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Papers by Derilene (Dee) Marco
Wherewithall, 2023
This paper explores how House of Complaints, an ongoing research project within Mother.Lab is a c... more This paper explores how House of Complaints, an ongoing research project within Mother.Lab is a curated space. The paper explores complaints as methodologies of and part of mothering.
Film Education Journal
This paper presents a multimodal conversation that engages the personal teaching and learning exp... more This paper presents a multimodal conversation that engages the personal teaching and learning experiences of the authors, Berenike Jung (in London when the conversation started) and Derilene Marco (in Johannesburg). Critically reflecting and engaging through an audio recording and letters, Jung and Marco ask each other about the processes of doing and performing the labour of decolonising film teaching in their respective courses and from different global locations. Keeping in mind the impositions and complexities of the pandemic, Jung and Marco also reflect upon the ways in which colonial posturing occurs in film studies spaces, such as highly visible international film conferences. In doing so, they reflect on how engagements such as these keep many scholars and their scholarship confined to traditional Eurocentric and North American strategies, methods and endorsements of approval and relevance. The piece is conversational and self-aware in its self-referential tone. It is intend...
Film education journal , 2022
This paper presents a multimodal conversation that engages the personal teaching and learning exp... more This paper presents a multimodal conversation that engages the personal teaching and learning experiences of the authors, Berenike Jung (in London when the conversation started) and Derilene Marco (in Johannesburg). Critically reflecting and engaging through an audio recording and letters, Jung and Marco ask each other about the processes of doing and performing the labour of decolonising film teaching in their respective courses and from different global locations. Keeping in mind the impositions and complexities of the pandemic, Jung and Marco also reflect upon the ways in which colonial posturing occurs in film studies spaces, such as highly visible international film conferences. In doing so, they reflect on how engagements such as these keep many scholars and their scholarship confined to traditional Eurocentric and North American strategies, methods and endorsements of approval and relevance. The piece is conversational and self-aware in its self-referential tone. It is intended that readers listen to parts of the audio if they please, but that they are not compelled to do so to find meaning.
Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain, 2018
Social Dynamics, 2021
ABSTRACT This article considers the ways in which characters are presented as “out of place” in d... more ABSTRACT This article considers the ways in which characters are presented as “out of place” in different apartheid city spaces in anti-apartheid era films of the late 1980s: A Dry White Season (1989, dir. Euzhan Palcy) and Mapantsula (1988, dir. Oliver Schmitz) and, to a lesser degree, Cry Freedom (1987, dir. Richard Attenborough). The article explores the manner in which the protagonists relate to each other through interracial friendship, relationality and mobility in the domestic spaces of cities and townships. It reads these relations as occupying and redefining apartheid sensibilities in distinct ways that filter into how postapartheid sensibilities are and can be navigated. The paper thus grapples with how seemingly fixed apartheid spaces and characters in the films can also be part of complex, real-life repositionings of racial identities in postapartheid South Africa that are not always clear and/or neat. The paper therefore argues that through their representations of the past, these films perform memory work and map our memories and historical constructions of apartheid.
Arts
This article considers different ways in which Blackness is represented as exceptional in the 201... more This article considers different ways in which Blackness is represented as exceptional in the 2018 film Black Panther. It also considers other iterations of Black visibility and legibility in the current popular culture context which appears to privilege Black narratives in interesting ways. The essay uses conceptual lenses from diaspora studies, Afro science fiction and Black feminist studies to critically engage the film and to critically question the notion of Black exceptionalism.
African Studies Review, 2017
Social Dynamics , 2021
To cite this article: Derilene (Dee) Marco (2021): Out-of-placeness and the city as a space of re... more To cite this article: Derilene (Dee) Marco (2021): Out-of-placeness and the city as a space of relation in apartheid-era cinema, Social Dynamics,
New Media Art and the South African Social Special Issue of Arts Journal , 2018
This article considers different ways in which Blackness is represented as exceptional in the 201... more This article considers different ways in which Blackness is represented as exceptional in the 2018 film Black Panther. It also considers other iterations of Black visibility and legibility in the current popular culture context which appears to privilege Black narratives in interesting ways. The essay uses conceptual lenses from diaspora studies, Afro science fiction and Black feminist studies to critically engage the film and to critically question the notion of Black exceptionalism.
