To fail at becoming South African: Moral blindness, liminality, and Rainbowism

In an effort to move away from Apartheid and its evils -South Africa and South Africans have committed to a shared moral project -the Rainbow Nation-Building Project (RNP); a project that confers certain moral duties and responsibilities upon its citizens, including a joint commitment to robust inclusivity, equality, and unity. Importantly, however, our environments –be they physical, social, or psychological –are such that they (actively or passively) obscure our awareness of some morally relevant facts about our society, and thereby hinder us as moral agents and therefore threaten our abilities to fulfil our moral project and commitment.What does it mean for us -a society ostensibly committed to the RNP -to be plagued by racism, sexism, queerphobia and xenophobia? What is it that contributes to our complicity regarding social practices and ideas that we would otherwise find morally objectionable? What does it say about our commitment to our publicly-exalted ideals and values (of inclusivity, diversity, reconciliation, justice, and unity) when we are unwittingly complicit in the marginalisation and social exclusion of members of our society? And how can institutions such as universities work to overcome this?In this work, I argue that the obscuring of, and failure to perceive, morally relevant facts that call on us for ethical attention and/or action -a phenomenon I refer to as ‘moral blindness’ -is responsible for at least some of our behaviours and practices that run contrary to our moral ambitions; and therefore has profound implications for us as moral agents and our ability to succeed in our moral goals. Moral blindness, then, is both an epistemic and ethical concern that enables socially unjust systems to perpetuate themselves; and is thus a threat toallmoral projects.I argue that, for South Africa, much of what can be identified as moral blindness is the direct result of the shifting and conflicting socio-cultural conditions the nation finds itself liminally caught amidst in its transition from its Apartheid past and towards its promised inclusive Rainbow Nation future. Commitment to the RNP, I argue, involves a self-transformation and habituation of certain supportive virtues on the part of South Africans to become the kinds of people who are compatible with the Rainbowist society -whom I call Rainbow Citizens. But this self-transformation itself is also a moral project, and therefore subject to the threat that moral blindness presents, and so too can be failed. If all this is true, then it seems that if we do not take moral blindness seriously, we could ultimately fail to become South African.Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Humanities, Philosophy, 202

Sexuality, Religion and Nationalism: A Contrapuntal Reading of the History of Female Activism and Political Change in Egypt

Focusing on the Thomson Reuters Foundation Women Survey in 2013 that found Egypt to be ‘the worst Arab state for women’ (Boros 1), this paper aims at tracing the interaction between sexuality, religion, and politics, in controlling and marginalizing the public roles of Egyptian women throughout the 20th Century, which has reached its climax in post-Mubarak Egypt. I argue that, despite sexual and social abuses, the first decade of the 21th Century has witnessed the emergence of a promising potential of political feminist activism and power in Egypt

Self-Actualization through Conscientization

This article takes a critical look at how Theatre of the Oppressed is assisting the self and social transformation of severely disadvantaged groups that fall into the legal and political gaps. Specifically, it will look at the ideological essence of Freire’s conscientization, as prompted through Theatre of the Oppressed workshops run with asylum seekers in Melbourne. It will focus on the early stages of the conscientization process which centers on the notion of ‘self’ through reflection and contextual orientation. This will encompass an analysis into the old, new and evolving definitions of ‘oppressed’ and oppressive dynamics with relation to Theatre of the Oppressed poetics. Discussion will then move beyond this notion of recognition of the oppressed self to verbalization as an acknowledgement of oppression. Later it discusses workshops and group dynamics as conscientizing elements that promote transformation of the self

Confronting Schuster race-to-face: post-apartheid blackface in Mama Jack

A research report submitted to the faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Wits University, Johannesburg, 2017In blackface colonial history, “amusing” white blackface performances that depicted black people as the “natural born fool” were popular with white audiences during a time when whites perceived their racial superiority to be threatened. In Post-1994 South Africa, white supremacy is no longer an uncontested “fact”. As a result, white identities that are premised on “old” legislated notions of racial superiority are made insecure by perceived threats posed against whiteness. The previously disenfranchised and excluded black is now the central focus of South African power and politics and the loss of white centrality creates the “victim” perception that all post-apartheid societal pressures and changes are put on, and against whites. Their power has been “confiscated” and thereby no longer unique to white identity. Blackface is utilised by Leon Schuster in the post-apartheid film, Mama Jack (2005) to reproduce old ideologies of whiteness that remind viewers of its presence, privilege and power. As in the colonial past, it is through the principle white character Jack Theron and his mobilisation of blackface that white supremacy remains intact throughout the film.XL201

