Telling stories of race: a study of racialised subjectivity in the post-apartheid academy

This report is submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand. Johannesburg, February 2014This study draws on in-depth interviews conducted with twenty black students from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds studying at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It attempts to explore and understand some of the complexities of racial subjectivities in a post-apartheid and racially diverse institutional context through Bourdieu’s constructs of habitus and field. Furthermore the psychosocial and phenomenological approach to theorizing black subjectivity evident in the theories of Fanon and Du Bois are further used to explore the complexities of racialised habitus. Bourdieu argues that encounter with an unfamiliar field will result in transformed habitus (socialized subjectivity). The subject’s movement and participation in different and unfamiliar fields will result in habitus that is conflicted and fraught with tension. Through a critical heremeneutic approach the analyses suggests much more complex, ambiguous and contradictory articulations of racialised subjectivity that manifest in relation with dimensions of cultural capital. These in turn produce complex processes of racialization for these students. The narrative analysis of content explores thematic content of the data and demonstrates dominant themes related to constructs of racialised subjectivity, with particular focus on ‘blackness’ as a distinct and contradictory construct. Through positive and negative constructs of blackness, both interpersonal and generalized interaction patterns of these students on campus is shown to reflect intricate ways that racialised boundaries are both created and sustained. The discursive layer of analysis further demonstrates the at times essentializing and contradictory deployment of race used by the students in their navigation of the academic field. The analysis of form further highlights similar and diverse academic trajectories of the students that are interwoven with accounts of racialised and classed histories. These accounts highlight the perceived importance of race in the accruement of cultural capital attributes both prior to and during their immersion within the academic context at tertiary level. The study argues for a more concerted effort at documenting the lived experiences of racialization including the subjective negotiation of multiple and contradicting interpellation processes within higher education more generally. Key Words: race, subjectivity, habitus, field, students, tertiary institution, Bourdieu, Fanon, Du Boi

Love as Method: Tracing the Contours of Love in Black and African Feminist Imaginations of Liberation

What imaginations of the self are evident in Black and African feminist visions of Black liberation? How is love framed as a centring politics of Black liberation across social and political struggles? These two questions address two features of Black and African feminist social justice politics: first, a re-imagining of the self via routes of the communal self and love of oneself; and, second, a centring of love as fundamental to any project of Black liberation. Exploring these two trajectories, the article engages gendered love in terms of its material and affective registers within feminist struggles for justice and healing. To do this, select readings of African and Black feminist theorising, reflections, and activist works are explored including Pumla Gqola, Sharlene Khan, June Jordan, bell hooks amongst others. The intellectual diversity of these feminist contributions connects with reference to a feminist project that is rooted in (re)imaginings of love and self that are simultaneously personal yet also political. In the end, the project of Black liberation must address itself to the place of love in healing. The article explores what some of these features of love liberation could entail

Layers of woundedness in Inxeba : masculinities disrupted, denied and defamed

Abstract: In this paper, we discuss the multi-layered representations of masculinities as they appear in the film Inxeba. Reading these multi-layered representations against a backdrop of the initiation practice of ulwaluko highlights the significance of heteronormativity in defining and engaging critical African Black masculinities in South Africa today. This is further compounded through the intersecting nuances of race and class configurations that matter for how contemporary Black masculinities are constructed. We argue that Inxeba’s successes and failures of representation bring to the fore intricate debates and ethical dilemmas of representation in the arts and social sciences more generally. In addition, if Inxeba fails in its (mis)representation of ulwaluko as less than a complex, nuanced and rich cultural practice, it is arguably successful in its exploration of the deeply entrenched heteronormative socio-material and psychical space of this practice

Psychology and the problematic of “the African”

