RESPONSE

In this engagement with the idea of the common in contemporary South Africa, the author uses three episodes from his own experience in and of South Africa – a performance at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2009; a bus journey from Cape Town in 2010; news of the Marikana mine massacre in August 2012 – as well as recent work by theorists Lauren Berlant, Bernard Stiegler and Paolo Virno, as prompts to explore how issues of public and private feature in recent representations and experiences of the South African postcolony. In responding to several of the essays included in this issue, the author also discusses the role of the institutions and infrastructures of cultural mediation in the production of cultural products that engage with these issues, and gestures towards the responsibilities of intellectuals and artists in interrogating their own positions in relation to the idea of the commons in South Africa.     

Mxolisi Nyezwa’s Poetry of No Sure Place

A change in direction of the journal New Coin during the 1990s saw the emergence of a diverse group of poets who had previously struggled for publication. This article recognises this often overlooked collective and argues that they quickly established their own style of “Poetry of No Sure Place”, which expresses a malaise of sadness within South Africa that is popularly felt but rarely articulated. Focusing on three collections of poetry by Mxolisi Nyezwa, I show how this group’s work rests on a permanent – and possibly worsening – sense of imbalance. The article explores how Nyezwa attempts to reconcile a felt public and private need to write, struggles to find a source of connection and questions the permanence of social change in South Africa. Nyezwa epitomises the marginalisation, apprehension and uncertainty of New Coin’s Poetry of No Sure Place.     

Introduction: a symposium on social justice

In recent years South African studies have been radically transformed by a new school of work. The essential thrust of this new Marxist school has been to reconceptualise, retheorise and reanalyse the relationship between the economic system and the racial system in South Africa. The traditional liberal school has failed to see the ways and the extent to which important forms of racial domination have actually been integral and functional components of South African capitalism. The Marxist school must not let its strengths in political economy numb it from a sensitivity to cultural, ideological and psychological factors that are not always reducable to, or subsumable within, questions of political economy.     

Investigating Differences in How the News Media Views Homosexuality Across Nations: An Analysis of the United States,South Africa,and Uganda

While there is a wealth of information about the extent to which people across the world disapprove of homosexuality, we know a lot less about the lenses through which they view same‐sex relations. The aim of this study is to understand better how homosexuality is framed in the public press, and how religion and economic development may combine to shape this discourse. Through an analysis of almost 400 newspaper articles, this study compares how homosexuality is framed in Uganda, South Africa, and the United States. Because these nations have high levels of religious belief, but differ in their level of economic development and democracy, we can assess how these factors interact to shape portrayals. Drawing on work from cultural sociology and the sociology of religion, this study shows that the United States is much more likely than Uganda to frame homosexuality as a civil rights issue and use entertainers as claimsmakers. Conversely, articles from Uganda are more likely than those from the United States or South Africa to frame homosexuality as a religious issue and draw on religious claimsmakers. Likewise, Uganda is much more likely than South Africa to discuss homosexuality in the context of Western influences.     

Remembrance: the Essop brothers,formative realism and contemporary African photography

Remembrance is the title of group of photographic artworks by Hasan and Husain Essop. Made in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the artworks picture people and places, buildings and landscapes. At first look, the action within the frames is straightforward. The photographs present ancient and modern religious sites in digitally produced, staged scenarios. However, there is an unseen complexity to these composite images that are made of hundreds of individual still shots, shot one section at a time and then meticulously stitched together. One impact of these contemporary artworks is their ability to show the powerful impact of global Islamic culture. Dynamics of place and belonging, the picturesque and landscape, slavery, religion and race are offered to view by means of these images. I offer formative realism as a conceptual framework to think with and against these pictures made by photographic means. I will say something about the concept and context of formative realism, discuss principal features and propose a way of seeing. The central questions are these: what do the Essops’ pictures show us about Islam in South Africa and beyond? How does this seeing matter to the ongoing activity of race, racism and “Othering” now? How does any of this matter to the dynamics of contemporary visual art in South Africa?     

From myth to history: Ethiopia and Eritrea’s transformations in four photographic works

As the Horn of Africa is going through major political, societal and cultural transformations, how does photography construct visions that take them into account? This short paper looks then at four recent bodies of work that evoke and revolve around the different perceived temporalities that go along them, raising questions on history, memory, transmission and finally on photography itself.     

