifies the asymmetry between knowledge and institution as a hangover of an older connection between liberal education and empire.2 He suggests that what made these Eurocentric assumptions invisible was in part the fact that area studies were still a matter of studying cultures that were foreign. The question is ultimately, what critical attitude is to be harnessed from within this scene of estrangement to articulate another perspective on the worldliness of knowledge that the late Edward Said once encouraged. Thinking about the inheritance of area studies after Said�s Orientalism or Valentine Mudimbe�s Invention of Africa is what now pressures a generation toward recharging the effective history of postcolonial criticism.
Crime, community and the governance of violence in post-apartheid South Africa
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2008) Pillay, Suren
The South African government has embarked on a programme ofencouraging social cohesion in South Africa first to address concerns stemmingfrom high levels of violent crime which characterise the society, and second, tofoster positive national identity in a complex, heterogeneous, racialised andstratified nation. Through a discussion of the impact of violent crime on emergentforms of community, this paper argues that the practices of communities evolvingin the post-apartheid period show tendencies toward fragmentation rather thanunification, undermining efforts of �nation-building�.
Debates on memory politics and counter-memory practices in South Africa in the 1990s
(UNISA Press, 2018) Grunebaum, Heidi
Memory politics are often regarded as the �soft� issues contested in the aftermath of political and social upheaval. Yet critical public debates on memory, justice, impunity and reconciliation in South Africa prompted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process suggest otherwise. I offer a partial review of some of the key themes and critical debates on justice, reconciliation and memory in the 1990s, followed by a discussion of the spatial practices of the Direct Action Centre for Peace and Memory (DACPM) whose multilayered social pedagogy and activist repertoire of the transitional period challenged the terms of the political transition and the scope of the TRC. The debates on the TRC and the practices of the DACPM constitute but a glimpse into the significance of memory-work for now forgotten terrains of civil activist intervention, contestation and practice.
Digitisation, history, and the making of a postcolonial archive of Southern African liberation struggles
(Indiana University Press, 2005) Lalu, Premesh; Isaacman, Allen; Nygren, Tom
This paper describes the history of an initiative to digitize a postcolonial archive on the struggle for freedom in Southern Africa. The authors outline the intellectual architecture of the project and the complex epistemological, political, and technical challenges that they confronted in their endeavor to construct a digital archive that might help reorient scholarly debates on the struggle for liberation.
Elusive Jannah: The Somali diaspora and borderless Muslim identity, by Cawo M. Abdi
(York University Libraries, 2018) Hadebe, Rutendo
Overall, Belonging and Transnational Refugee Settlement should be applauded for emphasizing the need to recognize the complexity of refugee lives, and to rethink the dominant assumptions that so often render refugees through singular frames of victimhood. With its accessible theoretical frameworks and diverse case study analyses, Belonging and Transnational Refugee Settlement is highly recommended for undergraduates, graduate students, and practitioners who are interested in refugee settlement from fields of migration studies, sociology, social work, health, policy, and other applied fields.
Empathy�s echo: post-apartheid fellow feeling
(Taylor & Francis, 2016) Truscott, Ross
The concept of empathy has been set to work, across a range of fields, to mark a break with the relational patterns of apartheid. Similarly, empathy has been identified, historically, as that which, within apartheid and colonial rule more generally, exceeded or escaped relations of domination. This paper approaches the discourse of empathy from a different angle, taking empathy as a concept embedded in colonial thinking. Given that so many claims to empathy have had recourse to psychoanalysis, the paper focuses on empathy in Freud�s work, specifically Dora�s case and Freud�s analysis of Michelangelo�s Moses, which are read alongside the images and installations of contemporary South African artist, Nandipha Mntambo, in particular her collection of images and installations in The Encounter. Three scenes are conjured wherein empathy confronts its impossibility, but rather than foreclose on empathy as a postapartheid condition, it is through the disclosure of the aporias of empathy that it might be brought into the realm of the ethical through a practice of reinscription and through the figure of Echo.
