“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
Wondering Hand(s) and Spirited Ink: Snapshots into the Black Public Humanities (Keleketla! Library, 2024)
Keleketla! Library, in partnership with the Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation (NEST) presents Wondering Hand(s) and Spirited Ink: Snapshots into the Black Public Humanities.
Inspired by the provocations of the 2019 Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation (NEST) colloquium Call for Proposals, the papers that form part of this collection directly confront questions of black memory, thought, imagination, and praxis under conditions of extreme racialised and gendered violence.
Each of the essays thinks deeply and seriously about the historical and epistemological foundations of our inherited conceptual frames and the subsequent impact for the ways we invoke these frames in narratives of resistance, hope and freedom. From their different disciplinary and sociopolitical locations, the authors in this collection take seriously sites beyond the academy – the art gallery, stage, music video, the bedroom, the township, and the dance floor, to name a few – as key sites of knowledge production that have and continue to inform emerging narratives around black futures.
The collection traverses thematic spaces such as desire and consent, consumption and freedom, black performative possibility, post-apartheid black subjectivity and black memory. The aim of the collection is to create a pedagogical device that foregrounds the sonic, aesthetic, epistemic and performative strategies of creating emancipatory thinking, feeling, imagining and being, that will contribute to critically expanding the decolonial black archive.
Edited by: Moshibudi Motimele and Rangoato Hlasane with contributions by: Mawethu Nkosana; Moshibudi Motimele; Ayabulela Mhlahlo; Nomancotsho Pakade; Gorata Chengeta; Tumi Mogorosi; Same Mdluli; Rangoato Hlasane and Zukolwenkosi Zikalala.