School of Arts

The primary objective of the study was to investigate the necessity of equipping professional jazz teachers with general music educational principles. A sample was drawn from the students and lecturers at three selected tertiary institutions. The secondary objective was to determine who is deemed competent to teach jazz at tertiary institutions: professional players, professional players with a teacher-training qualification in jazz, or both. Three of the tertiary institutions in South Africa that offer jazz as part of their curricula were chosen: the University of Cape Town, the University of Natal, Durban, and the Technikon Natal. A questionnaire survey and interviews were utilised as the means of collecting information about issues concerning jazz education. A quantitative research design was used to analyse the results obtained from the questionnaires. The results were tabulated in basic descriptive statistical form and the interviews were qualitatively analysed. In addition, fi...

Music educators in the Gauteng Province, especially in Music Magnet Schools, face enormous challenges in effectively implementing/enacting the music curriculum. The challenges stem from educators holding different beliefs and pedagogies when implementing/enacting the music curriculum. The challenges, in turn, cause tensions where music streams and teaching practices are concerned. The study investigates the technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge of implementing a Music Magnet School Programme in the Gauteng Province. Three main research questions guide the study: What are educators’ technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge of implementing a Music Magnet School Programme in the Gauteng Province? How do educators apply technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge in implementing a Music Magnet School Programme in the Gauteng Province? Why does educators’ technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge of implementing a Music Magnet School Programme in the Gauteng Province manifest itself in particular ways?
The study is driven by the standards, beliefs, and ideals of the pragmatist philosophy. A convergent parallel mixed-methods design is used to analyse and interpret data collected/generated quantitatively and qualitatively. Three instruments were used: questionnaires (close-ended quantitative and open-ended reflective activity); interviews (focus group discussions and one-on-one interviews); and classroom observations. Both probability and non-probability sampling procedures were followed, applying the cluster and purposive techniques. Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework served as a lens for investigating and exploring the phenomenon of the study.
The study’s findings inferred that most Music Magnet School educators, when teaching, follow the professional, societal, and personal propositions that later influence their teaching practices. Moreover, most participants do not see a need for a pragmatic music curriculum. Furthermore, certain dynamics were revealed that directly inhibit educators’ teaching practices, such as professional development, curriculum design, resources, and infrastructure. Therefore, this study recommends four propositions for effective educators’ implementation of the music curriculum.

Different perspectives, pedagogies, pedagogic ideologies, musical backgrounds, and beliefs account for the challenges experienced by music educators in the Gauteng Province, South Africa, in implementing and enacting a music curriculum, especially in Music Magnet Schools. These challenges result in dissonance and tensions regarding music streams and teaching practices. Hence, the investigative process of this study focused on educators’ knowledge in implementing a music curriculum in Music Magnet Schools in Gauteng Province. The research objectives of the study were to investigate educators’ technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge of implementing a Music Magnet School Programme in the Gauteng Province. To understand how educators’ technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge influence successful implementation of a Music Magnet School Programme in Gauteng. And to investigate why educators’ technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge of implementing a Music Magnet School Programme in the Gauteng Province manifest itself in particular ways. Integrated mixed methods drawing from elements of qualitative and quantitative traditions were employed for this study. The rationale for employing mixed methods was to investigate the structured (what) and the unstructured (how) of implementing the music curriculum. The study's findings inferred that in their teaching, Music Magnet School educators follow the professional, societal, and personal propositions that later influence their teaching practices. Moreover, the findings showed that most participants were notable opponents of a pragmatic music curriculum. Thus, this article recommends the four propositions that could assist in deepening educators’ understanding of several types of knowledge as an attempt to knowledge building.

This open forum focuses, in part, on the compatibility of homosexuality with African culture, cosmology and spirituality by reviewing selected critical texts on the subject of homosexuality in Africa. The argument questions whether the currently held perception of homosexuality as abhorrent is traditional to African culture or not. By situating homosexuality within African culture, cosmology and spirituality, the article refutes the claim that homosexuality is a colonial import.

Le Roi de Kahel (The King of Kahel), the ninth novel by the Guinean author Tierno Monénembo, published in 2008, deals with the French explorer Olivier de Sanderval, who carved for himself a kingdom in Pullo territory in the late XIXth Century. Three discourses are combined, from the obvious to the insidious. Written with the encouragement of the explorer’s descendants, whose desire was to rehabilitate the discredited figure of Sanderval, the novel seems to fit well in the Parisian literary establishment, where it obtained one of the major literary awards in 2008. The novel is also an indirect reflection on the socio-political context in which it was written, marked by the “colonial fracture”. Finally, postcoloniality as critical discourse is embedded in the novel. In this context, the article aims to first investigate the real value of the Renaudot prize awarded to a novel describing the early colonial experience. It will then briefly analyze some paratextual elements which place the novel between reality and fiction. The concepts of “territorialization” (Deleuze & Guattari) and “dialogism” (Bakhtin) will allow us to read Le Roi de Kahel as a postcolonial rewriting of an existing colonial text.

Two important manifestos on literature were published almost simultaneously in 2007 : “Pour une ‘littérature-monde’ en français” in the French newspaper Le Monde  by Michel Le Bris and numerous other French-speaking writers, and a three-hundred page essay Manifeste d’une nouvelle littérature africaine by the Cameroonian writer and critic Patrice Nganang. While the first manifesto has had a lot of repercussions in the “francophone” world, the second one went almost unnoticed. By comparing the manifestos, the aim of this article is to contribute towards paradigms through which novels by the young generation of African authors writing in French could be classified and analyzed. After a brief description of the Le Bris manifesto, Nganang’s critical essay on “preemptive writing” in post-genocide (1994) fictional works will be studied in some detail. The three key concepts of memory, (literary) field and francophonie will be used to define the literary works in French produced on the African continent in the twenty-first century. The conclusion will propose that the notion of postcolonial francophone studies be revisited.

