Helene Strauss | McMaster University (original) (raw)

Papers by Helene Strauss

Ariel a Review of International English Literature, 2003

Gillian Hart's Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa a... more Gillian Hart's Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa asks compelling questions about the internal and external pressures that have led to the ANC national government's seemingly eager acceptance of free market neoliberal economic policies to the detriment ...

Postcolonial Text, Apr 5, 2005

In South African fiction, women have a long history of opening their bodies to metaphor and abstr... more In South African fiction, women have a long history of opening their bodies to metaphor and abstraction. In post-apartheid South Africa in particular, it seems, the violated female body and womb are becoming popular sites from which to re-imagine identities grappling with the ...

Safundi, Apr 8, 2014

ABSTRACT

English in Africa, 2009

Recent events in South Africa have compelled, arguably for the first time since 1994, a serious p... more Recent events in South Africa have compelled, arguably for the first time since 1994, a serious public questioning of some of the regulatory fictions that are shaping South African engagements with democracy, particularly as these relate to myths about gender equity. These events ...

Subjectivity, 2020

Taking the film Strike a Rock (dir. Saragas 2017) as a case study, this paper attends to the affe... more Taking the film Strike a Rock (dir. Saragas 2017) as a case study, this paper attends to the affective charge of rocks and rubbish—in their material, symbolic, aesthetic and archival forms—as a feminist challenge to violent extractivism’s intergenerational echo. Set in Nkaneng, a township adjacent to the Lonmin Platinum mine in Marikana, where in 2012 the South African police opened fire on a group of striking miners, the film traces some of the means by which local women have been negotiating enduring forms of political and economic impasse in their communities. This paper tests an anthrodecentric approach to extractive capitalism’s historical exploitation of mineral, mechanical, muscular and psychic energies as a means to accelerating resistance to forms of violence at once human and ecological. It identifies in Strike a Rock’s documentary aesthetics an energy archive that animates resistant, regenerative political modalities of post-apartheid feminist affect.

Social Dynamics, 2019

This paper turns to the critically entangled terms of form and feeling as a basis for exploring p... more This paper turns to the critically entangled terms of form and feeling as a basis for exploring post-2012 South African protest and visual cultures. Against the backdrop of a newly ascendant political vernacular characterised by the reluctance to dichotomise emotion and reason in negotiating the terms of contemporary dissent, I examine specifically how the consequences of political disenchantment are affectively negotiated in and through documentary form. Films such as 'The People Versus The Rainbow,' 'Nation Nelson Mandela: The Myth and Me,' 'Miners Shot Down' and 'Strike a Rock' have recently come to exemplify what Rob Nixon calls “the versatile possibilities of politically engaged nonfiction”. Taking 'Nelson Mandela: The Myth and Me' and 'The People Versus The Rainbow Nation' as case studies, I trace the historicity and aesthetic structures embedded in those aspects of the post-2012 South African documentary image that might be said not only to move viewers, but to be constitutive of each film’s formal arrangement. The films convey the entanglement of documentary intelligibility and feeling in ways that are particularly pertinent to making sense of the contemporary South African “liberation reimagined”.

This essay considers the complex entanglement of embodiment, happiness, and time within recent So... more This essay considers the complex entanglement of embodiment, happiness, and time within recent South African social and biopolitical imaginaries. Specifically, the chronopolitical implications of shifting from politically atomizing modes of self-care in the face of structural injustice, towards forms of collective resistant action, are explored from an embodied-personal vantage point.

At a time when the reconciliation narratives peddled during the Mandela and Mbeki eras are increa... more At a time when the reconciliation narratives peddled during the Mandela and Mbeki eras are increasingly coming under stress, a number of South African filmmakers have been offering viewers deeply felt, often autobiographically inflected and experimental filmic engagements with the everyday, affective textures of contemporary political disillusionment. This article reads two films associated with the so-called ‘New Wave’ in South African filmmaking – namely Jenna Cato Bass’s Love the One You Love (2014) and Sibs Shongwe-La Mer’s Necktie Youth (2015) – in order to map the contours of waywardness as a mood and mode of cinematic narration peculiar to a particular post-transitional South African political conjuncture. Inspired by a recent flurry of international scholarly activity on the topic of mood, my analysis of these films considers the nuances that a reading of mood bring to understanding the aesthetics of ‘wayward feeling’ in contemporary South African visual culture.

This paper analyses Rehad Desai’s documentary film Miners Shot Down in an effort to chart some of... more This paper analyses Rehad Desai’s documentary film Miners Shot Down in an effort to chart some of the ways in which public feelings were managed in both the run-up to and the aftermath of the Marikana massacre in South Africa. I suggest that the affective and temporal dimensions of current attempts at containing perceived threats to financial and political stability on the part of South Africa’s business and political elite are key to understanding increasingly violent and repressive securitisation and crisis management strategies. The paper proceeds in three parts. First, I take a detour through scholarship on time and globalisation in order to make sense of the temporal politics of securitisation that led to the massacre in the first place. Second, I consider the difference between psychic and social forms of mourning and melancholia respectively, particularly in light of what these differences reveal about the technologies of sovereign control and affective containment implied by each. Finally, I offer a reading of the formal organisation of the documentary as a whole, and of those rhetorical and stylistic filmic elements that might be said to contract the temporal and affective distance that exists between the striking miners and viewing publics.
Follow this e-link for access to the paper:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/P3JDIpTu4P9s9D5PQUyZ/full

Introduction to a Special Issue of Critical Arts Journal on South-North Cultural and Media Studie... more Introduction to a Special Issue of Critical Arts Journal on South-North Cultural and Media Studies:

This paper offers a glimpse of work generated by the 2014 John Douglas Taylor conference on ‘Contemporary Orientations in African Cultural Studies’. The conference generated a number of inquiries into the time and place of contemporary African cultural work, many of which theorised beyond the frameworks that postcolonial and globalisation studies frequently offer. Within the shifting paradigms of Cultural Studies, the work of this conference (as well as the current project) moves away from reading the African everyday as exclusively a construction out of a series of colonial histories and relationalities, or global cultural flows. In line with Jean and John Comaroff’s Theory from the South (2011), this issue is instead dedicated to relocating the global centres from which Cultural Studies emanates and to positing African work’s challenge to normative zones of cultural critique. ‘Contemporary orientations’ attempts to relocate the time and space of critique in African studies, but it resists the gesture to posit a stable trajectory through which time moves. Rather, the terms of the contemporary and the orientation depend on how they are read in relation to a multitude of other temporalities, orientations, and objects.

Subjectivity, Jan 1, 2011

English Academy Review, Jan 1, 2012

Ariel a Review of International English Literature, 2003

Gillian Hart's Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa a... more Gillian Hart's Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa asks compelling questions about the internal and external pressures that have led to the ANC national government's seemingly eager acceptance of free market neoliberal economic policies to the detriment ...

Postcolonial Text, Apr 5, 2005

In South African fiction, women have a long history of opening their bodies to metaphor and abstr... more In South African fiction, women have a long history of opening their bodies to metaphor and abstraction. In post-apartheid South Africa in particular, it seems, the violated female body and womb are becoming popular sites from which to re-imagine identities grappling with the ...

Safundi, Apr 8, 2014

ABSTRACT

English in Africa, 2009

Recent events in South Africa have compelled, arguably for the first time since 1994, a serious p... more Recent events in South Africa have compelled, arguably for the first time since 1994, a serious public questioning of some of the regulatory fictions that are shaping South African engagements with democracy, particularly as these relate to myths about gender equity. These events ...

Subjectivity, 2020

Taking the film Strike a Rock (dir. Saragas 2017) as a case study, this paper attends to the affe... more Taking the film Strike a Rock (dir. Saragas 2017) as a case study, this paper attends to the affective charge of rocks and rubbish—in their material, symbolic, aesthetic and archival forms—as a feminist challenge to violent extractivism’s intergenerational echo. Set in Nkaneng, a township adjacent to the Lonmin Platinum mine in Marikana, where in 2012 the South African police opened fire on a group of striking miners, the film traces some of the means by which local women have been negotiating enduring forms of political and economic impasse in their communities. This paper tests an anthrodecentric approach to extractive capitalism’s historical exploitation of mineral, mechanical, muscular and psychic energies as a means to accelerating resistance to forms of violence at once human and ecological. It identifies in Strike a Rock’s documentary aesthetics an energy archive that animates resistant, regenerative political modalities of post-apartheid feminist affect.

Social Dynamics, 2019

This paper turns to the critically entangled terms of form and feeling as a basis for exploring p... more This paper turns to the critically entangled terms of form and feeling as a basis for exploring post-2012 South African protest and visual cultures. Against the backdrop of a newly ascendant political vernacular characterised by the reluctance to dichotomise emotion and reason in negotiating the terms of contemporary dissent, I examine specifically how the consequences of political disenchantment are affectively negotiated in and through documentary form. Films such as 'The People Versus The Rainbow,' 'Nation Nelson Mandela: The Myth and Me,' 'Miners Shot Down' and 'Strike a Rock' have recently come to exemplify what Rob Nixon calls “the versatile possibilities of politically engaged nonfiction”. Taking 'Nelson Mandela: The Myth and Me' and 'The People Versus The Rainbow Nation' as case studies, I trace the historicity and aesthetic structures embedded in those aspects of the post-2012 South African documentary image that might be said not only to move viewers, but to be constitutive of each film’s formal arrangement. The films convey the entanglement of documentary intelligibility and feeling in ways that are particularly pertinent to making sense of the contemporary South African “liberation reimagined”.

