Post-apartheid Culture Research Articles

Consuming the rich white “Bitch” on The Real Housewives of Johannesburg

ABSTRACT As the first African format of the Real Housewives franchise, The Real Housewives of Johannesburg features a majority black cast and unfolds in an African city. However, it positions a white woman, Christall Kay, in the key structural role of villainess. This article examines what pleasures are offered to viewers who are invited to consume Christall’s particularly controversial brand of entitled white villainy. As Christall is a primary source of narrative drive and conflict, elite black femininities are repeatedly pitted against her, and thus framed through the lens of Christall’s whiteness. This article contends that Christall's antagonistic role enables multiple avenues for enjoyment. As a villainess, Christall offers an ambivalent point of identification for white audiences, while the excess of Christall’s performance may allow black South African viewers to indulge in the camp delights of scrutinising entitled white femininity in post-apartheid culture.

Subjection and Survival in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, constructs a disturbing picture of the state of post-apartheid South Africa. It was generally criticized on the ground that instead of sharing national enthusiasm, it damaged the hopes of constructing a just and nonracial society by perpetuating racial stereotypes and fueling interracial violence. Disgrace, however, this paper holds, is a realistic, though gloomy, narrative of human condition. It is the scene of individuals struggling for survival amid existential and social forces in post-apartheid culture. Apartheid represented the era of victimization, subjection, and pathological attachments. It distorted intersubjective relations, turned humans’ interactions into power struggles, and produced deformed, stunted subjects. This paper examines the continuing presence of these deformed subjects in new South Africa and the violence that their presence occasions. The residual presence of character deformity and pathological intersubjectivity is a social reality of the new South Africa in Disgrace, a reality that diminishes the prospect of the promised sane society of post-apartheid era.

The branded skyline? A socio-semiotic critique of Johannesburg’s architectural adverts

ABSTRACTThis article critically analyses the semiotics of ‘architectural adverts’ (massive scale outdoor billboards that cover the entire facades of city buildings) in Johannesburg, South Africa. Drawing on critical advertising studies and scholarship critiquing neoliberal visual culture in cities of the Global South, the article critiques the visual landscape created by brands writ large across the cityscape. The critique is from two vantage points: the highway and the pavement. These are theorised as intersecting levels of geosemiotic meaning-making, shaped by structures of neoliberal power. We argue that architectural adverts colonise public sensibility by cloaking the realities of urban neglect and inequality with dazzling brand messages, and by making these visible at the expense of citizens’ visibility (and their view). We argue that the city government is neglecting its public mandate by allowing such advertising to be placed in public spaces, and that this failure exposes the neoliberal value set that dominates in post-apartheid culture.

“There is the Black Man’s Story and the White Man’s Story”: Narratives of Self and the Valence of “Stories” in Postapartheid Culture

SummaryTaking into its purview the marked tendency in postapartheid culture to emphasise self-narrativisation, this article examines “self-voicing” in conceptual terms, citing and discussing scholars who have commented on similar trends. The article then considers a more specific case in which narratives of the self loom large, namely Jonny Steinberg’s non-fiction work, The Number. In this book, Steinberg not only interweaves several instances of self-storying, but he also shows that narrative relays – in which the self becomes an entity that is susceptible to shaping – are themselves caught up in the politics of everyday life, and of cultural contestation more generally, rendering them contingent. The article concludes with a brief consideration of Achille Mbembe’s 2015 Facebook intervention in which he warns, in the wake of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, against the meta-text of an allconsuming preoccupation with the bogey of whiteness.

Contemporary South African horror: On meat, neo-liberalism and the postcolonial politics of a global form

Abstract Following the postapartheid encounter with neo-liberal economics, South African cultural production has begun to register the influence of global, popular forms borne into the country on the tide of multinational capital. Horror is one such commercial mode the manifestation of which, in contemporary South Africa, is thus bound up with processes of economic globalization. Its deployment in the country is also, however, committed to unveiling the brutalities and dehumanizations underpinning the neo-liberal operation of global capital. In these texts, economic deprivation and exploitation are made to resonate with the country’s history of racial oppression, and are given brutal form as evocations of the person become meat. The circumscribed position in which such narratives situate themselves – their critique of the processes which sustain them – is the focus of this article’s final stages: I suggest we read South Africa’s horror, not as complicit in some invalidating way, but as an experimental exploration of modes and voices in a postapartheid culture unrestrained by polarizing ethical demands to oppose the racist state. South African horror arises, then, in a context where the binary is losing purchase as a model for dissent, and this observation, I venture, may have implications not simply for the postapartheid production of such narratives, but for wider manifestations of the genre too.

The treatment action campaign and the three dimensions of lawyering: Reflections from the rainbow nation

The spread and perpetuation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa has hindered the country's social and economic growth after apartheid. This paper documents my experiences while working with the Projects Abroad Human Rights Office and specifically my interactions with the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an organization which has taken a multi-dimensional approach in order to educate people about HIV/AIDS and attempt to provide access to medicines for millions of South Africans afflicted with the disease. I discuss how TAC has used both traditional and non-traditional methods of advocacy to combat the epidemic and equate access to health care to a social justice issue by empowering marginalized communities. The paper's dual purpose is to applaud TAC's continuous success in combating HIV/AIDS with such a multi-dimensional approach and illustrate how other organizations can utilize such an approach in order to affect social change. To illustrate TAC's approach, I utilize Lucie White's three dimensions of lawyering and equate TAC to a single cause lawyer, signifying that White's characterization of multi-dimensional activism is not limited to individuals, but can rather be applied at the firm level. White's three dimensions include: (a) advocacy through litigation, (b) advocacy in stimulating progressive change, and (c) advocacy as a pedagogic process. From this analysis, I conclude that TAC's multi-dimensional approach and specifically its inherent practice of White's three dimensions has been the root of its success in educating millions about the virus and advocating for access to medicines for those who have contracted HIV. TAC's innovative advocacy has also mobilized a new generation of South African activists who have helped TAC grow into a vibrant and integral organization within the country's post-apartheid culture. Such an example can serve as a framework for future organizations who wish to tackle other challenges that face the country.

Afrikaans literature and (metropolitan) postcolonial theory: Interrogations from the Margin

Summary This article criticises proposals made by Rosemary Jolly about the manner in which postapartheid culture in South Africa should be approached to advance the creation of a postcolonial future. Although I provisionally agree with her that binary thinking should be avoided, I criticise the representation of Afrikaans literature on which part of her argument is based. The most important objection is that Jolly can see a role for certain kinds of writers only, namely dissident ones. I show how writers that I categorise as nondissident, nonnationalist, have already given form to the kind of culture envisaged by Jolly.