AVReQ The Podcast

This episode will focus on a compelling book exploring South Africa’s unresolved issue of reparation. It critiques the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s failure to adequately compensate victims of colonization and apartheid, which continues to undermine its processes and legacy. By examining the TRC’s key processes and highlighting their hindrance due to the lack of reparation, the discussion will aim to emphasise the deep-rooted trauma caused by this absence. Furthermore, the discussion will also explore the new concept of “reparative citizenship” to confront these challenges productively. This episode is essential for South Africans grappling with ongoing injustices and offers valuable insights for researchers in post-conflict transitional justice and politics. Prof Jaco Barnard-Naudé Jaco Barnard-Naudé (BCom(Law)(cum laude) LLB(summa cum laude)LLD(UP)MA(UCT)) is Professor of Jurisprudence and Co-Director of the Centre for Rhetoric Studies in the Department of Private Law. In the Faculty, Professor Barnard-Naudé currently serves as the Director of Research. He holds a B2-rating from the National Research Foundation (NRF) and is a past recipient of the UCT Fellows Award. In the United Kingdom, Prof Barnard-Naudé was the British Academy’s Newton Advanced Fellow in the Westminster Law & Theory Lab, School of Law at the University of Westminster between 2017 and 2020, and Honorary Research Fellow in the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London in 2019. Prof Joel Modiri Joel M Modiri is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Jurisprudence in the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria. He holds the degrees LLB cum laude (Pret) and PhD (Pret). His PhD thesis was entitled “The Jurisprudence of Steve Biko: A Study in Race, Law and Power in the ‘Afterlife’ of Colonial-apartheid”. His research and teaching interests are located in the broad field of jurisprudence and relate to critical race theory, Black political thought and African philosophy. His current projects intersect under two umbrellas rooted in the ethics and politics of the global Black radical tradition: Azanian critical theory and constitutional abolitionism. He was recently appointed as a United Nations Independent Eminent Expert in the area of race and racial discrimination.

In this episode, Professor Homi Bhabha engages in a conversation with acclaimed artist William Kentridge. Their dialogue revolves around Kentridge's latest project, "The Great YES, The Great No," a chamber opera set amidst a surreal 1941 sea voyage. They examine the thematic underpinnings of surrealism, fragmentation, and social dialogue in Kentridge's work, shedding light on his collaborative artistic process. Kentridge reveals his inspiration from historical moments and his approach to creating cohesive narratives from fragmented texts. The conversation delves deep into the universality of questions posed by Kentridge's art, touching on themes of migration, colonialism, and the ongoing quest for social justice. This episode explores art's role in reflecting and shaping our understanding of the world. HOMI K. BHABHA Professor Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Harvard University. He was founding director of Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center and director of the Harvard Humanities Center. He has received numerous awards and distinguished honorary professorships, including Extraordinary Professor affiliated with AVReQ, as reported in the Harvard Crimson here. Professor Bhabha is the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, contemporary art, and cosmopolitanism. His book Location of Culture has recently been reprinted as a Routledge Classic and has been translated into seven languages. He has written an introduction to a new translation of Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. WILLIAM KENTRIDGE From his base in Johannesburg, where he was born, William Kentridge works across artistic mediums, often with dozens of collaborators, to make art that is grounded in history, literature, politics and science. His work has been seen in museums and galleries internationally since the 1990s and can be found in private collections and institutions across the globe. He has directed operas for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, La Scala in Milan, the English National Opera in London, the Salzburg Festival and others. His original works for stage combine performance, projections, shadow play, voice and music. Kentridge is the recipient of honorary doctorates from several universities including Yale, Columbia and the University of London. He has been awarded the Kyoto Prize (2010), the Princesa de Asturias Award in 2017 and the Praemium Imperiale Prize in 2019

Radical Familiar. A different kind of aesthetic encounter In this installment of the masterclass, Rabia Abba Omar was in conversation with Gabrielle Goliath as she shared on “Radical Familiar. A different kind of aesthetic encounter.” This discussion of the AVReQ Masterclass stirred a profound contemplation on the intricate threads of representation, encounter, and response. Gabrielle directed her focus towards the realm of radical familiarity, black decolonial feminist repair, and the nuanced histories of black femme bodies. Through a tapestry of insights, the discourse offered a panorama of illumination, revealing pivotal junctures. Gabrielle Goliath Gabrielle Goliath situates her practice within the histories, life worlds and present-day conditions of black, brown, femme and queer life, refusing its terminal demarcation within a paradigm of racial-sexual violence. The conditions of hope that underscore the social encounters of her work ask for what she terms a life-work of mourning – “for to imagine and seek to realise the world otherwise is to bear with us those lost to or still surviving an order of violence we hope to and must transform”. Goliath’s immersive installations have shown across South Africa and internationally. She has won a number of awards including a Future Generation Art Prize/Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including Kunsthalle Zürich, TATE Modern, Frac Bretagne, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum.

