I currently hold the Andrew W Mellon Chair in Aesthetic Theory and Material Performance at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. My interests have been at the point of intersection of scholarly enquiry and artistic practice. I have a theoretical interest in the transformative capacities and limits of the human subject, and this has taken me into a range of distinct but interwoven enquiries. In the 1990s I curated a series of cultural responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa. It was for these events ("Fault Lines") that I wrote the play "Ubu and the Truth Commission" [for William Kentridge and Handspring Puppet Company]. The show had an extensive international reach. The period of transition in South Africa provoked an abiding interest in me, in the theory and performance of conversion. I have two published novels, “of Wild Dogs” and “The Transplant Men” and a play “After Cardenio” about an Anatomy At Oxford in 1650. I recently published the monograph, “William Kentridge: Being Led by the Nose” (U of Chicago).
Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, 1990
A la fin de son autobiographie Down Second Avenue (1959), Es' kia Mphahlele justifia... more A la fin de son autobiographie Down Second Avenue (1959), Es' kia Mphahlele justifiait en partie son depart en exil en expliquant que, d'un point de vue litt6raire, la situation sud-africaine ne donnait lieu qu'a des clich6s et inhibait toute creation. A l'inverse, un 6crivain ...
Njabulo S. Ndebele. "BEYOND 'PROTEST': NEW DIRECTIONS IN SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE.... more Njabulo S. Ndebele. "BEYOND 'PROTEST': NEW DIRECTIONS IN SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE." Criticism and Ideology: Second African Writers' Conference, Stockholm 1986. Ed. Kirsten Holst Petersen. Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, ...
In the early modern era, performance provided an instrument for the scrutiny of religious authent... more In the early modern era, performance provided an instrument for the scrutiny of religious authenticity, as confessional instruments were deployed to test for proofs of piety. The condition of the soul (or as the secularist might prefer it, the 'conscience') could be read via a semiotics of the body, with its rich syntax and vocabulary of expressive gesture and demeanor. Of course, it had long been presumed that religious convictions would necessarily make themselves manifest through embodied performance: that is in itself no new phenomenon. Yet consequent to the Reformation, there is a distinct traffic between secular and religious domains with regard to considerations about persuasions and performance. By the seventeenth century acting theory begins to be established, and arises in complex ways from the theological debates of the previous centuries. There is, moreover, an emerging sense of 'nation' as a geographical locus of a set of beliefs and practices. This paper considers the processes within theological and philosophical debates about belief; and how they intersect with new European conceptions of locality. Secularism is, in ways, an attempt to generate an authentic personhood that can reconcile questions of geography and conviction. Somewhat ironically, secularism itself becomes subject to the codes governing performance and authenticity in ways not wholly dissimilar to those that had marked the sincerity of the believer. The implications of this complex of beliefs and practices become profound across the following centuries. The revitalized significance of this 'territorialisation' of faiths and the staging of secularism surely has significance for our understanding of the recent displacement and geographic relocation of vast communities. But let us begin our enquiry by looking at the early modern emergence of a set of persuasions. Hamlet is depending on a set of givens when he asserts: "I have that within which passes show" (Act I Sc ii: 85). The Cartesian modeling of the dual person in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is here hypothesized as a split between inside and outside. During the dangerous years of religious crisis, it became natural to consider the inside as a site of authentic and enclaved truths, while the manifest outside (with its address to an other) is necessarily faux. Within these discursive habits, how might faith be staged? Could it be represented through an idiom of theatrics, drawn on to represent a 'true belief?' Should the outside be relied upon to represent the inside? And would the same instruments be deployed in the staging of secularism? In exploring this riddle, my paper considers a pair of weighty terms that begin to define an emerging set of discourses that cross between religious and secular domains of representation. Sincerity and hypocrisy, are dynamic and productive ideas that cross back and forth, drawing the secular and the sacred realms closer together. More specifically, the early modern history of performance makes evident a doubling of discourses across theatre arts and religious piety. My discussions will explore the ways in which such conceptual
I: The initiating event is a sound. WHISTLE FROM OFFSTAGE Subsequent to this whistle are two dist... more I: The initiating event is a sound. WHISTLE FROM OFFSTAGE Subsequent to this whistle are two distinct events: one is a lecture; the other takes place alongside the lectern and is a staging of a small scene. These simultaneous 'beats' are sketched below, and together they open a lecture-performance that presents a particular intersection of primate research, race theory, AI studies and theatre history. The lecture takes place alongside a scene in which a carved wooden chimpanzee puppet is manipulated by two puppeteers. [This is the vignette sketched immediately following this note.] The description of action in this paper (as distinct from the character-based spoken words) adhere to the conventions of the stage directions of a playtext. Such directions require a particular kind of discipline of mind: that is, the competence to read such directions with a creative capacity for a mental evocation of the event. This provides the point of departure for a theoretical question I explore, that is prompted by a reading of Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words I, a play that consists of a set of stage directions for a performer. These 'scenes' are here rendered in italic script. My paper is interested in considering the ways in which manifestly distinct discourses intersect, and become mutually constitutive, entangled; they figure over-determining modes of thought via a kind of osmotic transfusion. This porous intersection of ideas and modes suggests, for me, the ways in which intellectual histories and ideological habits inform one another, 'clouding the water', so to speak. The mutuality of informing
This paper is just published in Palgrave, Performing Secularity. It examines the history of the p... more This paper is just published in Palgrave, Performing Secularity. It examines the history of the performance of belief, as well as secular and religious identities.
