Desiree Lewis

Feminisms in South Africa

Abstract Feminist theory in present-day South Africa is posing an increasingly important challenge to male-dominated scholarship. Yet a number of feminists — by largely ignoring the intersection of race, class and gender — reproduce oppressive racial and class ideologies. This is evidenced in the way that much South African feminism draws on stereotypes of black women, privileging the knowledge and experience of white, western and middle-class feminists. This article concentrates on the first South African conference on women and gender with a view to examining these trends in local feminist theory and practice. Key features of the conference are explored with reference to the development of feminist theory locally and abroad.

Gender Myths and Citizenship in Two Autobiographies by South African Women

DESIREE LEWIS explores popularised definitions of womens belonging in the nation in the writings of ELLEN KUZWAYO and MAMPHELA RAMPHELE

Rethinking Nationalism in Relation to Foucault's History of Sexuality and Adrienne Rich's `Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence'

Perceptions of South Africa as a beacon of post-liberation progress are now central to much of the approbation of a country evading the economic and cultural ‘degeneration’ of other African countries in particular, and of many third-world ones in general. Central to this approval is the lauding of this country’s progressive legislation around gender equality and sexual rights. As Michel Foucault (1980) has shown, however, it is the anonymous dispersal of power for controlling sexualized bodies that identifies new coercive regimes. And in South Africa, as is the case elsewhere, this insidious coercion, which overrides the numerous progressive measures in place, is manifested in the discourses of sexuality to which citizens turn in defining their belonging within nations. South Africa exemplifies the dynamics of many neo-colonial contexts, where nation-building is firmly yoked to heterosexist relations and discourses. It also lays bare global trends where – despite many formal protections of gender equality and sexual freedoms – the resurgence of nationalism is being driven by fiercely resilient patriarchal discourses of sexuality. What follows are reflections on the relevance of Foucault’s and Rich’s arguments on sexuality and heterosexuality to understanding these dynamics. I consider how these theorists contribute to deepening analysis of individuals’ acquisition of a sense of national ‘belonging’ in South Africa, as well as other contexts where, to use Cynthia Enloe’s phrase, ‘nationalism has sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope’ (1989: 44). I deal with two areas: first, the intimate and privatized invasion of the body in the construction of citizens as subjects, and secondly the meshing of heterosexuality and nationalism.

The Conceptual Art of Berni Searle

Art configures subjectivity and creativity in ways that lie ‘inbetween’ the languages we normally use. DESIREE LEWIS writes that the work of Bernie Searle, a black woman who has entered an extremely exclusive domain and forged new forms and styles, offers provocative explorations of these ‘inbetween’ spaces

Biography, Nationalism and Yvonne Vera's Nehanda

Abstract This paper shows how biographies of individuals and nations are interlinked. While this story-telling has generally been seen as pivotal to anti-colonial African nationalist struggles, it is also a vital feature of the present. Nation-building, policy-making and a range of internal struggles within the nation are conveyed through distinctive stories about individuals and groups. Many stories about individuals and collectivities can be described as hagiographical in the sense that they extol messages of nationalism triumphantalism and the courage and altruism of those who struggled for liberation. Traditions of patriotic history in the postcolonial context have drawn on hagiography to bolster the precarious authority of elites: the censoring of certain memories and the rewriting of others have worked to create artificial collectivities, spurious alliances and fabricated enemies. The imaginative writing of Yvonne Vera, who revisions the story of Nehanda as an icon in Zimabwean nationalist history, radically rethinks fundamental assumptions about nationalism in relation to biographical storytelling. While clearly offering a laudatory and hagiographical representation, Vera contests the patrilineal and patriotic focus of much nationalist hagiography. Emphasising the imaginative and productive powers of biographical storytelling, Vera seeks to configure inspirational, resonant and liberating stories of pasts, presents and futures.

Sophia Klaaste: self-portraits

The photographs of Sophia Klaaste comprise an intimate personal archive of South African rural life, a kind of street photography in a village without streets, recording a young woman’s transition from adolescence to adulthood in the context of a remote Namaqualand village. Sophia Klaaste first used a camera as a participant in a photography project in 1999. Her photos stood out for their freshness, sensitivity, composition and candid portrayal of village society. She was only 16-years-old at the time, and trying desperately to find outlets for her feral imagination and vivacious personality; photography was one way she found to make sense of her life and the world she inhabits. Today, her collection of photographs consists of more than 1000 images. They record more than a decade of village life from the perspective of a young woman growing up in the ‘new’ South Africa, documenting family, friends, village events – funerals, dances, birthday parties, the Debutantes’ Ball – as Figure 1. Sophia Klaaste, ‘Self portrait with dog’, 2008.

