Arnold Shepperson

Ethics: a radical justice approach

This kind of preamble to any Code of Ethics overcomes all those hoary old arguments about the publics right to know, the so-called free-flow of information, and the conflict between Eurocentric and Afrocentric values.

Restructuring the industry: South African cinema beyond Apartheid

Contemporary film policy generally focuses on questions concerning content, representation, and profitability. Content in this case covers narrative, documentary, educational and other kinds of film and television. Representation is somewhat stickier, as if debates about content are not themselves subject to more than their fair share of controversy. What or who is represented in the content? Does this representation do justice or injustice to some or other community?

Media in Africa Political, Cultural and Theoretical Trajectories in the Global Environment

This article tackles assumptions made by Louise Bourgault in her pioneering book, Mass Media in Sub-Saharan Africa. The article discusses her claims about African journalism in relation to her engagement with western approaches, and with regard to issues of orality, the Shannon and Weaver communication model and to the megadiscipline of media studies. Short case studies are provided of the emergence of print media in several African countries (Nigeria, Ghana, Zambia, Kenya and South Africa), with the South African analysis looking more in-depth at the political economy of print media in the context of post-apartheid ideologies. The article concludes by positioning media studies in Africa against western media studies, and media studies as a ‘megadiscipline’, the intention being to account for and explain some of the disparities between North—South media studies and print media economies.

Eyes left! Some comments on Christo van Staden's ‘Claiming the African Mind’

SUMMARY This commentary piece charts the ways in which cultural studies, both in relation to Communication Studies and other disciplines, has emerged over some 20 years in South Africa. This development is considered in contrast with Christo van Stadens commentary piece ‘Claiming the African mind’ in Communicatio (vol 22 no 2, pp 71–76). After tracing social, political and intellectual origins of one strand of cultural studies in South Africa, that which has evolved at the Centre for Cultural and Media Studies (CCMS) at the University of Natal, the article recounts some of the considerations which have emerged for the practice of interdisciplinary cultural studies since 1990. The article concludes by outlining some of the efforts under way in CCMS to confront these challenges in the spirit of the Centres previous approaches and attitudes.

Research to do, results to sell: Enabling subjects and researchers

Abstract The nature of the encounter and exchange between researchers and subject communities is complex. The highly researched traditionalist ≠Khomani community in the Northern Cape, South Africa, has come to perceive researchers as often exploitative. The community expresses the expectation that research should result in immediate financial benefit for them. This paper addresses these perceptions and examines participatory research methods that ensure that marginalised voices are heard and represented. In so doing, we discuss the uses of cultural studies in development discourses

State of the discipline communication studies in South Africa

Abstract This article is an abridged version of a longer report commissioned in 1999 by the National Research Foundation (NRF) on the State of the Discipline: Communication Studies. The study reports on the challenges facing the discipline during the post-apartheid, post-disciplinary era. The report deals with communication in general, but focuses on journalism and mass communication teaching. The findings examine how practitioners teaching the discipline responded, especially with regard to issues of megadisciplinarity. The article offers a series of recommendations aimed at both opening up the discipline organizationally, and creating more focus in terms of how practitioners can improve their engagement with the subject matter in the southern African context.

Re-Semiotizing the South African Democratic Project: The African Renaissance

This article reviews the relationship between the semiotic implications of the emerging concept of the African Renaissance, and the historical trajectory of semiotic studies in South Africa. Linked with the residual ideological territories occupied under the rubrics of ‘semiotics’ and/or ‘semiology’ are the ways these discourses have been re-articulated or re-presented within the politics of the post-apartheid era. As a concept of the ‘post’, therefore, the semiotic implications of a projective strategy like the African Renaissance require more than the mindless dyadism of linguistic semiology. The article sketches the outline of the case for a radical appropriation of the semiotics embedded in C.S. Peirces pragmatism as a way of constituting the reality of ‘Renaissance’ concepts in terms of a Task. The place of semiotics within the broader philosophical and analytical programme is illustrated by means of a table that links semiotics, pragmatism, and radical theory. The table indicates how the issues discussed in this article can be seen to fall under a schema that foregrounds Peirces realization that aesthetic and ethical concepts are prior to those based purely on logic. As such, therefore, the article suggests that topics in social or cultural semiotics are more readily amenable to semiotic interpretation and analysis under a pragmatic rather than a linguistic methodological regime.

