Chronicling Deaths Foretold: The Testimony of the Corpse and the Problemof Political Violence in South Africa (original) (raw)
Related papers
Selling sorrow: testimony, representation and images of HIV‐positive South African women
Social Dynamics, 2008
In post-apartheid South Africa, testimony and personal narrative have opened a space for marginalised voices to emerge. At the same time, to testify is to occupy a position of vulnerability. This paper focuses on a series of self-portraits by black HIV-positive women and points to how their entry into the public sphere and the global art market has been conditioned by their social and economic marginality. These portraits have been read as 'maps', providing access to the truth of the subjects they represent. Such readings perpetuate rather than challenge the myth of the transparent, authentic African subject.
Photographies, 2022
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.
2019
The return to democratic non-racialism in South Africa took a tortuous turn that witnessed several human violations. A funereal complex pervaded the entire social formation as partisan politics unleashed a harvest of deaths that transgressed racial boundaries at one moment, but also became more intense at intra-racial levels, especially the black-on-black violence. The mnemonic revivification of some of these violations has raised questions on how to delineate such transgressions without offending aesthetic ideals. In many of the narratives of transition into South Africa’s liberal order, the narration of violence gets sensationalized, resulting in what Njabulo Ndebele perceives as the over-celebration of the spectacular. The implication is that the narration of violence oftentimes leads to a violence of representation. This essay explores Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying as a novel of South Africa’s transition to democracy, and suggests through theorizing the concept of violation that the...
“These violent delights have violent ends”: good subjects of everyday South African violence
Acta Academic, 2020
While the deaths of Mlungisi Nxumalo and Lucky Sefali barely registered in the media and public consciousness, they can be read as an exemplar of South African violence. Te more closely we examine this incident, the more difcult it becomes to distinguish between those fghting for justice, and those undermining it. Te imagined boundaries between law-abiding citizen and criminal become unclear, as does the distinction between the use of force to protect citizens, and the use of violence to damage the social fabric. Tis leads to a critique of the conventional attributions of criminality and ideas about effective criminal justice, and instead reframes the problem of violence as one of the constructions of certain kinds of subjects, persons for whom the normalised exercise of various forms of unrecognised or legitimated violence is part of the texture of everyday life.
Refusing Transcendence: The Deaths of Biko and the Archives of Apartheid
Impossible Mourning , 2014
This chapter is concerned with the question of remains, and in particular what remains after we imagine ourselves to have dealt with the trauma of the past in ways that enable us to move on. Since the time of the murder of the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in 1977, photographs and artworks depicting his corpse have been in public circulation. This chapter takes these images as its focus and reads Biko's murder as an instance of what the anthropologist Veena Das terms " bad death " —that is, a death that is difficult, complicated and even impossible to mourn. Through my readings of multiple images of Biko's corpse, I consider the relation between mourning, repression, and the archive. I argue that because of the ways in which they exceed the narrative of the apartheid state and the dominant post-apartheid narrative of reconciliation and healing, such works prevent Biko's death from being consigned to the archive. In this way these works also lead those who view them to engage with the unresolved, unmourned deaths of others, and to recognize that to which we cannot be reconciled. In the argument I make here, about and through a series of photographs and artworks that portray Biko's corpse, the archive comes to stand for an immense space of national repression. I argue that by eluding archival capture , and thereby a particular kind of coherence and closure, images of Biko's corpse remind us of what remains unresolved, often also of that which we would rather forget. I read the visibility of Biko's wounded corpse as a gesture toward the possibility of a different kind of body politic from that imagined into being during the transition from apartheid.
Corporealities of violence in southern and eastern Africa
Critical African Studies, 2015
In a recent discussion on the display and concealment of bodies during Rwanda's 1994 genocide, Nigel Eltringham asserts a common anthropological truism that 'violence is discursive', and that 'the victim's body is a key vehicle of that discourse' (2015, 161). This point preambles his argument that scholars should pay 'the same attention … to post-mortem disposal as has been given to ante-mortem degradation' (2015, 172) in contexts of violent conflict. His argument points to the need to consider ante-and post-mortem violence within continuous, coherent necropolitical frameworks of meaning (Fontein 2010), across often arbitrary or imposed distinctions between life and death. But the argument he develops also questions the validity of differentiating between 'the instrumental, didactic display of bodies in "cultures of terror", where the intention is to discipline a population and, in contrast, the concealment of bodies in contexts of genocide, where the intention is to exterminate a population' (2015, 168). As he shows for Rwanda's genocide, with comparative examples drawn from Argentina (Robben 2004), Columbia (Uribe 2004) and Zimbabwe (Fontein 2010), this dualism simply does not work. 'Not all cultures of terror display bodies instrumentally' and as the Rwandan case clearly shows, 'not all genocides only involve concealment' (Eltringham 2015, 167-168). Eltringham builds his case for the didactic and discursive significance of the diverse ways in which corpses were handled and disposed of during Rwanda's genocide with reference to, amongst other things, Taylor's well-known analysis of 'flow/blockage symbolism' in Rwanda's conceptions of the body (1999). These, Taylor argued, were reflected in the way that the genocide was carried out, which betrayed a preoccupation with the movement of persons and substances and with the canals, arteries, and conduits along which persons and substances flow: rivers, roadways, pathways, and even conduits of the human body such as the reproductive and digestive systems. (Taylor 1999, 128) Although this analysis is (as Eltringham notes) necessarily speculativebecause it is impossible to know, without thorough ethnographic work amongst perpetrators, what motivated them, and it remains possible the disposal of bodies 'was more pragmatic' and 'prosaic' than 'poetic'it does resemble cultural motifs and 'flow metaphors' elsewhere in the region (Warnier 2007). The articles in this special issue not only engage with the concerns that Eltringham raises but also, in an important way, move beyond them. The articles derive from a workshop held at the University of Edinburgh in September 2013, one of three workshops that formed a three-year British Academy-funded project entitled Transforming Bodies: Health, Migration and Violence in Southern Africa. Building on a recent growth of academic interest in the complex social and political significance of human corporeality, this international partnership between scholars at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, sought to explore how a focus on the transformations of human forms and substances