Restabilizing attachment to cultural objects. Aesthetics,emotions and biography

The scholarship on aesthetics and materiality has studied how objects help shape identity, social action and subjectivity. Objects, as ‘equipment[s] for living’ (Luhmann 2000), become the ‘obligatory passage points humans have to contend with in order to pursue their projects (Latour 1991). They provide patterns to which bodies can unconsciously latch onto, or help human agents work towards particular states of being (DeNora 2000, 2003). Objects are central in the long term process of taste construction, as any attachment to an object is made out of a delicate equilibrium of mediators, bodies, situations and techniques (Hennion and his collaborators (Hennion and Fouquet 2001; Hennion and Gomart 1999). In all of these accounts objects are the end result of long‐term processes of stabilization, in which the actual material object (a musical piece, a sculpture, an art installation, a glass of wine, the oeuvre of Bach as we know it) is both a result and yet a key co‐producer of its own generation. Whereas the literature has been generous and detailed in exploring the processes of assembling and sustaining object‐centered attachments, it has not sufficiently engaged with what happens when the aesthetic elements of cultural artifacts that have produced emotional resonance are transformed: what do these artifacts morph into? What explains the transition (or not) of different cultural objects? And relatedly, what happens to the key aesthetic qualities that were so central to how the objects had been defined, and to those who have emotionally attached to them? To answer these questions, this article uses as exemplars two different cases of attachment, predicated on the distinctive features of a cultural object – the transcendence of opera and the authenticity of a soccer jersey – that have undergone transformations.     

Emigration dynamics in southern Africa

This review of the dynamics of international migration in Southern Africa focuses on four aspects of labor migration: 1) while migrant workers suffer from discrimination and lack of protection, there are few alternatives for them; 2) the regulations imposed by the Chamber of Mines in South Africa favor the mining industry at the expense of the workers; 3) worker supplier states have few options for negotiating a commercialized migration policy to achieve economic benefits; and 4) foreign mine workers must unionize in order to escape perpetual subordination. The review opens with a consideration of how migrant mine workers from Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland have provided a source of cheap labor which has enhanced the economic prosperity of South Africa. The role of the Chamber of Mines in regulating the supply of labor and employment policy for its members is described. Attention is then turned to Lesotho where land pressure has exacerbated poverty levels. Large-scale migration has led the citizens of Lesotho to consider it a place to live or retire to, not a place to work. Labor migration from Lesotho is organized, is supported by the government, is recurrent, and remains a viable alternative despite faltering demand. The discussion of Lesotho includes a consideration of its political, economic, and demographic situation as well as of ecological factors. Briefer analyses are then provided for Botswana, Swaziland, and Mozambique. The receiving country, South Africa, is shown to be suffering a decline in economic growth which is marked by widespread unemployment. More than 250,000 Whites are prospective emigrants from South Africa. After considering the issues surrounding refugees, regional concerns created by changing economic and political scenarios, and labor strategies which could be adopted by supplier states, the report reiterates a series of recommendations which arose from two major conferences on the problem of unemployment. It is concluded that the tendency to emigrate is fostered by landlessness (Lesotho), surplus labor (Botswana and Swaziland), and political and economic underdevelopment (Mozambique). In order to redirect migrant flows, policies must address labor migration, political refugees, urban-rural dynamics, job-creation, income distribution, and democratization.     

The problem of order: Understanding how culture predicts social action

How is social order possible? Scholars in a variety of sociological subfields have sought to address this question, known as the problem of order, building theories and evidence that have tended to center either structural forces or human agency. I explain how this dichotomy has shaped the direction and extent of our scholarly progress, focusing on debates and developments in sociological social psychology and cultural sociology, and consider how theoretical and empirical developments in these fields enable us to revisit the problem of order in pursuit of new questions and answers. The great promise of this work is in its ability to identify the micro–macro linkages that enable personal agency and social change, while also explaining why the social order is so durable and how we arrive at and enact a shared definition of the situation as often as we do given individual differences and self‐complexity.     