The enchantment of freedom at University of the Western Cape
(Jos� Frantz, 2020) Lalu, Premesh
The history of the modern university is ,first and foremost ,the history of the unfolding of complex problematics of a planetary condition through established scientific and humanistic inquiry. Defined as such, the work of the university is not only to advance solutions for those problems that interchangeably favour state and public use of reason but also to discover, in the framing of the problem, the very conditions for constructing perspectives about a future that is radically other. In this sense, the demand placed on the university is always doubled, so that its interpretive, analytical, and critical work cuts into the non-identity of past and future. To this extent, the ideals of higher education mimic the processes of research and define the relationship established between the professoriate, the student body, and the university�s allied publics. The scientific revolutions
Government by grants: The post-pandemic politics of welfare
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) Dubbeld, Bernard; Pinto de Almeida, Fernanda
In April 2020, with South Africa in national lockdown, president Cyril Ramaphosa announced the Covid-19 relief program on a scale he called �historic�. He affirmed that the state would not only reestablish the economy but forge a new economy and ultimately a new society in what he called a �new global reality�. Already at the end of March, his government had announced a special Covid-19 Social Relief of Distress Grant of R350 a month to be paid to currently unemployed individuals who did not receive any other form of social grant or unemployment benefit. Existing Child Support Grant beneficiaries also received an additional sum. With Statistics South Africa announcing in September the unprecedented loss of 2.2 million jobs in the second quarter of the year, in October the government extended the special unemployment grant for another three months.
The grammar of domination and the subjection of agency: colonial texts and modes of evidence
(Blackwell Publishing) Lalu, Premesh
This article focuses on colonial accounts of the killing of the Xhosa chief, Hintsa, in 1835 at the hands of British forces along what came to be known as the Eastern Cape frontier. It explores the evidentiary procedures and protocols through which the event came to be narrated in colonial frames of intelligibility. In proposing a strategy for reading the colo�nial archive, the paper strategically interrupts the flow from an apartheid historiography to what is commonly referred to as "alternative history." The aim in effecting this interrup�tion is to call attention to the enabling possibilities of critical history. This is achieved not by way of declaration but rather through a practice whereby the foundational category of evidence is problematized. The paper alludes to the limits of alternative history and its approaches to evidence on the one hand, and the conditions of complicity within which evidence is produced on the other. Whereas alternative history identifies its task as one of re-writing South African history, critical history, it is suggested, offers the opportunity to reconstitute the field of history by addressing the sites of its production and also its prac�tices. In exploring the production of the colonial record on the killing of Hintsa, the paper seeks to complicate alternative history's slippage in and out of the evidentiary rules estab�lished by colonial domination even as it constitutes the category of evidence as an object for a politics of history of the present.
Incomplete histories: Steve Biko, the politics of self-writing and the apparatus of reading
(Southern African Literature and Culture Centre, UKZN, 2004) Lalu, Premesh
This paper gathers together deliberations surrounding Steve Biko�s I Write What I Like as it simultaneously registers the critical importance of the text as an incomplete history. Rather than presupposing the text as a form of biography or following a trend of translating Biko into a prophet of reconciliation, I argue that the text leads us towards the postcolonial problematic of self-writing. That problematic, I argue, names the encounter between self-writing and an apparatus of reading. The paper stages the encounter as a way to make explicit the text�s postcolonial interests and to mark the onset of an incomplete history. This, I argue incidentally, is where the postcolonial critic may set to work to finish the critique of apartheid. Incomplete histories call attention to how that which is unintelligible in a text makes an authoritative reading difficult.
Insights and current debates on community engagement in higher education institutions: Perspectives on the University of the Western Cape
(SAGE Publications, 2021) Bidandi, Fred; Ambe, Anthony Nforh; Mukong, Claudia Haking
This study investigated the insights and current debates on community engagement in higher education institutions with specific reference to the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa. The article argues that although community engagement seems to present some challenges, it has become an integral part of higher education in South Africa and beyond. The article examines community engagement in higher education institutions and evaluates its contributions based on the research question. The article evaluates community engagement from the perspective of the UWC, community, and students. Data were collected through semi-structured with key informants. In total, 12 participants participated in the interviews. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. The results of the study show that community engagement is dependent on institutions� relationships built between particular communities, which are easily lost if the people involved change. The results also show that community engagement has become a requisite for promotion and policy development. However, it reveals that issues of Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) often take time affecting students and researchers. Moreover, the findings indicate that there is no standard procedure for community engagement as departments, individual lecturers, and students have unique and different interests.
Inxeba (The Wound), Queerness and Xhosa Culture
(Taylor & Francis, 2020) Scott, Lwando
This article focuses on the controversy caused by the release of the film Inxeba (The Wound). Inxeba depicts a complex intersection of rites of passage, masculinities, queerness and the relationships between men in a homosocial environment within a Xhosa cultural setting. I argue that the subject matter of same-sex intimacy in the film challenges dominant constructions of Xhosa masculinities by going to the foundation of dominant Xhosa masculinities, namely the male initiation process. The film poses a challenge to Xhosa culture by boldly asking: what is the position of Xhosa culture on same-sex intimacies? The film depicts same-sex intimacy that takes place in one of the most sacred of Xhosa cultural spaces. In the article, the film is analysed as a conversation initiator, through which ideas about same-sex desire, Xhosa culture and ultimately African sexuality can be scrutinised and debated.

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