Scripted bodies: introduction

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, many airline passengers travelling from one of various African destinations to the United States (US) via Senegal will have experienced the invasive stop-over at Dakar. During the extended period for refuelling, Senegalese ground staff board the aircraft bearing bags for confiscated items, disposable gloves and walkie-talkies, while passengers are instructed to take up their seats and to keep their hand luggage on their laps. Zealously moving in-between the stunned passengers, airport employees proceed to ransack the plane for all suspicious objects, persons, baggage and other bodies. The probing and violation of the immediate spaces and surfaces of travellers’s bodies are graphically described in M. Neelika Jayawardane’s article. Jayawardane links the hyper-surveillance of the mobile threatening body to anxieties about sedentary ones, indicating that it is often in the former, a paradoxical product of neoliberal modernity, that we find clues to the extremism of the current US response to ‘terror’. Such analysis of empire’s reaction to the elusiveness of ‘terror’ both illuminates and amplifies Anne McClintock’s (2009) theorising of ‘paranoid empire’. McClintock invokes Constantine Cavafy’s poem first published in 1904, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (1992), to diagnose the political and discursive functions of an invented enemy from which Empire in the present needs to defend itself (McClintock 2009, p. 62). In its contemporary context of imperialism, the US has unleashed a terrifying dynamic of violence and fear, often conscripting the socially marginalised and those in former colonies into its transnational apparatuses of surveillance, torture and incarceration. McClintock argues that within the new global networks, it is not only those at the helms of control who are gripped by paranoia, but also those who implement empire’s authority abroad: both within and beyond the borders of the US, the soldiers, airport staff, bureaucrats, police guards, emigration officials and many others who, lacking real power of their own, project their fears and fantasies on to others – either in their own performances of omnipotence or in their anticipation of the ‘barbarians’, who will provide ‘a kind of solution’ (Cavafy, quoted in McClintock 2009, pp. 58–63).

Writing Baartman’s Agency: History, Biography, and the Imbroglios of Truth

“Baartman belongs to all of us,” states the central character in Zoe Wicomb’s novel, David’s Story (2000, 135). An activist who believes he can tell his own story only by meshing history, memory, and imagining, David insists that a story of Sara Baartman must be told in relation to his own locations and politics. In explaining his fusing of biography and autobiography, he comments on an enduring discursive role for Baartman. Whether configured in terms of grotesque physicality in the late 1800s and early 1900s, or as a figure testifying to colonial domination from the late twentieth century, Baartman has provided a reference point in the autobiographical narratives of those who represent her, with storytelling about her functioning to convey collective or individual desires in the present.

Gender, sexuality and commodity culture

In their discussion of the messianic promise and character of capitalism at the start of the new millennium, Jean and John Comaroff (2001) draw attention to the contradictory impulses of commodity culture during the last decade: on one hand, it has seemed to usher in limitless opportunities for individual and collective transformation through the acquisition of ‘‘things’’, of resources, technology and information; on the other, it has both entrenched and exacerbated longestablished power relations of race, gender and sexuality. They therefore pose the rhetorical questions:

Theory and Intertextuality: Reading Zora Neale Hurston and Bessie Head

For Julia Kristeva, intertextuality is both the inevitable consequence of all literary and textual practices and a method for exploring the discursive contexts of these practices. Rather than reading literary texts in isolation, we can explore their cultural and social configurations when they are read in relation to one another. Ultimately, then, ‘‘intertextuality’’ allows for a theory of cultural and textual meaning; it is integral to unraveling literary texts, their discursive traces and their communicative impact. By drawing on intertextuality as a theoretical practice, I question the extent to which specialized and academic critical theoretical practice can end up limiting, rather than explaining, fictional texts. In the process of interpreting texts, the classifying lexicon and strategies of criticism frequently unify contradictions to homogenize and rewrite the compound creative processes of fictional texts whose import often derives from their being fissured, open-ended and explosively imaginative. My aim in what follows is not to ‘‘jettison theory,’’ but to assess its role in reading fictional texts. As Maurice Berger states: ‘‘It is not theory per se that is the problem; [it is the] academization of criticism—the growing inclination of many critics . . . to base their arguments on abstruse theoretical models.’’ My comparative discussion of two writers’ textual practices focuses on how and why they have ambiguously used certain forms, narrative strategies and themes, and on the ways in which they grapple with processes of signification. Sande Cohen illuminates the relevance of this critical practice by identifying the importance of coding processes in criticism: