This essay critically responds to recent calls to decolonise the classics. In rejecting claims ab... more This essay critically responds to recent calls to decolonise the classics. In rejecting claims about the inherent value of certain literary works, I unravel my socially situated reading and responses, and therefore counter assumptions that literary value or acts of reading can be universalised. I reflect on personal encounters with Jane Austen’s novels and Emily Dickinson’s poetry, demonstrating how this generated my cognitive, sensory and imaginative growth. Analysed memories of discovering and first reading particular works are connected to a critique of prescriptive decolonial discourse. The essay illustrates this by focusing on readers’ embodied encounters with certain books, affective responses and heterogeneous subject positions. These can lead to their finding emotionally satisfying, edifying and inspirational meanings – irrespective of the historical, geopolitical or cultural worlds delineated by the works’ authors.
<p>Although the focus of this chapter is a particular recent photographer, its broader conc... more <p>Although the focus of this chapter is a particular recent photographer, its broader concern is with how performative African identities have been and continue to be imagined as anatomically and culturally generalized bodies. Several writers have identified the simultaneous growth of photography, ethnography, and colonizing projects from the nineteenth century. The photographed subject was frozen as an object for others' scrutiny, with photography reinforcing the huge divide between the meanings attached to the surfaces of the bodies of African people and ideas about whiteness and the West. The chapter focuses on how anthropological constructs and codes perist in ostensibly postcolonial and counterhegemonic representations. It analyzes the contemporary photographs of the internationally acclaimed South African photographer Zanele Muholi, especially images from her "Faces and Phases" photographs of black lesbians and transmen. On one hand, the portraits are powerful political statements: they portray the dignity and courage of certain lesbians and transmen, make a marginalized community visible in a heterosexist and racist public sphere, and gesture toward meanings of African identities that are radically at odds with both colonial and (patriarchal) nationalist identities. On the other hand, viewers are invited to recognize the agency and public visibility of the subject in ways similar to how viewers of colonial and nationalist performances have been encouraged to recognize and categorize the bodies of authentic African women and men.</p>
Traditionally, human security has been explored using gender-blind notions of individual, communa... more Traditionally, human security has been explored using gender-blind notions of individual, communal and national wellbeing. Although gender is routinely invoked in current scholarship and practice, its inclusion is often formulaic and ad hoc. Frequently, ‘gender’ is mechanically equated with ‘women’, and the writers tend to add women to existing accounts by superficially and erratically invoking their experiences.
Gender Studies and the New Academic Governance, 2017
Internationally, neo-liberalism shapes universities’ institutional cultures and research practice... more Internationally, neo-liberalism shapes universities’ institutional cultures and research practices in similar ways. Neo-liberalism also augments and redeploys core-periphery relations, creating market-based and developmentalist knowledge-producing networks that pose distinctive challenges for feminists in different geopolitical spaces. By analysing the location of current feminist work in South African universities, this article considers how an analysis of globalisation’s effects in specific contexts can help deepen transnational feminist critiques of the neo-liberal academy. The article is also concerned with how transnational feminism can challenge the entrenched power relations that global neo-liberal research and knowledge production reproduces.
Abstract. Discursive Challenges for African Feminisms. In what follows, I draw attention to the n... more Abstract. Discursive Challenges for African Feminisms. In what follows, I draw attention to the necessity for connecting national and continental feminist challenges to those that confront feminisms globally. Two main discursive manifestations of the neo-liberal co-optation of feminism are explored: the growth of moderate rights-based discourses; and secondly, the co-optation and adulteration of gender research and teaching. While there are important differ-ences in the way that these trends have evolved and currently function in dif-ferent parts of the world, I stress that they are politically connected. In the third and final section, I focus on ways in which some feminist commentators are invigorating the language and practice of feminism to contest our present context of hegemonised knowledge and information. key words: Africa, feminism, gender, philosophy, post-colonial, globalization
We are reminded by scholars, scholar activists and activists that our current landscape of resist... more We are reminded by scholars, scholar activists and activists that our current landscape of resistance and performance around gender and sexuality is considerable, especially relative to the moral and political repression before the mid 1990s. Among other sources, Deborah Posel’s much cited article, “Getting the nation talking about sex': reflections on the discursive constitution of sexuality in South Africa since 1994”, much of the work of feminist academics like Pula Gqola and Gabeba Baderoon, artists such as Zanele Muholi, or activist sites such as Gender Dynamix attest to this liberated landscape. (Some of my work also insists on this, with studies of Muholi, Masondo and popular culture, for example, arguing that South African subjects have discovered inventive ways to perform and imagine gender and sexual freedoms beyond the scripts bequeathed by patriarchal and heterosexist colonialism and apartheid.)
