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Books by Louise Bethlehem
Critical Arts, 2020
Special issue of _Critical Arts_ co-edited by Louise Bethlehem and Tal Zalmanovich.
Safundi, 2019
Special edition of _Safundi_ 20(2), coedited by Louise Bethlehem, Lindelwa Dalamba and Uhuru Phal... more Special edition of _Safundi_ 20(2), coedited by Louise Bethlehem, Lindelwa Dalamba and Uhuru Phalafala.
Safundi, 2018
Special edition of Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies
Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and its Aftermath traces the responses to the emergent par... more Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and its Aftermath traces the responses to the emergent paradigm of South African literary studies from the 1970s onwards. Embedded in the influential critical texts of the field, it claims, are hidden narratives-of land, race, gender, ...
Critical Arts, Jan 1, 2012
This special edition of Critical Arts arose from the interchange between affect and institution. ... more This special edition of Critical Arts arose from the interchange between affect and institution. We wagered that Mieke Bal's (2007a: 23) notion of a 'migratory aesthetics' might be a productive way of revisiting the cultural studies classroom as a site of 'sentient ...
African Identities, Jan 1, 2009
The study of labour in Africa has undergone important transformations over the last 20 years. Fol... more The study of labour in Africa has undergone important transformations over the last 20 years. Following a period of intense scrutiny from the 1950s to the 1980s, research on working classes, labour unions, capitalist expansion and proletarianisation in Africa experienced ...
Violence and Non-Violence in Africa This unique book seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct... more Violence and Non-Violence in Africa This unique book seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct the pervasive, almost ritualistic, association of Africa with forms of extreme violence, the latter bordering on and including genocide. The volume highlights political, social and cultural ...
Papers by Louise Bethlehem
his article offers a reflection on the life of South Africa's extraordinary political leader,... more his article offers a reflection on the life of South Africa's extraordinary political leader, Nelson Mandela and on the legacies of the struggle against apartheid that he and his cohort of fellow activists shaped
photographies, 2022
Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In... more Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term “empty photographs” into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as “‘bad,’ ‘boring,’ or repetitious” in post-apartheid settings (“The Uneven Citizenry,” 189). This article revisits a subset of such images to contest their seeming emptiness—pallbearers escorting dead activists to their graves during political funerals in late-apartheid South Africa. Focusing specifically on Afrapix photographer, Gille de Vlieg’s images of Themba Dlamini’s funeral in Driefontein in 1990, the paper restores their local history to view and unpacks the visual cultural and material cultural circuits of militant mourning in which they were embedded. It then uses various orders of metonymy in the visual field to comment on the “necropolitics” of the apartheid regime (Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”). The paper concludes with a reflection on Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the “civil gaze” (Civil Imagination) and considers what unfolds when a reckoning with the differential distribution of death that characterizes necropower reorients this faculty away from the individual photograph towards series, genre or corpus.
This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled... more This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers historiographic traction over other Cold War settings. Throughout the international antiapartheid struggle, South African expressive culture was channeled through local paradigms of reception in the world beyond, in taut negotiation with aesthetic, institutional, linguistic, and political considerations. Instances of cultural translation, catachresis, and slippage resulting from the deterritorialization of South African cultural formations can thus be contextualized, historicized, and turned back reflexively on other conjunctures, to defamiliarize existing scholarship. Makeba's long exile in Ahmed Sékou Touré's Guinea between 1969 and ...
A blog entry was written by Louise Bethlehem on the genesis of the European<br> Research Co... more A blog entry was written by Louise Bethlehem on the genesis of the European<br> Research Council Project "Apartheid<br> The Global Itinerary: South African<br> Cultural Formations in Transnational<br> Circulation, 1948-1990"
A blog entry was written by Louise Bethlehem on the genesis of the European<br> Research Co... more A blog entry was written by Louise Bethlehem on the genesis of the European<br> Research Council Project "Apartheid<br> The Global Itinerary: South African<br> Cultural Formations in Transnational<br> Circulation, 1948-1990"
A tribute to the legendary Hugh Ramapolo Masekela who<br> died on 23 January 2018.
