Update on Fashioning Masculinity event

Fashioning Masculinity, which  we spoke of a few weeks ago, is ready to roll in. The event will take place on Tuesday 16 August 2011, 8h30 to 17h00, at the Medical Research Council in Parow, Cape Town. An interdisciplinary event hosted by UNISA's Institute for Social and Health Sciences  in collaboration with the MRC-UNISA Safety and Peace Promoion Research Unit,  the event is meant to be a stage to kindle some new and less despairing thinking about masculinities and the way in which manhood is fashioned, created, styled, imagined, challenged, enlarged, reworked - you name it. Another set of thoughts I hope will come through is on traditions: what are the traditions of thinking about and fashioning masculinities. After all, this event is part of the Changing Traditions Project. Regardless, the programme so far is highly promising. Proposed topics include 'what defines men'; 'female masculinities'; 'metrosexuality'; 'Zimbabwean masculinities in exile'; 'black rage and Baldwin, Biko, Malcolm, Mbeki, and Malema'; 'masculinities in the police'; 'masculinities in the army', 'rugby'; 'blindess', 'male-biased architecture'. I'm looking forward to some ideas about men and traditions of masculine self-fashioning, representation and stylization coming through. I think there is still space. If you are around Cape Town, then, make contact either with Kharnita Mohamed kmohamed@mrc.ac.za 021 938-0398 or Candice Rule crule@mrc.ac.za 021-938-0535.

Fantasies about the unsettled past at the Apartheid Archives Conference

It turns out that nostalgia is a heck of messy thing. I guess memory itself is always less than entirely reliable, indeed wily. That much was clear at the 3^rd Apartheid Archives Conference that happened this past week, 25 to 29 July 2011, at Wits University, under the theme ‘narratives, nostalgia and nationhoods’. I know that I am part of the Apartheid Archives Project (AAP) network, but this baby was a mind-blowing event.

Nostalgia, since it reflects and restores, certainly isn’t simple sentimental reminiscence. In fact, being often a treacherous fantasy, it can betray memory, fictionalise reality. A painful yearning for home that is no longer there, it is also not just bittersweet memory for the past, pining for lost time. Instead nostalgia, a symbolic return, often coloured by trauma, stages an encounter between history and memory while trying to act as guide for the future that often is coloured by unspoken shame and guilt in the present. To reflect on nostalgia is to encounter the good old bad days, what Professor Leswin Laubscher, member of AAP, referred to as ‘ache for an absent other, or an irretrievable self’.



Leswin Laubscher at 3AAC. The poet and scholar Gabeba Baderoon
is in the background (photo: Ratele).

But you probably knew that from Jacob Dlamini’s book. Or maybe not. Or like Eric Miyeni and others dislike the book. Dlamini, a homeboy of mine whom I met for the first time at 3AAC, where he was one of 8 keynote speakers, has been getting a lot of grief from Miyeni, Andile Mngxitama, and others for his book Native Nostalgia for remembering black life in apartheid-era Katlehong the way he does. Mngxitama says it reproduces a white perspective; refers to the book as giving an Oprahesque view of township existence. In Miyeni’s words, Dlamini’s book’s premise is “so sickening I decided never to read it”. How does that work: getting sick from imagining what a book contains? Come on Mr Miyeni, you do your name an injustice. The chutzpah of writing in a column about a book you have not read is admirable; but I think it gives a crutch to the pervasive anti-book reading culture that I want to think a book-writing man like you in a more calmer moment would not support. Read the book, only then you can trash it. Actually, in my reading of Native Nostalgia, which featured so much at the 3AAC, it does not say “we had fun under apartheid”. It illustrates that black people actually had a life even then, despite the inhumanity of the regime. In my book, the book is an uncomfortably fine read (except for the earlier parts when it keeps on promising what it will do later), at once touching and maddening and provocative. I recommend it, precisely because of how he interprets subjects who would say “Things were better under apartheid”. Gutsy, smart writing.  

Jacob Dlamini at 3AAC (photo: Ratele)



Although all this black-on-black skirmish is about what the apartheid past looked like, did to us, what we did and were back then, and how to think about the unsetlled past, I am getting a bit sidetracked aren't I. Back to the AAC. Things were never what they seemed under apartheid, needless to say. In trying to engineer a future white utopia, apartheid turned out to be a pornographic fantasy gone awry, and not just for many ordinary black people. But it didn’t just end there. The regime did not only soil the future for black people (and white people), it would make the past a shameful place for any ethical white person. Anyhow, that’s what I got at 3AAC.



