Doctoral Degrees (English, Media and Performance Studies)

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The role of computer games and social constructivism in skills development of learners from different educational backgrounds.
(2005) Foko, Thato.; Amory, Alan M.
This study is positioned within a specific South African context where many learners not only lack access to resources but are considered underprepared and therefore are seen as academically disadvantaged. Research findings presented here centre on learning theories within the social constructivist paradigm, make use of a developmental research methodology and use a number of different research instruments. The main objective of this study was to investigate the use of virtual learning environments, constructed as educational adventure games, as viable learning tools and to determine the influence of game play on skill development and overcoming learning difficulties. More specifically two educational games, Zadarh and ãKhozi developed at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, were used to investigate the use of technology in classrooms that included underprepared and academically disadvantaged learners. Zadarh was designed to challenge learner misconceptions related to photosynthesis and photorespiration and was used to investigate and evaluate the effectiveness of games to overcome these misconceptions. ãKhozi was used to introduce learners to issues related to HIV/Aids and to evaluate the use of such tools to develop skills. However, It was first necessary to develop an instrument, based on the Persona Outlining Model (POM), to evaluate and measure skills. The POM uses a number of interfaces (literacy, communication and visualization skills) and properties (age, gender and socio-economic background) to describe a typical learner, or game player. The instrument based on these interfaces and properties was used to evaluate the skills of young South Africans from Buhlebemfundo, Qhakaza and Tholokuhle schools and two universities, namely, University of Zululand [UniZulu] and University of KwaZulu-Natal [UKZN]), all from the region of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. The majority of the sampled learners appear to lack appropriate visualisation, logical, mathematical, reading and writing skills and results suggest that poor performance may be associated with a low household income and poor English language skills. While participants (Buhlebemfundo, Qhakaza and Tholokuhle schools, and UniZulu and UKZN university students) who played Zadarh individually solved game problems, they still held many of the misconceptions. Further investigation revealed that when participants were unable to solve a problem they learnt by rote the solution to the problem. Playing Zadarh in groups and allowing participants to ask for clarification of assessment instrument questions showed that many participants developed a deeper understanding on the relationships between photosynthesis and respiration. Participants from Qhakaza were asked to play ãKhozi in flexible groups whichchanged from session to session. Using the previously developed skills assessment instrument showed improve visual, literacy and communication skills. Results strongly suggest that only through dialogue can misconceptions be overcome and that learning is a social activity as proposed by Vygotsky over 80 years ago. More specifically research presented here supports Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, the role of play in development and the need for written language skills. The new art form of digital games when conceived as microworlds can play an important role in education if games support co-operation between players, peers and mentors, allow for exploration through play and support the development of reading and writing skills.
States of nomadism, conditions of diaspora : studies in writing between South Africa and the United States, 1913-1936.
(2008) Courau, Rogier Philippe.; Woeber, Catherine Ann.
Using the theoretical idea of ‘writing between’ to describe the condition of the travelling subject, this study attempts to chart some of the literary, intellectual and cultural connections that exist(ed) between black South African intellectuals and writers, and the experiences of their African- American counterparts in their common movements towards civil liberty, enfranchisement and valorised consciousness. The years 1913-1936 saw important historical events taking place in the United States, South Africa and the world – and their effects on the peoples of the African diaspora were signficant. Such events elicited unified black diasporic responses to colonial hegemony. Using theories of transatlantic/transnational cultural negotiation as a starting point, conceptualisations that map out, and give context to, the connections between transcontinental black experiences of slavery and subjugation, this study seeks to re-envisage such black South African and African-American intellectual discourses through reading them anew. These texts have been re-covered and re-situated, are both published and unpublished, and engage the notion of travel and the instability of transatlantic voyaging in the liminal state of ‘writing between’. With my particular regional focus, I explore the cultural and intellectual politics of these diasporic interrelations in the form of case studies of texts from several genres, including fiction and autobiography. They are: the travel writings of Xhosa intellectual, DDT Jabavu, with a focus on his 1913 journey to the United States; an analysis of Ethelreda Lewis’s novel, Wild Deer (1933), which imagines the visit of an African-American musician, Paul Robeson-like figure to South Africa; and Eslanda Goode Robeson’s representation of her African Journey (1945) to the country in 1936, and the traveller’s gaze as expressed through the ethnographic imagination, or the anthropological ‘eye’ in the text.
Andries Botha : creativity in a context of change.
(2009) Leigh, Valerie T. L.; Leeb-du Toit, Juliette Cecile.
In this text I consider Andries Botha's work over the period 1977 to 2007. I particularly look at Botha's creative response to the period of change in which he has worked and at his own considerations of works of art as acts of creative citizenship and private creativity. The text is based largely on interviews with Botha wherein he discusses his intentions and gives insight into the character of his creative imagination. In light of the interviews I write on individual works in detail, giving attention, to a certain extent, to chronology. During the late 1970s Botha was particularly concerned with establishing a sculptural language that would be expressive of his experience as a South African creative artist in the time of turbulence in the country and of paradox in his own circumstances as liberal thinker and inheritor of a conservative Afrikaner Nationalist background. Botha's creative output has been considerable. He commenced his career in a period of waning modernity and an increasing presence of Postmodernist culture. In his works of the 1980s he makes use of conceptual means – installation, assemblage, multiples, technology and unusual materials to express, through myth and allegory, his understanding of aspects of the human condition. The many associations, aesthetic, historical and political, regarding land, in a South African and in an international context, also became his concern. He sought to look at the affects on selfhood in the wake of apartheid, considering particularly the Afrikaner male and indigenous women, with especial reference to KwaZulu- Natal. He has been particularly interested in the effects of the abuse of power in a local and in an international sphere and in the situation of subaltern peoples in the aftermath of domination. When Botha commenced studies at the (then) University of Natal, the prevailing philosophical attitude was Humanism, and his attitude to social responsibility is often markedly humanistic. His own thinking regarding his creative work coincided in many aspects with Marxist aesthetic. A development of Postmodernist thinking occurred in South Africa with the writing of Die Sestigers, who had had large contact with French philosophical writing of mid-twentieth century. Botha's challenge, as was that of Die Sestigers, was to take cognisance of international thinking and at the same time to work creatively within an experience of the South African locale. Botha's reading of Merleau-Pontys' writings on phenomenology influenced him to respond to the immediacy of experience and record that response in his work. Largeness is a distinguishing feature of his art which I discuss in connection with the character of the sublime, as perceived by Burke. The character of duende, as seen by Lorca, is also distinctive to Botha's art and is used by him creatively to effect catharsis. He shows responsibility in his creative citizenship and in his private creativity in understanding and meeting the changes of the time.
Computer aided techniques for the attribution of Attic black-figure vase-paintings using the Princeton painter as a model.
(2009) Ryan, Adrian John.; Hilton, John Laurence.; Hough, Gavin.
Because of their abundance and because of the insight into the ancient world offered by the depictions on their decorated surfaces, Attic painted ceramics are an extremely valuable source of material evidence. Knowing the identities and personalities of the artists who painted them not only helps us understand the paintings, but also helps in the process of dating them and, in the case of sherds, reconstructing them. However, few of the artists signed their wares, and the identities of the artists have to be revealed through a close analysis of the style in a process called attribution. The vast majority of the attributions of archaic Attic vases are due to John Beazley whose monumental works set the stage for the dominance of attribution studies in the scholarship of Greek ceramics for most of the 20th century. However, the number of new scholars trained in this arcane art is dwindling as new avenues of archaeological research have gained ascendency. A computer-aided technique for attribution may preserve the benefits of the art while allowing new scholars to explore previously ignored areas of research. To this end, the present study provides a theoretical framework for computer-aided attribution, and using the corpus of the Princeton Painter - a painter active in the 6th century BCE - demonstrates the principal that, by employing pattern recognition techniques, computers may be trained to serve as an aid in the attribution process. Three different techniques are presented that are capable of distinguishing between paintings of the Princeton Painter and some of his contemporaries with reasonable accuracy. The first uses shape descriptors to distinguish between the methods employed by respective artists to render minor anatomical details. The second shows that the relative positions of cranial features of the male figures on black-figure paintings is an indicator of style and may also be used as part of the attribution process. Finally a novel technique is presented that can distinguish between pots constructed by different potters based on their shape profiles. This technique may offer valuable clues for attribution when artists are known to work mostly with a single potter.
"From Jo'burg to Jozi" : a study of the writings and images of Johannesburg from 1980-2003.
(2007) Manase, Irikidzayi.
The thesis examines some of the short and long fiction set in Johannesburg, which is published between approximately 1980 and 2003. The thesis examines how the residents viewed themselves, and evaluates the various social and political struggles and strategies that were employed in an attempt to belong, imagine the city differently and establish strategic identities that would enable them to live a better life during the focused quarter of a century of experiences in an ever-changing fictive Johannesburg.
Improvisations of empire : Thomas Pringle in Scotland, the Cape Colony and London, 1789-1834.
(2008) Shum, Matthew Colin Noel.
This dissertation offers an extended examination of the writing of the 1820 Scottish settler Thomas Pringle. Though the primary focus of analysis is Pringle's poetry, the dissertation also engages extensively with Pringle's prose writing, particularly the Narrative ofa Residence in South Africa (1834), as well as the archival records of his personal and official correspondence. As the title suggests, the dissertation works through three distinct periods of Pringle's life, in each of which it locates different but related colonial postures or dispositions. In this schema, Pringle's Scottish writing is understood as obeisant to British cultural and linguistic norms, which it reproduces in a fashion that may be considered colonial in its deference to metropolitan standards. The Scottish context also provides Pringle with examples of people considered marginal to the developing modernity of the Scottish state (such as gypsies), who provide, I argue, baseline models for how Pringle will come to represent colonised indigenous peoples. In addition, the general principles of Scottish Enlightenment thought, in particular the four stages theory of historical development, supplied Pringle with a model within which to conceptualise the colonial state and its future evolution. Chapters two and three focus on Pringle's colonial career in the Cape Colony. Here I argue that Pringle's poetry of this period provides evidence of two distinct phases. In the first and most difficult period of settlement Pringle wrote poetry of