Between 1950 and 1985, tens of thousands of South Africans were arrested for contravening the Immorality Act (1950) that prohibited extramarital heterosex between whites and Blacks and was extended in 1957 to also criminalize the attempt to have interracial sex. Aimed at maintaining whites’ mythical purity, the law was both a weapon to mould the sexual behaviour of transgressive heterosexual white men and a means to constitute race and reproduce racial inequality. Implementing the law inflicted great harms, not only on white men, but also on the Black women with whom they were arrested, harms that were gendered, racialized and sexualized in particular ways. In this presentation, Susanne M. Klausen discusses the state’s policing of ‘mixed’ sex during apartheid, from its role in cultivating a culture of surveillance, to the brutal methods of enforcement, to some of the ways the ugly “lessons learned” about race, desire and sex continue to haunt South Africa today. ⁠Susanne M. Klausen Susanne M. Klausen is the Julia Gregg Brill Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Her main areas of research are the history of fertility politics in modern South Africa, nationalism and sexuality, and transnational movements for reproductive justice. She is the author of Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910-1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2015) that won the Women’s History Prize awarded by the Canadian Committee on Women’s History (2016) and the Joel Gregory Prize awarded by the Canadian Association of African Studies (2016). Prof Klausen has published articles in a range of scholarly journals and is currently writing a monograph on the criminalization of interracial heterosex in South Africa during apartheid.

This episode offers a nuanced dissection of the rise and development of physical education, later reimagined as sport science, as a department and as an academic discipline at Stellenbosch University from its inception in 1937 to 2019. Located within a complex institutional history, this research foregrounds the extent to which the university’s ethos of conservativism and traditionalist values influenced departmental shifts over the course of eight decades. At its core, the presentation examines the extent to which the university played a crucial role in the politics of nation-building across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. ANELL STACEY DARIES Anell Stacey Daries graduated with a PhD in history at Stellenbosch University. Her broad research explores the origins, trajectories and social implications of sciences to do with the human body. Her doctoral research is titled “The History of Physical Education at Stellenbosch University, 1937-2019” and examines the history of scientific and academic practices in physical education at the institution. Apart from her ongoing research interest, Dr Daries has experience as a lecturer, academic facilitator and mentor. As her teaching philosophy foregrounds a student-centred ethos, Dr Daries seeks to facilitate innovative ways of student engagement which foregrounds the student in the knowledge-building process. HANDRI WALTERS Handri Walters graduated with a PhD in social anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch. Her research focuses on race and racial categorization within a broader history of racial science and the interstices between knowledge production, politics and ideology. In this regard her research has delved into the institutional history of Stellenbosch University as related to Afrikaner nationalism, the institutional production of knowledge, and the conceptualization of Afrikaners and its others. Recent iterations of her research include the spectre of race as currently manifesting in scientific study – including, but not limited to, the field of population genetics.

This lecture addresses the public value of the social sciences and its implications for ethical engagement by academics, particularly focusing on universities’ moral responsibilities in societies emerging out of conflict. JOHN BREWER John Brewer is a Professor of Post Conflict Studies in the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. He was awarded an Honorary DSocSci from Brunel University and is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow in the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has held visiting appointments at Yale University, St John’s College Oxford, Corpus Christi College Cambridge and the Australia National University. He has been President of the British Sociological Association. He is Honorary Professor Extraordinary at Stellenbosch University and is a member of the United Nations Roster of Global Experts. He is the author or co-author of sixteen books and editor or co-editor of a further six.