You might not be familiar with the AAP, so here is what it is all about. A loose formation of international group of actors from different fields of enquiry and practice, it’s led by Professors Norman Duncan (in picture below) and Garth Stevens. The main goal is to make sense of South Africans’ stories (but not only South African stories) of racism under the old regime. It is interested in the persisting consequences of the past racist order on personal and collective functioning in today’s society. Yes, indeed, the past is dead, long live the past! The Project “is fundamentally premised on the understanding that traumatic experiences from the past will constantly attempt to re-inscribe themselves (often in masked form) in the present, if they are not acknowledged, interrogated and addressed.” It argues that “it is important for South African society [and doubtless any society which has pasts characterised by racist division, legislated or otherwise] to review, so as to acknowledge and deal with its past, in order to better manage its present and future.”



Norman Duncan, leader of the AAP (photo: Ratele)

Zimitri Erasmus and Garth Stevens, co-leader of the AAP (photo: Ratele)



With nostalgia and nationhoods added to the foundational theme of narrative then, 3AAC was set to offer a stage “to explore various deployments of nostalgia in personal narratives of the past, emphasising its critical and creative possibilities.” And what possibilities! As a few people said, at the end you were not sure what nostalgia is and what the past wasn’t. Along the way, we lost nationhoods, but that is ok; we had our hands and ears full of memories of the unsettled pasts, nevermind the future. As the organisers had promised, the conference brought “into conversation a diversity of scholars critically engaged with nostalgia as a means to expand social memory, reclaim and reconfigure subjugated knowledge(s) and experience(s), to produce new knowledge(s) and new subjectivities; surface ways in which nostalgia is employed not only as a means of reconstructing historical knowledge and subjectivities but also as ‘a set of resources for the future’”. It did all of that. And how it did it. Then it did some: how did they manage to have Nadine Gordimer, William Kentridge, Chris van Wyk, Hugh Masekela, Zoe Wicomb all there, I ask? Impressive.

I am not sure why I experienced a pleasant feeling seeing the trumpet master Bra Hugh helping the 1991 Literture Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer take off her coat (see a not very clear image below). I enjoyed the work that Kentridge presented. Chris van Wyk talked about township dogs, and he was tears-down-the-cheeks-fall-off-the-chair hilarious. Wicomb, who was generous with her time to the conference, having given one of the keynote addresses and sitting through all of the conference talks, read a new story in progress. She is intriguing, even from her look, Wicomb is. The five artists were brought together for the event moderated by another fine South African, Mark Gevisser, the biographer of Thabo Mbeki. It was unbelievable stuff; perhaps historical. You had to be there to experience it. Make a date to be at the next AAC in 2013 when it is likely to be next staged. 

Hugh Masekela helping Nadine Gordimer take off her coat (photo: Ratele).

Traditions of service

So, off we went to Zambia to present at the 6th African Regional Safe Communities Conference. It was a good conference. A lot of people who are invested in doing the painstaking work of attempting to create a safer, more peaceful, kinder and gentler world for all.

Anyway whilst in Livingstone, I went to the ATM to do my bit for the Zambian economy and of course to buy some commodified tradition to make my Zambian experience authentic. As you get to know me, you will learn I get attached to particular machines in foreign countries. My first meeting with that particular ATM had been spectacularly successful the day before. The next day however though this machine greeted me cordially, it could not assist me. So, off I went to the next machine feeling a little rejected and disappointed (well actually a lot disappointed and rejected). A long queue informed me that it was not merely me that the other machine had refused service to. This cheered me up,  no-one after all, likes to be the sole rejectee of their favorite machine.

One of my fellow rejectees however, was rejected again at the new machine and what was more had just been robbed by the new machine. It had taken his money out of his account without giving him any Zambian Kwachas in return. Aw, I commisserated even though I really didn't care about his plight and was convinced that the new machine would never do to special special me what it had done to him.

Well, I'm sure you know ... do I have to say it? Really, I mean, really? So, the new machine took my money out of my account and did not give me Kwachas to buy more things I don't really need but am convinced I do.

I went inside to the bank. The bank incidentally was inside a Shoprite (a South African supermarket chain). I spoke to the woman behind the counter cordially and told her about the new machine. Was I shocked when she said well, there is nothing she can do. I should take my ATM slip and go back to South Africa and have my bank resolve it. Nothing, she wanted to do nothing. She wanted me to meekly go away and not bother her with the theft of my money by her bank's machine.

Can you tell I kicked up a ruckus and refused to enter the bank to take the scene I was creating out of the public eye. No, their bank had robbed me, I said loudly, and they would not do anything and so forth. Give me some proof to take home, I insisted. No, she said she couldn't do anything. Not check the thieving ATM which was sending in a queue of people behind me to complain about the theft of their money. Eventually one of her male colleagues slipped her a form to give to me about twenty minutes, a lot of loud insistence and a good deal of lost faith in the Zambian banking system later. I filled it in, they stamped it, I asked why they could not have just given me the form in the first place. It was only for Zambian customers, foreigners had to go home and fill in their own countries forms or something responsibility-shirking like that.

