Avitha Sooful: Allegorical embodiments of the local landscape

This article offers a critical reading of a number of artworks by Avitha Sooful, mainly dating from the period 1980 to 2004. Readings of other relevant works that illustrate either continuities or disjunctures with her artistic practices and world views are included. This is part of a larger study that investigated the constructs of identity, place and displacement in the artworks of female artists who were employed at Vaal University of Technology (VUT) during that time.1 The first ten years of democracy and transformation in South Africa tacitly underpin the scope of the article, which focuses on Sooful’s cultural exchange and interchange with the changing political and social realities in a new South Africa. The theoretical underpinnings of this article are embedded in the discourses of geographically and historically specific events in South Africa, and cultural studies theories. They are framed by postcolonial readings of identity, place and displacement. The artist’s work is used to demonstrate how her subject position inspired her to produce artworks that reconfigured the local Durban and Free State regions over the 20 years concerned.http://journals.sabinet.co.za/ej/ejour_dearte.htmlhttp://www.unisa.ac.za/default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=20117am201

‘Material girls’: lingering in the presence of the material sublime

By exploring selected, recent works produced by amongst others Zanele Muholi, Nandipha Mntambo, Tracey Rose and Leora Farber it is the aim of this essay to trace a possible resurgence of the real through the depiction of the corporeal in their work. The artists have been selected because their work provide a fecundity of ‘corporeal realness’ or corpo(real)ity. The exploration is further layered by inquiring how the resurgence of the real corresponds to the aesthetic category of the material sublime. The material sublime dates from the nineteenth century as has been regarded as a sub-theory within the broader classical sublime. It is argued that the material sublime together with contemporary feminist theorists e.g. Bonnie Mann, Karen Barad, Elizabeth Wilson and Vicky Kirby, provide a useful lens for re-thinking the engagement between matter and discourse. It is in particular through the resilient flesh represented in Muholi’s, Mntambo’s and Farber’s work, that they and their subjects are turned into what can be playfully termed ‘Material Girls’.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcrc20gv201

‘Out of place’? An auto-ethnography of refuge and postcolonial exile

The nature of postcolonial exile has changed considerably over the last two or three decades. The demography of migrants has shifted from intellectual dissidents and the participants in brain drain exoduses to all kinds of refugees and asylum seekers. Scholarship on this subject is vast but there is one group that is emerging and scarcely understood – the African-Australians of refugee background. This article seeks to contribute a part of that story using autobiographical or auto-ethnographical insight. My choice of this approach is predicated on the belief that it exploits personal experiences as units within the collective experience of a people. As a refugee from Sudan with some years in Kenya, I have found by experience and in autobiographies of others that blackness trumps African-ness in Diasporic identity constructions in the Western world. This, I argue, masks the ways in which African-Australians are generally understood as reflected in public discourse