Interventions, 2021
Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemis... more Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths that have shaped influential recent accounts of the city? This article outlines the contours of a “hydrocolonial Johannesburg” though combining Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall’s invitation to “read for water” with existing methodologies that read for infrastructure. It sets these strategies to work in the context of Lauren Beukes’ second work of speculative fiction, _Zoo City_ (Beukes, Lauren. 2010. Zoo City. Johannesburg: Jacana Media). The novel propels its readers into a noiresque fantasy world whose spatial coordinates closely reflect the extra-textual city of Johannesburg. Taking my cue from Beukes’ infrastructural allusions, I mobilize her text to provide the struts for my own as I explore the intertextuality of _Zoo City_ with works by William Kentridge and Sarah Gertrude Millin. Alternately foregrounded or barely perceptible until deliberately sought out, water helps to distinguish the various locales of the novel from one another. My essay turns to _Zoo City_ to offer three vignettes that trace the flows of water and the contiguous presence of infrastructures in Johannesburg, pursuing their intersection beyond the boundaries of the novel into a larger expressive cultural archive to reflect on the relations between privilege and forms of anthropogenic degradation in the life of the city.
Critical Arts, 2020
Special issue of _Critical Arts_ co-edited by Louise Bethlehem and Tal Zalmanovich.
Safundi, 2019
Special edition of _Safundi_ 20(2), coedited by Louise Bethlehem, Lindelwa Dalamba and Uhuru Phal... more Special edition of _Safundi_ 20(2), coedited by Louise Bethlehem, Lindelwa Dalamba and Uhuru Phalafala.
Safundi, 2018
Special edition of Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies
Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and its Aftermath traces the responses to the emergent par... more Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and its Aftermath traces the responses to the emergent paradigm of South African literary studies from the 1970s onwards. Embedded in the influential critical texts of the field, it claims, are hidden narratives-of land, race, gender, ...
Critical Arts, Jan 1, 2012
This special edition of Critical Arts arose from the interchange between affect and institution. ... more This special edition of Critical Arts arose from the interchange between affect and institution. We wagered that Mieke Bal's (2007a: 23) notion of a 'migratory aesthetics' might be a productive way of revisiting the cultural studies classroom as a site of 'sentient ...
African Identities, Jan 1, 2009
The study of labour in Africa has undergone important transformations over the last 20 years. Fol... more The study of labour in Africa has undergone important transformations over the last 20 years. Following a period of intense scrutiny from the 1950s to the 1980s, research on working classes, labour unions, capitalist expansion and proletarianisation in Africa experienced ...
Violence and Non-Violence in Africa This unique book seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct... more Violence and Non-Violence in Africa This unique book seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct the pervasive, almost ritualistic, association of Africa with forms of extreme violence, the latter bordering on and including genocide. The volume highlights political, social and cultural ...
his article offers a reflection on the life of South Africa's extraordinary political leader,... more his article offers a reflection on the life of South Africa's extraordinary political leader, Nelson Mandela and on the legacies of the struggle against apartheid that he and his cohort of fellow activists shaped
photographies, 2022
Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In... more Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term “empty photographs” into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as “‘bad,’ ‘boring,’ or repetitious” in post-apartheid settings (“The Uneven Citizenry,” 189). This article revisits a subset of such images to contest their seeming emptiness—pallbearers escorting dead activists to their graves during political funerals in late-apartheid South Africa. Focusing specifically on Afrapix photographer, Gille de Vlieg’s images of Themba Dlamini’s funeral in Driefontein in 1990, the paper restores their local history to view and unpacks the visual cultural and material cultural circuits of militant mourning in which they were embedded. It then uses various orders of metonymy in the visual field to comment on the “necropolitics” of the apartheid regime (Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”). The paper concludes with a reflection on Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the “civil gaze” (Civil Imagination) and considers what unfolds when a reckoning with the differential distribution of death that characterizes necropower reorients this faculty away from the individual photograph towards series, genre or corpus.
This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled... more This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers historiographic traction over other Cold War settings. Throughout the international antiapartheid struggle, South African expressive culture was channeled through local paradigms of reception in the world beyond, in taut negotiation with aesthetic, institutional, linguistic, and political considerations. Instances of cultural translation, catachresis, and slippage resulting from the deterritorialization of South African cultural formations can thus be contextualized, historicized, and turned back reflexively on other conjunctures, to defamiliarize existing scholarship. Makeba's long exile in Ahmed Sékou Touré's Guinea between 1969 and ...
