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In this article, I consider a selection of photographs of a man of color from a luxury book of male nudes, Images (1982), aimed at white gay men and published in South Africa by Alternative Books (AB) in the late apartheid period. Given the exclusive association of assimilable homosexuality with whiteness in the national gay press and other homoerotic commodities available in South Africa at the same historical juncture, I propose that these photographs, which interrupted longstanding, racist homoerotic iconographies, elicited experiences of ambivalence (and thus critical reflection) amongst their historical audiences. To this end, I analyze the editorial and commercial content of the newspapers Link/Skakel and Exit for the period that AB was active (1981–1991), anticipating an overlap of readership between these papers and the publisher's titles. More precisely, I discuss the prevalence of the figure of the "good homosexual" and representations of classical (that is, white) male beauty in these papers to plot how apartheid logic was broadly reproduced (and same-sex desire disciplined according to such dictates) in mainstream South African gay movements, institutions, and print cultures during this time, but, notably, not in Images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of the unfolding social cohesion in previously racially segregated residential spaces has attracted attention since the collapse of apartheid in South Africa and the subsequent transition to democracy in 1994. This paper uses sense of neighbourhood to investigate the emerging social interactions in Cambridge, a former whites-only residential suburb in East London, South Africa. Fitting a binary logistic regression on survey data from a sample of residents of Cambridge, the paper tests the likelihood of race and gender influencing three indicators of the sense of neighbourhood: the sense of safety, trust and norms of reciprocity. The results show that relational dimensions of the sense of neighbourhood differed along racial lines, with low levels of interracial trust mirroring studies elsewhere in the country, and the national-level South African Reconciliation Barometer survey reports. Due to the voluntaristic nature of relational ties, social integration will remain elusive, and regardless of the extent of racial changes, variations in the sense of neighbourhood will characterise the urban residential spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the ending of apartheid, the state, political parties, civil society and ordinary people in South Africa have attempted to deal with the traumatic legacies of the past to engender a common sense of nationhood. This paper examines this process of dealing with the past through the theoretical lens of post-colonialism, focusing, in particular, on attempts to establish historical truth and collective memory for black women, who have often been most marginalised by colonialism and apartheid and excluded from dominant accounts of history. It argues that if black women are denied a presence and agency in the construction of collective memory, their belonging and citizenship is consequently mediated in the process of nation building. It considers how exclusionary and discriminating patterns are reproduced through attempts to construct national memory-archives, focusing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It then explores the measures being taken to create a more inclusive process of restoring collective memory. In particular, it discusses the importance and possibilities of creating a postcolonial archive, where the voices and texts of historically marginalised people can be incorporated into national projects of remembering and notions of belonging. The paper focuses specifically on recent attempts to archive black women's pictorial and written testimony in a memory cloths programme. It concludes that representations of the past by women are a valuable tool in tracing the ways in which the legacy of their belonging and social standing shapes their contemporary citizenship. The radical potential of postcolonial archives lies in the fact that they can work against more sanitised representations of contemporary South Africa and towards the requirements for social justice (especially for black women) that are embodied within, but were arguably not met by, the TRC and broader nation building processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses apartheid political history and ‘coloured’ identity challenges in South African society. A textual analysis of Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (MSS, 1990) adheres to understanding ‘coloured’ identity struggle as an ‘Other’ and their racial marginality during apartheid. This research deeply studies race and identity theories with Frantz Fanon’s psychological notion of racism, decolonisation and the idea of cross-racial relations are important to analyse MSS. A textual study of MSS is significant for examining the impact of apartheid on ‘coloured’ characters. This research finds that ‘coloured’ community’s struggle and their racial consciousness of being other were political and psychological challenges during apartheid time. To put in a nutshell, apartheid stories are not individual representations but these are collectively representing the ‘coloured’ community's struggle in South Africa. Racial consciousness of being other was a form of racial exclusion so, a discussion on ‘coloured’ discourse becomes important to contextualise political history. The negligence of the ‘coloured’ issues during apartheid questioned the psychological development of ‘coloured’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors of this paper adopted a transformative framework in this article to examine how the legacy of apartheid continues to manifest within higher education in South Africa. In particular, the authors analyzed (a) how mainstream mentoring knowledge of 'black' and 'marginalized' people have influenced mentoring in post-apartheid South Africa; (b) varied ways in which mentoring initiatives and programs have been silenced and ignored previously marginalized voices through the application of apartheid mentoring knowledge, and (c) shared how the mentors/lecturers and students show and tell their stories about the demands of mentoring and the emphasis of contextual and responsive mentoring for the previously marginalized people in higher education in South Africa. The shortage of mentoring has been cited as a crucial reason for women's lack of advancement in leadership. Implications for advancing transformation through mentoring in higher education in South Africa are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages issues of complicated femininity and the representation of such in South African telenovela Gomora. Set in South African township Alexandra, Gomora tells the story of contemporary life in post-apartheid South Africa, where people are forced to engage issues of poverty, inequality, racism, and more. In particular, the paper engages one of the main characters in the program, Nomasonto Mildred Molefe. Mam' Sonto is the matriarch of her family who is also the head of an established hijacking syndicate. Throughout the first season of this show, audiences are able to engage with a complicated