Displacing and deflecting otherness: the subversion of the dichotomised framework of self and other in Lawrence Lemaoana's Last Line of Defence

Abstract

South African artist Lawrence Lemaoana's artwork, Last Line of Defence, evinces new ways in which young South African artists are renegotiating the Self/Other binary coupling in their art. In this work, Lemaoana subverts colonial and apartheid paradigms which sought to fix the self and other not only at opposite ends of an ideological pole, but also the manner in which physical or visual markers of difference were employed as tools in perpetuating the division and hierarchy that governed this binary framework. Through the use of a masquerade constructed from stereotypical notions of white ascendancy and femininity, Lemaoana attempts to deflect the physical markers of difference attached to his identity and establish the unreliability of physical qualities as signifiers of otherness.