Annalisa Oboe

The TRC Women's Hearings as Performance and Protest in the New South Africa

On 28 and 29 July 1997, a special committee of South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard the testimonies of women who had been abused and brutalized during the years of apartheid rule by white South Africans. Seizing this unique opportunity to liberate their minds and voices, long suppressed by a heartless patriarchal system, the women told their tales within the traditional frame of oral performances. But the lack of a truly gender-sensitive format forced their testimonies into evasive strategies born partly of an ingrained resentment of male domination and partly of codes of secrecy under which blacks waged a long military struggle against the system.

“As there are hyena-men and panther-men …”: Chris Abani, Pieter Hugo, and the shocking life of images

This article looks at the combined work of South African photographer Pieter Hugo and of “global Igbo” author Chris Abani in the volume Nollywood (2009). In their creative work both artists usually strive to see beyond established aesthetic and ethical paradigms and to bypass conventional modes of representation, in order to zoom in on adventurous and often shocking areas of existence in both life and art in Africa. In his collection of photographs known as the Nollywood series, Hugo engages with the Nigerian video film industry in collaboration with local actors and make-up artists in order to recreate the workings and general atmosphere of Nollywood films. Their cooperation produces a series of violently surreal, hallucinating tableaux. The volume features an introduction by Chris Abani which aptly evokes Nollywood’s history and production, and provides a key to reading Hugo’s creative rendition of the phenomenon. Marked by an incessant effort to move beyond the limits of both literary and cultural representation, Abani’s work is a highly appropriate contribution to the artistic experimentation in the collection. This article argues that the visual and textual works of Hugo and Abani both revisit and remove – through sometimes disquietingly violent aesthetical intervention – the borders that are kept in place by societal control on culture and the arts.

Arte di tenebra? Paul Gilroy e il discorso razziale nella cultura inglese contemporanea

Il contributo e un’introduzione critica al saggio Art of Darkness dell’intellettuale inglese Paul Gilroy, che riflette sul movimento delle arti “nere” o black in Gran Bretagna nel secondo Novecento e discute il rapporto fra “razza”, produzione artistica e cultura nazionale in termini che possono essere interessanti anche per altre realta europee contemporanee, inclusa l’Italia. La lettura proposta illustra il tipo di ricerca e il punto di vista teorico prospettati da Gilroy tra la fine degli anni Ottanta e l’inizio degli anni Novanta, che sono in seguito diventati una pietra miliare degli studi transnazionali nelle scienze umane e sociali. Art of Darkness viene letto nel rapporto con il pensiero postcoloniale e soprattutto nella continuita con la prima monografia dello studioso, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987), sullo stato dei rapporti razziali nel Regno Unito fra gli anni Settanta e Ottanta, e con quello che a tutt’oggi rimane il suo testo piu famoso, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), sull’Atlantico nero come controcultura della modernita.