woman who is good and bad, kind and cruel. Moving away from a moral reading of the character, this paper unpacks how the character comes to be and how she asserts her own power and agency in engaging a deeply racist and sexist society in order to survive and provide for her family. Engaging works of Pumla Gqola, Sisonke Msimang, Roxanne Gay, and more, the paper presents a reading of this character that enables a clear argument for the need for such depictions of complicated womanhood as part of pushing the reified boundaries of patriarchy that women are forced to exist within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this personal response to Gillian Straker's paper in which she analyses the significance of and contributions to the Apartheid Archives, I reflect on memories of apartheid re-evoked for me. These include recollections of the degree to which racial consciousness entrenched by apartheid contaminated personal relationships, as well as a recognition of the complex intersection of race and class in influencing the roles of victims/survivors, beneficiaries, or perpetrators. Other themes touched on are the question of nostalgia for elements of life during the oppressive apartheid period, and on the reclaiming of language that was perverted by the apartheid system. In sum, I affirm the value of the Apartheid Archives in facilitating a processing of traumatic memories and their integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For many Black South African women, speaking about the gruesome and demeaning treatment they experienced during Apartheid is not easy. Silence became normalized due to the unspeakable nature of what many of the women went through. They struggled to find a way to express their traumas and many lived and continue to live with these hidden transcripts of their lives. For some, shame and lack of safe spaces or platforms to speak/express their traumas contributed to this silence. Indeed, many women continue to struggle to find the language to express their traumas. This paper engages how, through visual narratives such as embroidery, women become active actors in the telling of their lived realities. Drawing from a qualitative approach and using visual narratives in the form of embroideries, the paper offers insights on how unspeakable lived experiences of trauma can be expressed. The paper further highlights ways in which embroidery can be used to connect both the personal and collective stories of Black women in South Africa and to show how suffering is an interpersonal experience. Finally, the possibilities and potentials of visual artwork, as a canvas that offers space for expressing stories of trauma, survival, and healing, are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examined the brutal tactics used by security forces in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown in South Africa. Key questions raised relate to the philosophical (dis)connectedness of their actions. The paper posits that the way in which some police and soldiers conducted themselves in black communities is reminiscent of colonial-apartheid hermeneutics. Their conduct, devoid of Ubuntu, relegates the culprits to "mere symbols with no substance," in a deeply conditioned state of mental subjugation. Though black, the culprits remain largely unAfrikan in thought. The paper concludes that training for security forces needs to inculcate philosophies of Afrikanism. Furthermore, the paper highlights key lessons to be embraced. Recommendations made include the professionalisation of the security forces, enabling public dialogue, and bringing the culprits to book faster to restore the image of the country, the government, and the security agencies. This paper used a qualitative desktop design that applied inductive analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion relates Gillian Straker's work on the South African apartheid archives to Rawlsian social ethics, and to Margalit's ethics of memory, with special emphasis on her “bystander/beneficiary” formulation. From a psychoanalytic point of view, it questions whether Brombergian dissociation adequately accounts for the pre-dissociative self-loss described by some of the archive participants. Returning to ethics, it invokes Margalit's concept of the moral witness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Inspired by Karen Barad's agential realism and Donna Haraway's use of the Chthulucene, our paper profoundly troubles and unsettles the humanist subject that has been the cause of so much trouble. Re-turning to a government primary school in Cape Town as the "research site," we adopt temporal and spatial diffraction as a postqualitative research methodology. The colonial practices related to land ownership, are not in the past, but remain in its be(com)ing. Land "use" in South Africa during Apartheid, was, and still is, a form of violence. Thinking-with Neimanis and McLauchlan, we understand a school as not separate from the phenomenon of climate change, but as one of its sites and as a feminist project. A diffractive image articulates aesthetically and politically how the land as the more-than-human is a significant part of the phenomenon and queers school as a concept and "research site." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his writings, Bernard Magubane theorizes racial capitalism but without necessarily invoking the term. Instead, he frequently refers to "the political economy of race and class" in the South African society. First, Magubane traces the roots of capitalism and racism in South Africa back to European expansionism. Second, he grapples with dispossession during the colonial period and calls it "the fact of conquest". This period was a significant prelude to apartheid capitalism and racism. Third, having analyzed these forms of domination, he argues that black people in South Africa would be liberated through the insurrection of the working people. Magubane's main contribution is his use of historical analysis to understand the next move by imperialism and its impact on the interaction of race and class and the struggle for liberation. Magubane seeks to develop a clear theoretical framework to understand the nature of the South African society. In this paper, I will attempt to illustrate Magubane's contribution to Marxist thought based on his study of South Africa's racially hierarchical political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument of this paper is that the search for alternatives to capitalism, the prevailing and dominant socio-economic and political system in South Africa (and elsewhere), is both necessary and urgent, especially because it has failed to meet even the most basic needs and aspirations of the citizenry. In South Africa, this failure is borne out by the fact that despite all the policy reforms, strategies and plans of the post-Apartheid government, the material conditions of the vast majority of people have not met the promise of liberation and may in fact have regressed in some regards. The article examines key elements of the failures of capitalism by reference to a key set of critical indicators, following which it examines some of the foundational ideas about socialism that underpin the emergent solidaristic responses to global corporate capitalism. The final section will deal with the