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The extent to which Khoe and San people speak and are literate in their own languages within South Africa is of concern. The “Rethinking Khoe and San Indigeneity, Language and Culture in the Transf...

The study examines tracking as literacy, analysed through conventions of storytelling, involving participant observation in the field and through a discussion of cyber-tracking. The conclusion is t...

A comparative analysis examines the relevance of journal measurement indices for the humanities and the sciences. The analysis explains how different measurements work, what they measure and their ...

Transnational media broadcasters, including MultiChoice, cater to global (or continental) audiences, but have primary obligations to local domains in their country of origin. This study explores Mu...

Mobile telecoms has changed the way in which South Africans function. Of all the changes in the post-apartheid era, this is one of the most fundamental, and at the same time, one of the least studi...

The effects of ethical clearance or institutional review board practices are discussed in relation to the experiences of academic field researchers on the one hand and indigenous research participa...

In South Africa, criticisms of peer review often hinge on allegations of racism, anti-African attitudes, and viewpoint discrimination. This article discusses the issue of peer-review, and examines these allegations in terms of claims of Western conceptual gatekeeping. Cautions are offered on allegations of exceptionalism, as are some strategies on dealing with the process of peer review.

ReaGiles are pre-fabricated, self-contained, education and entertainment complexes situated on 400m2 sites at local schools or public open spaces consisting of a 60-seat cinema, 30- seat computer and Internet facility, community care and policing centre. These complexes are intended to service historically underserviced peri-urban black dormitory townships of South Africa and to help create jobs, especially amongst the youth, women and the disabled. The ReaGile concept, on roll-out, has the potential to revolutionise exhibition and distribution in local film industries in ways mirroring the ground-breaking Nollywood straight-to-DVD model. The article discusses the potential of the ReaGile concept to offer solutions to the twin crises of 1) representation stemming from existing film distribution networks that limit micro- budget filmmakers, and 2) of government departments and local municipalities' tendency towards dividing practices that objectivise the subject through frustrating development via ...

The article identifies the ambivalent, contradictory identities of those English-speaking listeners in the far-flung outreaches of the Empire in the period between the two world wars who forged complex identities supporting aspects of the British Empire, while nurturing notions of independence with a rapidly changing political, economic and cultural dispensation that made up the ‘British world’ in the interwar years. The focus remains on the establishment of national public service broadcasters in three of the four original British ‘dominions’ – Canada, Australia and South Africa – and specifically their interaction with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) during the founding years of public broadcasting in those countries. The research delves into the policies and circumstances that drove this cooperation, and situates these in the context of the larger collaboration between fledging broadcasters within the interwar period of the British Empire.

Media history is a relatively new area in media studies worldwide. In South Africa, it has not made significant inroads onto the agendas of conference programmes, academic journal articles or student syllabi. Twenty years ago, the eminent Danish scholar, Hans Fredrik Dahl (1994: 551), noted that 'the media as a historical object is far from fully understood at present'. In South African scholarship at least, not much has changed. Dahl went on to suggest that there are two main reasons for the paucity of media-historical studies. The 'endless present' and 'ubiquitous reality' of the media seem to make them 'resist historical exploration by their sheer and monotonous insistence on dealing with contemporary moments' (ibid.). The second reason is a lack of interest in the media on the part of the historical fraternity, where the most important question seems to revolve around the value and credibility of the media as source material, rather than the media per se. This means that little effort has been invested in developing a methodology appropriate to historical studies of the media. While the majority of research projects on media deal with the here and now, and the urgency of a rapidly changing structural, ethical and technological milieu in which the media are situated discourages reflective accounts of the past, there is evidence of a growing interest in media history. Both the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and the International Communication Association (ICA) have healthy sections devoted to the area. This issue of Critical Arts contributes to that interest, in what is the first of two back-to-back editions devoted to exploring the media in historical terms. Specifically, the emphasis is on Empire and media in the twentieth century. The current issue centres on broadcasting (with a nod to telecommunications), while the subsequent issue will focus on print media. To speak of 'broadcasting' before 1950 is to speak predominantly of radio, and indeed all the articles in this issue confine themselves to the medium of radio. Empire and audience In the 20th century, the concept of 'empires' appeared to be an anachronism--a leftover from a bygone era of raw exploitation and extraction. While it is true that the glory days of the late 19th century were over, the importance of the imperial project remained long after the European flags were lowered. The history of the global south is, in large measure, the history of colonisation and postcolonial endeavours. Many institutions--political, economic and cultural--bear traces of earlier arrangements. This is particularly true of the media, both broadcast and print. Empires were peopled with a variety of constituents: there were the colonial governors, acting as the direct proxies for the colonial authorities; the predominantly white communities--either 'expats' who lived in the colonies for a number of years, but whose hearts and minds remained 'at home' in the motherland, or 'settlers' who lived in the country on a permanent basis, often over several generations with no intention of returning to Europe; other white settler groups of different languages and ethnicities who shared little of the cultural, ideological or political affinities of the colonists; and, finally, the indigenous populations--always the largest by number, but inevitably the group with the smallest stake in matters such as broadcasting. The various articles in this issue all speak to the different audiences they served. In the account of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) during the Second World War, Teer-Tomaselli outlines how the tension between the long-term English-speaking settlers and their white Afrikaner counterparts was exacerbated by the former's dedication to the Commonwealth's war efforts, and the latter's quest for self-determination and independence from Britain. The broadcaster's role in this was ambiguous at first, as the animosities in the outside society spilt over into the corporation itself. …