A blog entry was written by Louise Bethlehem on the genesis of the European<br> Research Co... more A blog entry was written by Louise Bethlehem on the genesis of the European<br> Research Council Project "Apartheid<br> The Global Itinerary: South African<br> Cultural Formations in Transnational<br> Circulation, 1948-1990"
A blog entry was written by Louise Bethlehem on the genesis of the European<br> Research Co... more A blog entry was written by Louise Bethlehem on the genesis of the European<br> Research Council Project "Apartheid<br> The Global Itinerary: South African<br> Cultural Formations in Transnational<br> Circulation, 1948-1990"
A tribute to the legendary Hugh Ramapolo Masekela who<br> died on 23 January 2018.
Interventions, 2021
Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemis... more Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths that have shaped influential recent accounts of the city? This article outlines the contours of a “hydrocolonial Johannesburg” though combining Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall’s invitation to “read for water” with existing methodologies that read for infrastructure. It sets these strategies to work in the context of Lauren Beukes’ second work of speculative fiction, _Zoo City_ (Beukes, Lauren. 2010. Zoo City. Johannesburg: Jacana Media). The novel propels its readers into a noiresque fantasy world whose spatial coordinates closely reflect the extra-textual city of Johannesburg. Taking my cue from Beukes’ infrastructural allusions, I mobilize her text to provide the struts for my own as I explore the intertextuality of _Zoo City_ with works by William Kentridge and Sarah Gertrude Millin. Alternately foregrounded or barely perceptible until deliberately sought out, water helps to distinguish the various locales of the novel from one another. My essay turns to _Zoo City_ to offer three vignettes that trace the flows of water and the contiguous presence of infrastructures in Johannesburg, pursuing their intersection beyond the boundaries of the novel into a larger expressive cultural archive to reflect on the relations between privilege and forms of anthropogenic degradation in the life of the city.
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2019
ABSTRACT The contemporary mobilization of the apartheid-Israel analogy on the part of activists a... more ABSTRACT The contemporary mobilization of the apartheid-Israel analogy on the part of activists and academics alike obscures the fact that it has a long history of use on the part of Hebrew-speaking writers and intellectuals. Some of the earliest comparative references to apartheid arose from the Hebrew translation and stage adaptation of Alan Paton’s celebrated 1948 novel Cry, the Beloved Country. Departing from the performative focus of Eitan Bar-Yosef who uses blackface in the stage adaptation to reflect on Jewish whiteness in the nascent state of Israel, we analyse critical intellectual responses to the prose translation on the part of figures who were very differently positioned in relation to the hegemonic Zionist ideology of the period. Analysis of the commentary by the socialist Rivka Gurfein, the liberal Ezriel Carlebach, and the revisionist Yohannan Pogrebinsky, allows us to position apartheid as a heuristic device through which to chart debates internal to Israeli politics in the early years of the Zionist state. These help to expose the constitutive ambivalence of Israel as a “colonial post-colony” in Joseph Massad’s reckoning, thus touching on the very self-definition of the Jewish state.
English in Africa, 1997
... all manner of learning, whereas other Countries are all of them, overspread with Barbarisme&a... more ... all manner of learning, whereas other Countries are all of them, overspread with Barbarisme&quot; (in Rabasa 1985, 7). This is one of the ghosts which Gray must exorcize if he is to assert indigenous worth, and the tactic he ... Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar would not be surprised. ...
The Conversation Africa
A survey of poetic tributes to Nelson Mandela with a focus on Dennis Brutus, Seamus Heaney and Wo... more A survey of poetic tributes to Nelson Mandela with a focus on Dennis Brutus, Seamus Heaney and Wole Soyinka.
Interested individuals are requested to submit one copy of the following documents as a single PD... more Interested individuals are requested to submit one copy of the following documents as a single PDF File: • Curriculum vitae (including language proficiency) • Transcript of grades • Abstract of Ph.D. dissertation • Evaluation of Ph.D. dissertation (if available) • Document describing proposed post-doctoral research topic (up to 1500 words) • A writing sample: Ph.D. chapter or paper accepted for publication • Additionally, two letters of recommendation are to be sent directly to the administrative director of the project, Maya Roudner: mayarou@savion.huji.ac.il.
