Kirk B. Sides is Assistant Professor of Global Black Literatures whose research focuses on race, the environment and climate change in the literatures of Africa and its Diaspora.
His work is interested in questions of the early formation of African literature in the twentieth century, as well as the long history of ecological thinking and environmental writing from Africa and the Diaspora.
He is currently finishing a book project that looks at representations of race, climate crisis and environmental apocalypse in African literature and film.
A second project on 'global apartheid' traces an intellectual history of South African apartheid, and maps its transcolonial origins in German anthropology and Jim Crow Segregation policies.
This paper argues that Zakes Mdas novel Cion (2007), in imagining an Atlantic world not overdete... more This paper argues that Zakes Mdas novel Cion (2007), in imagining an Atlantic world not overdetermined by the essentialisms of transatlantic slavery, un-maps the hemispheric boundaries between North and South. In Cion Mda transplants his protagonist Toloki, who in his earlier incarnation as the Professional Mourner of Ways of Dying (1995) offered a complicated prognosis on the racial and even historical ills of a post-apartheid South Africa in transition, across the Atlantic to the rural environs of small-town Ohio. With almost anthropological attention to the details of his new life-world, Toloki articulates a South African perspective on the cultural and aesthetic politics of an America South still negotiating the vicissitudes of slavery. I suggest that in moving beyond the memorialization of history as a function of race, and instead focusing on the innovative aesthetic potential of memory, Mda charts a transnational southern imaginary that unsettles the materialism of previous articulations of the Black Atlantic. The hegemonic categories and cartographies of the Black Atlantic are undone as the novel offers a reading of post-slavery America from a post-Apartheid South African perspective, two souths of the Atlantic world that complicate the racial mappings of postcolonialism.
This article argues that the 2010 short film Pumzi is an exploration of post-crisis, ecological r... more This article argues that the 2010 short film Pumzi is an exploration of post-crisis, ecological rehabilitation that asks for a rethinking of narratives modes for representing climate change. Employing seeds and sowing as ecological tropes, Pumzi explores how we create and carry narrative in relation to a rapidly changing earth. Both the multi-scalar geographical expanses as well as the deep geological timelines of Anthropocene discourse mean that placing the human in relation to its post-crisis environment requires more collective notions of what narrative production and world (re-)building mean. This article argues that Pumzi cultivates a sympoietic—making together—mode of storytelling in an age of environmental crisis and planet-death as a well to both tell new stories and to think future worlds. In this way, Pumzi offers us a vision of an afrofuturist eco-ethics based in narrative practice.
Abstract This paper brings together histories of race, both in the United States and in South Afr... more Abstract This paper brings together histories of race, both in the United States and in South Africa, in order to think about how slavery, segregation, and apartheid, as well as responses to these, have shaped ideas about national identity and belonging. In it I explore the ways these two histories of racial oppression – both slavery and segregation in the US, as well as segregation and apartheid in South Africa – share not only common and overlapping discursive histories, but can be seen as part of larger transatlantic dialogs on race, racial governance, and the boundaries of national belonging. The paper attempts to chart a history of exchange, between South Africa and the US, of ideas on racial policy and race thinking. This different genealogy for crossing the Atlantic will offer ways to think together events such as the shootings in Ferguson in the US and the shooting of miners at Marikana in South Africa, as related instances of how race – as defining feature of neoliberalism – continues to function in both places.
This article will argue that Zakes Mda’s 2007 novel Cion stages a
dialog, one where two “Souths” ... more This article will argue that Zakes Mda’s 2007 novel Cion stages a dialog, one where two “Souths” – South Africa and the American South – speak to one another and give a critical voice to an underacknowledged history of transatlantic discursive exchange on race and racial governance. Mda’s fictional South African critique, of an America still struggling with the cultural and political legacies of slavery, gestures towards a history of exchange between the two countries that in many ways is representative of a more global dialog on racial segregation during the first half of the twentieth century – of which both southern (US) segregation and apartheid are seminal examples. Moreover, this article explores various conceptualizations of race as well as the governance of racial relations as they have been articulated through ecological imaginaries, and especially between South Africa and the Southern United States over the course of the twentieth century. In this article, I argue that not only can apartheid (as well as pre-apartheid segregation) be rethought of as part of a global conversation on race and thus less as a South African anomaly, but also that the United States through its examples of various racialist technologies was highly influential across the colonial and apartheid worlds.