troubled lyric interiority which reflected an incommensurable gap between colonial experience and the expressive expectations and conventions which he brought to it. Following his fallout with Governor Somerset and a de facto alliance with the mission humanitarians, Pringle's poetry moves away from a Romantic preoccupation with the self and begins to engage larger public issues, such as the treatment of indigenous people. In this mode, Pringle very often assumes an indigenous persona and I examine the extent to which such a gesture might be considered both appropriative and incipiently transcultural. As indicated earlier, I also examine the generic and representational models which might have informed Pringle's treatment of this subject. The chapters also consider Pringle's colonial politics, and emphasise that his reputation as a 'radical' is a misleading one; there are, furthermore, no easy conjunctures to be established between Pringle's allegedly radical politics and a radicalism of representation in his poetry (a commonplace critical assumption). In the final chapter I examine the complexities of Pringle's London years, which require that we bring into focus both his Scottish and his South African experience and their mediation by this new context. Here the broad focus of my argument is that we must take account not only of Pringle's standing as an abolitionist-humanitarian and Secretary to the high profile Anti-Slavery Society, but also his position as a respectable man of letters, particularly his role as editor of the influential but genteel 'annual', Friendship's Offering, from 1829-1835. These dual public roles reciprocated one another, I argue, in that Pringle's reputation as a poet of 'elegance' and 'taste' also lent credence to his reputation an ethically exemplary humanitarian. This reciprocation of roles is strongly evident in Pringle's best known poems of this period, «The Bechuana Boy" and «The Emigrant's Cabin", which rewrite colonial experience in a way that conforms to the expectations of his metropolitan readers. During his residence in London, Pringle also produced a number of poems in the subgenre of what could be described as evangelical redemptivism. These hortatory and proselytising pieces were mainly published in missionary magazines, and though South African in subject matter they could equally be set in any area of empire where mission work was being done. This subgenre I analyse as an offshoot of the extreme evangelical and abolitionist enthusiasms of the 1830s, with their belief in their divinely mandated mission to fully Christianise the British empire and emancipate all its subjects. In conclusion, this study argues for an understanding of Pringle's work as being intersected by differences in imperial location and status, as well as by a significant degree of instability and contradiction in its representation of the colonial project. Far from being cohered around a teleological liberal vision of an emancipated future, Pringle's work, both prose and poetry, repeatedly reveals a contradiction and contrariety that suggests fundamental irresolution rather than firm conviction.
Mirror mirror on the wall : dramatic characterisation as a means for reflecting on personal values.
(2007) Janse van Vuuren, Petro.; Barnes, Hazel Susan.
Based on theories from: Educational or Process Drama. Improvisaiional Theatre. Drama Therapy and Psychology: this thesis is an in depth exploration of a methodology for educational drama that can be used lo examine values. This method proposes a system that will assist participants to discover and assess their own altitudes and bring them into dialogue with other value systems. The theoretical focus of this thesis was drawn from selected theorists: Roai. Iz/.o. Panely, Vogler and Heathcole amongst others: which conlribuled to the establishment of a practical methodology that provides a process of self discovery through improvisational drama and role-play. The dichotomous relationship between art and nature (perceived rcalitx), allows the participant lo engage in the discourse of self evaluation and social conscientisaiion. The methodology is based on the narrative structure of myth and the archetypes that populate mythic landscapes. Myths relate the journey of a hero, who undergoes personal growth as the result of a change of perspective. This occurs during the hero's journey from her ordinary world to a special world where adventure and danger awaits. The hero must find the elixir that will heal her own wounds and the wounds of her communitw Ihe archetypes play a unique role in helping the hero lo face her own desires, values and altitudes and to lest these \ allies in the Ileal of physical battle or emotional turmoil. With Participatory Action Research as main methoclologv. the thesis used questionnaires, interviews, journal entries and dramatic workshops for data gathering. The longitudinal nature of this exploration look place over a period of two years and the cohort group comprised of adolescent girls and boys, aged 14 to 16 years. The research found that the method was very successful for inciting critical discussion and moral debate. In the safety of the dramatic context, the cohort group gained new understanding about the conflict between the good of the community verses the individuars desires. Consequently they were able to come to terms with those desires that influence their behaviour and talk about these in relation to other values. Keywords: Values interrogation, educational drama, process drama, drama therapy, drama journeys, improvisation, role-play, social conscicntisation. Tcmenos, dramatic play, educational play, archetypes, psychological transference, meaning making process, practical methodology, dichotomy.
Interpretation and the /Xam narratives.
(2006) Wessels, Michael Anthony.; Gunner, Elizabeth.
There has, in the last quarter of a century, been an increased interest in the /Xam narratives that form the major part of the nineteenth century archive of materials collected by Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek in Cape Town from /Xam informants. This has resulted in a proliferation of writing about the Bleek and Lloyd collection and its contents. The critical examination of some of this body of writing forms part of the project of this thesis. The other aim of the thesis is to provide a close reading of certain of the /Xam texts themselves. This thesis is based on the view that the first of these projects has only been attempted in a cursory and indirect fashion and that the second, namely the close reading of/Xam texts, has not yet been undertaken on a scale that parallels the range and complexity of the materials or which exhausts the interpretative possibilities they offer. This thesis aims to fill some of these gaps in the literature without claiming that a comprehensive or definitive study is possible in so wide and rich a field. Postmodern and postcolonial theory has emphasised the discursive and ideological nature of the language of both hermeneutics and literature. In my consideration of the /Xam texts and the writing that has been produced in relation to them, I attempt to consistently foreground the historicity and textuality of my own practice and the practices of the materials with which I am working. In this regard I question, especially, two assumptions about the /Xam narratives: that they are primarily aetiological and that their chief character, /Kaggen, the Mantis, is a trickster.
Journeying beyond Embo : the construction of exile, place and identity in the writings of Lewis.
(2007) Lombardozzi, Letizia Maria.; Stiebel, Evelyn Alexandra.
