The South African Feature Film Industry: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Although the South African film industry has the required competency to become a significant player in the international film market, few South African films enjoy commercial success. This paper examines why South African films are not more successful and assesses what government and other stakeholders can do to promote a sustainable and successful film industry. The paper draws on the experiences of the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries to argue that the South African government should not focus solely on the cultural aspects of the film product but should attach more importance to distribution, promotion and audience development.     

Social Capital and Livelihoods in Johannesburg: Differential Advantages and Unexpected Outcomes among Foreign‐Born Migrants,Internal Migrants,and Long‐Term South African Residents

Foreign‐born migrants – a group rarely compared with both internal migrants and long‐term residents – are often positioned as the most disadvantaged South African urban population. We use data from a 2008 cross‐sectional household survey conducted in Johannesburg to compare a contextually relevant measure of social capital and livelihood advantages between foreign‐born migrants, internal migrants, and long‐term South African residents. Our findings are counterintuitive and emphasize the need to explore the heterogeneity of urban migrant populations, and the mechanisms in which they better their lives, by showing that (1) foreign‐born migrants have better urban livelihood outcomes, and (2) indicators of social capital are not necessarily associated with improved livelihood outcomes.     

‘Entering the territory of incitement’: oppositionality and Africa South

Africa South was an anti‐apartheid journal edited by Ronald Segal which was published in South Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This article explores the historical and political significance of Africa South and considers its implications for an understanding of ‘oppositionality’ in the post‐apartheid present. The central challenge which Africa South offered to its own context was its transnational perspective. Africa South was an important meeting place in the global routes of the developing pan‐African movement. It is also noteworthy for its effort to bring disparate areas of history and experience – both within the African continent and across the African diaspora – into revealing alignment with one another. The principle of conjuncture, I argue, initiated an important analytical move: the opportunity for illuminating comparison, the re‐conceptualisation of an often fragmented political and social landscape and an unusual glimpse of the whole. In tension with this totalising vision is the journal’s generic eclecticism, its flexible political identity and its collaborative construction. In both its unity and its fragmentation, Africa South offers an important point of departure for activist journalism and oppositional intellectual endeavours in the present.     

New women,old messages? Constructions of femininities,race and hypersexualised bodies in selected South African magazines, 2003–2006

This article discusses the ways in which racialised femininities are differently presented as hyper(hetero)sexual in three South African magazines targeting female readers – Femina, Fair Lady and True Love – between 2003 Fair Lady. 2003. RoC. Fair Lady, : 71 [Google Scholar] and 2006. I argue that the bodily work women are expected to perform is determined by constructs of race, where women are advised to regulate and control their physical bodies as a means of maintaining (hetero)sexual desirability or becoming (hetero)sexually desirable. I discuss how the racist portrayal of black womanhood in magazine advertisements that target white female readers of Femina and Fair Lady are sexualised in ways that define the black female body as alluring and exotic. My discussion reveals that the privileging of white heterofemininity in all three magazines as normative and ideal, simultaneously defines black women as the embodiment of a racialised (hetero)sexuality – at times mediated by essentialist ideas of Africa – which echoes racist colonial discourse and defines black women as essentially different.     

The place of South African philosophy in the future of South African philosophy

The title of my paper reads like an oxymoron if not downright confusion. However, it is not meant to be an oxymoron and it does not betray my private confusion. It is deliberate and perhaps a bit political. These two words “South Africa” rightly conjure up an image of things that are either in the south of Africa or things that are African in the south. I find the first image deserving of attention for my purposes. Juxtaposing the concerns of academic philosophy in South Africa (the country) alongside the ordinary reference of the term South Africa (and resultant expectations), I seek to argue that the practice of philosophy in South Africa does not sufficiently show South African characteristics. I specifically argue that the practice of philosophy in South Africa is far removed from the place in which it operates. While there are historical reasons to explain this state of affairs, the future of philosophy in this place can only be secured by an active renunciation of the status quo accompanied by a deliberate responsiveness to the philosophical needs of South Africa. It is incumbent on the dominant philosophers to make this renunciation and foster deliberate responsiveness.     

