Louise Green

Stereoscopic visions: reading colonial and contemporary African photography

This piece argues for the importance of critical engagements with photographs in order to explore and rethink the past, to reflect on the present and to imagine the future. It provides a brief overview of the articles that constitute the first part of the Social Dynamics special issue on photography in Africa, a collection that contributes to the growing body of scholarship that deepens our understandings of the significance of photography on the continent.

The social lives of handmade things: Configuring value in post-apartheid South Africa

Taking Arjun Appadurai’s suggestive argument about the ‘social lives’ of things as its starting point, this paper traces the pathways of two commodities for sale in South Africa: a pottery bowl and a resin spoon. Both these objects acquire their value in part from the quality of being handmade. The aim of this paper is not to demystify the claim to value made by either the pottery bowl or the resin spoon, nor to judge one or the other as the more ‘authentic’ expression of a resistance to the contemporary reifications of the everyday. Instead, it explores a family resemblance between these two objects and traces the way in which, within contemporary global ‘regimes of value’, what is handmade acquires value. If, as Jean and John Comaroff suggest, neo‐liberalism ideologically constructs a world of increasing abstraction, the trajectories of these two objects reveal how both locality and work return in an attenuated form as attributes of commodities.

A density of texture: reading photography from South, North and West Africa

The second part of this special issue brings together five scholarly articles and four essays which continue the discussion about photography in Africa begun by the articles and interviews included in the first part and published in March of 2014 (volume 40, issue 1). In the introduction to the March issue, we made the argument that while we live in a world saturated with images, not all images are equally visible. It is only when photographs are activated that they become “moving objects” – images that, as Azoulay (2008) notes, affect us and circulate through time and space. Photographs are activated when they are read with a certain active attention, and when they are allowed to unsettle the world and its many visual iterations. The first three papers included here discuss South African photographers, and in each piece the place of South Africa in relation to both the rest of the continent and to the rest of the world is a key theme that is explored through the specific practices of visual representation. All three articles are also concerned in one way or another with the question of mobility and migration. Svea Josephy’s paper “Compound Fractures” tracks the shifting practices of photographic representation that have accompanied the changing nature of hostel and compound life in the post-apartheid period. The control of migrant labour and the lives of migrant workers was one of the structuring principles of apartheid and while legislative apartheid has been dismantled, Josephy notes that the architecture of hostels and compounds remain a significant feature of the South African landscape. The paper begins with a brief history of the representation of the compound since the nineteenth century, but its main focus is on post-apartheid transformations of the compound space. Through close readings of images by Peter Magubane, T.J. Lemon, Sabelo Mlangeni, Angela Buckland, Jodi Bieber, David Goldblatt, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Sam Nhlengethwa, Josephy’s paper examines the changing ways in which the provisional character of the lives of migrant workers comes to be expressed photographically in the context of deeply entrenched retrogressive socioeconomic and architectural structures. Marietta Kesting’s paper “Photographic Portraits of Migrants in South Africa: Framed between Identity Photographs and (Self-)presentation” is also concerned with the representation of migrants in contemporary South Africa and focuses specifically on certain paradigmatic images of the figure of the migrant in

Private property and the problem of the miraculous: the kramats and the city of Cape Town

This paper seeks to explore the place of kramats the graves of Muslim saints or Auliyah – in the landscape of contemporary Cape Town. The kramat sites have been proclaimed as heritage sites because of their importance as tangible signs of Islam at the Cape. At the same time, the process of the kramats becoming heritage sites has contained moments of intense, often sensational, public contestation. Offering a reading of the discourses surrounding two contested kramats in Cape Town, this paper explores the way kramats mark out a miraculous space in the prosaic modern city and introduce into the post-apartheid evaluation of heritage, alternative conceptions of space and notions of temporality. They are sites of impossibility where, it is claimed, the laws of nature themselves are interrupted to mark the intangible particularities of the site. This paper explores what happens when this miraculous space is subject to the demands of private property and municipal law and the conflicts that arise from this collision of different conceptual and experiential modalities. It considers the effects of the entanglement of legend and history that result from the production of these sites as heritage in a market-driven economy.