A boundary is not that at which something stops, but ...is that from which something begins its presencing. (Bhabha 1994:1) For the purpose of this thesis, the above statement will be central, because implicit in it is a particular awareness of what constitutes exile and the exihc experience, both variously defined boundaries within which to view the historicity of the exiled subject. Bhabha's statement prompts one to reflect on the multi-faceted marginalised situation faced by the exiled subject. It can be argued that Lewis Nkosi, a black exiled South African writer, has remained a largely underresearched writer, particularly in South Africa. His works have not been as widely researched possibly as those of his contemporaries, despite his local and international profile and reputation as an astute scholar and writer, for various reasons which this thesis will explore. His writings and extensive commentaries on African and world literature certainly merit research, particularly in respect of his construction of place and identity. He has been influential in South African letters and frequently cited - however, his years outside the country have led to his neglect within South Africa. This thesis hopes to go some way towards recovering Lewis Nkosi as writer and scholar, particularly in terms of his construction of identity, both within South Africa and as exile. This thesis will examine representative texts by this writer, using perspectives of theorists such as Fanon (1986), Bhabha (1994), Said (1983) and Quayson (2002) among other writers who particularly discuss notions of space and place from a post colonial perspective. Reference to Nkosi's own history as well as his non-fictional writing will be seen as relevant in defining what 'home' and 'exile' have meant to Nkosi and how a construction of 'place' enhances the sense of identity. The question to be considered is: how, through his writing - both non-fiction and fiction - does Nkosi construct identity through place, how, in other words, has he pushed back boundaries as an exile writer? Here the impact that place has on our understanding of who we are will be explored. This thesis will investigate then the development, perception and experience of place and identity in the works of this writer. Nkosi's somewhat nomadic lifestyle in exile makes him an interesting case: the exposure to American and European culture he enjoyed as a writer in exile has not been the norm for most black South African writers. Nkosi's concept of place and identity will be analysed as they developed first in his early journalism days of Ilanga lase Natal and Drum, and subsequently in his primary works of critical essays and later fiction. Nkosi's act of writing is also the place where identity and memory meet, and this study will refer to early literary essays contained in his literary works Home and Exile (1965), The Transplanted Heart (1975) and Tasks and Masks (1981). A reading of these works together with his many earlier articles and reviews as well as his latest novels and dramas, will show the ways in which this writer self-consciously participates in the construction of place and identity, how he explores, through his writing, his sense of place and his identity as a South African exile, and how his perceptions may have changed during his long career as writer. As Nkosi affirms: "all of those are strands of memory about place and it automatically gets into your writing, because I think, it is both the terrain of consciousness and the orientation to reality" (Lombardozzi 2003:331). This dissertation will focus then, on the construction of home, identity and exile in Nkosi's discourse, written over nearly five decades of South Africa's turbulent history, a period during which all these terms were contested sites. Theories of place and identity are inevitably made more complex by the condition of exile, as place and identity are immutably concatenated, so that what is said about place must also include the construction of identity. In this regard theorists on exile such as Grant (1979), Gurr (1981), Seidel (1986), Robinson (1994) and Whitehouse (2000) will be examined, and theorists such as Cartey (1969), Fanon (1986), Owomoyela (1996) and Walter (2003) on the issue of identity will be considered. The thesis will therefore position Nkosi in terms of his generation of exile writers, and how this has impacted on his construction of identity, and will to this end, explore interconnected issues surrounding home, identity and exile.
Shifting spaces in the 'new South Africa' : site-specific performance as an intercultural exploration of sites, using as examples Jay Pather's Cityscapes, Durban (2002) and Home, Durban (2003)
(2006) Craighead, Clare Leslie.; Loots, Lliane Jennifer.
This dissertation aims to investigate an extended notion of site within site-specific dance theatre. Using multiple theoretical frameworks, which include second wave feminism and its recognition of the body as a site of/for struggle (Goldberg, 1987) in conjunction with site-specific performance theory (Kaye, 2000; Kwon, 2004), Foucault's (1979) notion of 'biopower' and cultural studies, this dissertation seeks to engage site-specific dance theatre as a mode of social and cultural production. Multiculturalism (Schechner, 1988/1991) and interculturalism (Bharucha, 1996; Schechner, 1991) in performance theory and practice, are also engaged to solidify debates around performance as instances of cultural production. These frameworks are engaged in relation to the contemporary production of site-specific dance theatre in Durban, South Africa. Local dance practitioner and academic Jay Pather's site-specific/installation works CityScapes, Durban (2002) and Home, Durban (2003) are used as case-studies for interrogation and investigation in relation to the chosen theoretical discourses. CityScapes and Home provide two instances of site-specific dance theatre that have emerged from within post-apartheid South Africa. The two works are engaged in close relation to the post-apartheid South African context, and its promotion of a 'rainbow nation' in the 'New South Africa'. CityScapes provides a platform to engage ideas of access to and ownership of dance forms and the spaces which they occupy - prompting critical questioning around the impact of South Africa's historical segregations and their influence upon contemporary (South African) society/societies. Similarly, Home provides a platform to engage notions of 'homespaces' as these relate to access to and ownership of private and public spaces, and how this impacts cultural inter(re)actions in post-apartheid South Africa. Both case-studies provide instances of critical performance practice, which allows for meaningful theoretical inter(re)action in relation to the two chosen performance works. In this light, this dissertation also provides an instance of much needed academic enquiry into the local, South African contemporary dance-scape.
