Marion Arnold

Making Oneself at Home: A Dialogue on Women, Culture, Belonging and Denizenship

Abstract Arnold and Meskimmon converse about shared and different experiences of relocating from southern Africa and the United States to Britain, which they identify as ‘home’. Their dialogue teases out the complexities of defining ‘homeland’ from the perspectives of culture and domicile. In an exchange of memories and references to writers, theorists and visual artists, Arnold and Meskimmon discuss the consequences of migration in terms of nationality, citizenship, denizenship, and art practice. The dialogue generates personal testimony about ‘be(com)ing’ transcultural and making oneself at home to effect a sense of belonging. Encounters with place and the roles of cultural artefacts are cited as mediators in negotiating relationships with ‘home’, and the concept of denizenship is advocated as a means of thinking through kinds of citizenship that might better describe the experiences of women as they make themselves at home in a global world.

Mind the Gap: Translation in a Fractured African Society

The spaces and tensions between races, ethnic groups, and communities in late Apartheid and post-1994 South African society, and the co-existence of different languages, religions and cultures, generated a society so fractured that cultural translation became a formidably difficult task. The concept of translation in a transforming society is examined through an analysis of two-dimensional language as a means of translating political events and experiences into visual forms, which attempt to communicate across cultural gaps. Iconic documentary photographs by Sam Nzima (1976) and Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) photographers (1997), struggle posters by co-operatives and formally trained designers, and artworks by Kevin Brand, Sue Williamson and Marion Arnold are discussed. The images reveal that different forms of visual representation encode different relationships of signifying content and aesthetic form to offer alternatives to speech and writing in communicating some implications of Apartheid politics, leaving a legacy that validates art and design as tools of political activism.

African Art Today

Books reviewed in this article: Monica Blackmun Visona, Robin Poynor, Herbert M Cole and Michael D Harris, A History of Art in Africa Pamela McCluskey, Art from Africa: Long Steps Never Broke a Back Christa Clark et al, A Personal Journey: Central African Art from the Lawrence Gussman Collection Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, Contemporary African Art