Social movements and biopolitical states: A study of humanitarian aid in Cape Town 2008

In May of 2008, a wave of xenophobic violence erupted in South Africa resulting in the displacement of thousands of ‘refugees’ who ended up in government-established ‘safety camps’. Due to the lack of an adequate response by government and the United Nations, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a South African AIDS activist organisation, began providing relief to the displaced population. In this paper, we are interested in investigating the ‘biopolitical technologies’ used by the TAC in their response to this crisis. We argue that the TAC's approach to providing humanitarian aid to refugees in Cape Town drew on both the organisation's own archive and repertoire of activist techniques and practices and the biopolitical toolkit deployed by international agencies such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. The outcome of this cross-fertilisation, we argue, was a hybrid assemblage of tactics and techniques that did not conform to the characterisation of humanitarian aid as simply another kind of bureaucratic antipolitics. The case study draws attention to the ways in which the TAC sought to ‘empower’ refugees and non-nationals as well as pressure and leverage the South African state into responding to the crisis, and thereby fulfil its pastoral role as ‘the watchful shepherd’ and the protector of human life.     

Can we talk about the right to healthcare without language? A critique of key international human rights law,drawing on the experiences of a Deaf woman in Cape Town,South Africa

A case study in Cape Town, South Africa, explores the right to health for signing Deaf ¹ 1. By Deaf (capitalised) we understand those permanently sensorily disabled people who are born deaf or who become deaf as children and whose first language is sign – South African Sign Language (SASL) in this country. View all notes patients attending health services and who are unable to communicate in a language they understand. It argues that, without language, Deaf South Africans’ dignity and right to health is violated, resulting in serious consequences such as incorrect diagnosis, improper treatment and standard of care not being applied. It critiques the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and the limits of General Comment 14 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The paper demonstrates that Deaf patients do not have informational access to healthcare. It argues that language via professional interpreter services is essential to their South African constitutional right of access to healthcare. General Comment 14 addresses informational accessibility, but this is insufficient without addressing language as a pre-requisite. The CRPD imposes on the South African government human rights obligations to provide professional interpreter services for Deaf people, but unfortunately it allows a loophole by enabling cost to serve as reasonable grounds to defer action.     

'If we only had some of what they have' Ralph Ellison in Wales

Abstract

During his period as a merchant marine in the Second World War, the African American novelist Ralph Ellison was stationed in Swansea, Wales. His short story 'In a Strange Country', collected in Flying Home and Other Stories (1998), is based on these Welsh experiences, and there are two other unpublished Welsh-based stories among the Ellison papers at the Library of Congress: 'A Storm of Blizzard Proportions' and 'The Red Cross at Morriston, South Wales'. This article considers these stories as a basis for exploring the cultural and historical connections and correspondences between African Americans and the Welsh. In drawing inspiration from Ellison's critical writings, the article seeks to substantiate a genuinely comparative, transatlantic approach to literary and cultural texts. This approach leads to an exploration of the ways in which the diversity of the Welsh experience – manifested in language, politics and cultural practice – led Ellison to meditate in new ways on the issues of race, nationhood and identity that he would later famously address in Invisible Man.     

Suburban road-closures and the ruinous landscapes of privilege in Johannesburg

In this article we trace the emergence of road-closures – i.e. the barricading by local residents of public roads ostensibly in response to crime – in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg in the decade after apartheid. We argue that road-closures manifest an attempt at material “fixing” an urban order of privilege, even as privilege and inequality is increasingly “deterritorialised” in the city of the global South. While conventionally theorised as part of a broader global trend towards the privatisation and securitisation of urban space, we demonstrate that road-closures contain qualitatively different expectations of the urban order to e.g. private gated communities. Whereas gated communities are premised on and driven by a political economy of self-exclusion from urban life, road-closures simultaneously resist and prefigure this “deterritorialised” reordering of privilege in the post-apartheid city. Based on archival research in local community newspapers over a 10-year period between and 2004 (the high-water mark of the so-called road-closure “debates”), we trace shifting discourses about road closures and the city: from anxieties about crime and loss of privilege, to fantasies of abandonment, to the assertion (and rupture) of a mythical suburban utopia. Drawing on a literature on ruins as the material effects of a past order manifest in the urban order of the present, we assert that despite anxieties about the loss of privilege, these enclosed neighbourhoods remain spaces of extreme privilege, now implicated into an emergent geography in which old and new spaces of privilege overlap to reinforce spatial inequalities in post-apartheid Johannesburg.     

