The expectation, given the supposed establishment and progressive maturation of post-1994 democratic structures and systems in South Africa, is that grotesque violence should not be possible on the scale  that we are currently experiencing. Since 2004, South Africa has witnessed a series of fairly harrowing manifestations of racism, ones which we are regularly confronted with in the media. Rather than…

On Black women’s Creativity and the Future Imperfect: Thoughts, Propositions, Issues[1] Black female practitioners in the arts are fundamentally embedded in a context that has challenged their very right to exist, and the resulting absence of black women in art has been a self-evidential critique of this tendency in the discipline. Maria Lugones in “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” begins her essay thus:…

A word from everyday language, self-evident in literary studies, metaphorically used in anthropology, generalized in semiotics, ambivalently circulating in art history and film studies, and shunned in musicology, the concept of [insert own word here] seems to ask for trouble. Bal 2009 21   Faucault establishes in The Order of Things the difficulty and the precarious nature of the ‘human sciences’ and their uncertainty as sciences through “their dangerous familiarity with philosophy, their ill-defined reliance upon other domains of knowledge, their perpetually secondary and derived character, and also their claim to universality”[1]. As a field the humanities proceed in accordance with models or concepts borrowed from biology, economics, and the…