Exploring South African mathematics teachers’ experiences of learner migration

This paper focuses on patterns of post-apartheid learner migration between schools previously segregated along racial lines. South Africa’s shift away from cultural and linguistic isolationism and the ways this has impacted educational arrangements in this country, most particularly in relation to the language of learning and teaching, affects mathematics teaching and learning in complex ways. We focus on how changes in the demographic make-up of some schools have affected the teaching and learning of mathematics by drawing on two case study vignettes in historically different schools. The vignettes are used to illuminate our discussion and to raise key questions requiring further research.     

The influence of interviewer characteristics on support for democracy and political engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa*

This study investigates how an interviewer’s characteristics affect how respondents answer survey questions about democracy and political engagement. I analyze data from the 2008 Afrobarometer surveys, in which 810 interviewers surveyed 27,713 respondents across 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Using these data, I study how interviewer education, age, and gender affect two outcomes: (1) response distributions to attitudinal and behavioral survey questions and (2) the likelihood of respondents saying ‘don’t know’ to a survey question. The analysis also investigates how the respondent’s perception of who sponsored the survey (NGO, private sector, government) affects attitudes. The results show that these interviewer characteristics affect the quality of survey data on political attitudes and behaviors. In the discussion, I consider the implications for research based on public opinion data about democracy and political engagement.     

An opera house for the “Paris of South America”: pathways to the institutionalization of high culture

Who has the power to institutionalize culture? How is it that cultural forms become legitimated and appropriated by certain groups? And what are the organizational forms that guarantee the continuity of the interlocks among classifications, etiquette, and resources in the long run? This article explores these questions by observing the struggle over the institutionalization of opera as high culture during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Buenos Aires, a region of the world understudied by cultural sociologists. It contends that to answer these questions we need to observe the contested dynamics though which the process of institutionalization happens. It also shows how this contestation affects, in the long-term, the processes of evaluation and legitimation of the classification upheld, and the consequences it has in terms of audience stratification. In the Discussion section, I present a novel framework for the study of pathways to high culture institutionalization that highlights how the role of the state and competing stakeholders can introduce variable relationships among the elites, the arts, and social closure.     

Culturally appropriate pedagogy: is it always necessary? The case of East Asians learning math and science

‘Culturally appropriate pedagogy’ has become an important practice since 1990 to address the increasingly diverse student population in every part of the world. For all the good intentions, however, there is an inherent danger in identifying and accommodating students’ cultural differences: we may fall into the trap of reifying superficially or even ethnocentrically understood cultural differences and pigeonholing students simply because of their assumed ‘cultural differences’. How should we decide when a ‘culturally appropriate pedagogy’ is necessary and how should a truly culturally appropriate pedagogy be designed? This study investigates a group of Chinese mathematicians/scientists/engineers’ perspectives in order to shed light on these questions.     

‘It's not acceptable for the husband to stay at home': Taking a discourse analytical approach to capture the gendering of work

This article illustrates some of the ways in which the notion of (paid) work is actively being gendered, and how these gendering processes take place not only through organizational practices but also in discourses that circulate outside an organization in the private domain. Drawing on 15 in‐depth interviews with women who opted out of their own professional career in order to accompany their husbands on their overseas work assignment to Hong Kong, we demonstrate some of the benefits of using a discourse analytical approach to capturing and identifying the processes through which these women actively (although not necessarily consciously) gender the notion of work, thereby reinforcing the gender order and its male bias. We argue that identifying and making visible these gendered and gendering practices is an important component of, and a potential trigger for, change both in organizations as well as private contexts.     

The Sunday Times Heritage Project: heritage,the media and the formation of national consciousness

Since the advent of democracy in 1994, the landscape of memory in South Africa has undergone significant changes. While most new monuments, memorials and heritage sites have emerged under the aegis of the government, this article focuses on a private sector initiative, the Sunday Times Heritage Project (STHP), sponsored by the Sunday Times newspaper in celebration of its centenary in 2006. The project involved the installation of 30 small-scale memorials commemorating key moments in the history of South Africa, with each memorial being accompanied by a website entry. The article focuses on the role of the media in shaping a new national consciousness in South Africa and specifically investigates how a new, supposedly shared history emerges through the work of the Sunday Times journalists in selecting stories and negotiating with stakeholders. With reference to specific examples, significant differences are highlighted between the newspaper’s heritage initiative and the state-initiated memory projects, but ultimately, it is argued, the STHP reveals a calculated or unconscious acceptance of the state-endorsed historical discourse structured around resistance narratives, which has become hegemonic since 1994.     