African dreams of cohesion: elite pacting and community development in transfrontier conservation areas in southern Africa

In this paper we argue that there is a paradox in the managerial attempt of the South African Peace Park Foundation, to foster cohesion within the development of Trans Frontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa by focusing on community participation and development. Cohesion is mainly found at the level of the elite – both European and African – promoting the idea of the TFCAs, which provides them with opportunities to develop ‘Super‐African’ identities, based on identifying with nature and the landscape rather than the nation‐state. The imagery about the African landscape on which this process is based has its roots in colonial and primitivist discourse on Africa and Africans which includes Africans in the concept of landscape, but only if apparently unadulterated by modernity. This ultimately presents a problem for the TFCA development and its aim to develop local communities: if local people would indeed economically develop, with all the material consequences, they would no longer belong in the inclusive European aesthetics of the African landscape.     

Can personal narratives heal trauma? A consideration of testimonies given at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

This study investigates the therapeutic effects of narratives and linguistic expression in people who have suffered trauma. The kind of trauma considered is that which took place as a result of politically related violence in the South African liberation struggle, and the narratives and language discussed are selected from testimonies given during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Certain linguistic criteria identified by Pennebaker as predictors of successful therapeutic outcomes in the narratives of individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are applied to excerpts from the TRC testimonies. Linguistic analysis validates Pennebaker’s findings to some extent, but the investigation concludes that while linguistic expression may demonstrate cognitive processing and facilitate coherence, it is not enough to enable healing. Many factors, not only articulation, interact to determine the extent to which individuals can be healed. Some trauma is so intense that it cannot be verbalised at all.     

Determinants of approval of the work of truth commissions in the southern cone: a comparative study / Determinantes de la aprobación del trabajo realizado por las Comisiones de Verdad y Reconciliación en el cono sur: un estudio comparativo

The socio-demographic and psychosocial approval determinants of the work conducted by the truth and reconciliation commissions (TRC) are analysed based on original survey data from Chilean, Argentinian and Peruvian samples (N = 2,947). A linear multiple regression analysis was carried out (R² between .28 and .44; f² between .45 and .78) which reveals the positive effect of commission functions perceived achievement, mainly the knowledge of truth (β = .28), justice (β = .15) and the contribution in creating a common history (β = .15). An analysis by country reveals in Chile salient variables such as institutional trust, political ideas, institutional apologies and hope and sadness emotions. In Argentina, together with TRC functions, the degree of information about the work of the commission and the perception of a negative social climate appear as relevant predictors. As regards Peru, the degree of exposure to violence appears as a good predictor of TRC’s work support. The results show the relevance of TRC functions’ fulfillment, as well as the role of institutional variables in the approval of the work they have done.     

Transgressive Sexualities: Politics of Pleasure and Desire in Kamasutra: A Tale of Love and Fire

Utilizing feminist film theory, critical reviews, and viewer responses, this article examines visual representations of transgressive sexuality in two diasporic Indian women's films: Kamasutra: A Tale of Love by Mira Nair, and Fire by Deepa Mehta. The article draws from research on ancient discourses on sexuality in India to argue that contemporary constructions of women's sexuality in South Asia are not devoid of patriarchal and fundamentalist cultural politics of representation.     

Social documentary and personal investigations in contemporary South African photography: Tracey Derrick’s “One in Nine” series

A shell of white gauze floats against a split background in Tracey Derrick’s 2009 photograph, Inhabit – Habergeon – middle English, piece of armour to protect the neck and chest (Inhabit), both autonomous and materially frail. The shadowed wall lifts the calcified gauze towards the viewer, as its lithe body hovers above the vertical divide that separates light from dark. This position apart from the edge may be read as a passage missed or overcome. A year of invasive treatment following her diagnosis of stage two breast cancer in March of 2008 led South African documentary photographer Tracey Derrick to create a photographic series that combines her humanist sensibility with personal reflections on illness. Derrick represents meditations on her trajectory through illness in “One in Nine: My Year as a Statistic,” a collection of reposeful digital colour photographs – including Inhabit – that features the cast Derrick made to obtain accurate measurements for her prosthesis. This body of work complicates a widely held assumption that post-apartheid photography in South Africa focuses more on the individual than collective societal issues. Derrick’s unusual series warrants methodological treatment that attends to the complex ways in which the visual vocabulary and concerns of apartheid-era documentary photography overlap with the personal explorations associated with post-1994 photographic production. In this paper, I utilise socio-historical, psychoanalytic and phenomenological readings of Tracey Derrick’s photograph and “One in Nine” series to elicit an interpretation of the image and series as statement of agency within a metaphorical battle against an invisible, yet pervasive disease. By reading Derrick’s photograph through these theoretical lenses, I reveal her image to be a metaphoric assertion of tenacity and Derrick’s agency, and highlight the areas of overlap between Derrick’s documentary practice and her more personal “One in Nine” project.     