African Studies Review, 2014
To cite this article: Derilene Marco (2011) Rhyming with "knowledge of self": the South African h... more To cite this article: Derilene Marco (2011) Rhyming with "knowledge of self": the South African hip-hop scene's discourses on race and knowledge, Muziki, 8:2, 96-106,
Film and book reviews by Derilene (Dee) Marco
Thesis Chapters by Derilene (Dee) Marco
Films about South Africa 1987-2014: Representations of 'The Rainbow', 2016
INTRODUCTION No generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors. 1 This thesis is a... more INTRODUCTION No generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors. 1 This thesis is a sustained consideration and analysis of selected post-apartheid South African films. The thesis explores what the films do by paying specific attention to those elements that have not been critically analysed before: mainly, the complexity of post-apartheid identities of individual characters; the presence of trauma in films that grapple with the apartheid past; and finally, the consideration of post-apartheid films and individual characters, as representative of different structures of feeling. The aim of the thesis is thus to analyse and consider what has gone unnoticed in post-apartheid films before and what is so ever-present now: anger, disdain and a disappointment in the promises of 'The Rainbow'. It interrogates the cinematic realisation of the 'Rainbow Nation' and explores new, fractured post-apartheid identities through an analysis of films ranging from A Dry White Season (1987) to Elelwani (2014). The thesis employs a thematic and periodic structure which aids thinking about apartheid and post-apartheid as specific periods of time but also as specific identities of place and race. The thesis is thus positioned in the complicated, overlapping terrain of scholarly discussions of national cinema, race and ethnicity, as well as touching on questions of representation, trauma, memory and identity. Throughout, I have tried to pay attention to what is specific to the South African situation, while also, at the same time, avoiding isolating this exploration of South African cinema from other theoretical and critical discussions. Keeping this in mind, the research questions of the thesis are: 1 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 131.
Books by Derilene (Dee) Marco
Sasinda And Siselapha (still Here): Black Feminist Approaches to Cultural Studies in South Africa's Twenty-Five Years Since 1994, 2021
Sasinda futhi Siselapha is a fearless new interdisciplinary collection of contemporary criticism ... more Sasinda futhi Siselapha is a fearless new interdisciplinary collection of contemporary criticism in the arts and humanities by a group of scholars working on contemporary South Africa. Authors examine the period after the legal end of apartheid across genre and with an eye toward humanistically oriented systematic social scientific approaches to the study of culture. Derilene (Dee) Marco studies the cinematic legacies in the adaptation of Coetzee's Disgrace; Sharlene Khan explores the hateful art criticism that has become the norm in response to Black and women of color artists; Natalia Molebatsi theorizes about the poetry scene and its aesthetics and ethics of healing across generations; Zethu Cakata examines the injuries caused by unenforced post 1994 language policies; Ashraf Jamal analyzes how African is African art and Bhavisha Panchia offers a provocative argument for the use of laughter, humor and play as anticolonial political ethical strategies; Peter Hudson scrutinizes the colonial unconscious reproducing itself through capitalist property relations in the present; and Robert Muponde and Abebe Zegeye write about the legacies of "white writing. Willoughby-Herard links the study of culture to what Barbara Christian famously called the race for theory through interdisciplinary method, rigorous historiography of the making of a range of fields in feminist visual culture studies, and through attention to preeminent theorists in feminist African and African Diaspora Studies. From June Jordan to Sibongile Khumalo to Mary Rahube, poetry, song, fiction, and drama offer us renderings of the meaning of an ongoing and spirit-filled struggle with potential victory.
Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain (eds. Nike Jung and Stella Bruzzi) , 2019
Wherewithall, 2023
This paper explores how House of Complaints, an ongoing research project within Mother.Lab is a c... more This paper explores how House of Complaints, an ongoing research project within Mother.Lab is a curated space. The paper explores complaints as methodologies of and part of mothering.
Film Education Journal
This paper presents a multimodal conversation that engages the personal teaching and learning exp... more This paper presents a multimodal conversation that engages the personal teaching and learning experiences of the authors, Berenike Jung (in London when the conversation started) and Derilene Marco (in Johannesburg). Critically reflecting and engaging through an audio recording and letters, Jung and Marco ask each other about the processes of doing and performing the labour of decolonising film teaching in their respective courses and from different global locations. Keeping in mind the impositions and complexities of the pandemic, Jung and Marco also reflect upon the ways in which colonial posturing occurs in film studies spaces, such as highly visible international film conferences. In doing so, they reflect on how engagements such as these keep many scholars and their scholarship confined to traditional Eurocentric and North American strategies, methods and endorsements of approval and relevance. The piece is conversational and self-aware in its self-referential tone. It is intend...
Film education journal , 2022
This paper presents a multimodal conversation that engages the personal teaching and learning exp... more This paper presents a multimodal conversation that engages the personal teaching and learning experiences of the authors, Berenike Jung (in London when the conversation started) and Derilene Marco (in Johannesburg). Critically reflecting and engaging through an audio recording and letters, Jung and Marco ask each other about the processes of doing and performing the labour of decolonising film teaching in their respective courses and from different global locations. Keeping in mind the impositions and complexities of the pandemic, Jung and Marco also reflect upon the ways in which colonial posturing occurs in film studies spaces, such as highly visible international film conferences. In doing so, they reflect on how engagements such as these keep many scholars and their scholarship confined to traditional Eurocentric and North American strategies, methods and endorsements of approval and relevance. The piece is conversational and self-aware in its self-referential tone. It is intended that readers listen to parts of the audio if they please, but that they are not compelled to do so to find meaning.
Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain, 2018
Social Dynamics, 2021
ABSTRACT This article considers the ways in which characters are presented as “out of place” in d... more ABSTRACT This article considers the ways in which characters are presented as “out of place” in different apartheid city spaces in anti-apartheid era films of the late 1980s: A Dry White Season (1989, dir. Euzhan Palcy) and Mapantsula (1988, dir. Oliver Schmitz) and, to a lesser degree, Cry Freedom (1987, dir. Richard Attenborough). The article explores the manner in which the protagonists relate to each other through interracial friendship, relationality and mobility in the domestic spaces of cities and townships. It reads these relations as occupying and redefining apartheid sensibilities in distinct ways that filter into how postapartheid sensibilities are and can be navigated. The paper thus grapples with how seemingly fixed apartheid spaces and characters in the films can also be part of complex, real-life repositionings of racial identities in postapartheid South Africa that are not always clear and/or neat. The paper therefore argues that through their representations of the past, these films perform memory work and map our memories and historical constructions of apartheid.
Arts
This article considers different ways in which Blackness is represented as exceptional in the 201... more This article considers different ways in which Blackness is represented as exceptional in the 2018 film Black Panther. It also considers other iterations of Black visibility and legibility in the current popular culture context which appears to privilege Black narratives in interesting ways. The essay uses conceptual lenses from diaspora studies, Afro science fiction and Black feminist studies to critically engage the film and to critically question the notion of Black exceptionalism.