The necessary conjunction

ABSTRACT Current discussion of Science and the Humanities in the South African academy tends to pose these two fields of study in oppositional and exclusionary terms: Science or the Humanities. In this paper we argue that the proper and necessary conjunction for discussion of science and the humanities should be an “and” rather than an “or” and suggest that the question of this conjunction has now become of critical importance for all those involved in the humanities.Tracing the opposition back to its roots in CP Snows Two cultures, we argue that this received idea is outdated in terms of contemporary developments both in the history of science and in the practices in the humanities. In the unpredictable world of post-normal science, we argue, the application of historical, theoretical and textual interpretation to the world represents a key skill for the citizen in the information age.

The language of dogs: intermediate forms in global culture

Abstract Jean‐Jacques Rousseau, drawing on accounts of the Cape, shaped arguments and discourses about animal and human nature in the nascent disciplines of ethology and anthropology. This paper examines how the discourses of ethology and anthropology mesh and separate in South Africa by looking at two of the most important early South African writers on primates: late eighteenth century French explorer François Levaillant and early twentieth century Afrikaans writer and naturalist Eugene Marais. It examines their own attitudes towards, and their epistemological stance in, our unsettled primate universe. Levaillant and Marais, in writing of captive and wild baboons, find they are writing more generally of the cost of domestication, of the loss of some original power. In the case of Levaillant, the stance he produces – that of the intermediary between nature and civilization – forms part of his highly influential contribution both to anthropology and to the developing genre of safari or wildlife documentary writing. For Marais, the temptation to crude racial thinking seems to have been counteracted, to some extent, by his own addiction and self‐awareness of characteristics he shared with other races and other primates.

Olive Schreiner and the Labour of Writing

We shall find nothing new in human nature once we have once carefully dissected and analysed the one being we shall ever truly know — ourselves (Schreiner 1984: 198).

Dirt redeployed: the cultural politics of dirt continued

On a visit to the Nigerian city of Ibadan in 1900, William MacGregor, the colonial governor of Lagos Colony and a qualified medical practitioner, described the traditional Yoruba practice for acknowledging the power and authority of political leaders: “Whilst I was there the two highest Chiefs in the land, one of them the Bashorun of Oyo, next in rank to the Alaafin [supreme ruler, king] himself, presented themselves before the Alaafin” (CO 879/62/13, 10). What happened next, while unsurprising to anyone familiar with Yoruba courtly and deferential practices, created a strong reaction in the British onlooker because of the unexpected appearance of dirt:

Putting dirt in its place: the cultural politics of dirt in Africa

On January 12 2018, US President Donald Trump made headlines once again, this time with a statement about immigration. In a meeting in the Oval Office the previous day, he had asked the by now noto...

Modernity’s dirt: carbon emissions and the technique of life

ABSTRACT Under colonialism, the concept of dirt was frequently employed ideologically to make judgements about relative worth. In Africa, a particular European cultural idiom or “technique of life” was presented as superior because of its “cleanliness.” This paper is concerned with modernity’s “technique of life” at a particular historical moment when, as a result of environmental crisis, it is suddenly called upon to give an account of itself. I undercut modernity’s claim to cleanliness by suggesting that what it introduces alongside regimes of order and sanitation is a much more globally destructive form of dirt in the form of increasing carbon dioxide levels. The CAIT Climate Data Explorer is a website that compares carbon dioxide emissions across a range of categories. This paper reads three graphs generated by this website as incomplete figures for making visible modernity’s “technique of life.” Realist fiction, read as a supplement to the climate graph records, is able to reinvest some of the abstract categories employed by the climate data tool – transport, fugitive emissions and electricity use – with the details that characterise particular techniques of life and to reveal the way they continue to be defined, at this historical moment, by narratives of development and consumption.