emergence of alternative solidaristic and cooperative forms of social and solidaristic economy in response to the persistent crisis of capitalism and its effects on the global poor and the natural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two objectives. It aims, firstly, to provide an overview of the explanatory dilemmas that J.M. Coetzee highlights in his acclaimed essay "The mind of apartheid" in respect of existing theories of apartheid ideology. It then makes recourse, secondly, to a series of concepts in Lacanian psychoanalysis so as to shed light on these dilemmas. Two questions seem to particularly vex Coetzee. Firstly, where should we seek to locate agency in respect of apartheid ideology: predominantly on the side of the subject or predominantly the side of structure? Secondly, if we need to appeal both to subject and structure, then how are we to understand the relation between these two factors in the workings of apartheid ideology? By means of Lacanian conceptualisation, the paper supplements and extends Coetzee's argument according to which the notion of desire is central to understanding the spread and hold of apartheid ideology. The paper then moves on to elaborate a Lacanian understanding of ideological agency which accounts for the relation between subject and structure (or, in Lacanian terms, subject and the symbolic Other) and does so by thinking apartheid as a transaction of desire and/or lack between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many European societies, arts education and culture play a central role in their education systems. In England, the situation is very different. There, for the last two decades, the state has progressively marginalised the role of the arts in the public education system in the belief that the 'market' does not value the arts. However, England also has a strong relatively autonomous private education system financed directly by parental fees. This paper explores the extent to which the top private schools have diverged from this process of marginalisation. The findings suggest that these top private schools have invested more in the arts, which have subsequently come to play an increasingly important role in the education they provide. One consequence is that we have witnessed the emergence of two 'systems' of education in England, which pose a significant challenge for cultural policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-apartheid government in South Africa has provided increased opportunities for public participation at the local government level. Local party politics tend to bedevil these local participatory processes. This paper discusses ANC party politics and how they impact on public participation. It draws on a case study of five municipalities in the Cape Winelands District of the Western Cape that was conducted through semi-structured interviews and secondary data analysis. Local ANC politics has a huge impact on local government structures and their participatory processes. The ANC is a unitary structure in its policy but there is a lack of uniformity in understanding, commitment, and implementation of participatory policies at different levels of the organisation and government spheres. Some deployed public representatives work to advance themselves and their factions, at the expense of the ANC and the communities they are supposed to be leading. The findings of this study have as much significance for civil society as for the local state and its representatives. They show that it is not always the case that the state is bad and civil society is good as leaders of civil society get involved in clientelist relationships and blatant corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reads contemporary South Africa through the lens of melancholia and situates the experience of loss at the heart of social entanglements in the country. It argues that the purchase of melancholia lies partly in the fact that the problem of disarticulated and disenfranchised loss is common to post-apartheid modernity in general. It suggests that post-apartheid melancholia is a resultant effect of the country's fraught engagement with loss and (be)longing. It also notes that post-apartheid melancholia is a result of structural traumas and moral anguish that have not been worked through. This paper shows how melancholia manifests in the different modes of attachments to, and identifications with victimhood; it explains why each identity group lays il/legitimate claims to victimhood in South Africa. In addition, this paper conceptualises post-apartheid melancholia along racial and generational lines. That is, it examines the ways in which personal testimonies and meditations shed light on the prospects of white, black and intergenerational melancholia in post-apartheid South Africa. In all, this paper argues that melancholia is an affective structure of the everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa which – if we are not quick to pathologise it – may help combat hurried attempts at closing the door on the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Matlala and Matom first began photographing their respective worlds in the 1980s, demand for political images of apartheid overshadowed quotidian concerns. Since then, a shift away from the political to the personal in South African photography has offered a space of reflection for the kinds of images that they sought to make. This paper focuses on the historical, social and political aspects of these two photographers' photo-archives. It attempts to place their work and photographic concerns within the broader archive of South African photography and to demonstrate continuities and ruptures between the past and the present.Photographs are first and foremost, records, and markers of time. Although photographs might be seen to be of their time, of everyday occurrences, they also transcend time. Thus, their relationship to time is necessarily complex, and requires interpretation and analysis within a disciplinary and discursive frame, which in this paper is work and the everyday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the onset of the apartheid era, Jewish women across South Africa began to publish community cookbooks to raise money for Jewish schools, synagogues, and other organizations. Through their combination of recipes, titles, advertisements, prefaces, and guidelines, community cookbooks narrated the economic, social, and cultural successes of the women who compiled them. In the postwar period, South African Jewish women sought a place for themselves in Jewish communal life, and in the white middle class of the country’s new apartheid order. By producing and consuming community cookbooks, these women armed themselves with the organizational platform and the cultural capital that would help them claim that place. In order to be able to step into the public sphere while meeting their domestic obligations, they came to rely on the invisibilized labor of the black women who worked in their homes and kitchens. The paper uses cookbooks to think critically about the position of South African Jews in the apartheid system, analyzing how Jewish women benefited from the privileges of whiteness in the intimate arena of their homes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary diffusion of a 'spy