This was the "Una's Lecture" I delivered at Berkeley in 2015. It considers performance, claims to... more This was the "Una's Lecture" I delivered at Berkeley in 2015. It considers performance, claims to truth, and strategies of rhetoric. The paper begins with Hobbes, and closes with an eye to recent Commissions and tribunals.
This is a catalogue essay to accompany the exhibition "Holdings" which I curated in Johannesburg,... more This is a catalogue essay to accompany the exhibition "Holdings" which I curated in Johannesburg, at the University of the Witwatersrand. The essay consider the ways in which the archive "holds on" to things of value, thereby both accruing value and acknowledging it in a recursive loop. Do we hold on to what we value? Or do we value things that we have held? The archive is a space of profound ambiguity in this matter. Circulation and stasis, too, can both be markers and bearers of value, in ways that might seem counter-intuitive.
In 1999 I wrote a review of Coetzee's novel "Disgrace" for the "Mail & Guardian" paper in South A... more In 1999 I wrote a review of Coetzee's novel "Disgrace" for the "Mail & Guardian" paper in South Africa. In the past year I have taught seminars on the work at the University of Leeds and at Berkeley, and have been prompted to some new considerations. I don't wish to write a full paper on the work, because I feel the review articulated much of my thinking about the novel. Nonetheless, I would wish to point out that the review was edited in publication, and is at points rather compressed. I no longer have access to that piece as originally written, and so choose to leave it as it was when published, in 1999. What is attached here are some additional notes on my recent thinking, along with the original review.
This paper explores conversion as a major motif in the history of the theory of the subject. Thea... more This paper explores conversion as a major motif in the history of the theory of the subject. Theatre history, theology, philosophy and art history provide intertextual and multidisciplinary modes of enquiry, in a consideration of the meaning of "sincerity" in the early modern era
Poison and Empire - this paper explores the technologies of competing epistemological systems acr... more Poison and Empire - this paper explores the technologies of competing epistemological systems across the thresholds of empire. Indigenous knowledge systems - exemplified here through a study of pharmacological uses as well as weaponry - are a profound threat to metropolitan assumptions about its own orders of understanding. The canny hermeneutics of Sherlock Holmes exemplify modernist logics of evidence and systematic thinking, in the imperial imagination.
Twain's remarkable novel provides a way into considerations of race and identity in the antebellu... more Twain's remarkable novel provides a way into considerations of race and identity in the antebellum South. This paper draws on psychoanalytic theory, race theory, post-colonial studies.
This paper examines an inter-cultural and transnational theatre experiment between world-renowned... more This paper examines an inter-cultural and transnational theatre experiment between world-renowned Handspring Puppet Company and the celebrated Coulibaly Puppet Company of Mali. It considers diplomatic relations between France and Egypt in the early nineteenth century and the transaction of Nature as Culture. It was a contribution to the Palgrave MacMillan "Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa" edited by Mark Fleishman
This paper is an exploration of puppetry arts and the writing and directing of a new work of thea... more This paper is an exploration of puppetry arts and the writing and directing of a new work of theatre arising from a commission to make a so-called "Missing Shakespeare play, "Cardenio". The work recounts the events surrounding the death by hanging of a young woman condemned in 1650 for infanticide. Her body was given to the medical scholars at Oxford for an Anatomy lesson. The case provides one of the most striking stories about the early Royal Society. The paper has been posted earlier but The copy here includes the images
This is the entry on Lionel Trilling for the new "Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics." The brief p... more This is the entry on Lionel Trilling for the new "Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics." The brief piece considers some of the key concerns in Trilling's work; situates him in relation to the account of Matthew Arnold, and his engagement with the anti-Semitism of Arnold's father, Thomas Arnold. It looks at Trilling's liberalism, and the years of the intellectual Cold War; as well as Trilling's work on sincerity.
This paper constitutes the introductory essay for "Handspring Puppet Company". The essay consider... more This paper constitutes the introductory essay for "Handspring Puppet Company". The essay considers the aesthetics and theatrical practices of Handspring, as well as the ethical and philosophical implications of the arts of puppetry.
