A way home: performing auto-ethnography to inspirit liberatory agency and to transcend the estrangement effects of exile

Research Report submitted to the Wits School of Arts University of the Witwatersrand Faculty of Humanities In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Dramatic Art 2015By and large, not much research has been done around the effects of cultural and political exile on South African citizens exiled during Apartheid. This study intends, firstly, to explore the effects of estrangement on a second-generation South African exile; and secondly, to explore how theatre and performance practice can assist the exile to inspirit liberatory agency to regain a sense of belonging/home. The study is conducted through a performance auto-ethnography research paradigm and methodology. The creative performance work chronicles a South African life in exile in search of belonging/home. Aesthetically, it draws from a variety of theatre and performance influences, but more specifically it is rooted in indigenous Southern African performance genres, namely iiNgoma (healing rituals), iziBongo (praise poetry), and iiNtsomi (storytelling)

Interview: A case for sheer compulsive and imaginative depth

No Abstrac

Assimilation—On (Not) Turning White: Memory and the Narration of the Postwar History of Japanese Canadians in Southern Alberta

This essay explores understandings of “race” – specifically, what it means to be Japanese – of nisei (“second generation”) individuals who acknowledge their near complete assimilation structurally and normatively into the Canadian mainstream. In historically-contextualized analyses of memory fragments from oral-history interviews conducted between 2011-2017, it focusses on voices and experiences of southern Alberta, an area whose significance to local, national, continental, and trans-Pacific histories of people of Japanese descent is belied by a lack of dedicated scholarly attention. In this light, this essay reveals how the fact of being Japanese in the latter half of the twentieth century was strategically central to nisei lives as individuals and in their communities. In imagining a racial hierarchy whose apex they knew they could never share with the hakujin (whites), the racial heritage they nevertheless inherited and would bequeath could be so potent as to reverse the direction of the colonial gaze with empowering effects in individual engagements then and as remembered now. We see how the narration and validation of one’s life is the navigation of wider historical contexts, the shaping of the post-colonial legacy of Imperial cultures, as Britain and Japan withdrew from their erstwhile colonial projects in Canada

They are burning memory! A study of intergenerational dissonance

Fire, a weapon of choice in recent protest action, leaves behind ashes and silence. What voices of meaning could rise out of such ashes? What could they tell us about the future of our still new democracy

Citizens, Writers and Readers (Remaking Culture in South Africa)

International audienc