Full Description
This book offers a holistic guide as to how South African identity and culture can be understood in the past, present, and future.
Drawing from the rich archive of previously published articles from the journal Safundi, South African Cultural Studies documents the mutual histories of the country and the journal over the past quarter century. Divided into six sections, the first section addresses cultural figures, including Oprah Winfrey, Trevor Noah, Olive Schreiner, and Dimitri Tsafendas—an unusual group that illustrates the unique and international character of South African culture. The second part brings attention to the important role that photography has had in depicting and narrating South African cultural life, whether through the intimacies found in recent images by Zanele Muholi or the historical work of David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng. Part three of the book looks at music as another idiom that has proven indispensable for South African social life with Miriam Makeba, Rodriguez, and Die Antwoord providing examples. The fourth and fifth sections of this book address sexuality and film, respectively, underscoring at once the contrasting approaches to popular culture that have surfaced in Safundi as well as their requisite abilities for grasping everyday tastes and mores. The worlds of Ms. magazine, District 9, Black Panther, and Spike Lee, to pick only several topics raised, supply ways of thinking across these chapters. The final part of the volume concludes with the role of place in the construction of culture, whether museums, national monuments, the Spur restaurant franchise, or landscapes like the Karoo.
This book will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, activists and critics, as well as readers who are generally interested in understanding South Africa's cultural history over the past century.
Contents
Introduction 1. Soaring on the Wings of Pride: Martin Luther King Jr. and the "New" South Africa (2004) 2. Oprah in South Africa: The Politics of Coevalness and the Creation of a Black Public Sphere (2007) 3. The Transnational Circulation of Dissent: Olive Schreiner and the Colonial Counter-flows of Unitarian Freethinking (2013) 4. The Political and Intellectual World of Bernard Makhosozwe Magubane (1930-2013) (2015) 5. Visions of Tsafendas: Literary Biography and the Limits of "Research" (2015) 6. Gaining currency confession comedy and the economics of racial ambiguity in Trevor Noah s Born a Crime (2021) 7. Resistance, Memory, and Hope: The Photographic Art of Peter Magubane (2005) 8. Zanele Muholi's Intimate Archive: Photography and Post-apartheid Lesbian Lives (2010) 9. Being (2010) 10. Santu Mofokeng: Alternative Ways of Seeing (1996-2013) (2014) 11. Reframing the Afrikaner Subject: The Visual Grammar of David Goldblatt and Roelof van Wyk (2014) 12. Re-collecting the Musical Politics of John and Nokutela Dube (2012) 13. Part II: Zef/Poor White Kitsch Chique: Die Antwoord's Comedy of Degradation (2012) 14. The South African Life and Afterlife of Jim Reeves (2014) 15. A Marriage of Inconvenience: Miriam Makeba's relationship with Stokely Carmichael (2016) 16. Rodriguez, apartheid, and censorship: cold facts, and fiction (2021) 17. Caster Semenya: Gods and Monsters (2010) 18. A peculiar place for a feminist? The New South African woman, True Love magazine and Lebo(gang) Mashile (2016) 19. Queer politics and intersectionality in South Africa (2017) 20. The gender-apartheid analogy in the transnational feminist imaginary: Ms. Magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation, 1972-2002 (2018) 21. Yearning for rootedness in a femicidal landscape (2021) 22. Anti-Apartheid Solidarity Networks and the Production of Come Back, Africa (2015) 23. The D Is Silent: Django Unchained and the African American West (2015) 24. "Zones of indistinction" and visions of post reconciliation South Africa in District 9 (2017) 25. Between the world and Wakanda (2019) 26. Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing and the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa (2019) 27. A Taste for Strife; or, Spur in the South African Imaginary (2015) 28. The Karoo and eco-inflections of fracking: preliminary notes on literary imagination (2017) 29. Uncertain objects and ethnographic possibilities thinking through the Smithsonian Universal African Expedition (2020) 30. This is the Place: Salt Lake City, Utah, and the Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria: monuments to settler constructions of history race and religion (2021) 31. Contradictory excessiveness: abandoned trolleys in post-apartheid South Africa (2021)
