Sarah Nuttall

Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa

Nations as well as individuals are in many ways the sum of their memories, which are shaped by perception as much as by events. This collection of essays by South African academics looks at the ways the country is dealing with its past, a complex mixture of colonialism, slavery, apartheid, struggle, and guilt. The emphasis is on how that past is being perceived and moulded in the post-apartheid era.

City forms and writing the ‘now’ in South Africa

This article considers ways of theorising the now, or the contemporary, in South Africa. It seeks a method of reading that offers unexpected and defamiliarising routes through the cultural archive. The article discusses notions of race, class and space both in a general and historical sense and, in the second part, as they relate to new literatures of the city now emerging in South Africa. By focusing on urban ‘philosophies’ of the street it examines city life and city forms in fictional work on Johannesburg in particular. The article attempts to make an overall argument about how we might read the contemporary South African space.

Subjectivities of Whiteness

Abstract: This article focuses on constructions of whiteness in South African autobiographies and other narratives of the self. It attempts to understand how the category of whiteness—racial, social, political, and economic—is given meaning in this context. The essay departs from US- and British-based studies of whiteness, as well as from African studies of “settlers.” It aims to draw out the particularities of the South African context and the ways in which whiteness emerges within the tropes of looking, watching, masking, concealment, transfiguration, and secrecy in these texts. It shows that the play between visibility and invisibility emerges as a central paradox in this body of writing. Thus it attempts to shift contemporary South African discussions away from racism per se toward a discussion of how race works in psychical, symbolic, and political terms. It considers amplifications of whitenesses which may have been at odds with official and critical orthodoxies in order to approach registers out of which whiteness may come to be situated differently in this context.

INTRODUCTION: Private lives and public cultures in South Africa

This introductory essay considers how we might forge a critical language to discuss an emerging constellation of cultural production in South Africa: that which focuses on the work of ‘intimate exposure’ in order to shape a public–private sphere, which in turn forges forms of citizenship unavailable, or submerged by, a history of segregation. We ask the two following questions in order to better understand the dynamics of desegregation and re-racialization in twenty-first century South Africa: what is at stake in the dynamics of private exposure, particularly, but not limited to, the work of contemporary artists, be it exposure of the self or exposure of the lives of others – out of aggression or tenderness, as a gesture of ordinariness or excess, in relation to strangeness or love? Moreover, how do new dramas of secrecy, confession and exposure map onto or circumvent the staging of these issues during the apartheid years, which, itself layering over the scars of the colonial period, provide the subterranean foundation across which recent events play out? Addressing these and other questions takes us through a series of debates animating the current global and South African cultural studies.This introductory essay considers how we might forge a critical language to discuss an emerging constellation of cultural production in South Africa: that which focuses on the work of ‘intimate exposure’ in order to shape a public private sphere, which in turn forges forms of citizenship unavailable, or submerged by, a history of segregation. We ask the two following questions in order to better understand the dynamics of desegregation and re-racialization in twenty-first century South Africa: what is at stake in the dynamics of private exposure, particularly, but not limited to, the work of contemporary artists, be it exposure of the self or exposure of the lives of others out of aggression or tenderness, as a gesture of ordinariness or excess, in relation to strangeness or love? Moreover, how do new dramas of secrecy, confession and exposure map onto or circumvent the staging of these issues during the apartheid years, which, itself layering over the scars of the colonial period, provide the subterranean foundation across which recent events play out? Addressing these and other questions takes us through a series of debates animating the current global and South African cultural studies.

Cultural Reconstruction in the New South Africa

one wants to visit. A country that forged its culture in the hard mills of violent and relentless struggle is now decompressing in a rapid, uneven process of political liberalization and cultural reinvention, promoting transformations of outlook and behavior in which economics lags behind. This is a transition above all in identity and self-representation. New cultural developments, bubbling up all around in daily life, in turn demand a fresh scholarly analysis. The contributors to this volume have chosen to engage with the perspective of cultural studies, allied to postcolonial and globalization theory. These points of view provide a loose amalgam of opportunities to reflect critically; to look at genres and cultural sites hitherto neglected, including the apparently ephemeral and trivial; to look beyond genres and artifacts to sport, built space, the road; to look at new phenomena-the digital revolution, the rise of township tourism, new operations of African economic migrants, new efforts by the media to promote a rainbow nation. Few areas of inquiry within African studies could attract more interest, for cultural change is obviously central to the creation of the new South Africa. It is through expressive forms that the political revolution can most immediately be lived out: in reconciliation, in refashioning of personal and collective identities, and in the rediscovery of a common humanity. Giving a key role to culture is of course nothing new in South Africaone reason, perhaps, why there is such expertise in cultural analysis in

A Politics of the Emergent Cultural Studies in South Africa

This essay attempts to track the changing shape of cultural studies in South Africa, drawing on both local and global reference points. In the first part of the essay, I account for the preoccupations of South African cultural studies from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. In the second part, I reflect on further shifts since 2000. Here I argue for a politics of the emergent, an increasing turn towards the negotiation of the possible, the drawing in of trans-national frames, and the reformulation of theories of race in the aftermath of resistance politics. Studies of popular culture during this period increasingly come to be superseded by a focus on public culture and on circulation. The essay concludes by considering current contests in cultural studies in South Africa and with a reflection on its current place within a reconstituted public intellectual space.