This essay critically responds to recent calls to decolonise the classics. In rejecting claims ab... more This essay critically responds to recent calls to decolonise the classics. In rejecting claims about the inherent value of certain literary works, I unravel my socially situated reading and responses, and therefore counter assumptions that literary value or acts of reading can be universalised. I reflect on personal encounters with Jane Austen’s novels and Emily Dickinson’s poetry, demonstrating how this generated my cognitive, sensory and imaginative growth. Analysed memories of discovering and first reading particular works are connected to a critique of prescriptive decolonial discourse. The essay illustrates this by focusing on readers’ embodied encounters with certain books, affective responses and heterogeneous subject positions. These can lead to their finding emotionally satisfying, edifying and inspirational meanings – irrespective of the historical, geopolitical or cultural worlds delineated by the works’ authors.
<p>Although the focus of this chapter is a particular recent photographer, its broader conc... more <p>Although the focus of this chapter is a particular recent photographer, its broader concern is with how performative African identities have been and continue to be imagined as anatomically and culturally generalized bodies. Several writers have identified the simultaneous growth of photography, ethnography, and colonizing projects from the nineteenth century. The photographed subject was frozen as an object for others' scrutiny, with photography reinforcing the huge divide between the meanings attached to the surfaces of the bodies of African people and ideas about whiteness and the West. The chapter focuses on how anthropological constructs and codes perist in ostensibly postcolonial and counterhegemonic representations. It analyzes the contemporary photographs of the internationally acclaimed South African photographer Zanele Muholi, especially images from her "Faces and Phases" photographs of black lesbians and transmen. On one hand, the portraits are powerful political statements: they portray the dignity and courage of certain lesbians and transmen, make a marginalized community visible in a heterosexist and racist public sphere, and gesture toward meanings of African identities that are radically at odds with both colonial and (patriarchal) nationalist identities. On the other hand, viewers are invited to recognize the agency and public visibility of the subject in ways similar to how viewers of colonial and nationalist performances have been encouraged to recognize and categorize the bodies of authentic African women and men.</p>
Traditionally, human security has been explored using gender-blind notions of individual, communa... more Traditionally, human security has been explored using gender-blind notions of individual, communal and national wellbeing. Although gender is routinely invoked in current scholarship and practice, its inclusion is often formulaic and ad hoc. Frequently, ‘gender’ is mechanically equated with ‘women’, and the writers tend to add women to existing accounts by superficially and erratically invoking their experiences.
Gender Studies and the New Academic Governance, 2017
Internationally, neo-liberalism shapes universities’ institutional cultures and research practice... more Internationally, neo-liberalism shapes universities’ institutional cultures and research practices in similar ways. Neo-liberalism also augments and redeploys core-periphery relations, creating market-based and developmentalist knowledge-producing networks that pose distinctive challenges for feminists in different geopolitical spaces. By analysing the location of current feminist work in South African universities, this article considers how an analysis of globalisation’s effects in specific contexts can help deepen transnational feminist critiques of the neo-liberal academy. The article is also concerned with how transnational feminism can challenge the entrenched power relations that global neo-liberal research and knowledge production reproduces.
Abstract. Discursive Challenges for African Feminisms. In what follows, I draw attention to the n... more Abstract. Discursive Challenges for African Feminisms. In what follows, I draw attention to the necessity for connecting national and continental feminist challenges to those that confront feminisms globally. Two main discursive manifestations of the neo-liberal co-optation of feminism are explored: the growth of moderate rights-based discourses; and secondly, the co-optation and adulteration of gender research and teaching. While there are important differ-ences in the way that these trends have evolved and currently function in dif-ferent parts of the world, I stress that they are politically connected. In the third and final section, I focus on ways in which some feminist commentators are invigorating the language and practice of feminism to contest our present context of hegemonised knowledge and information. key words: Africa, feminism, gender, philosophy, post-colonial, globalization
We are reminded by scholars, scholar activists and activists that our current landscape of resist... more We are reminded by scholars, scholar activists and activists that our current landscape of resistance and performance around gender and sexuality is considerable, especially relative to the moral and political repression before the mid 1990s. Among other sources, Deborah Posel’s much cited article, “Getting the nation talking about sex': reflections on the discursive constitution of sexuality in South Africa since 1994”, much of the work of feminist academics like Pula Gqola and Gabeba Baderoon, artists such as Zanele Muholi, or activist sites such as Gender Dynamix attest to this liberated landscape. (Some of my work also insists on this, with studies of Muholi, Masondo and popular culture, for example, arguing that South African subjects have discovered inventive ways to perform and imagine gender and sexual freedoms beyond the scripts bequeathed by patriarchal and heterosexist colonialism and apartheid.)
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