African Jerusalem : the vision of Robert Grendon.
(2007) Christison, Grant.; Woeber, Catherine Ann.
This thesis discovers the spiritual and aesthetic vision of poet-journalist Robert Grendon (c. 1867–1949), a man of Irish-Herero parentage. It situates him in the wider Swedenborgian discourse regarding African ‘regeneration’. While preserving the overall diachronic continuity of a literary biography, it treats his principal thematic preoccupations synchronically. The objective has been to show the imaginative ways in which he employs his rich and diverse religio-philosophical background to account for South Africa’s social problems, to pass judgement upon the principal players, and to point out an alternative path to a brighter future. Chapter 1 looks at Emanuel Swedenborg’s mystical revelations on the heightened spiritual proclivity of the ‘celestial’ African, and the consequences of New Jerusalem’s descent over the heart of Africa, which Swedenborg believed to be taking place, undetected by Europeans, around 1770. It also examines how those pronouncements were received in Europe, America, and—most particularly—in Africa. Chapter 2 examines the circumstances surrounding Grendon’s birth and childhood in what is today Namibia. It takes note of a family tradition that Joseph Grendon married a daughter of Maharero, a prominent Herero chief, and it looks at Robert Grendon’s views on ‘miscegenation’. Chapter 3 deals with Grendon’s schooling at Zonnebloem College, Cape Town. Chapter 4 describes his cultural, sporting, and political activities in Kimberley and Uitenhage in the 1890s, bringing to light his editorship of Coloured South African in 1899. It also considers his conception of ‘progress’. Chapter 5 looks at some early poems, including the domestic verse-drama, ‘Melia and Pietro’ (1897–98). It also contextualizes a single, surviving editorial from Coloured South African. Chapter 6 treats Grendon’s tour de force, the epic poem, Paul Kruger’s Dream (1902), as well as his personal involvement in the South African War, and his spiritualized account of the ‘Struggle for Supremacy’ in South Africa. Chapter 7 relates to Grendon’s fruitful Natal period, 1900–05: his headmastership of the Edendale Training Institute and of Ohlange College, and his editorship of Ilanga’s English columns during the foreign absence of the editor-in-chief, John L. Dube, from February 1904 to May 1905. Chapter 8 analyzes some of the shorter and medium-length poems written in Natal, 1901–04. Chapter 9 is a close examination of the poem, ‘Pro Aliis Damnati’, showing its Swedenborgian basis, and how it dramatizes Swedenborg’s concept of ‘scortatory’ love. Chapter 10 describes Grendon’s early years in Swaziland from 1905. Chapter 11 deals with his period as editor of Abantu-Batho in Johannesburg, 1915–16. Chapter 12 describes his last years in Swaziland, and his relationship with the Swazi royal family.
Culture in the public sphere : recovering a tradition of radical cultural-political debate in South Africa, 1938-1960.
(2005) Sandwith, Corinne.; Daymond, Margaret Joan.
This thesis is concerned with the negotiation of cultural and literary matters in South African public life during the period 1938 to 1960. While I begin with an exploration of the more 'orthodox' or 'academic' traditions of literary-cultural discussion in South Africa, the far more urgent preoccupation has been to explore a hitherto undocumented tradition of cultural-political debate in the South African public sphere, one which arose in the ' counter-public' circles of oppositional South African political groups. What has emerged is a rich and heterogeneous public debate about literature and culture in South Africa which has so far gone unrecorded and unrecognised. What sets this 'minority' discussion apart from more mainstream cultural discourses, I argue, is its overt engagement with contemporary socio-political issues. Articulated mainly by 'subaltern' writer-intellectuals - who occupied a precarious position in the social order either by virtue of their racial classification, class position or political affiliation - this is a cultural debate which offers a forthright critique of existing race and class norms. In these traditions, literary-cultural discussion becomes a vehicle for the articulation of radical political views and a means whereby marginalised individuals and groups can engage in oppositional public debate. In this regard, I argue, literary-cultural debate becomes a means of engaging in the kind of public political participation which is not available in the ' legitimate' public sphere. Focusing in the first instance on literary criticism 'proper', this thesis considers the distinctive reading strategies, hermeneutic practices, and evaluative frameworks which mark these alternative South African discursive traditions . Here I argue that the political, content-oriented, historical and ideological emphases of an alternative South African tradition are in marked contrast to the formalist, abstracted and moralising tendencies of more normative approaches. What the thesis points to is not only the existence of a substantial body of anti-colonial criticism and response in South Africa from the mid-1930s onwards, but also to a vigorous tradition of Marxist literary criticism in South Africa, one which predates the arrival of Marxist approaches in South African universities by some thirty years. Aside from the more traditional critical arena of literary consumption and evaluation, the thesis also considers a more general public discussion, one in which questions such as the place of politics in art, the social function of literature/culture, and the complex 'postcolonial' questions of cultural allegiance, identity and exclusion are debated at length. In this regard, culture becomes one of the primary sites of a much broader contestation of ruling class power. Regarded by many in these traditions as intrinsic to the operations of class and colonial oppression, culture also figures as one ofthe primary nodes of resistance. In seeking out these marginal South African 'subaltern counterpublics', the project has sought to retrieve a history of radical cultural-political debate in South Africa which is not available as part of the existing literary-cultural archive. In this regard, I hope not only to keep these ideas ' afloat' as a way of complicating and interrogating the present, but also seek to provide a more accurate and inclusive sense of the South African public sphere during the period under review. In particular, I offer a sense of the many competing intellectual discourses which formed the broader intellectual context out of which the dominant English Studies model was eventually constellated. I also give attention to the complex social processes by means of which certain intellectual discourses are granted legitimacy and permanence while others are discarded: what emerges in this regard, as I suggest, is gradual 'outlawing' of politics from South African cultural debates which coincides with the rise of the apartheid state.