In this instalment of the masterclass, Gratia Aimee Ilibagiza is in conversation with Professor Azrini Wahidin as she shares her experience of conducting research with prisoners, her feminist praxis, and the processes of reparative knowledge. This discussion is regarded as an extension of the AVReQ series on sensitive research, creating new ethics for social justice research, and draws on Azrini’s experience in the field. Prof Azrini thematically charts her experience of conducting research with prisoners, sex offenders, the LGBTQI community in prison, and death row offenders (about the meaning of death and dying) in England, Wales, and the U.S.A. Prof Azrini furthermore reflected on what it means to be in such spaces as a researcher and entering this very particular field of trauma. A field/space where she says, one must learn to listen and engage differently in all areas of the research, including preparing before one goes into the field, negotiating access, thinking very carefully about one’s own positionality, and also about the final products that are produced from your work. Prof Azrini similarly reflected on what it means to bear witness, the burden on the researcher who goes in and witnesses within a particular space and what you take with you when you leave such spaces. In essence, this conversation was about giving embodied insight into the work and what it means to do research in the area of the reparative quest. AZRINI WAHIDIN Professor Azrini Wahidin from the University of Warwick, is the author of 13 co-edited books, 3 monographs and numerous articles. She is a Fellow of Academy of Social Sciences, and for the latest Research Exercise Framework of 2021, was a panel member for Social Policy and Social Work UOA 20. She is a feminist researcher and is the current Chair of the Ethics Committee for the British Society of Criminology. She was responsible for writing the Statement of the Ethics for the BSC and has written on the subject of ethics and the dilemmas of researching sensitive issues. Her latest book, ‘Under Siege: The role of women in liberation movements under the Apartheid regime and the transition to peace’, builds on a body of work on female ex-combatants, the legacy of Conflict, transition justice, peace and reconciliation. GRATIA AIMEE ILIBAGIZA Gratia Aimee Ilibagiza is an MA student in Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University. She describes herself as a creative improvisor, Rwandan traditional dance practitioner, and feminist. Her research interests include questions of identity, embodiment and belonging amongst Rwandan refugees living in exile, through the lens of cultural dance and performance. Gratia is dedicated to and interested in educational spaces, where she can apply her knowledge and skills as contributions to collective growth and healing. She was part of the inaugural cohort of the Zanele Mbeki Fellowship program and received the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, previously at Wits University, where she attained her undergraduate qualifications.

In this instalment of the masterclass, Professor Dennis Francis is in conversation with Professor Shirley Anne Tate discussing decoloniality, intersectionality as a framework, and anti-racist interventions in higher education. Prof Tate shares an extract from an upcoming edited volume on decolonization and anti-racism in settler colonial states of which South Africa is a part of. She positions the discussion within the context of absolute exhaustion from the violence that we saw during Black Lives Matter, and other incidences, within and outside of the University. These are events, she states, that brought us face to face with the horror of black and indigenous death on a virtual loop, unbridled white supremacy and conceptualizations of freedom by black and indigenous people. This brought about the question of what she(we) could do, as somebody who wants to develop, what she calls ‘the decolonial intersectional anti-racist interventions’, that are long overdue in universities. Furthermore, she also discussed how this decolonial intersectional ani-racism requires acknowledgment of white domination, implication, and complicity, by white people, but also by black people, people of colour and indigenous people. In addition, Prof Tate also ponders upon the question of whether ‘white feminist allyship’ can be trusted in delivering decolonial intersectional ani-racist change and what would this look like institutionally? Shirley Anne Tate Shirley Anne Tate is a Jamaican descendant of African enslaved people. She is Professor and Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Feminism and Intersectionality, Sociology Department, University of Alberta, Canada, and an Honorary Professor in the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) at Nelson Mandela University. Previously, she was a Professor of Race and Education, the first appointment of its kind in the UK, and founding Director of the Centre for Race, Education, and Decoloniality (CRED) at Leeds Beckett University. She is a qualitative researcher interested in intersectional thinking, drawing on Black feminist, gender, critical ‘race’, and Caribbean decolonial theory within her focus on Black Atlantic Diaspora Studies. Dennis Francis Professor Dennis Francis is a South African-based scholar and activist whose work engages with questions related to gender, sexualities and schooling. Dennis is a former Dean of Education and currently a Professor of Sociology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Their research, located in the sociology of education, focuses on how educational structures, discourses and practices reproduce cisheteronormativity and social inequality in schools and how these are also resisted and challenged. Their most recent books are Troubling the Teaching and Learning of Gender and Sexuality Diversity in South African Education (PalgraveMacmillan, 2017) and Queer Activism in South African Education: Disrupting Cis(hetero)normativity in Schools (Routledge 2022). Professor Francis is also the recipient of several distinguished teaching and researcher awards, including the South African Education Research Association (ERASA) and the Stellenbosch Distinguished Teacher Award.

On May 24, 2022, a mass shooting occurred at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, United States, where 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, a former student at the school, fatally shot nineteen students and two teachers, while seventeen others survived despite being injured. The words "The sound of Children Screaming has been removed," were an editor’s note attached to a video, published by the Austin American-Statesman of Uvalde of the shooting. As a response to this note, Professor Anthony Collins delivers a theoretical conceptual lecture on representations of violence. ANTHONY COLLINS Professor Anthony Collins is an interdisciplinary social scientist and social justice activist. Their work integrates a range of disciplines including criminology, cultural studies (including gender and decolonial studies) and psychology, with attention to culture and identity. Their primary focus is on violence and trauma, with specific attention to South Africa, both in terms of developing better critical conceptualization of violence in postcolonial settings, and more effective violence reduction interventions. Prof Collins has a specific interest in gender-based violence, including GBV in universities, and community interventions for reducing GBV. Their work also focuses on secondary and vicarious trauma amongst people researching and supporting survivors of violence, and further extends to the broad topic of globalization, consumer culture and youth identities.