On 26 December 1940, 1 580 central European Jewish refugees were imprisoned on the
Indian Ocean i... more On 26 December 1940, 1 580 central European Jewish refugees were imprisoned on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius by the British colonial government after attempting to enterPalestine illegally. As they could not be repatriated to Nazi-occupied Europe and because no other country would grant them safe harbour, the British government arranged to have the group detained in Mauritius, an island in the tropical zone roughly 500 miles east of Madagascar, then still a British colony. It is here, in Beau Bassin, that the group of now stateless, Jewish refugees would be detained for the duration of World War II, leaving an impact on the island and its people, as well as the South African Jewish community. However, it is an impact that has remained largely unexplored. In doing so, we propose to map an Indian Ocean archive in order to think about the global impact of both the Holocaust and World War II, and especially for the ways in which this historical moment, otherwise understood largely as a ‘European’ event, actually played out on a larger stage of colonial and postcolonial geopolitical machinations. What, we ask, does it mean to think about Europe, 1939–1945 from the Indian Ocean?
Invited conference review of ethnographic and documentary film program at the Arts Council of Afr... more Invited conference review of ethnographic and documentary film program at the Arts Council of African Studies Association Fifteenth Triennial: UCLA, March 23–27, 2011.
Films reviewed include: Sandrine Loncke, Dance with the Wodaabes (2011); Elizabeth Perrill, Ukucwebzela: To Shine (2010); and Susan Vogel, Fold, Crumple, Crush: The Art of El Anatsui (2011).
In "First Word: Reports from the Fifteenth Triennial Symposium of African Arts," by S. Anderson, T. Bick, L. Gomoli, S. Rosenfield, and K. Sides, 1, 4–9, African Arts (Fall 2011), 5–6.
This paper argues that Zakes Mdas novel Cion (2007), in imagining an Atlantic world not overdete... more This paper argues that Zakes Mdas novel Cion (2007), in imagining an Atlantic world not overdetermined by the essentialisms of transatlantic slavery, un-maps the hemispheric boundaries between North and South. In Cion Mda transplants his protagonist Toloki, who in his earlier incarnation as the Professional Mourner of Ways of Dying (1995) offered a complicated prognosis on the racial and even historical ills of a post-apartheid South Africa in transition, across the Atlantic to the rural environs of small-town Ohio. With almost anthropological attention to the details of his new life-world, Toloki articulates a South African perspective on the cultural and aesthetic politics of an America South still negotiating the vicissitudes of slavery. I suggest that in moving beyond the memorialization of history as a function of race, and instead focusing on the innovative aesthetic potential of memory, Mda charts a transnational southern imaginary that unsettles the materialism of previous articulations of the Black Atlantic. The hegemonic categories and cartographies of the Black Atlantic are undone as the novel offers a reading of post-slavery America from a post-Apartheid South African perspective, two souths of the Atlantic world that complicate the racial mappings of postcolonialism.
This article argues that the 2010 short film Pumzi is an exploration of post-crisis, ecological r... more This article argues that the 2010 short film Pumzi is an exploration of post-crisis, ecological rehabilitation that asks for a rethinking of narratives modes for representing climate change. Employing seeds and sowing as ecological tropes, Pumzi explores how we create and carry narrative in relation to a rapidly changing earth. Both the multi-scalar geographical expanses as well as the deep geological timelines of Anthropocene discourse mean that placing the human in relation to its post-crisis environment requires more collective notions of what narrative production and world (re-)building mean. This article argues that Pumzi cultivates a sympoietic—making together—mode of storytelling in an age of environmental crisis and planet-death as a well to both tell new stories and to think future worlds. In this way, Pumzi offers us a vision of an afrofuturist eco-ethics based in narrative practice.