African Studies Review, 2017
Social Dynamics , 2021
To cite this article: Derilene (Dee) Marco (2021): Out-of-placeness and the city as a space of re... more To cite this article: Derilene (Dee) Marco (2021): Out-of-placeness and the city as a space of relation in apartheid-era cinema, Social Dynamics,
New Media Art and the South African Social Special Issue of Arts Journal , 2018
This article considers different ways in which Blackness is represented as exceptional in the 201... more This article considers different ways in which Blackness is represented as exceptional in the 2018 film Black Panther. It also considers other iterations of Black visibility and legibility in the current popular culture context which appears to privilege Black narratives in interesting ways. The essay uses conceptual lenses from diaspora studies, Afro science fiction and Black feminist studies to critically engage the film and to critically question the notion of Black exceptionalism.
African Studies Review, 2014
To cite this article: Derilene Marco (2011) Rhyming with "knowledge of self": the South African h... more To cite this article: Derilene Marco (2011) Rhyming with "knowledge of self": the South African hip-hop scene's discourses on race and knowledge, Muziki, 8:2, 96-106,
Films about South Africa 1987-2014: Representations of 'The Rainbow', 2016
INTRODUCTION No generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors. 1 This thesis is a... more INTRODUCTION No generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors. 1 This thesis is a sustained consideration and analysis of selected post-apartheid South African films. The thesis explores what the films do by paying specific attention to those elements that have not been critically analysed before: mainly, the complexity of post-apartheid identities of individual characters; the presence of trauma in films that grapple with the apartheid past; and finally, the consideration of post-apartheid films and individual characters, as representative of different structures of feeling. The aim of the thesis is thus to analyse and consider what has gone unnoticed in post-apartheid films before and what is so ever-present now: anger, disdain and a disappointment in the promises of 'The Rainbow'. It interrogates the cinematic realisation of the 'Rainbow Nation' and explores new, fractured post-apartheid identities through an analysis of films ranging from A Dry White Season (1987) to Elelwani (2014). The thesis employs a thematic and periodic structure which aids thinking about apartheid and post-apartheid as specific periods of time but also as specific identities of place and race. The thesis is thus positioned in the complicated, overlapping terrain of scholarly discussions of national cinema, race and ethnicity, as well as touching on questions of representation, trauma, memory and identity. Throughout, I have tried to pay attention to what is specific to the South African situation, while also, at the same time, avoiding isolating this exploration of South African cinema from other theoretical and critical discussions. Keeping this in mind, the research questions of the thesis are: 1 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 131.
Sasinda And Siselapha (still Here): Black Feminist Approaches to Cultural Studies in South Africa's Twenty-Five Years Since 1994, 2021
Sasinda futhi Siselapha is a fearless new interdisciplinary collection of contemporary criticism ... more Sasinda futhi Siselapha is a fearless new interdisciplinary collection of contemporary criticism in the arts and humanities by a group of scholars working on contemporary South Africa. Authors examine the period after the legal end of apartheid across genre and with an eye toward humanistically oriented systematic social scientific approaches to the study of culture. Derilene (Dee) Marco studies the cinematic legacies in the adaptation of Coetzee's Disgrace; Sharlene Khan explores the hateful art criticism that has become the norm in response to Black and women of color artists; Natalia Molebatsi theorizes about the poetry scene and its aesthetics and ethics of healing across generations; Zethu Cakata examines the injuries caused by unenforced post 1994 language policies; Ashraf Jamal analyzes how African is African art and Bhavisha Panchia offers a provocative argument for the use of laughter, humor and play as anticolonial political ethical strategies; Peter Hudson scrutinizes the colonial unconscious reproducing itself through capitalist property relations in the present; and Robert Muponde and Abebe Zegeye write about the legacies of "white writing. Willoughby-Herard links the study of culture to what Barbara Christian famously called the race for theory through interdisciplinary method, rigorous historiography of the making of a range of fields in feminist visual culture studies, and through attention to preeminent theorists in feminist African and African Diaspora Studies. From June Jordan to Sibongile Khumalo to Mary Rahube, poetry, song, fiction, and drama offer us renderings of the meaning of an ongoing and spirit-filled struggle with potential victory.
Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain (eds. Nike Jung and Stella Bruzzi) , 2019