Anxious urbanity: xenophobia,the native subject and the refugee camp

G. Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall; A history of South African ‘Coloured’ politics, (Cape Town, David Philip, 1987)

Ian Goldin, Making Race: The politics and economics of Coloured identity in South Africa (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1987).

Gavin Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall: A History of South African ‘Coloured’ Politics (Cape Town: David Philip, 1987).

Women in African Literature Today, No. 15, James Curry Limited, London: 1987.

Left‐Radical Movements in South Africa and Namibia 1900–1981 A Bibliographical and Historical Study, compiled by Elizabeth W. Böhmer. 2 vols. Cape Town: South African Library, 1986 and 1987.

South African Review 4. Edited and compiled by Glenn Moss and Ingrid Obery for the Southern African Research Service (SARS). Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987, 599 pp., R24,95

The Rise and Decline of Apartheid: A study of political movements among the coloured people of South Africa, 1880–1985, R.E. van der Ross, (Cape Town, Tafelberg, 1986)

Setiloane, Gabriel M. African Theology ‐An Introduction. Johannnesburg. Skotaville 1986.

Pass Controls and the Urban African Proletariat, by Doug Hindson, Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1987.

Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives, edited by Belinda Bozzoli (Ravan, Johannesburg, 1987).     

Forward,Ever Forward: a reading of Robert Harris,Photographic Album of South African Scenery,Port Elizabeth,c.1880–1886

Early copies of the Photographic Album of South African Scenery that was published between c.1880 and c.1888 by Robert Harris in Port Elizabeth consisted of 28 double-card pages with two, occasionally one, tipped-in photographs per page. During the near-decade of its production, the number of images increased, printed captions replaced handwritten captions and both the selection and arrangement of images became gradually more coherent and programmatic. The paper interprets these changes as Robert Harris’s attempt to construct a public identity for South Africa at the moment its economy and society were being transformed by the diamond mines at Kimberley and elsewhere that constitute the focus of the later form of the form Album. In the developed form of the Album, a narrative progression is suggested to move from Cape Town and the Western Province, to Port Elizabeth and the Eastern Province, to the Kimberley Diamond Fields, Natal, etc. In order to read this journey critically, the paper is arranged to demonstrate the constituent parts of this journey in the representation of cities and towns, laid out in grid plans on the African veld; the depiction of individual buildings with their expressive vocabulary of architectural style; and the idea of commerce – represented in street scenes, markets and seaports – and the facilitation of commerce through roads, bridges and mountain passes. The disproportionately large number of photographs of Kimberley, with both its mining operations and no less than three commercial markets, underlines the significance of commerce and industry in the new South African identity. The emphasis on commercial achievement in the Album leaves an obviously subordinate role for images of nature in both agriculture and landscape. Farming is represented through such exploitative practices as forest clearing and hunting, rather than the developed forms of agriculture of wine farming, sheep farming and wheat farming. And landscape in the Album is either a landscape subdued to the wants and needs of a settler population that would bludgeon its way through mountain passes or divert the course of rivers to facilitate commerce, or a landscape that is defined by the imported aesthetic conventions of the picturesque and sublime. Similarly, grouping the photographs of indigenous peoples that are scattered throughout the Album, one may see that their representation is entirely instrumental, divided crudely into roles of either war-like barbarians or pliant labourers. In these ways, the Photographic Album may be understood as a true mirror of the colonial achievement.     