The book in Africa

In an interview “with himself”, Dambudzo Marechera recalls some childhood memories about reading and writing in Rusape, the small Rhodesian town where he was born. ...there was the rubbish dump where they dumped the garbage from the white sections of the town – a very small-minded very racist town. I scratched around in the rubbish with other kids, looking for comics, magazines, books, broken toys, anything that could help us kids pass the time in the ghetto. But for me it was the reading material that was important. You could say my very first books were the books which the rabidly racist Rusape whites were reading at the time. Ha-ha my most prized possession was a tattered Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia – very British Empire orientated and nonetheless a treasure of curious facts about the universe and the earth. There were jingoistic British Second World War comics. Superman. Batman. Spiderman. Super this, super that. Mickey Spillane, James Hadley Chase, Peter Cheyne, Tarzan things and Tarzan thongs. I had these two friends, Washington and Wattington, twins. They had built ‘offices’ of mud and tin and cardboard, offices about two and a half feet high. They had a children’s typewriter. They were the Chairman and General Manager. I was the office boy. We had a library there – of books and comics salvaged from the dump. Every day it was the rubbish dump – and then the office. Washington typed down meticulous records of each day’s acquisitions. See what I mean? There was the typewriter, there were these books. After school everyday that was what we did. (Veit-Wild 1992:2-3)

Secrecy's Softwares

In this paper, we reflect on the many deaths as well as the new lives of secrecy in our political and cultural age. We consider through five rubrics (statehood, security, finance, urbanity, and selfhood) the complicated and constantly shifting scales of relation between secrecy, transparency, conspiracy, and intimacy. We explore the paradox of publics and states asking for both transparency and security in an age of heightened suspicion. Moreover, financial processes, often referred to as “offshoring,” give new forms and content to particular sets of secret relations. Secrets, it seems, have become more open and more motile than we have understood them to be. We briefly consider, in the fourth part of this paper, how aspects of the offshore play out in relation to urban landscapes, drawing on examples from Johannesburg. Finally, we consider the shifting vocabularies of intimacy in relation to the death of the secret as we know it. New struggles over the means and meanings of secrecy and transparency as the lines between these terms shift in substantial ways are the central subject of this essay.

Self and text in Y magazine

In this essay I would like to pursue two ideas: first, that a new culture of ‘selfstylisation’ is emerging in South African middle class youth cultures and second, that cultural texts, including literary texts, take on new roles as accessories to this process of self-stylisation. While most cultural commentators assume that contemporary, visually-based youth cultures are increasingly removed from the literary text in its conventional form, I want to argue that in fact the literary text plays an important role in contemporary self-styling. That it does so demands that we theorise the text differently, however. Moreover, a theorisation of contemporary positionings of the text by young urban Africans in Johannesburg helps us to understand further the nature of processes of selffashioning that are emerging. The first part of my essay will explore the notion of self-stylisation in the context of Y or ‘loxion’ culture in Rosebank, Johannesburg. I have written about this more fully elsewhere, and will seek here only to offer the outlines of an analysis of this urban youth cultural formation (see Nuttall 2004). In the second part, I turn to Y magazine itself and to its processes of textual accesorisation in particular. I focus the discussion on the books pages, which form part of a larger section of reviews of cultural and media products. These multi-media reviews pages, in which literary reviews jostle with CD, video, techware, advertisement and urban design reviews, form micro-texts, fragments circulating within the culture and forming important parts of young people’s interpretative packages. Y culture, increasingly also known as ‘loxion kulcha’ (‘loxion’ being a rescripting of the word ‘location’), has emerged since 1996 from Johannesburg’s suburbs, in particular Rosebank, and is crafted by urban black youth, but crossover in its appeal, occupying the borderlands of the local and the global. ‘Y’ is a living letter, the livewire sign of the times in Johannesburg, now widely known by young hip South Africans as ‘Jozi’. It stands for Youth, but also for ‘Why? It inscribes itself against, kicks loose from, X (the name given to the generation who fought in the anti-apartheid struggle and subsequently had difficulty finding

The humanities unplugged

I want to play devil’s advocate in this discussion and suggest that one of the reasons why the NRF or the MacMahon Foundation would rather fund a chair in the Square Kilometre Array than a chair in race, ethnicity and the human condition at a top South African university is because the humanities have lost their steam and have become prone to repetition. Current pressures on the field are, without any doubt, the result of state idolatry – the quasi-magical belief that science and technology will solve most of our problems. Yet the relative malaise in the field and our inability to find adequate funding is also a consequence of the crisis of our conceptual imagination. The ways in which the humanities have read the world for the past 30 years is offering fewer new insights than it used to. It feels increasingly out of sync with the ways in which a new generation is navigating that world. In order to renew the critical and epistemological energies of the humanities, we need to consider a broad set of shifts coming at the close of a particular era in thought and politics, one deeply shaped by symptomatic reading, decolonisation, Cold War cultural politics and anti-apartheid resistance politics. It might be that what we have long taken to be the act of critique is now unable to speak to the emerging pressures and new orders of twenty-first-century thought and practice. Symptomatic reading, as scholars like Bruno Latour (2004) and Elaine Freedgood (2006) have been intimating, has been the method of reading that enabled a long conversation to happen across various disciplines in the humanities since the 1970s. The critical meta-languages that have been central to this method were psychoanalysis and Marxism. One of the founding texts in the way we have read for the last 30 years was Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981). In the logic of ‘the political unconscious’, as Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus put it, what makes domination or ideology possible is precisely the fact that not everything is transparent. As a result, ‘interpretation can never operate on the assumption that the text means just what it says’. The most significant aspect of a text is what it represses. To read and to interpret (which, after all, is the core project of the humanities) is therefore to always seek the latent meaning behind the manifest one. The interpreter translates or rewrites a text in the language of a deeper, foundational code and reveals truths that are located below the surface of the text. Within this paradigm, the project of the humanities is about restoration. The task of the critic is to disclose the absent cause that structures the real or for that matter the