culture' and other legitimated forms of citizen to citizen monitoring in society has arguably impacted on the area of romantic relationships. This may be particularly exacerbated in relationships that defy societal norms such as is the case with interracial romantic relationships. The surveillance of romantic choices by parents and friends has called on interracial couples to redouble efforts to safeguard their intimacy. Using the idea of 'Foucaultdian' surveillance as a conceptual starting point, this paper argues that interracial couples in post-apartheid South Africa face barriers to intimacy through the perceived and realized surveillance of their relational choices by friends and family. Findings from in-depth interviews suggest that the staying power of racial primacy in contemporary South Africa leads friends and families of interracial couples to assume the role of gatekeepers thereby instilling a strategically empowering form of self-watching in the couples as to when and how to disclose their relationship status. The study aids in the broader conceptual re-imagining of what it means to watch and be watched within the societal confines of racialized close social network dynamics. Limitations and implications for future research are also offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In South Africa the segregation laws of the apartheid years had an impact on contacts and interactions between cultural groups, which led to prejudice, intolerance and painful intercultural experiences. The influence of the past is still evident in present-day South African society, despite greater mobility between different cultural groups. This paper reports on four research studies that investigated how social work and the arts together can explore ways to facilitate contact between diverse groups that will lead to positive experiences. The aim of these studies was to create an opportunity to develop intercultural awareness through joint music-making in an attempt to address prejudice and intolerance. The paper will firstly discuss how a transdisciplinary approach can be utilised. Secondly, the paper posits that making music together is a way to assist diverse groups to explore their own cultural understandings, to 'hear the voices' of other cultures, and to move towards greater intercultural awareness that could enhance tolerance in a diverse society. Thirdly, the hermeneutical perspective will be presented as an aspect of the process to support the development of awareness between diverse groups. Concluding recommendations focus on how making music together can become a form of intercultural social work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the recent oppressive histories of apartheid and colonialism, the legacies of slavery in South Africa are often overlooked in thinking about aspects of post-apartheid democracy's discursive formulation of race, nation, and reconciliation. This paper analyses how two examples in Cape Town – the permanent exhibition Representing Slavery at the Slave Lodge Museum and the Memorial to the Enslaved in Church Square – represent the historic event of slavery in South Africa. The paper argues that the museum exhibition and the memorial site are instances of memorialisation and simultaneously function as political processes that offer insight into discourses of race and reconciliation in South Africa during the early stages of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) rejects the classical political economy distinction between productive and unproductive labor, the latter defined as all labor that does not produce surplus-value. Rather, much non-commodified labor, particularly that done in the domestic sphere, is not unproductive but necessary since it produces labor-power. Hence, SRT has proposed an alternative distinction: productive versus reproductive spheres of labor. This article argues that this opposition too is analytically and politically misleading. Capital is concerned with profit, not with the reproduction of the living labor within which labor-power is always embedded. It is the everyday struggles of living labor that determines its reproduction. These take place not just in the kin-based sphere of the family but in overlapping, shifting places and processes, including struggles for better wages and working conditions in capitalist firms. This paper uses two different contexts in southern Africa to make this argument: an influential debate over how to understand changes in apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s; and a sugar-cane plantation in Mozambique where interdependent contradictions of class, gender and race defined a social division of labor that systematically compromised the reproduction of living labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the extent to which globalisation has affected the post-apartheid state's ability to fulfil the right to adequate houses enshrined in the South African Constitution (Act 108 of 1996). Underpinned by the rights-based approach to development (RBAD) which provides a mechanism to promote, protect, and fulfil various rights, the study employed a quantitative methodology. A survey was the preferred data collection method and a questionnaire was used as the data collection instrument. The probability sampling technique of random cluster sample was used in the study and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyse questionnaires focusing primarily on descriptive statistics. The sample size consisted of 500 survey respondents selected from two towns in the Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality in the Eastern Cape Province. We used an alpha level of.05 for all statistical tests. The study was premised on the following null hypothesis (H0): the right to housing is equally distributed among the population. The findings indicate that the right to houses is not equally distributed among the population, X2 (2, N = 500) = 56.37, p <.05. Therefore, the null hypothesis (H0) is rejected. We can conclude, therefore, that there is a statistically significant difference amongst the groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation and political ideology were closely interlinked in apartheid South Africa: forced removals in areas considered important for conservation was a common practice. Post-Apartheid reforms sought to address the injustices of the past, and at the level of policy, the Land Restitution Act of 1994 recognizes the injustices suffered by specific groups during Apartheid providing a framework to address their claims. However, the land claims process is still marked by various injustices. Drawing on life history interviews conducted with 31 members of the Likhayalethu Community, South Africa, as a case study this paper presents an analytical discussion of how the Land Restitution policy framework in South Africa attempts to address the epistemic injustices in the case of claims in protected areas. The paper raises concerns about the capacity of this policy framework to prevent epistemic injustices from continuing to occur through the current land restitution process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses South Africa's Covid relief plan for its creative sector—the Presidential Employment Stimulus Plan (PESP)—as a locus for understanding the evolution of state