Space, body and subjectivity: shifting conceptions of black African masculinities in four audio-visual texts.
(2010) Mngadi, Sikhumbuzo Richard.; Coullie, Judith Lutge.
Research in constructions of masculinities in South Africa is already an established field, having in part developed out of the need to contextualise global theories in the social, economic and cultural realities of African subjects. In its turn, this research has engendered a number of focused studies which have sought to depart from the traditional ‘men’s studies’ paradigm. Needless to say, studies in constructions of masculinities have infused the traditional paradigm with a new vitality. This thesis proceeds from the premise that to be a man in (South) Africa and elsewhere is contingent upon a diversity of social, economic, political, generational and cultural expectations. I argue that these expectations, which are linked variously to status, sexual orientation and choice, mean that recognition of gender subjectivity as performed must take precedence over the idea of a stable gender role. And, at times, this applies with more force in African societies, traditional and modern (or, as is often the case, a confluence of both), than it does in western ones where class, rather than the complex intersection of tradition and modernity, tends to set gender identities on a more stable platform. I then propose the view that a nuanced conceptualisation of masculinities in South Africa needs to inform analysis of representations of men and women, and I do so by means of an in-depth critical analysis of the shifting conceptions of black African men and women in Shaka Zulu (1986), Mapantsula (1988), Fools (1998) and Yizo Yizo 1 (1999).
Performance, power and agency : Isaiah Shembe's hymns and the sacred dance in the Church of the Nazarites.
(2010) Sithole, Nkosinathi.; West, Gerald Oakley.; Brown, Duncan John Bruce.
This study examines the sacred dance in the Nazaretha Church and Isaiah Shembe's hymns as “agency” and not “response” (Coplan, 1994: 27). A number of studies on the Nazaretha Church and Isaiah Shembe posit that Shembe created his popular texts (especially the sacred dance) as a response to colonialism and the oppression of black people. In countering such a proposition I argue that in exploring the sacred dance we need to look at the motivation for members to participate in the dance. With that view in mind, I examine the sacred dance and the hymns as examples of a popular culture which is both „transnational‟ and „transglobal‟, to use Hofmeyr‟s terms (2004). This is because it is common in the Nazaretha Church that members taking part in the sacred dance claim to be doing so on behalf of their dead relatives, as it is believed that ancestors are able to participate in those dances through the bodies of their living relatives. In return, those in the ancestral realm will reward the living performers by offering them „blessings‟. In the Nazarite Church, and through performances like the sacred dance, the physical and spiritual worlds are perceived to be integrated. I therefore examine these hymns and performances as examples of popular culture “that is more than sub- or trans-national, [that] is trans-worldly and trans-global” (Hofmeyr, 2004: 9). In other words, I examine the sacred dance as performances and the hymns as texts whose audience is not only living people but also people in heaven. This means my study goes beyond the view that Nazarite performances are rituals of empowerment for the members, a majority of whom are economically, socially and politically marginalised (Muller, 1999), to look at them as significant on their own account. In undertaking the abovementioned task, I examine these hymns and performances in relation to “oral testimony of their significance to the people who [perform] and [listen] to them” (White, 1989: 37). Oral testimony of dreams and miracles suggests that Nazarite members who take part in the sacred dance do so primarily because of the imagined relationship between the individual and divine power. As Mbembe states, “it is the subject‟s relation to divine sovereignty that serves as the main provider of meanings for most people” (2002: 270). I argue that Nazarite members take part in the sacred dance mainly as an attempt to “manage the „real world‟ on the basis of the conviction that all symbolisation refers primarily to a system of the invisible, of a magical universe, the present belonging above all to a sequence that opens onto something different” (270).
Forms of community service : Guy Butler's literary contributions.
(2003) Akal, Anthony Vincent George.; Chapman, Michael James Faulds.
Guy Butler (1918-2001) was one of South Africa's most prolific English writers. His work extended across several genres. He has hitherto been seen by his critics in terms of neat binaries: Marxists versus liberals, Negritudinists versus 'colonials'. In this study it is argued that a modification of these polarised positions is necessary. Butler's own position is simultaneously one of Oxford scholar and Karoo son, engaged with both the challenges and difficulties of 'local habitation'. By testing these oppositions against the concepts of 'past significance' and 'present praxis' I suggest that Butler is neither simply transcendental nor socially committed, neither simply international nor local. In taking advantage of a 'freer' perspective succeeding the 'struggle' decades in South Africa, I suggest a more inclusive reevaluation of Butler as both artist and public figure serving an inclusive 'imagined community'. Chapter One focuses on Butler's plays, both those published and - for the first time - those unpublished, and examines the texts in the context, locally, of a repressive apartheid regime and, internationally, against the background of the Cold War. What emerges is a writer whose views were neither exclusive nor sectarian, and who was an outspoken critic of injustice, wherever this occurred. Butler's hitherto undervalued contribution to the development of serious drama as an art form in South Africa is given prominence. Chapter Two deals with Butler's poetry. For all his intervention in public debate, it is his poetic expression that reveals his most profound insights. His attempts to "take root" in a local habitation are scrutinised, and it is argued that the poetry has been misunderstood by many of his critics, especially those on the Left. Besides his "compulsion to belong", the study explores the twin search of Butler for an African synthesis through his utilisation of the Apollo-Dionysus paradigm, and his 'eschatological imperative'. While attempting to adapt European forms and sensibilities to African experience his poetry - it is argued - also seeks to heal the divisions of a fragmented South African society. In Chapter Three Butler's cultural projects are examined. It is argued that his cultural narrative is not one of separation but of integration premised (in his own words) on a "common humanity". Several projects are scrutinised in the context of post-1960 Republican South Africa, where National Party policies attempted to impose crushing political and social hegemonies on the English community as well as on all communities of colour. While Butler's immediate aims were to ensure the survival of the English language and English cultural identity, the scope of his cultural projects reveals that his 'imagined community' extended to all South Africans: his vision was not one of elite cultural separation, but of egalitarian integration. Butler's achievements in his many and varied forms of service are considered as having contributed to the formation of a new, democratic society in South Africa.