This essay considers the complex entanglement of embodiment, happiness, and time within recent So... more This essay considers the complex entanglement of embodiment, happiness, and time within recent South African social and biopolitical imaginaries. Specifically, the chronopolitical implications of shifting from politically atomizing modes of self-care in the face of structural injustice, towards forms of collective resistant action, are explored from an embodied-personal vantage point.

At a time when the reconciliation narratives peddled during the Mandela and Mbeki eras are increa... more At a time when the reconciliation narratives peddled during the Mandela and Mbeki eras are increasingly coming under stress, a number of South African filmmakers have been offering viewers deeply felt, often autobiographically inflected and experimental filmic engagements with the everyday, affective textures of contemporary political disillusionment. This article reads two films associated with the so-called ‘New Wave’ in South African filmmaking – namely Jenna Cato Bass’s Love the One You Love (2014) and Sibs Shongwe-La Mer’s Necktie Youth (2015) – in order to map the contours of waywardness as a mood and mode of cinematic narration peculiar to a particular post-transitional South African political conjuncture. Inspired by a recent flurry of international scholarly activity on the topic of mood, my analysis of these films considers the nuances that a reading of mood bring to understanding the aesthetics of ‘wayward feeling’ in contemporary South African visual culture.

This paper analyses Rehad Desai’s documentary film Miners Shot Down in an effort to chart some of... more This paper analyses Rehad Desai’s documentary film Miners Shot Down in an effort to chart some of the ways in which public feelings were managed in both the run-up to and the aftermath of the Marikana massacre in South Africa. I suggest that the affective and temporal dimensions of current attempts at containing perceived threats to financial and political stability on the part of South Africa’s business and political elite are key to understanding increasingly violent and repressive securitisation and crisis management strategies. The paper proceeds in three parts. First, I take a detour through scholarship on time and globalisation in order to make sense of the temporal politics of securitisation that led to the massacre in the first place. Second, I consider the difference between psychic and social forms of mourning and melancholia respectively, particularly in light of what these differences reveal about the technologies of sovereign control and affective containment implied by each. Finally, I offer a reading of the formal organisation of the documentary as a whole, and of those rhetorical and stylistic filmic elements that might be said to contract the temporal and affective distance that exists between the striking miners and viewing publics.
Follow this e-link for access to the paper:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/P3JDIpTu4P9s9D5PQUyZ/full

Introduction to a Special Issue of Critical Arts Journal on South-North Cultural and Media Studie... more Introduction to a Special Issue of Critical Arts Journal on South-North Cultural and Media Studies:

This paper offers a glimpse of work generated by the 2014 John Douglas Taylor conference on ‘Contemporary Orientations in African Cultural Studies’. The conference generated a number of inquiries into the time and place of contemporary African cultural work, many of which theorised beyond the frameworks that postcolonial and globalisation studies frequently offer. Within the shifting paradigms of Cultural Studies, the work of this conference (as well as the current project) moves away from reading the African everyday as exclusively a construction out of a series of colonial histories and relationalities, or global cultural flows. In line with Jean and John Comaroff’s Theory from the South (2011), this issue is instead dedicated to relocating the global centres from which Cultural Studies emanates and to positing African work’s challenge to normative zones of cultural critique. ‘Contemporary orientations’ attempts to relocate the time and space of critique in African studies, but it resists the gesture to posit a stable trajectory through which time moves. Rather, the terms of the contemporary and the orientation depend on how they are read in relation to a multitude of other temporalities, orientations, and objects.

Subjectivity, Jan 1, 2011

English Academy Review, Jan 1, 2012

Routledge, 2017

Co-edited with Jessie Forsyth and Sarah Olutola

University of Toronto Press, 2022

Inventive new methods of audio-visual mediation and aesthetic activism have been giving shape, si... more Inventive new methods of audio-visual mediation and aesthetic activism have been giving shape, since at least the mid-2000s, to feelings of despair, disappointment, and rage at the injustice that South Africa’s colonial and apartheid histories continue to trail in their wake. Wayward Feeling reveals how racism, sexism, and other forms of structural disenfranchisement have continued to assert themselves in affective terms, and how these terms have been recast in spaces both public and intimate in "post-rainbow" times.

Helene Strauss argues that the tension between aspiration and achievability has yielded modes of feeling that increasingly disrupt the thrall of post-apartheid nation-building and reconciliation myths, even as wide-spread attachment to the utopian ideals of the anti-apartheid struggle continues to shape dissenting political organising and cultural production. Drawing on a variety of audio-visual forms – including video installations, conceptual artwork, documentary film, live art, and sonic installations – Wayward Feeling examines some of the affective resources that people in contemporary South Africa have been drawing on to make difficult lives more bearable.