arts sponsorship since the country's first free elections in 1994. It begins with an historical discussion outlining the evolution of various philosophies of national arts sector caretaking. Particular attention is drawn to the philosophical shift from democratic aspirations during the transition from apartheid in the early 1990s to the sector's steady integration into a broader neoliberal development strategy leading up to the present. National policy papers and development programs from the last two decades demonstrate the steady entrenchment of an economistic approach to the arts, decoupled from principles argued for during the transition to democracy such as education, national cohesion, or cultural representation. Structural dynamics governing the creative sector are crossed by the political prerogatives of artists who rely on state arts funding. To explain the tension between government care regimes for creative and cultural industries intersect with historically situated philosophies of how the arts intervene in communities facing crisis, we end our discussion through an analysis of a project funded by the PESP: i-Yeza, the Covid-19 Awareness Roadshow. Pivoting from macro-level discussion of arts policy to ethnographic analysis of this specific project's conception and reception demonstrates how community consciousness diverges from neoliberalism's instrumental logic. By linking the legacy of socially critical township theatre to Covid awareness and vaccination, i-Yeza performs a politics of care premised on a vision of national moral redemption despite state decay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the ways in which characters are presented as "out of place" in different apartheid city spaces in anti-apartheid era films of the late 1980s: A Dry White Season (1989, dir. Euzhan Palcy) and Mapantsula (1988, dir. Oliver Schmitz) and, to a lesser degree, Cry Freedom (1987, dir. Richard Attenborough). The article explores the manner in which the protagonists relate to each other through interracial friendship, relationality and mobility in the domestic spaces of cities and townships. It reads these relations as occupying and redefining apartheid sensibilities in distinct ways that filter into how postapartheid sensibilities are and can be navigated. The paper thus grapples with how seemingly fixed apartheid spaces and characters in the films can also be part of complex, real-life repositionings of racial identities in postapartheid South Africa that are not always clear and/or neat. The paper therefore argues that through their representations of the past, these films perform memory work and map our memories and historical constructions of apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apartheid left in its wake a South Africa characterized by social inequalities that are embedded and reflected in all spheres of social life, including the higher education system. While the post-apartheid government has made efforts to transform the higher education system it inherited, the pace has been slow and has fallen significantly short of what many regard as modest expectations. This paper interrogates why transformation has remained elusive in the higher education sector in post-apartheid South Africa, particularly with regards to the institutional culture at historically white universities (HWUs). Focusing on the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) campaign at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and Luister, a documentary film at the University of Stellenbosch, it employs critical race theory (CRT) as a conceptual framework and analytical tool. Using CRT identifies the centrality of racism in shaping the slow pace of transformation in general and concerning the institutional culture at HWUs in particular. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of this lack of transformation, particularly in a time where poverty is endemic and unemployment rampant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The roles of prominent anti-apartheid fighters, trade unionists, journalists, religious leaders, writers – fictional and non-fictional – and artists have been important in the documentation of the public intellectual culture in South Africa. These are sets of people whose efforts and influences enhanced the achievement of a democratic South Africa. However, since the official end of apartheid in 1994, most South African critics have been those in academics. Artists, especially playwrights, have not received as much attention as they should. Also, when playwrights are studied, attention is mostly directed towards anti-apartheid playwrights, and most of these studies are not focused on positioning them within the conceptual framework of the public intellectual. As a way of studying the effectiveness and ultimate worth of the transitional playwright, this paper seeks to engage in a qualitative interrogation of the works of South African playwright and cultural critic, Mike Van Graan by exploring his status as a public intellectual in the era after apartheid. To achieve this, the paper examines one of Van Graan's plays, Some Mothers' Sons (2005), and one online essay published in 2020 and shared on his social media pages: Facebook, and Twitter. The extension of this study to social media platforms will enable this paper to adopt a study of Van Graan's literary and non-literary works and the reactions they have gathered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through land restitution, a component of land reform, the state seeks to restore the dignity of black communities who lost their land during colonial and apartheid times. Land restitution seeks to return the land that was unfairly grabbed from black people or to offer alternative land or cash compensation. Much public discourse and research on South African land reform has been on the failure of land reform projects and on land acquisition debates. Little research has been published foregrounding the voices of beneficiaries. By capturing their lived experiences after land transfer, this paper examines whether these beneficiaries have been "restituted." My study in the Macleantown and Salem restitution cases shows that access to land has restored the dignity of beneficiaries and produced nostalgia because of the return of ancestors' land, although the livelihoods of beneficiaries have not improved and these projects have failed to function. I argue that these land compensated beneficiaries have not been properly 'restituted,' because the programme has failed to improve their livelihoods or to produce modern solutions for the restitution programme. Land restitution in these areas has largely not led to land justice because beneficiaries are living in poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New African poet, playwright, and intellectual H.I.E. Dhlomo is often cited as one of twentieth-century South Africa's most important cultural figures. In contrast to his celebrated theoretical writings, however, Dhlomo's actual literary work tends to receive mixed reviews from scholars. This paper seeks to reassess Dhlomo's much-maligned use of Romantic and Gothic tropes by focusing on two of his lesser-known plays: Men and Women and The Expert. These plays, which date from towards the end of Dhlomo's playwriting career, have never been