Abstract This paper brings together histories of race, both in the United States and in South Afr... more Abstract This paper brings together histories of race, both in the United States and in South Africa, in order to think about how slavery, segregation, and apartheid, as well as responses to these, have shaped ideas about national identity and belonging. In it I explore the ways these two histories of racial oppression – both slavery and segregation in the US, as well as segregation and apartheid in South Africa – share not only common and overlapping discursive histories, but can be seen as part of larger transatlantic dialogs on race, racial governance, and the boundaries of national belonging. The paper attempts to chart a history of exchange, between South Africa and the US, of ideas on racial policy and race thinking. This different genealogy for crossing the Atlantic will offer ways to think together events such as the shootings in Ferguson in the US and the shooting of miners at Marikana in South Africa, as related instances of how race – as defining feature of neoliberalism – continues to function in both places.
This article will argue that Zakes Mda’s 2007 novel Cion stages a
dialog, one where two “Souths” ... more This article will argue that Zakes Mda’s 2007 novel Cion stages a dialog, one where two “Souths” – South Africa and the American South – speak to one another and give a critical voice to an underacknowledged history of transatlantic discursive exchange on race and racial governance. Mda’s fictional South African critique, of an America still struggling with the cultural and political legacies of slavery, gestures towards a history of exchange between the two countries that in many ways is representative of a more global dialog on racial segregation during the first half of the twentieth century – of which both southern (US) segregation and apartheid are seminal examples. Moreover, this article explores various conceptualizations of race as well as the governance of racial relations as they have been articulated through ecological imaginaries, and especially between South Africa and the Southern United States over the course of the twentieth century. In this article, I argue that not only can apartheid (as well as pre-apartheid segregation) be rethought of as part of a global conversation on race and thus less as a South African anomaly, but also that the United States through its examples of various racialist technologies was highly influential across the colonial and apartheid worlds.
On 26 December 1940, 1 580 central European Jewish refugees were imprisoned on the
Indian Ocean i... more On 26 December 1940, 1 580 central European Jewish refugees were imprisoned on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius by the British colonial government after attempting to enterPalestine illegally. As they could not be repatriated to Nazi-occupied Europe and because no other country would grant them safe harbour, the British government arranged to have the group detained in Mauritius, an island in the tropical zone roughly 500 miles east of Madagascar, then still a British colony. It is here, in Beau Bassin, that the group of now stateless, Jewish refugees would be detained for the duration of World War II, leaving an impact on the island and its people, as well as the South African Jewish community. However, it is an impact that has remained largely unexplored. In doing so, we propose to map an Indian Ocean archive in order to think about the global impact of both the Holocaust and World War II, and especially for the ways in which this historical moment, otherwise understood largely as a ‘European’ event, actually played out on a larger stage of colonial and postcolonial geopolitical machinations. What, we ask, does it mean to think about Europe, 1939–1945 from the Indian Ocean?
Invited conference review of ethnographic and documentary film program at the Arts Council of Afr... more Invited conference review of ethnographic and documentary film program at the Arts Council of African Studies Association Fifteenth Triennial: UCLA, March 23–27, 2011.
Films reviewed include: Sandrine Loncke, Dance with the Wodaabes (2011); Elizabeth Perrill, Ukucwebzela: To Shine (2010); and Susan Vogel, Fold, Crumple, Crush: The Art of El Anatsui (2011).
In "First Word: Reports from the Fifteenth Triennial Symposium of African Arts," by S. Anderson, T. Bick, L. Gomoli, S. Rosenfield, and K. Sides, 1, 4–9, African Arts (Fall 2011), 5–6.
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Papers by Kirk Sides
dialog, one where two “Souths” – South Africa and the American
South – speak to one another and give a critical voice to an underacknowledged
history of transatlantic discursive exchange on race
and racial governance. Mda’s fictional South African critique, of an
America still struggling with the cultural and political legacies of
slavery, gestures towards a history of exchange between the two
countries that in many ways is representative of a more global dialog
on racial segregation during the first half of the twentieth century –
of which both southern (US) segregation and apartheid are seminal
examples. Moreover, this article explores various conceptualizations
of race as well as the governance of racial relations as they have been
articulated through ecological imaginaries, and especially between
South Africa and the Southern United States over the course of the
twentieth century. In this article, I argue that not only can apartheid (as
well as pre-apartheid segregation) be rethought of as part of a global
conversation on race and thus less as a South African anomaly, but
also that the United States through its examples of various racialist
technologies was highly influential across the colonial and apartheid
worlds.