Derrida's discussion of 'Pointure' sets in place a three-way philosophical encounter. This paper... more Derrida's discussion of 'Pointure' sets in place a three-way philosophical encounter. This paper uses the principle of "Pointure' to consider the interpenetration of persons in the tradition of the Trinity. It raises some questions about the three-in-one, in a consideration of the aesthetic implications of the shift from a medieval to an Albertian aesthetic practice in the West, and the significance for models of Personhood.
Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, 1990
A la fin de son autobiographie Down Second Avenue (1959), Es' kia Mphahlele justifia... more A la fin de son autobiographie Down Second Avenue (1959), Es' kia Mphahlele justifiait en partie son depart en exil en expliquant que, d'un point de vue litt6raire, la situation sud-africaine ne donnait lieu qu'a des clich6s et inhibait toute creation. A l'inverse, un 6crivain ...
Njabulo S. Ndebele. "BEYOND 'PROTEST': NEW DIRECTIONS IN SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE.... more Njabulo S. Ndebele. "BEYOND 'PROTEST': NEW DIRECTIONS IN SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE." Criticism and Ideology: Second African Writers' Conference, Stockholm 1986. Ed. Kirsten Holst Petersen. Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, ...
In the early modern era, performance provided an instrument for the scrutiny of religious authent... more In the early modern era, performance provided an instrument for the scrutiny of religious authenticity, as confessional instruments were deployed to test for proofs of piety. The condition of the soul (or as the secularist might prefer it, the 'conscience') could be read via a semiotics of the body, with its rich syntax and vocabulary of expressive gesture and demeanor. Of course, it had long been presumed that religious convictions would necessarily make themselves manifest through embodied performance: that is in itself no new phenomenon. Yet consequent to the Reformation, there is a distinct traffic between secular and religious domains with regard to considerations about persuasions and performance. By the seventeenth century acting theory begins to be established, and arises in complex ways from the theological debates of the previous centuries. There is, moreover, an emerging sense of 'nation' as a geographical locus of a set of beliefs and practices. This paper considers the processes within theological and philosophical debates about belief; and how they intersect with new European conceptions of locality. Secularism is, in ways, an attempt to generate an authentic personhood that can reconcile questions of geography and conviction. Somewhat ironically, secularism itself becomes subject to the codes governing performance and authenticity in ways not wholly dissimilar to those that had marked the sincerity of the believer. The implications of this complex of beliefs and practices become profound across the following centuries. The revitalized significance of this 'territorialisation' of faiths and the staging of secularism surely has significance for our understanding of the recent displacement and geographic relocation of vast communities. But let us begin our enquiry by looking at the early modern emergence of a set of persuasions. Hamlet is depending on a set of givens when he asserts: "I have that within which passes show" (Act I Sc ii: 85). The Cartesian modeling of the dual person in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is here hypothesized as a split between inside and outside. During the dangerous years of religious crisis, it became natural to consider the inside as a site of authentic and enclaved truths, while the manifest outside (with its address to an other) is necessarily faux. Within these discursive habits, how might faith be staged? Could it be represented through an idiom of theatrics, drawn on to represent a 'true belief?' Should the outside be relied upon to represent the inside? And would the same instruments be deployed in the staging of secularism? In exploring this riddle, my paper considers a pair of weighty terms that begin to define an emerging set of discourses that cross between religious and secular domains of representation. Sincerity and hypocrisy, are dynamic and productive ideas that cross back and forth, drawing the secular and the sacred realms closer together. More specifically, the early modern history of performance makes evident a doubling of discourses across theatre arts and religious piety. My discussions will explore the ways in which such conceptual
I: The initiating event is a sound. WHISTLE FROM OFFSTAGE Subsequent to this whistle are two dist... more I: The initiating event is a sound. WHISTLE FROM OFFSTAGE Subsequent to this whistle are two distinct events: one is a lecture; the other takes place alongside the lectern and is a staging of a small scene. These simultaneous 'beats' are sketched below, and together they open a lecture-performance that presents a particular intersection of primate research, race theory, AI studies and theatre history. The lecture takes place alongside a scene in which a carved wooden chimpanzee puppet is manipulated by two puppeteers. [This is the vignette sketched immediately following this note.] The description of action in this paper (as distinct from the character-based spoken words) adhere to the conventions of the stage directions of a playtext. Such directions require a particular kind of discipline of mind: that is, the competence to read such directions with a creative capacity for a mental evocation of the event. This provides the point of departure for a theoretical question I explore, that is prompted by a reading of Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words I, a play that consists of a set of stage directions for a performer. These 'scenes' are here rendered in italic script. My paper is interested in considering the ways in which manifestly distinct discourses intersect, and become mutually constitutive, entangled; they figure over-determining modes of thought via a kind of osmotic transfusion. This porous intersection of ideas and modes suggests, for me, the ways in which intellectual histories and ideological habits inform one another, 'clouding the water', so to speak. The mutuality of informing
This paper is just published in Palgrave, Performing Secularity. It examines the history of the p... more This paper is just published in Palgrave, Performing Secularity. It examines the history of the performance of belief, as well as secular and religious identities.