GLOBAL BLACK SELF-FASHIONINGS: HIP HOP AS DIASPORIC SPACE

This essay examines how the “black” racial significance of hip hop culture is received, interpreted, and redeployed within the Afro-Atlantic world. Beyond questions of cultural consumption and reproduction, it is argued that hip hop's expanding global reach has facilitated the contemporary making and moving of black diasporic subjects themselves. Here, African descendant youth in an array of locales use the performative contours of hip hop to mobilize notions of black-self in ways that are at one time both contestive and transcendent of nationally bound racial framings. Hip hop in this way can be seen as enabling a current global (re)mapping of black political imaginaries via social dynamics of diaspora. In pursuing this argument, this essay looks toward hip hop movements in Brazil, Cuba, and South Africa as compelling, yet varying examples of how transnationally attuned identities of blackness are marshaled in the fashioning of diasporic subjects through hip hop.     

The public private sphere: family narrative and democracy in Argentina and South Africa

This article explores the paradoxical prominence of seemingly private family stories and memories in the democratic public spheres emerging in the wake of the ‘Dirty War’ in Argentina and apartheid in South Africa. In part because the discourse of the family was used in these cases to both uphold and protest dictatorial regimes, individuals who lost family members to state violence became powerful moral agents in the post‐dictatorship and post‐apartheid periods. Narratives told by and about these individuals – ranging from personal testimony given in each country’s truth commission to representations in theatre, fiction and film – have worked to constitute what may be called a ‘public private sphere’. They not only express personal grief, but also (and especially in wider cultural circulation) have been emplotted and mobilised to construct democratic publics. These may or may not correspond to the nationwide publics envisioned in state discourses of reconciliation. Using genealogical fiction surrounding ‘disappeared children’ in Argentina as a lens to analyse South Africa, this article argues that stories of children attempting to piece together their family histories reveal this dynamic as they become sites for convening democratic publics and critiquing transitional politics.     

JOHANNESBURG INTERIORS

Almost two decades into the post-apartheid era, inner-city Johannesburg – like much of South Africa – remains structured by deeply ingrained forms of physical and imaginative segregation. Building on architect Sarah Calburn's suggestion that one way to address these divisions would be to make the city's external or outside spaces feel more like domestic interiors as well as on the calls of writer Njabulo Ndebele for new forms of public intimacy, this article explores three distinct artistic projects that each attempt to push beyond segregation by opening up private homes for public perusal and/or making public space more intimate and home-like: Kgebetli Moele's novel Room 207, Christoph Gurk's performance art collection X Homes Johannesburg and Terry Kurgan's public photography/digital media experiment Hotel Yeoville. Working with concepts of home, hotels and hospitality, it theorizes the modes of ‘intimate exposure’ these projects enact as forms of hospitality or Derridean ‘hos(ti)pitality’ potentially capable of welcoming diverse groups into a shared public space while at the same time foregrounding inequalities in need of redress. While the role of artistic projects in shaping culture should not be overemphasized, the article also underscores how such works have emerged in contemporary South Africa as vibrant ways of thinking in public and thinking the public.     

“We have been thrown away”: surplus people projects and the logics of waste

ABSTRACT

This essay considers discourses of waste that include humans among the objects of discard: surplus/disposable populations in the Marxian tradition, or what Zygmunt Bauman has called “human waste.” Notions of “surplus people” have a long history in South Africa, and this essay traces a genealogy of their narrative and cultural forms. These forms can alternately mask and expose the “indispensable dispensab[ility]” of vulnerable communities treated as waste: devastated, depleted, discarded, disregarded. I situate the blockbuster film District 9 within a longer tradition of documenting the plight of people who recognise that they have been “thrown away,” in texts by Solomon T. Plaatje, Cosmas Desmond, Nadine Gordimer, and others. Attending to questions of geographic and temporal scale, I read between the historical example of South African apartheid and “global apartheid” as shorthand for the stratifications effected by neoliberal globalisation. How do these formations attend to the ideological violence, racial specificity, and enforced invisibility of surplus? This exclusion from the polity works through acts of un-imagining: in moments of crisis when they are pushed to the brink, the poor may have no recourse to the ethical and political grounds upon which they might claim the right to survival.