Among the new generation of African women authors writing in
French, Bessora occupies a very particular place. Daughter of “afropolitanism”, she assumes her position in the literary field of African novel writing. Her third novel, Deux bébés et l’addition (2002) represents the ambivalence of her artistic project: while she is opposed to any form of determination (in particular racial and sexual), she herself succumbs to certain characterizations at the level of her writing, as she follows the path of her predecessors, in particular Mariama Bâ and Ken Bugul. An analytic study of Bessora’s novel, and in particular of its main character, a male midwife, will indicate how this writer finds her own voice in this literary ancestry.

The notion of literary posture, developed by Jérôme Meizoz, has recently integrated the field of postcolonial studies, thanks in particular to the edited book by Anthony Mangeon, Postures postcoloniales. Domaines africains et antillais (2012). Based on the concepts of Pierre Bourdieu—field, habitus and especially illusio—posture could be defined, in the domain of literary studies, as a way to “acquire” a position in the field, negotiated and renegotiated in a personal way, in order to inhabit a role, or even a status. The notion of posture would thus allow to better taking hold of the way authors present their positions not only in terms of symbolic capital and notoriety, but also in terms of their worldview. Posture has a rhetoric dimension, which is reflected in the textual, and an “actional” dimension, reflected in the contextual.It is in this framework that this article analyzes the most recent literary production (the textual) of the Franco-Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou, at a time this writer had to reinvent himself, following his huge positive critical acclaim. This production is linked to his activities on the margins of literature (the contextual), mainly his presence on social media and his participation to the Étonnants voyageurs literary festival (and in particular the festival organized in Brazzaville in February 2013). This “child of the postcolony” (Abdourahman Waberi), fervent advocate of the littérature-monde movement, displays in his latest work a certain return to the Africa of his childhood. This posture will be analyzed through his latest works, two novels and two essays, published between 2010 and 2013. The article will conclude on the validity of the notion of posture in postcolonial Francophone studies.

If scholars have written much about Saartjie Baartman over the past few years, it is because she has become embedded in the collective unconscious of the postcolonial imagination. Examined, measured, weighed and, after her death, dissected and placed into jars by the anatomist Georges Cuvier and displayed to the public until as recently as 1994, Saartjie Baartman represents that which the West perceived as the knowable Other. In 53cm, Bessora reverses the gaze placed on Sara Baartman; the novel is set in contemporary France and is narrated by Zara, a gaulologue whose aim is to document French culture in her quest for the talismanic " ca't de séjou ". In the meticulous dissection and classification of the elements of the culture she encounters, Zara misunderstands and misrepresents it, not unlike the ethnographers and anatomists of 19th century Europe. This article aims to show how, with the use of irony and hyperbole, Bessora systematically dismantles the power that racist, ethnographic discourse has on cultures that are considered foreign to France and agents of that culture, including immigrants, by appropriating the language used by naturalists such as Cuvier and Montandon, and by using it to exoticise mundane and ordinary aspects of life in Paris. Using Jacques Derrida's theories on deconstruction and Homi K. Bhabha's notion of the Third Space, this article argues that it is not only the language used by these ethnographers that Bessora seeks to reclaim and reinterpret, but the French language itself.

Calixthe Beyala's first novels - commonly known as the African trilogy - are among her most original ones, as they open new perspectives in African women's writing and anticipate her own career. Her second novel in particular, Tu t'appelleras Tanga, is pivotal in this process, showing the change, in the trilogy, from a first person narrative (as was still the norm in novels written by African women in the 1980's), to a narrative where there is a clear distinction between author and narrator, as is prevalent in her later work. This evolution is part of Beyala's literary project, the aim of which is to make her mark as part of the literary establishment and of the world of publishing. In order to comprehend the specificity of the Cameroonian author's first fictional works, the relationship between language, as a tool to fictionalize the surrounding world, and prostitution, one of the main themes of the novel and also a way to survive in a depressed modern African environment, will be analyzed.

Seemingly chaotic, Gerard de Nerval 's works represent an attempt to find a lost unity. Les Filles du Feu would therefore be the ideal nook for the author. This work, however, indicates that separation is  an essential theme and this articles attempts to unveil it at three levels of discourse: poetical, polemical and symbolic. What at a poetical level seems to be a promising appearance, becomes, in reality, a painful separation, through a transcription of partial memory of a bygone past, which is in essence sorrowful, and the narrator is left with only the mourning for a lost object. This emptiness...

Calixthe Beyala's first novels - commonly known as the African trilogy - are among her most original ones, as they open new perspectives in African women's writing and anticipate her own career. Her second novel in particular, Tu t'appelleras Tanga, is pivotal in this process, showing the change, in the trilogy, from a first person narrative (as was still the norm in novels written by African women in the 1980's), to a narrative where there is a clear distinction between author and narrator, as is prevalent in her later work. This evolution is part of Beyala's literary project, the aim of which is to make her mark as part of the literary establishment and of the world of publishing. In order to comprehend the specificity of the Cameroonian author's first fictional works, the relationship between language, as a tool to fictionalize the surrounding world, and prostitution, one of the main themes of the novel and also a way to survive in a depressed modern African environment, will be analyzed.