The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) was a microcosm of the wider South African political situation, riven through with political, racial and linguistic divisions. A substantial English-speaking population compacted an alliance with a sizable sector of Afrikaans speakers under the leadership of Jan Smuts to form the United Party, dedicated to a unified, bilingual South Africa with strong ties to the wider British Commonwealth. The largest majority of Afrikaans speakers nurtured a desire for republican autonomy and Afrikaner cultural supremacy. In 1939, both sides of the divide were employed by the SABC, which tended to wait until the waters cleared before making any strong policy decisions on broadcasting either way. Once it became clear that the country would go to war, the SABC threw its weight behind this effort. Programming, including news, was relayed from the British Broadcasting Corporation, keeping South Africans up to date with the war efforts. World War II fundamentally chan...

Ownership of field research records involving informants and subject communities is discussed with regard to doing research amongst indigenous populations. Intellectual property rights (IPR) law often assumes, for example, that an age-old mythical story retold by a contemporary informant is owned by the legal entity that facilitated its being captured in writing. The implication is that if the story-teller now wants to tell the same story to someone else, written legal permission from the legal entity would be required. IPR contracts freeze the dynamism of knowledge, killing its ‘lived’ relation, and the process owned by others (our research partners/hosts/subjects) is transformed into commodities that the original storytellers no longer own or control. For our ǂKhomani Bushman hosts, this constitutes information theft. A third party, in our case the academy, claims ownership of ideas our subjects thought were theirs. This article examines ensuing issues of IPR and ethics in relation to doing rese...

Bureaucratic mechanisms adopted in universities which favour high publication output at the expense of inter-disciplinary collaboration translate into myopic vision within disciplines. Competition for limited resources often leads to academics clearly demarcating and jealously guarding their respective fields in order to justify their line of inquiry and, in the current economic climate, to emphasise the necessity of funding. This article argues for trans-disciplinary collaboration, using the field of 'Bushman studies' as a focal point. Trans-disciplinary researches around a single topic should be viewed as different components of an interlocking system. Myopic disciplinary vision should be cast aside in favour of more holistic approaches that incorporate multiple (and sometimes contradictory) viewpoints, to arrive at a more nuanced and realistic estimation of a particular field of inquiry.

The domain of intellectual property rights, along with the regulations that govern them, has a steadily, almost visibly incremental bearing these days upon the ordinary lives of people across the globe, in the rich world and the poor and in the North and the South. Its influence has escalated to the point where for some it may mean the difference between life and death; on it are now founded industries in the first rank of corporate power and thrust. As a modus for wealth creation it is being transferred onto other previously unthought-of sectors outside the familiar orbit of the market: indigenous cultural forms, music, fabric and other designs, symbols, artefacts, knowledge of natural resources, dance steps, motifs, advertising catch phrases, logos and brand names …

Being an academic in a Third-World country is fraught with challenges that test the endurance of even the most travel-hardy researchers. From negotiating passport bureaucracy to navigating one's way through hordes of religious pilgrims at Easter, amidst livestock and cattle, travelling in Ethiopia certainly requires astute negotiating skills and a healthy dose of caution. It does have remarkable attributes that make the trip worthwhile, though, as the rustic, old-world charm and sheer magnitude of 11th-century churches, intricately hand-painted and engraved with scenes from biblical narratives, are awe-inspiring. However, the old-world charm is in tandem with old-world technology, like pen and paper bureaucracy systems that take eons to be processed. This narrative extrapolates on wide-spread unhygienic food preparation practices, the surcharging of white foreigners (locally known as ferengies) due to their perceived wealth, and Ethiopia's inability to participate in international economic compet...