I write what we like: A textual analysis of Fallist microblogging

Fallists belong to a constellation of radical student activist movements that pledge to disturb and reimagine South African society. Rather than restricting themselves to coordinated forms of collective action, Fallists’ advance their “revolution-as-becoming” within a context of everyday resistance (Haynes & Prakash, 1991; Molefe, 2015). In this dissertation, I propose that Fallists form an “emerging networked counterpublic” made up of individual activists that enact everyday forms of resistance on Twitter (Jackson & Foucault Welles, 2016:399). This dissertation explores the use of Twitter by a microblogger who has emerged organically as a “crowdsourced elite” among Fallists (Papacharissi & de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). I contend that this microblogger exemplifies the repertoires of communication and resistance that pervade within Fallist networks on Twitter (Jackson & Foucault Welles, 2016). The microblogger is identified through methods of observation and social network analysis (SNA). “#whitetip,” a Twitter hashtag network that exemplifies Fallist communication and resistance, informs the interpretive content analysis that follows. This analysis is conducted on the tweets that the microblogger broadcast between 1 April and 30 September 2016. Tweets are categorised according to “evaluative frames” that emerged inductively during the course of analysis. I find that “resentment,” “pride and care,” and “play” made up the vast majority of evaluative frames. The microblogger employs the platform in a manner that disturbs dominant understandings of public sphere communication: the microblogger’s tweets are evaluative rather than deliberative, and assert a marginal, embodied subjectivity (Papacharissi, 2014; Warner, 2002)

Space and illusion: a practical and theoretical investigation into the critical status of illusion in social space

In this thesis I examine how disorientation, immersion and entertainment have come to characterize our understanding and experience of social space and consider the way representation - traditionally reserved for the visual, literary and aural disciplines of painting and poetry - has developed into ideological and experiential phenomena. However, rather than a single line or logical flow running between contemporary social space and the ideological imperatives of global capital, I argue that differentiated modes of spatial illusion exist in a turbulent and contradictory system of relations. Consequentially, this thesis explores the critical status of illusion. Taking spaces of retail and leisure as the focus of my inquiry I ask if the highly fabricated structures of shopping and entertainment provide some insight into new developments in global economy. More specifically, the relation between the 'experiential placemaking' of urban design and the 6experience economy' is analysed through their relation to discordant modes of illusion. Instead of extending the old categories of truth and illusion, I assess the histories, movements and interactions of highly constructed spatialities to ask if we can begin to think more openly and positively about the role of illusion in social space. It is through my work with video, installation, and projections that I consider the effect of global economy on social space. By editing and projecting geographically distant spaces and activities into a single narrative I analyse the fictional realities that shape our experience of shopping, travel and leisure. Throughout the text the relation between the global and the particular is interpreted as a critical relation between 'representational' and 'transcendental' spatialities. With this empirical analysis I investigate (i) how well known tropes of illusion - traditionally thought of as 'mimetic representation', 'phantasmagoric effects' and 'religious transcendentalism' - have mutated into a spatial form; (ii) what relation these highly constructed modes of disorientation, immersion and spectacle have on both one another and our relationship with space; and (iii) the potential for thinking and experiencing the production of fictional realities as a critical portal into the otherwise hidden workings of global capital

Relations of dominance and equality in D. H. Lawrence

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, 1985

Having a people : beyond individualism and essentialism in resistance to interlocked oppressions.

This dissertation draws on the Aristotelian and contemporary communitarian belief that humans are socially constituted, and analyzes the manifestations of this belief in contemporary identity politics and in the concept of \u27culture\u27 that often underlies identity politics. While I argue that it is important to maintain a communitarian conception of the self, I depart from Aristotle and the communitarian tradition by rejecting the assumption that a constitutive community is characterized by unity and homogeneity. I then claim that identity politics has inherited both the virtues and the problems of communitarian theory. Just as communitarians claim that the self is never free from social constitution, so identity politics have taken the self\u27s identity to be formed along lines of socially defined group differences, and like communitarianism, some identity politics has entailed a call for unity. In the case of identity politics, the requirement for membership in the community may be sharing certain essential characteristics of identity; difference can result in marginalization, forced assimilation to the group norm, or expulsion. Because identity politics often relies upon the concept of \u27culture\u27 to ground group identities, I also examine this concept. When a community\u27s unity derives from its members understanding themselves to share a culture, the maintenance of the culture itself can be conservatizing; the culture can remain closed off from changes as it preserves the traditional or authentic ; furthermore, it can come to be treated as an object outside of the people who live it and as such the changing lived realities of these people--particularly changes that cross lines of identity--do not serve to continually offer new, changing, and ambiguous ways of conceiving of what is shared between members of the community. I argue for the development of group identity that recognizes intersecting group differences, and can permit hybridity or mixed identities. I end by suggesting that for a constitutive community to remain truly constitutive without harming its members through marginalization, forced assimilation to a norm or a shared essence, or stagnation, members must give up the sort of control that maintains the community as a unity