Autobiography of bone : an original cycle of dramatic poems researching the problematics of reconceptualisation of the formal boundaries between the genres of poetry and drama.
(2010) Moolman, Jacobus Philippus.; Chapman, Michael James Faulds.; Green, Michael Cawood.
Autobiography of Bone consists of a cycle of original dramatic poems and short poetic dramas which investigate the problematics of a reconceptualisation of the genre-based distinctions between poetry and drama. The work seeks to extend and then map the new territory revealed to me as a result of my experiments with form, and with the consequences that new forms have for content and meaning. The material in the cycle of poems presents and explores a multi-layered and wide-ranging, rather than unitary, response to issues of the body (specifically disability), memory and language. A concluding scholarly essay, “Orthopaedia” – Understanding the Writing Practice”, researches some of the theoretical and conceptual issues that informed the poems, including the influence of verse drama and the contemporary long poem, in an attempt to construct an archaeology of the writing process and the imagination of the writer.
Wopko Jensma : a monograph, the interface between poety and schizophrenia.
(2002) Sheik, Ayub.; Van Wyk, Johan.; Wade, Jean-Philippe.
This thesis is a monograph of South African poet and artist, Wopko Jensma. Jensma's published anthologies, Sing/or Our Execution (1973), Where White is the Colour, Where Black is the Number (1974) and Have You Seen My Clippings (1977) together with the relatively unknown and unpublished, Blood and More Blood deal with issues of identity relating to race and class within the context of apartheid South Africa in the nineteen seventies. These four anthologies represent a poetics of resistance conceived as an antidote to personal and social suffering as a result of the racist oppression of blacks in South Africa. Jensma's experimental poetry harnesses the signatures of jazz lyrics, concrete poetry, the avantgarde as well as African dance forms in bizarre cameos of underclass misery and racial oppression. In lieu of metrical regularity and rhyme the aesthetic experience is simulated by asemantic qualities of speech, sound and rhythmic undulations in a poetry characterised by what Samuel Beckett has called "the withdrawal of semantic crutches" (Schwab 1994:6). Jensma's schizoid discourse manifests itself as an asocial dialect with highly personal idioms, approximate phrases and substitutes which make his language extremely difficult to follow at times. Jensma's diction of private idiomatic language, mixing of dialects, the use of syncopation, ellipsis and experimental topography have no doubt contributed to the cryptic and arcane aberrations associated with schizophrenia. This schizoid versification is a paradoxical wish to protect the core of oneself from communication whilst simultaneously expressing the need to be discovered and acknowledged. This private idiomatic language reveal ordinary people driven into interior psychological spaces, as well as psychotic and surreal extremes in order to survive an overwhelming and implosive reality. Jensma's textual strategies deconstruct modernist assumptions about rationality, domination and meaning as a tyranny of power. The socially constructed self is exposed as a subject disempowered and alienated by ideologies which demand acquiescence and which offer false assurances in return. Likewise, the schizoid scrambling of the signifier is an attempt to repel the subjection implicit in rationalist discourse and to encourage an awareness of the world ideologically sanctioned by its dominant discourses. This study begins with a detailed biography of Jensma. The next chapter establishes the theoretical assumptions which inform the interface between Jensma's poetry and schizophrenia. Jensma's poetry is then systematically appraised in terms of themes, form and subjectivity. The last chapter is a study of the intertextual relations which provide insight into the context and milieii in which Jensma wrote and which permit a reading of Jensma's poetry as a discursive space in which different literary histories co-exist and respond to one another. The thesis concludes with an evaluation of Jensma's poetry as a pathological yet incisive response to the reductive politics of racial essence, cultural crisis and the vagaries of consumer culture.
Staging empowerment? An investigation into participation and development in HIV and AIDS theatre projects.
(2010) Durden, Emma.; Dalrymple, Lynn I.