Rabia Abba Omar is a researcher and curator working towards a MA in Visual Studies from Stellenbosch University’s Visual Arts Department. She likes to think with/of the ocean, memory, archives, and is currently exploring the body as an archive of violence. She is a MA Fellow of Imagining Futures of Un/Archived Pasts project (Exeter University) and based at AVReQ. She holds a MA in Heritage Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand, where she was part of the Oceanic Humanities of the Global South and is an alumni of the UnSchool of Disruptive Design’s Emerging Leaders Fellowship. In this episode, Rabia speaks about her research on the slave ship São José, expanded and developed upon through the AVReQ reading group sessions. This paper was recently presented at the South African Visual Arts Historians conference at DUT and is based on a section of Rabia’s MA Research Report completed while I was at Wits. On 27 December 1794, the São José Paquete d’Africa wrecked just off the shores of Cape Town. Battling the rough winds, high swells and stuck between two reefs, the crew set about to rescue the 512 enslaved people held in the ship’s hold. Despite this 212 enslaved people succumbed as the ship broke into pieces. This paper looks at the ghostly echoes of the concreted shackles found on the São José wreck site. It uses the stone-like concretions of the shackles to explore how we can begin to consider human and more than human assemblages that lie below the waterline and how we can use these to think about their hard and violent histories and the legacies, and objects, that remain with us. Former ConCourt Judge and anti-apartheid activist lawyer, Justice Albie Sachs also joined us for this event. What was special about a visit from Justice Sachs this time around is the fact that the São José slave ship was discovered in front of his home in the oceans of Clifton/Camps Bay Beach. In 2015, Justice Sachs also hosted a special event at his home to commemorate the enslaved people that died in the shipwreck.

Zintombizethu (zethu) Matebeni is a sociologist, activist and writer whose research focuses on the development of African Queer Studies. She has worked at different universities in South Africa and the United States of America and has been part of decolonizing interventions, including #RhodesMustFall and the Black Academic Caucus at the University of Cape Town. zethu has edited and co-edited various volumes on African LGBTQI life, including Reclaiming African: queer perspectives on sexual and gender identities (Modjaji, 2014); Queer in Africa: LGBTQI Identities, Citizenship and Activism (Routledge, 2018); and Beyond the Mountain: queer life in 'Africa's gay capital' (UNISA Press, 2021). zethu holds the National Research Foundation South Africa Research Chair in Sexualities, Genders and Queer Studies at the University of Fort Hare. Click below for full profile: https://www.ufh.ac.za/news/News/NRFAWARDSSOUTHAFRICA Rabia Abba Omar is a researcher and curator working towards a MA in Visual Studies from Stellenbosch University’s Visual Arts Department. She likes to think with/of the ocean, memory, archives, and is currently exploring the body as an archive of violence. She is a MA Fellow of Imagining Futures of Un/Archived Pasts project (Exeter University) and based at AVReQ. She holds a MA in Heritage Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand, where she was part of the Oceanic Humanities of the Global South and is an alumni of the UnSchool of Disruptive Design’s Emerging Leaders Fellowship. https://avreq.sun.ac.za/people/ms-rabia-abba-omar/

Andrea Gullotta is lecturer in Russian at the University of Palermo. He has also worked for the University of Glasgow, the Ca' Foscari University of Venice and the University of Padua, where he obtained his PhD. He is co-editor of the journal AvtobiografiЯ, which deals with life-writing and the representation of the self in Russian culture. His main research area is Gulag literature. He has authored dozen of works on Gulag literature, Gulag poetry and Gulag culture.

Professor Siona O’Connell (PhD) is an African Studies scholar/practitioner in the School of the Arts at the University of Pretoria. Her research focus falls within three areas, that of Memory Studies, Creative Studies and Restorative Justice in postcolonial and post-apartheid South Africa. She is widely respected for her work on the effects of race-based land dispossession. Her co-edited book, ‘Hanging on a Wire’ won the 2018 National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) Humanities and Social award for the best non-fiction edited volume and her monograph on forced removals in Cape Town, “An Impossible Return: Cape Town’s Forced Removals” continues to garner broad recommendations. Watch the Ballie Boys short film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhlThBeCMG0&t=610s

Professor Heidi Grunebaum is a writer and academic, and Director of the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Her work focusses on the afterlives of genocide, war and forced displacement, and on the relationship between art and politics. She is author of Memorialising the Past: Everyday Life in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2011), co-editor of Uncontained: Opening the Community Art Project Archive (2012) and Athone in Mind (2017) amongst other writings. With Mark J. Kaplan, she made the documentary film, The Village Under the Forest (2013) on the Palestinian Nakba. She is currently making a second documentary film with Kaplan set in Germany on weaponization of Jewish memory politics.