Indian Ocean island of Mauritius by the British colonial government after attempting to enterPalestine illegally. As they could not be repatriated to Nazi-occupied Europe and because no other country would grant them safe harbour, the British government arranged to have the group detained in Mauritius, an island in the tropical zone roughly 500 miles east of Madagascar, then still a British colony. It is here, in Beau Bassin, that the group of now stateless, Jewish refugees would be detained for the duration of World War II, leaving an impact on the island and its people, as well as the South African Jewish community. However, it is an impact that has remained largely unexplored. In doing so, we propose to map an Indian Ocean archive in order to think about the global impact of both the Holocaust and World War II, and especially for the ways in which this historical moment, otherwise understood largely as a ‘European’ event, actually played out on a larger stage of colonial and postcolonial geopolitical machinations. What, we ask, does it mean to think about Europe, 1939–1945 from the Indian Ocean?
Films reviewed include: Sandrine Loncke, Dance with the Wodaabes (2011); Elizabeth Perrill, Ukucwebzela: To Shine (2010); and Susan Vogel, Fold, Crumple, Crush: The Art of El Anatsui (2011).
In "First Word: Reports from the Fifteenth Triennial Symposium of African Arts," by S. Anderson, T. Bick, L. Gomoli, S. Rosenfield, and K. Sides, 1, 4–9, African Arts (Fall 2011), 5–6.
dialog, one where two “Souths” – South Africa and the American
South – speak to one another and give a critical voice to an underacknowledged
history of transatlantic discursive exchange on race
and racial governance. Mda’s fictional South African critique, of an
America still struggling with the cultural and political legacies of
slavery, gestures towards a history of exchange between the two
countries that in many ways is representative of a more global dialog
on racial segregation during the first half of the twentieth century –
of which both southern (US) segregation and apartheid are seminal
examples. Moreover, this article explores various conceptualizations
of race as well as the governance of racial relations as they have been
articulated through ecological imaginaries, and especially between
South Africa and the Southern United States over the course of the
twentieth century. In this article, I argue that not only can apartheid (as
well as pre-apartheid segregation) be rethought of as part of a global
conversation on race and thus less as a South African anomaly, but
also that the United States through its examples of various racialist
technologies was highly influential across the colonial and apartheid
worlds.
Indian Ocean island of Mauritius by the British colonial government after attempting to enterPalestine illegally. As they could not be repatriated to Nazi-occupied Europe and because no other country would grant them safe harbour, the British government arranged to have the group detained in Mauritius, an island in the tropical zone roughly 500 miles east of Madagascar, then still a British colony. It is here, in Beau Bassin, that the group of now stateless, Jewish refugees would be detained for the duration of World War II, leaving an impact on the island and its people, as well as the South African Jewish community. However, it is an impact that has remained largely unexplored. In doing so, we propose to map an Indian Ocean archive in order to think about the global impact of both the Holocaust and World War II, and especially for the ways in which this historical moment, otherwise understood largely as a ‘European’ event, actually played out on a larger stage of colonial and postcolonial geopolitical machinations. What, we ask, does it mean to think about Europe, 1939–1945 from the Indian Ocean?
Films reviewed include: Sandrine Loncke, Dance with the Wodaabes (2011); Elizabeth Perrill, Ukucwebzela: To Shine (2010); and Susan Vogel, Fold, Crumple, Crush: The Art of El Anatsui (2011).
In "First Word: Reports from the Fifteenth Triennial Symposium of African Arts," by S. Anderson, T. Bick, L. Gomoli, S. Rosenfield, and K. Sides, 1, 4–9, African Arts (Fall 2011), 5–6.