In the teeming Negro and colored shantytowns of Johannesburg, where newspapers and magazines are a rarity, a truck piled high with magazines rumbled through the unpaved streets last week. Wherever it stopped, hundreds of people swarmed about it, buying the magazine: The African Drum. (extract from 'South African Drumbeats', TIME Magazine, 1952) This short article is based on an address I offered at the opening of the 'G.R. Naidoo: a generous eye' photographic exhibition held at the Albert Luthuli Museum in Groutville, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, on 18 June 2010. (1) The travelling exhibition celebrates the work and life of G.R. Naidoo, a photojournalist who was committed to reporting on South Africa's freedom struggle in the 1950s. The Drum Decade (1950s), as the moment is known, has a special place in South African popular memory. This was the time and the place that a whole generation of black journalists and photographers cut their teeth, and went on to become the subject of university classrooms and academic books on literature and films for well over the next seven decades. So powerful was the writing and imaging that emerged from the period, that no other moment in South African journalism (or photography) has eclipsed it. From a reading of English literature course entries, some might think that journalism in South Africa stopped when Drum had passed its primo in the mid1960s. Drum became the most widely read magazine in Africa at the time. A 1959 TIME article, entitled 'Drum beat in Africa', stated that 240 000 copies of Drum were distributed across Africa, to countries like Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The magazine was so popular, in fact, that illiterate people allegedly paid educated friends to read them the magazine. What Drum launched, of course, was a whole generation of engaging writers and cultural workers whose sociology of everyday township life became the model for many disciplines. That their output was written during apartheid, and that they were nevertheless able to generate their stories, photography and act in films like Come back Africa (1959), is testimony to the idea that even the most repressed can tackle their conditions through creativity, resilience and intelligence. Adversity generates the best in people: they create, they cooperate and they generate--ideas, stories, histories, and so on. It is in these kinds of moments that journalism becomes a means to a social end. Journalists and photographers change the world. Think of the pictures of war and how single photographs have rattled the global conscience: * The young naked girl burned with agent orange, fleeing towards the camera during the war in Vietnam; * The picture of Hector Pieterson being carried horizontally during the Soweto uprising; * The Kevin Carter photograph of a baby in Rwanda desperately trying to get to a place of safety as a nearby vulture eyes it; * And, the euphoria as we saw Nelson Mandela for the first time in 26 years in February 1990. Who can fail to be affected by such evocative, historically significant images? Photographers always take sides, they don't just take pictures. And, if they think they are just picture takers, then I would refer you all to the film Under fire, where the photographer changes his defensive catchphrase: 'I don't take sides, I just take pictures.' The pictures, he learns, 'take sides', even as they are appropriated by different constituencies struggling for different--even opposing--outcomes. Photographers are part of what they document; they also often pay the price for their compassion. Kevin Carter committed suicide soon after he took the picture of the baby and the vulture. Many reporters have paid the price of their profession they are shot, captured, assassinated, jailed, threatened and interrogated. It cannot be surprising, therefore, that reporters, journalists and photographers have more than just a theoretical understanding of the idea of human rights and social justice. …

A satirical genuflection to gurudom is offered. Academic practice and the fads which dominate the post-LitCrit paradigm in the humanities are questioned. Problems in methodology, theoreticism and epistemology are revealed. The analogue era and ideas of McLuhan, who foresaw the aesthetics of the (not yet discovered) digital age are revisited, as is the relevance of cultural studies in the digital age, when the idea of culture is under question. Early theorists like Mill, Williams and Taylor are discussed within the new context.

The year 2009 is witness to Critical Arts' thirtieth year of publishing. It also witnesses the first time that three issues will be published annually. (Our inexperience in the early 1980s did see the intention to publish three to four issues a year. This schedule largely failed, given our lack of capacity at that stage.) At least one of the three issues to be published annually from 2009 will be allocated to a particular theme, with guest editors being tasked to develop new approaches. The epistemological history of the journal is well documented elsewhere, so I will simply offer some comments on how we arrived at the new arrangements and publisher licensing agreements in 2005. Critical Arts started negotiations with companies such as Sage, Edward Arnold and Blackwell at the initiative of its Indonesian/Australian editorial board member, Ien Ang, in the early 1990s. These UK-based publishers were intrigued with the journal, but none could then see a market for a regional southern publication which would need to be subscribed to and read in the North to ensure its viability. In one sense, Critical Arts was well ahead of the game in these negotiations, as the market for 'regional' journals had yet to be constituted via the electronically mediated information economy still on the horizon. The World Wide Web later shifted the mode from paper to a primarily electronic platform, providing economies of scale and market opportunities recognised by Carfax in the late 1990s, whose visit to South Africa was sponsored by the National Research Foundation's International Office for Scientific Liaison. Robert Kriger and Abebe Zegeye were the visionaries who got the ball rolling. Another six years were to pass before the agreement was enacted, due to mergers and acquisitions which demanded due attention from Carfax, as first Routledge and then Taylor & Francis successively entered into the picture. These business developments needed to be settled before Carfax could revisit the original model and wrap up the earlier agreements with 11 South African journals, including Critical Arts. Most of the titles included in the initial bouquet are published directly by Unisa Press, whereas Critical Arts has always been, and remains, independent. Since 2005, Critical Arts has been approached by no less than three international publishers to join their stables (including one whom we had approached ten years previously), which means we must be doing something right in terms of relevance, readership and viability. The nature of the agreement Critical Arts is owned by Critical Arts Projects, constituted by its founding editor and associate editors (whoever they may be). In 2005, Critical Arts licensed Unisa Press to publish the journal. In turn, Unisa Press licensed Routledge for the international edition, while Unisa retained the African rights. Unisa Press edits, typesets, markets and manages the subscriber list of the journal in conjunction with Routledge. Journals in the consortium remain editorially independent. They retain their ownership of the title--some even retain copyright. The model is based on strategic business partnerships which build capacity, permit wider dissemination, and identify income streams which should result in viability. The link with Routledge via Unisa Press helps journals to retain and enhance their respective regional identities, and to use their specific content niches to build their international profiles and impact factors. Positioning Critical Arts for global impact and the Digital Age * Critical Arts is proactive. In the 1980s Critical Arts set out to shape the nature of debates in the disciplines of drama and performance, cinema studies, cultural and media studies, literature, education, and so on. This was not intended as an arrogant exercise--though it was often seen to be so. Rather, we were pursuing an anti-apartheid strategy which challenged received disciplinary assumptions about the academic enterprise and its relation to the political and social hegemony. …