Cultural Studies is the Crisis: Culturalism and Dynamic Justice:

The sometimes overrated “crisis in cultural studies” may be to some extent self-inflicted. The authors outline the transformation of the moral or ethical origins of cultural studies as those of what was essentially a research project, into the instrumentalist routines of an academic bureaucracy. Because these developments arise largely from the failure of the political Left to accommodate the collapse of the Cold War ideological stand-off, it is suggested that cultural studies has in many ways become something of an intellectual commodity that informs reactionary agendas equally, as well as those claiming to be Progressive. The article proposes an elaboration of the concept of Dynamic Justice, as developed by Agnes Heller (1987), as the grounds for recovering cultural studies’ earlier research impetus.

Special Issue: From One to An-Other: Auto-Ethnographic Explorations in Southern Africa: Introduction

This volume deals with two discrete groups of San Bushmen who live to the north and south of the new Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, which spans both South Africa and Botswana. The village we have been visiting in Botswana since April 1995 is located in the south central Kalahari Desert. This migrant group of between 100 and 200 displaced !Xoo people, who speak a dialect of !Kung, has settled near Ngwatle Pan, joined by an assortment of Bakgalagadi, Malala, Batswana, and others. The community coalesced around two Afrikaansspeaking !Xoo brothers in the late 1980s, facilitated by a deep sense of Bushmanness articulated by most of these sojourners, irrespective of their ethnic or geographical origins. Unlike the Bakgalagadi, the !Xoo have had no visible means of regular income. Few others than ourselves, filmmaker Rob Waldron, and the Nqwaa Khobee Xeya Trust are researching their history, conditions, and development prospects (Community Mobilisation, 2000; Flyman, 2000; Simoes, 2001; Tomaselli, 2001a; Wang, 2002). On the South African side of the Park, 200 km south of Ngwatle, the Nama and Afrikaans-speaking ≠Khomani, whose original language was N/u, have a long lineage and live in a variety of scattered settlements in the Northern Cape. Since winning a court land claim in early 1999, this previously scattered clan of a couple of thousand people has chosen different paths: Some have become pastoralists farming sheep and goats; others have moved into small towns in the area; and one small, self-declared, relatively alcohol-free group lives on a sand dune on a farm called Blinkwater (Sparkling Waters). The remainder, about 80, try to live “traditionally” on an inadequate tract of wilderness opposite a liquor store run by the Molopo Lodge. This traditional group has been—on paper at least—the recipient of huge amounts of development aid from both the state and international donors. Its members are also employed in a variety of cultural villages and game parks in three provinces and have been intensively written

“Where's Shaka Zulu?”: Shaka Zulu as an intervention in contemporary political discourse

This article discusses some of the ideological fall-out of apartheids discourse of ethnicity as enshrined in the television mini-series Shaka Zulu. After briefly reviewing the various ways that a range of participants in apartheids final struggles either endorsed or criticized the series, a further look is taken at how, a decade after its first flighting, the series elicited some very different responses, some directly contradicting the earlier ones, from a few of the same sources. Given that the television image does refer to people and events that are part of the historical record, the article then continues to explore the adequacy of film and video as historical record. This is framed in terms of the distinctly different logical forms of historical inquiry and historical film narratives. These, in turn, are viewed along side the rather more practical logic of actual film production. The article concludes by suggesting that the production record of the Shaka Zulu genre of television or film can provide a logical grounding for understanding how producers, distributors and exhibitors of the product exploit the rhetoric of myth in the form of generally unspoken logical quantifiers that frame subsequent reception.