published, yet reveal a great deal about both the nature of his literary project and the conditions of Black cultural production in segregation-era South Africa. Indeed, I argue that these plays engage in some of the most radical social critiques found anywhere in pre-apartheid South African drama, and, furthermore that the melodramatic and incongruous elements of these works are essential to their intended impact. Having experienced segregation-era South African society as an unfolding nightmare, for H.I.E. Dhlomo laughter and horror were intimately related. Ultimately, I contend that Dhlomo's linkage of laughter to the supernatural and the Gothic marks an important moment in South African history, illustrating powerfully the dashed hopes and aspirations of the New African generation within the context of tightening white philanthropic control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how the South African government and mining corporations have appropriated anti-apartheid and anti-colonial discourses to legitimise Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) as a radically transformative policy without being transformative in conception, discourse, or action. There is a presumption in academic circles that BEE is a panacea for radically transforming historical, structural, and unequal power relations in South Africa. This article rejects this presumption by demonstrating how the conception and discourse of BEE have ignored these power relations and their underlying political economic structures of apartheid capitalism even before the policy was implemented or enforced by the government. Using [Young, Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press] critique of the distributive paradigm of justice, and employing [Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press] three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this article argues that the government and mining corporations present BEE as a new measure of radical transformation while simultaneously reducing this transformation to the micro concept of economic participation, focusing on numbers, representation, and targets rather than on historical, structural, and unequal power relations. As a result, the government and these corporations have reinforced and maintained these power relations while employing the discourse of BEE to masquerade as advancing their transformation. The crux is that BEE encourages Black people to operate within economically and institutionally oppressive structures which amplify the conditions they purport to be challenging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do cinema houses have to tell us about the experience of collective leisure in early twentieth-century South Africa? This article considers how the cinema house points to unprecedented social conditions that allowed the emergence of new publics. Drawing on scholarship on the development of cinema in South Africa, the article considers how the historical transformations through which the cinema has passed since the 1910s suggest attempts to domesticate the space of projection of the cinema as well as the formation of new cinema audiences. Diverging from readings of the cinema in South Africa that focus on film, the article considers how the cinema house is inscribed in this scholarship as an evocative cipher of incipient publics and as a metaphor for the containment of a new public sphere during the periods of segregation and Apartheid. While today the cinema house no longer occupies the place it once did, the paper concludes with a reflection on recent recreations of the space of the cinema in two South African art installations. The restaging of these cinemas offers a way into the making of a collective space and the kinds of distinct publics they forged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Drama of the Peace Process in South Africa" by Sylvia Neame is a book that reflects on the author's experiences and writings during the late 1980s in South Africa. Neame, a South African historian and former member of the South African Communist Party and African National Congress, provides insights into the ANC's strategy and debates surrounding negotiations with the apartheid regime. The book includes extracts from her diaries, as well as papers she wrote during that time. While the book offers valuable perspectives on the ANC/SACP alliance and the author's efforts to shape the approach to negotiations, it may not appeal to a wide audience due to its length and lack of broader context. [Extracted from the article]

This paper is a consideration of a limited number of social and creative imaginaries and their pivotal and difficult implications for trans-generational reflections, narratives and cultural memory in South Africa. The first part of the paper centres around the role-played by narrative. In black communities, the attempts to envision and elaborate alternative understandings of history were acts of knowledge production that negated imperial and colonial modernity and especially their politics of racial subjection and exclusion. The section concludes with a brief consideration of the hermeneutical challenges that are presented by conventional interpretive approaches to narrative and its political imperatives. Following the underscoring of why narrative matters, the second part of the paper maps out the persistent ways in which alienation is foregrounded as an important constituent of black-senses-of-being, especially in relation to the land, the means of life, kin, space and the social-formation. The discussion concludes with a consideration of some key challenges that the calls for transformation and decolonisation present for the processes of knowledge production, narration and interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting on narratives collected as part of the Apartheid Archive Project, a memory project of "ordinary" experiences of living under apartheid, this paper engages with stories that articulate white South Africans' shame/ful relationships with Black female domestic workers. It is increasingly of concern that the dominant response to apartheid abuses are to consider them "in the past" in order to avoid discomforting reminders. Shame and its silencing effect, as feminist and other critical literature shows, is bound up with relations of power, legitimating privilege and subjugation. Yet, shame may also be deployed as narrative strategy to deal with subjective discomfort and guilt by those seeking to disentangle themselves from association with social privilege and its abuses. How do we respond to narratives that may have both effects? Drawing on contemporary critical pedagogies, such as the work of Zembylas that specifically engage with the affective turn, and guided by Probyn's argument that shame is a powerful resource of social critique, this paper suggests productive possibilities of such narratives in contemporary South Africa. While acknowledging contestations, an argument is made for the value of stories of shame/shaming towards troubling the erasure of apartheid and its continuities in the present while also disrupting the denial of historical and current complicity with power and privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on insights gained from two decades of research on South African heritage and