Full Description
The San or Bushmen of southern Africa have exerted a fascination over generations of writers and scholars, from novelists and anarchists to ethnologists and geneticists, and also occupy a special place in the popular imagination as the First People and the contemporary remnant of spiritual and natural man. The ways in which particular groups of people from southern Africa have been traditionally categorised and positioned as objects of scrutiny by a range of academic disciplines is increasingly being contested and questioned. There is a growing awareness of the cultural, economic and genetic entanglement of the peoples of the region.
This book examines how San and Khoe people are represented, by others, as well as by those who identify as San or Khoe. It interrogates the ways in which disciplines, through their methodologies and ways of authorising knowledge, not only "discover" or "reveal" knowledge but produce it in ways that involve complex and often ambiguous relationships with power structures and forms of intellectual, symbolic and cultural capital. One major trend that emerges is that the San and Khoe can no longer be seen as people of the past but have to be acknowledged as contemporary and socially situated individuals and communities who are increasingly contesting the representations which others have imposed on them.
This book was originally published as two special issues of Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies.
Contents
1. San representation: an overview of the field 2. To exhibit or be exhibited: the visual art of Vetkat Regopstaan Boesman Kruiper 3. Simulacral, genealogical, auratic and representational failure: Bushman authenticity as methodological collapse 4. Development narratives: the value of multiple voices and ontologies in Kalahari research 5. The music of dead sisters: a feminist comparison of two folktales about singing bones and reeds 6. The creation of the eland: a close reading of a Drakensberg San narrative 7. The damaging effects of romantic mythopoeia on Khoesan linguistics 8. The Boer and the Jackal: Satire and Resistance in Khoi Orature 9. 'Di-xerreten and the lioness': text and landscape of a |Xam narrative 10. Who owns what? Indigenous knowledge and struggles over representation 11. Narrating Biesje Poort: negotiating absence of storyline, vagueness and multivocality in the representation of Southern Kalahari rock engravings 12. 'Different people' coming together: representations of alterity in |Xam Bushman (San) narrative 13. Icons and archives: the Orpen lithograph in the context of 19th-century depictions of rock paintings 14. Truths, representationalism and disciplinarity in Khoesan researches 15. Researching the San, San/ding the research