A Model of Heterosexual Adaptive Relationship Functioning in South Africa: Implications for HIV Prevention Interventions

Abstract

Objectives: Couple-based HIV prevention efforts are an important HIV prevention strategy in South Africa but there is a lack of understanding as to what constitutes healthy relationships in South African sociodisadvantaged communities. Methods: To address this, 8 focus group discussions were conducted with 27 men and 23 Black African women living in a large disadvantaged community in Cape Town, South Africa. Results: A model of adaptive relationship functioning is put forth, which involves four primary relationship components that emerged as central to healthy relationships: active relationship building, emotional support/display, communication, and problem-solving. Conclusions: The results of this study can inform couple-based HIV prevention efforts.     

Fielding supranationalism: the European Central Bank as a field effect

The European Central Bank (ECB), like all European institutions, poses basic problems of definition and comparability. Mobilizing Bourdieusian field theory (BFT) to resolve them, we map out the ECB's deep investments in scientific prestige and scholarly productivity – that is, its hyper-scientization – and the ambiguities therein, and then set out to explain them. Mobilizing diverse sources that include official documents, on-site interviews, and comparative data, we argue that hyper-scientization is a field effect expressing the ECB's origins and cross-location in three worlds: financial institutions, professional economics, and European politics. We then trace out the signs and symptoms of cross-location. First, we trace the origins of the ECB's directorate for research, DGR, which differentiated the ECB from most other European central banks at the time of its founding. Thus invested, the ECB accelerated its scholarly activities in step with the internationalization and scientization of economics. But this also expressed the ECB's stake in European authority struggles: research exchanges are a means of building relationships with national central banks, which was especially crucial in the lead-up to the European Union's (EU) 2004 enlargement. We thus argue that there is more to the ECB than its independence and policy operations, and that some of its most striking features are best explained as effects of its multiple field locations.     

African studies at a crossroads: producing theory across the disciplines in South Africa

African studies in South Africa is currently at a crossroads – of making choices in the process of establishing itself institutionally and reconstituting itself as a discursive and epistemological field, including an interrogation of its histories and a decolonisation of its scholarly legacies. But being at a crossroads does not imply being at a loss; on the contrary, for African studies it means realising its potential of being a hub of critical thinking and a catalyst in the transformation of the humanities and the social sciences in the country and, possibly, internationally. Proceeding from this assumption, I will ask: what are the conditions of possibility for the emergence of African studies in South Africa as a space of transdisciplinary debate, one that is driven by a commitment to socially relevant issues and within which critical standpoints to be voiced by public intellectuals can crystallise? Some approaches critical for the development of such a field are present in South African scholarship, but – as it often happens in hierarchical academic structures – they are scattered across different disciplines or areas of expertise. Further, one of the main problems of African studies scholarship internationally – lying at the core of power inequalities of scholarship in Africa and the West – is the artificial split between “theory” and “(empirical) material” and the question of who is expected to produce what. This article starts with a discussion of the recent debates provoked by a restructuring of African studies and related disciplines at the University of Cape Town. To understand the resonance of these debates, beyond the context of one university and country, they will be placed, firstly, in the international context of African studies and, secondly, in the national context of debating the function and place of the humanities and the social sciences in South Africa. Both contexts highlight the importance of producing critical theory (instead of applying theory produced in the West). Hence, the following three subsections of this article will examine works by South African scholars that, produced within various disciplines (history, sociology and cultural studies), interrelate the insights of these disciplines and, in so doing, initiate new theoretical approaches. Using its crossroads position, African studies in South Africa can become a “laboratory” in which new critical approaches can be interrelated and debated. Opened up to dialogue with African studies in Africa and worldwide, it can become a theoretically invigorating space, nationally and internationally.     

Global resonance,local amplification: Antjie Krog on a world stage

As a result of the publication of Country of my Skull, an extraordinary literary enactment of witness and confession, Antjie Krog has become internationally known as a writer profoundly engaged with the events and human drama uncovered by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Her voice is read as that of an expert witness of trauma, forgiveness and the means by which the horrors of the past may be addressed. In seeking to understand how Krog came to be taken up internationally as a representative voice of the South African transition, I focus on a particular global–local nexus for an explanation. I theorise that dealing with the past via truth commissions, a global publishing context and the work of a local writer with a record of excellent literary output and political action enabled a fit which resulted in Krog coming to prominence on a world stage. This then amplified her public status in South Africa. I argue that Krog is emblematic of a new type of representative public person who is no longer afforded a hearing just because of the excellence of their ideas, writing or speech, but who also embodies pain, suffering and affectedness.