monuments, this paper critically reflects on the status quo of heritage transformation in South Africa 25 years after the end of apartheid. It assesses new directions in national heritage policy and government strategy in relation to recent developments around post-apartheid heritage and the popular demand for a removal of 'colonial statues', which gained impetus from the #Rhodes Must Fall campaign. It is argued that the government's approach to heritage transformation and most notably its treatment of white minority heritage, dominated by the 'juxtaposition model', has had limited success. The paper illustrates how heritage and the memory of the past are entangled with socio-political and economic realities in the present, which in turn is overshadowed by the long-term effects of apartheid and impacted by global or transnational considerations, such as foreign investment and tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores strategies deployed by a sample of white, British-born South Africans to account for their positions during apartheid and post-apartheid. Whereas literature on white racism identifies denial as a key strategy towards racial discrimination and the maintenance of privilege, the historical and political 10 context of South Africa makes this tactic implausible. The paper contributes to understandings of pluralism within white identifications through investigation of diverse discursive strategies used to frame the overtly racist, apartheid regime and the present post-apartheid, supposedly, 'post-race' state. A range of positions attempting to minimise individual implication are identified. 15 A common feature however is to reimagine the structure of social relations in order to diminish responsibility for the sins of the past or the success of the future; suggesting profound difficulties in adjusting to the new social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a paper on student mobilisation or youth activism in South Africa from a critical race theory, black consciousness and cultural studies perspective with an emphasis on meaning construction, symbolic action and locating the author centrally in the empirical-analytical process. It is presented through the personalised experiences and reflexive-narrative style (i.e. story-within-the-story) of the author's own point of view, which makes it an auto- (personal experience), ethno- (rich cultural and historical context) -graphic (descriptive and visual) piece. Using the autoethnographic method of narrating observations in the field, at the event of the 23 October 2015 "Fees-must-fall" gathering at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the paper offers a reflexive comparison of the experiences of the author present at two distinct (but historically related, i.e. past related to present and vice versa) political junctures of student mobilisation for higher education in South Africa—first as a student in the late 1980s and then as a passive observer-cum-social science researcher at the 2015 student protests at the Union Buildings, in Pretoria. In adopting this novel qualitative method of interrogating student mobilisation from a personal experiential point of view, this paper offers a different approach to reporting qualitative field research that conventionally presents the ideas and opinions of its participants as the main interrogation point, not that of the author's. The main narrative is therefore premised on the author's own experiences with student mobilisation for educational reform during the height of apartheid and under this current democratic social context of the "hashtag fees-must-fall" (#FMF) movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dispossession is characteristically associated with the period of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. Consequently, not much consideration is given to how the previously marginalised continue to be dispossessed in their everyday lives by coal mining activities in the current political dispensation. This article reframes dispossession as a perpetual post-apartheid experience in African communities. In this paper, dispossession does not only encompass events of deprivation, and the loss of land and property, but also covers the loss of the incorporeal. The relocation of African ancestral graves in Tweefontein (Ogies) is discussed as an aspect of dispossession. The politics surrounding household relocations and grave exhumations illustrates how communities not only lose the material; land and tombs, but also lose their intangible possessions; ancestral connection, identity, heritage and belonging because of mining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on South Africa's post-apartheid foreign policy decision-making has stagnated. For more than a quarter century analysts have generally drawn on secondary material from other scholars, newspaper reporting, and the speeches of government officials to elucidate how South Africa crafts and carries out its foreign policy. The accessibility of previously classified archival documents and the availability of policy makers for research interviews holds the potential to advance scholarship on South African foreign policy along two fronts. First, these primary sources offer insight into foreign policy decision-making processes. And second, they encourage a critical re-evaluation of many of the traditional understandings and tropes that have dominated the study of South African foreign policy. This paper outlines the state of foreign policy studies in South Africa and then demonstrates the power of primary research to alter key ideas about the conduct and content of South African foreign policy through three case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often stated that art reflects reality. Therefore, it should not be a surprise that in times of extreme conflict and oppression, theatre practitioners explore themes such as violence, legacy and emancipation during and after such situations. As with any verbatim theatre production, the play is based on real stories and events. Within the South African context, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has enabled a large number of enlightening narratives to enter local, national and international discourses. This has also provided many opportunities for the further exploration of both the individual stories, and themes arising, through the medium of verbatim theatre. This paper reflects on a number of different examples of verbatim theatre productions in a post-apartheid South Africa, including productions such as Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), He Left Quietly (2002) and Truth in Translation (2006). While these theatre productions utilize real stories to explore topical and contentious themes, each production explores the different narratives by employing a variety of dramaturgical techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bantu Education system, which replaced missionary-run black schooling in the mid-1950s, expanded schooling to accommodate the basic economic needs of the South African economy but it was done as cheaply as possible. The state paid teachers' salaries and in return it expected obedience and conformity from its employees. It was a tight-fisted, authoritarian education system, which stifled aspiration and human creativity. Yet, I