This was the "Una's Lecture" I delivered at Berkeley in 2015. It considers performance, claims to... more This was the "Una's Lecture" I delivered at Berkeley in 2015. It considers performance, claims to truth, and strategies of rhetoric. The paper begins with Hobbes, and closes with an eye to recent Commissions and tribunals.
This is a catalogue essay to accompany the exhibition "Holdings" which I curated in Johannesburg,... more This is a catalogue essay to accompany the exhibition "Holdings" which I curated in Johannesburg, at the University of the Witwatersrand. The essay consider the ways in which the archive "holds on" to things of value, thereby both accruing value and acknowledging it in a recursive loop. Do we hold on to what we value? Or do we value things that we have held? The archive is a space of profound ambiguity in this matter. Circulation and stasis, too, can both be markers and bearers of value, in ways that might seem counter-intuitive.
In 1999 I wrote a review of Coetzee's novel "Disgrace" for the "Mail & Guardian" paper in South A... more In 1999 I wrote a review of Coetzee's novel "Disgrace" for the "Mail & Guardian" paper in South Africa. In the past year I have taught seminars on the work at the University of Leeds and at Berkeley, and have been prompted to some new considerations. I don't wish to write a full paper on the work, because I feel the review articulated much of my thinking about the novel. Nonetheless, I would wish to point out that the review was edited in publication, and is at points rather compressed. I no longer have access to that piece as originally written, and so choose to leave it as it was when published, in 1999. What is attached here are some additional notes on my recent thinking, along with the original review.
This paper explores conversion as a major motif in the history of the theory of the subject. Thea... more This paper explores conversion as a major motif in the history of the theory of the subject. Theatre history, theology, philosophy and art history provide intertextual and multidisciplinary modes of enquiry, in a consideration of the meaning of "sincerity" in the early modern era
Poison and Empire - this paper explores the technologies of competing epistemological systems acr... more Poison and Empire - this paper explores the technologies of competing epistemological systems across the thresholds of empire. Indigenous knowledge systems - exemplified here through a study of pharmacological uses as well as weaponry - are a profound threat to metropolitan assumptions about its own orders of understanding. The canny hermeneutics of Sherlock Holmes exemplify modernist logics of evidence and systematic thinking, in the imperial imagination.
Twain's remarkable novel provides a way into considerations of race and identity in the antebellu... more Twain's remarkable novel provides a way into considerations of race and identity in the antebellum South. This paper draws on psychoanalytic theory, race theory, post-colonial studies.
This paper examines an inter-cultural and transnational theatre experiment between world-renowned... more This paper examines an inter-cultural and transnational theatre experiment between world-renowned Handspring Puppet Company and the celebrated Coulibaly Puppet Company of Mali. It considers diplomatic relations between France and Egypt in the early nineteenth century and the transaction of Nature as Culture. It was a contribution to the Palgrave MacMillan "Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa" edited by Mark Fleishman
This paper is an exploration of puppetry arts and the writing and directing of a new work of thea... more This paper is an exploration of puppetry arts and the writing and directing of a new work of theatre arising from a commission to make a so-called "Missing Shakespeare play, "Cardenio". The work recounts the events surrounding the death by hanging of a young woman condemned in 1650 for infanticide. Her body was given to the medical scholars at Oxford for an Anatomy lesson. The case provides one of the most striking stories about the early Royal Society. The paper has been posted earlier but The copy here includes the images
This is the entry on Lionel Trilling for the new "Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics." The brief p... more This is the entry on Lionel Trilling for the new "Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics." The brief piece considers some of the key concerns in Trilling's work; situates him in relation to the account of Matthew Arnold, and his engagement with the anti-Semitism of Arnold's father, Thomas Arnold. It looks at Trilling's liberalism, and the years of the intellectual Cold War; as well as Trilling's work on sincerity.
This paper constitutes the introductory essay for "Handspring Puppet Company". The essay consider... more This paper constitutes the introductory essay for "Handspring Puppet Company". The essay considers the aesthetics and theatrical practices of Handspring, as well as the ethical and philosophical implications of the arts of puppetry.
Derrida's discussion of 'Pointure' sets in place a three-way philosophical encounter. This paper... more Derrida's discussion of 'Pointure' sets in place a three-way philosophical encounter. This paper uses the principle of "Pointure' to consider the interpenetration of persons in the tradition of the Trinity. It raises some questions about the three-in-one, in a consideration of the aesthetic implications of the shift from a medieval to an Albertian aesthetic practice in the West, and the significance for models of Personhood.
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