This thesis is an exploration of contemporary practice in the field of theatre for development as HIV and AIDS communication. The thesis explores the theoretical fields of communication for development, entertainment education and empowerment, in an attempt to understand how different approaches to communicating about HIV and AIDS can influence personal and social change, and impact on both personal empowerment and community development. An examination of the literature on using theatre as a means to bring about development leads to the identification of key areas for investigation, including how participation is envisioned and implemented in theatre projects that focus on HIV and AIDS, and how participants are empowered through these processes. My study includes a broad survey of practitioners who use theatre in this way, the results of which inform an examination of three specific case studies. The research data reflects that participation is used as a strategy in different ways in theory-driven interventions that are consciously designed to meet specific goals. While many practitioners highlight participation, this is often in interventions that are guided by the modernisation approach to development, where external organisations attempt to bring about pre-determined change within a beneficiary community. The low levels of participation in essential decision-making processes in these projects mean that these projects preclude some of the elements essential to bringing about empowerment, such as the development of a greater critical consciousness and encouraging community-based problem solving. Such practice cannot bring about substantial long-term changes and empowerment for the project beneficiaries or for society more broadly. My research identifies a need to reconsider HIV and AIDS communication within the context of development, if change is to be brought about. In my concluding chapter, I suggest a number of ways to bring practice closer to the paradigm of meaningful participation as informed by empowerment theory.
Women in the Histories of Herodotus.
(2001) Delany, Ann Moreton.; Mackay, E. Anne.
This thesis examines the portrayal of women in the Histories of Herod at us against the backdrop of two influences, Greek mythology, and the social customs and thought pertaining to women in ancient Greek society. Herodotus' Histories are particularly wide-ranging and, unlike Thucydides' later account of the Peloponnesian War, not confined to the exclusively political and military spheres. As a result. Herodotus' female characters appear naturally in the course of the stories he is telling, stories he has found as the result of his inquiries. Since his researches are so wide-ranging, the information so acquired comes from many and varied sources, both chronologically and geographically. In the course of placing the information he has gathered before his readers or audience, Herodotus has to present it in terms that can be understood and readily assimilated by those receiving it. It is my contention that in order to achieve this end he naturally moulds his stories according to two systems of information with which he and his audience are familiar, that of mythology and that of the social practices and attitudes of his time concerning women, and that these two systems of information act as a backdrop against which the stories he has collected are viewed. When dealing with information from societies very different from the Greek, Herodotus frequently has occasion to define such information in terms of its alterity or 'otherness' in comparison with what for him and his audience is accepted practice. In this way he is able to render strange, alien and foreign customs comprehensible for his audience by expressing them in terms of what they are not and for this purpose he uses Greek societal norms as his reference point. Conversely, he is also able to render stories from foreign lands familiar by recasting his tales using mythological elements well known to his audience, elements which would enjoy instant recognition in the minds of those receiving the information he is imparting. For ease in examining the social context against which Herodotus is telling his stories concerning women, his female characters have been assigned to the categories of daughter, sister, wife and mother, and in each chapter the customs, attitudes and beliefs pertaining to such categories in both societal and mythological terms have been laid out before examining the characters in each category in the text. There is a final category of Women in Power since the women in this category are an excellent example of alterity in relation to Greek thought and practice.
'Who is the other woman?' : representation, alterity and ethics in the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
(1998) Arnott, Jill Margaret.; Attwell, David.
This dissertation analyses a number of key themes in the work of postcolonial theorist and literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and uses her ideas to argue for the usefulness of both deconstructive and postmodern thought in a postcolonial context generally, and in South Africa in particular. The early part of the thesis presents a brief overview of Spivak's work (Chapter 1) and discusses its relationship with Derridean deconstruction and what I have called "progressive postmodern thought". Chapter 2 explores in detail Spivak's use of theoretical concepts adapted from, or closely related to, deconstruction. Perhaps the most important of these is catachresis - the idea that all naming is in a sense false, and the words we use to conceptualise the world must be seen as "inadequate, yet necessary". The thesis looks at how Spivak foregrounds the methodological consequences of this insight in her own practice of constantly revisiting and rethinking her own conclusions, and also at the political consequences of recognising specific terms like "nation", "identity" or "woman" as catachrestic. Closely related to this area of Spivak's work are her idea of "strategic essentialism" and her adaptation of Derrida's concept of the pharmakon -- that which is simultaneously poison and medicine. Chapter 3 relates Spivak's work to three key areas of postmodern thought: alterity, and the ethics of the relationship between self and other; Lyotard's notions of the differand and the "unpresentable"; and aporia, or the ethical and political consequences of undecidability. I argue here that all of these emphases are potentially very useful in postcolonial studies, particularly in relation to the predicament - of the gendered subaltern, and that they help to define a progressive postmodern politics. The remainder of the dissertation discusses individual essays at greater length. Chapter 4 focuses in the main on "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) and Spivak's arguments concerning the nature of subalternity and the politics of representation. Chapter 5 examines Spivak's engagement with French Feminism and her feminist critiques of mainstream deconstruction, arguing that Spivak's use of deconstruction undermines the opposition between linguistic and material forms of oppression and hence between theory and practice. Chapter 6 focuses on Spivak's reading of literary texts and raises issues concerning, inter alia, the production of the first world self at the expense of the third world other; the limits of both metropolitan theories and narratives of national liberation, democracy and development in relation to the experience of the gendered subaltern; reading the text of the subaltern body; the (impossible but necessary) ethical relationship between first world feminist and the subaltern in neocolonial space; rights and responsibility; the need to respect subaltern selfhood; and the possibility of what Spivak calls "learning from below". Finally, I look at the relevance of Spivak's thought to three areas of South African political and academic life: conflicts over representation within the local Women's movement; notions of national origin and national identity; and debates over deconstruction and the relationship between the academy and society.

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (English, Media and Performance Studies) by Date Accessioned