“Three generations of white South African men were bound together at that table. Vermuelen was the first generation. He defined Africa, made it safe for Basson to defile. I was the last generation, the last to grow up in segregated neighborhoods. Between us was the silent photograph of Wouter Basson. Like a distant father, Basson was absent at the dining table.” – Henk Rossouw (Hole in the White ‘Hood). Also Mahmood Mamdani on Bantu Education at UCT, Gael Reagon on sisterhood, Binyavanga Wainaina on dis-covering Kenya, Gaston Zossou on African intellectuals and more…
Cover:
Strange Fruit by Lewis Allen
Ghosts, spectres, revenants. Hauntology as a means to think and feel future (Iwalewa Books, 2020)
Hauntology as a successful academic concept holds a pun on the idea of ‘ontology’. It denotes a temporal nonlinearity, the persistence and lingering of failed, of omitted, often utopian, ideas that also formed radical visions of futures and opens a field to discuss presence and absence, visibility and invisibility. The present we live is embedded in the presence of ghosts and specters, and the traces of imaginations of different times and spaces may become visible and doable.
The scholars and artists contributing to this volume discuss these conceptual outlines in a series of transdisciplinary contributions. Art in its various forms is the integral part of these hauntological engagements.
Edited by Katharina Fink, Marie-Anne Kohl, Nadine Siegert