In this commentary we extend Manganyi’s critique of Eurocentric and Western scientific practice of engaging the African Other as inherently strange and unfamiliar. This particular mode of representation and knowing the Other is functional in embodying a uniqueness that renders African bodies as non-human. It is also functional in reifying a science that pretends to objective practice. We take up Manganyi’s notion of making strange to interrogate some of the nuances of what it means to engage the Other in the context of a socio-political and historical analysis. We further present some of the problematics of trying to understand the current contexts of social ills in society through a lens that does not reproduce this dehumanising meaning of subjectivities and groups, and that does not end up making strange what we are trying to understand. Lastly, we posit some problematics concerning how Africans as colonised peoples have been made strange to themselves and become entangled in relations of violence and power that make the familiar unfamiliar even to themselves

Creating a culture of thinking? Reflections on teaching an undergraduate Critical Social Psychology course

This article is a retrospective reflection on the experience of teaching a newly introduced third-year Critical Social Psychology course at the University of the Witwatersrand. Student evaluations and course presentation are discussed in order to critically reflect on the implications, if any, for nurturing critical thought and practice in students’ work. While considering the content, structure, assessments and presentation of the course, this article examines the teachers’ own learning and development of professional identity as teaching practitioners. Using Freire and Foucault’s approaches to a critical pedagogy, the article highlights the importance of interrogation of student-teacher relations, as well as knowledge production in general

Creating a culture of thinking? Reflections on teaching an undergraduate Critical Social Psychology course

This article is a retrospective reflection on the experience of teaching a newly introduced third-year Critical Social Psychology course at the University of the Witwatersrand. Student evaluations and course presentation are discussed in order to critically reflect on the implications, if any, for nurturing critical thought and practice in students’ work. While considering the content, structure, assessments and presentation of the course, this article examines the teachers’ own learning and development of professional identity as teaching practitioners. Using Freire and Foucault’s approaches to a critical pedagogy, the article highlights the importance of interrogation of student-teacher relations, as well as knowledge production in general

Gender and Migration: Feminist Interventions

Provocative and intellectually challenging, Gender and Migration critically analyses how gender has been taken up in studies of migration and its theories, practices and effects. Each essay uses feminist frameworks to highlight how more traditional tropes of gender eschew the complexities of gender and migration. In tackling this problem, this collection offers students and researchers of migration a more nuanced understanding of the topic

Gender and Migration: Feminist Perspectives

Provocative and intellectually challenging, Gender and Migration critically analyses how gender has been taken up in studies of migration and its theories, practices and effects. Each essay uses feminist frameworks to highlight how more traditional tropes of gender eschew the complexities of gender and migration. In tackling this problem, this collection offers students and researchers of migration a more nuanced understanding of the topic

Second wave of violence scholarship : South African synergies with a global research agenda

Abstract onlyViolence is a serious public health and human rights challenge with global psychosocial impacts across the human lifespan. As a middle-income country (MIC), South Africa experiences high levels of interpersonal, self-directed and collective violence, taking physical, sexual and/or psychological forms. Careful epidemiological research has consistently shown that complex causal pathways bind the social fabric of structural inequality, socio-cultural tolerance of violence, militarized masculinity, disrupted community and family life, and erosion of social capital, to individual-level biological, developmental and personality-related risk factors to produce this polymorphic profile of violence in the country. Engaging with a concern that violence studies may have reached something of a theoretical impasse, ‘second wave’ violence scholars have argued that the future of violence research may not lie primarily in merely amassing more data on risk but rather in better theorizing the mechanisms that translate risk into enactment, and that mobilize individual and collective aspects of subjectivity within these enactments. With reference to several illustrative forms of violence in South Africa, in this article we suggest revisiting two conceptual orientations to violence, arguing that this may be useful in developing thinking in line with this new global agenda. Firstly, the definition of our object of enquiry requires revisiting to fully capture its complexity. Secondly, we advocate for the utility of specific incident analyses/case studies of violent encounters to explore the mechanisms of translation and mobilization of multiple interactive factors in enactments of violence. We argue that addressing some of the moral and methodological challenges highlighted in revisiting these orientations requires integrating critical social science theory with insights derived from epidemiology and, that combining these approaches may take us further in understanding and addressing the recalcitrant range of forms and manifestations of violence