The unpublished work of Peirceian philosopher and cultural studies theorist Arnold Shepperson is the subject of this article. A background to the life and work of Shepperson is offered to provide a template against which the articles published in this theme issue of Critical Arts, which is dedicated to Shepperson's work, can be approached and understood. The narrative follows Shepperson's career from his experiences in the South African mining industry, his time as a student and researcher, to his work on his PhD which remains incomplete due to his untimely death. The article establishes a conceptual template within which Shepperson's epistemological history can be read.

This study offers an account of the campaigning of the three main political parties involved in the 1994 national general election in South Africa through a close reading of their paid advertisements in the mainstream print media. Prior to the 1994 elections, the use of political advertising in the lead-up to elections was sporadic. The first democratic elections changed all the rules of engagement: while there were no television advertisements, there were largescale, expensive and complex print campaigns. The narrative approach followed in this article traces the symbology, coherence and arguments marshalled by the political parties, illustrating that parties were able to draw on already-established repertoires of accepted symbols, tapping into the deep-rooted fears, desires, aspirations and historical loyalties of their established constituencies.

The study documents and analyzes the restructuring and transformation of South African broadcasting and telecommunications sector, in the light of two parallel trends: · The globally-apparent challenges to the sector; and · The impact of the neo-liberal agenda on the part of the South African government towards the ‘structuring' of state-owned enterprises. The ‘crises' in public broadcasting and telecommunications sectors internationally are well documented. Globalisation, technological advances including digitalisation, convergence of both platforms and content, extreme financial constraint, and the attendant processes accompanying them are usually cited as the mainsprings of the predicament. In South Africa there is the added complication of political and social restructuring, following a change of government and the movement towards transformation from 1994. In the era of globalisation, the nation-state, far from becoming irrelevant, has become a key player in driving the project of neoliberalism, reform and restructuring. To meet the challenges of the global economy, ‘neo-liberal' governments, including South Africa, have pursued a dual strategy of both rolling back the state, while being more centralised and directive. Typically, the state has restructured itself by concentrating on those departments most closely connected to the global economy, particularly those attached to Departments of finance and trade. At the second level, ‘state assets' are reassessed in the light of their potential for self-sustenance, or even commercial profit. Public utilities, such as telecommunications and broadcasting, power supply and public transport, are particularly susceptible to ‘restructuring', ‘commercialisation' and ‘privatisation'. South African ‘State Owned Enterprises' provide a salient case in point. The public broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), and the public telecommunications provider, Telkom, have been undergoing various moves towards both transformation and restructuring since 1993. Some of these changes are in line with similar movements in broadcasters and telecoms throughout the world, including adjustments to the management structures and more efficient approaches to business; while others are directed towards satisfying the social and economic imperatives of a changing society, specifically the almost revolutionary change in content and programming. Critical Arts Vol.18(1) 2004: 8-41

Extracted from text ... 1 Transformation ransformation of the South African M e d i a Keyan G. Tomaselli+ International Seminars on the Political Economy of the Southern African Media held in 1996, 2000 and 2002 marked significant moments in the trajectory of (Southern) African media scholarship. The first was "Identities, Democracy, Culture and Communication in Southern Africa", funded by Media, Culture and Society and the University of Oslo (cf. Teer-Tomaselli and Roome 1997; Hall 1997). The later seminars were hosted jointly by the Graduate Programme in Cultural and Media Studies (CCMS) of the University of Natal, Durban, the World Association for Christian ..

(2000). Identity and ethnicity through multiple windows. Critical Arts: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 1-5.