want to argue in this paper, it unintentionally opened spaces which could nurture human ambition. I am not talking here about ambition merely for upward social mobility but for an assertion of humanity in the midst of a dehumanising social order. Morris Isaacson High School in Soweto was one of those spaces. I will show that Morris Isaacson, from the 1960s to the early 1990s, was a place where young people from mostly very poor backgrounds could aspire to be something more than an economic unit, where they could become creative and rounded human beings. Although the academic ethos of the school should not be underestimated, a variety of cultural, intellectual, and sports activities, which had no direct economic utility, enriched the lives of students and expanded their horizons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-apartheid South Africa, one of the central analytical questions is to do with the continuity of protests, in particular student movement protests that are highly driven by social, economic and political conditions in the present. In a social and political context of student protests, student movement is considered a threat to the state and a target for state violence. In this paper, we assert that student movement in contemporary South Africa is a social and political space in which we can begin to engage with and understand issues of dispossession and repossession as re-emerging struggles in South Africa. We also assert that student protests should be understood as real or perceived emancipatory terrain of transformation within and beyond the university campus, but also as the engine that engages with the unfinished struggle for decolonisation and transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. We draw on and engage with decolonial thought as our analytical lens through which to unpack and understand student protests in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Respectability has been a significant feature of status in the Cape, shaped by racial dynamics that have their foundation in slavery and colonialism and later formalised in apartheid legislation. The issue of representation is central to the paper and draws on the work of Stuart Hall who suggests that the concept of representation plays a more active and creative role in how we think about the world and our place in it. Drawing on oral history and personal family photographs taken during apartheid, I postulate that, through acts of performance such as dressing up and sitting for photographs, people who were classified coloured, attempted to take control of the way they were represented. In so doing, they actively resisted their dehumanisation and racial subjugation. In this regard I argue that the photographs defy and resist the memories that we have of apartheid and testify to a will to freedom and humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cape Town (South Africa) provides a unique setting to critique the myriad forces producing the varied, contextual conditions of water security. In post-apartheid Cape Town, water is considered a constitutional right and all citizens are guaranteed free minimum access. Despite this progress, water security is often fragmented and personalized. This paper examines the perspectives and experiences of residents in Langa township following the 'Day Zero' event of 2018. Embedded in the optics of the crisis we found differentiated dimensions of security more reflective of the apartheid era. Our findings illustrate the need for adaptive water governance to promote water justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study shows that occupations in South Africa are segregated and stratified by gender. While some women (mostly Black and "Coloured") overwhelmingly fill low-paying jobs, others (mostly White and Indian/Asian, but also Coloured) tend to fill higher-paying professional positions. This paper finds evidence of a long-term reduction in gender segregation and stratification, with women and men entering occupations previously dominated by the other gender, although this trend is sensitive to several data considerations. Most recent evidence, however, points to stagnation in this process. Distinct worker characteristics by gender – including education, location, or age – cannot explain the existing segregation or women's overrepresentation in low-paying jobs, compared with men's representation. They do partially explain the overrepresentation of women in some higher-paying positions and the declining stratification of the labor market by gender. Education is the primary driver for upward mobility for women and gender equality in the South African labor market. Note: This study follows the current South African government's usage of the racial category "Coloured," with the caveat that the term is not in acceptable use outside South Africa. HIGHLIGHTS Gendered occupations and pay gaps in South Africa have not been adequately studied. Black women suffer double labor segregation in South Africa, by gender and by race. Post-apartheid progress in reducing labor segregation has been faster by gender than by race. Improved education offers women a route to better-paid professional occupations Although women now access better jobs, managerial positions remain disproportionately male. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performing excess is a trope of comedy that dates back to the earliest times – with jokers and clowns being the most popular example of how comedy allows individuals to abandon restrictions of decorum and social graces. In a society where increasing democratic freedom allows for expressions of identity to be performed more openly, it is interesting to note how excess has been linked to the consumption of material goods, wealth and the caricatured performance of culture. Comedy, true to its nature, allows for these expressions of excessive consumption to appear even more pronounced than they do in other cultural products. In the South African Indian community, excess is used in an attempt to emphasize belonging in a market-driven capitalist economy and is also used to lampoon stereotypes of the rapacious Indian. Two main issues arise from depictions in South African Indian comedy. First, the South African Indian community has been associated with the stereotype of greed and rapaciousness, and the comedians (most prominently Karou Charou and Peru and Bala) are often criticized for allowing the use of stereotypical tropes to capitalize on the lampooning of the South African Indian community. Second, the exaggerated stereotypes reflect the state of comedy in post-Apartheid South Africa, with a heavy reliance on stereotypes and excessive displays of conspicuous consumption. The comedy in post-Apartheid South Africa, particularly from minority communities, has often been 'low brow', with an emphasis on excess, exaggeration of stereotypes and self-deprecatory humour. This excessiveness is prevalent in some South African Indian comedy, which relies heavily on stereotypes, such as that of bling township culture and excessive alcohol consumption, to provoke humour. This paper explores excess as an expression of consumption: how is consumption linked to comedy and how does this reflect the identity of South African Indians? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]