The creative and intellectual treatment of the experiences, conditions, and aspirations of black people never fit quiet neatly within the paradigms of ‘established’ disciplines and institutions. These paradigmatic negations form part of the fastidious exclusions and denials of the reality and totality of the black perspective and politics of any given moment. In order to fully appreciate the potentialities of…  

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…

What should be the adequate compensation for suffering? The connections between this question, the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995) and the South African transitional justice mechanisms of the mid-nineties are drawn, not least, by Derrida himself. During his lecture tour of South Africa in 1998, Derrida chose to focus on the aspect of forgiveness; fittingly so, as…

Ellen Gallagher, a painter by training, works with “chaos as advertising” (Goodeve 2005:40). Her matter is specifically the magazine advertising directed at the black culture of the “Negro self-improvement” movement of the fifties and sixties (Goodeve 2005). In terms of commercial messages, issues of beauty seem to focus on body type, skin tone, hair texture, and the color of one’s skin is the least…

The physical and material inclusion of hair in art is a contemporary phenomenon and tests the boundaries of traditional art, the real hair in an art piece is an intrusion of reality into what is more comfortably viewed as a discrete art object. The inclusion of hair recalls human presence, social interactions, and physical mortality (Klayman 1998). Perhaps no contemporary black artist is…

This short paper is a measurable attempt to mediate the real and perceived gaps that locate Africa based artists to the peripheries. It asks where the opportunity for self-representation are, and looks at the engaged strategies of interpretative recovery that have the potential to demystify and delineate the zones of enunciation that are usually so fraught with gross misreading’s. In…

ABSTRACT: ART FROM THE TOWNSHIP When investigating art from the sociological point of view it is clear that we deal with several sets of interdependencies simultaneously, there is the interrelationship between the individual artist and his art, the interrelationship between the artist and his society and culture. Since these two sets of interrelationships are not mutually exclusive, they also exist…