I don't know how it works in Zambia but in South Africa when you interact with an institution, you have to follow the tradition of providing a paper trail. I went to my bank, exhausted and saddened, my memory of Zambia now clouded by the machines who would not care for me and the bankers who would refuse to right the wrongs of their machines. I took my bank my little form and told my sad story. My bank official was horrified, that I, a citizen of this wondrous land could be so misused in that foreign place. She cared for me. She called the other banking people and made them care about my sad little story and the twenty minutes she spent with me felt like she was making Herculean banking efforts for me.

And there it was, a tradition of service. I didn't care if I got my money back. I cared that I was cared for by an impersonal institution. Institutions who set down policies, dry, standardised boring to read policies about customer service set traditions of caring or uncaring as the case may be. Although I am with my bank for financial reasons, on the day their traditions and policies of care enfolded me, they now have my loyalty. I did get my money back, in two weeks. Not because my bank is caring but because I had insisted on following authorising traditions by demanding a piece of paper as witness to back up my claim. I broke the tradition of silent consumer who has been cheated in Zambia.

So, what do we get out of that. I do not trust the Zambian banking system, their policies are uncaring of me. South Africa is much much better. And all the machines are my friend.

Public Seminar on Masculinities, Gender-based Violence Prevention and Gender Equality in the Global South

Sonke Gender Justice Network, Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust, and the Women’s Health Unit at the University of Cape Town will be hosting a public seminar under the title: Conversations on Masculinities, Gender-based Violence Prevention and Gender Equality in the Global South. The seminar is to be held on Monday 8^th August 2011, 17h30 to 19h30, at the Lesley Social Sciences Building, University of Cape Town. The speakers are Dr Gary Barker, founding director of Instituto Promundo in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Washington, DC, USA who is also founding co-chair of the Global MenEngage Alliance; Mazibuko Jara, Senior Researcher in the Law, Race and Gender Research Unit, Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Kopano Ratele, Professor in the Institute of Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa, who is also co-director of the Medical Research Council-University of South Africa's Safety and Peace Promotion Research Unit and member of Sonke Gender Justice Network board. Professor Diane Cooper, Director of Women's Health Research Unit in the School of Public Health and Family Medicine at University of Cape Town will act moderator.

Fashioning Masculinity

Fashioning masculinity is an interdisciplinary event hosted by the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences’ (ISHS) Programme on Traditions and Transformation (POTT) Changing Traditions strategic project. This event will be focused on men and the ways in which they are fashioned and fashion themselves.

Men fashion themselves every day, through the clothes they wear, the demeanor they inhabit and/or the bodies they build and groom. Men’s clothes and bodies signify social meanings like status, geographic location, race, ethnicity, affiliations, aspiration and generation. Even the absence of ‘conscious’ self-stylization is gendered. Both a mechanic in grease-covered overalls and a male executive in his uniform, the corporate suit express particular kinds of masculinity. Men’s bodies and clothing act as visual symbols of different types of manhood. Clothing and particular kinds of bodies therefore enable and produce articulations of differing masculinities. However, neither clothing nor the bodies of men exist outside of tradition as they are subject to a system of recognition. We assume a man in a suit is some kind of corporate executive and a man in grease-covered overalls is a mechanic as these are their traditional forms of attire. This event will look at this relationship between fashioning, masculinity and tradition.

Fashioning masculinity aims to enable interesting and inventive ideas to emerge about tradition and the traditions, historical and contemporary of masculine self-fashioning, men’s representation and stylization in the streets, media and fashion industry.

Fashioning Masculinity will launch the Changing Traditions Project 2011 theme - Changing Traditions: Everyday Lives of African Men. It is the first of three events and will culminate in the biennial travelling pitso in Ethiopia in November. Changing Traditions’ is a trans-disciplinary, international and Africa-centered undertaking that focuses on the traditions surrounding the production of wealth, identity, peace, and equality.

You are cordially invited to submit an abstract for Fashioning Masculinity. Please distribute the call for participation widely.

Deadline for abstracts: 25 July 2011

For further information contact:

Kharnita Mohamed kmohamed@mrc.ac.za 021 938-0478

Candice Rule crule@mrc.ac.za 021-938-0535

Woe unto us: the crisis has come (again)

The impasse and disregard the humanities experiences is a vociferous topic for its imminent demise is constantly predicted. But then despite the end of history being predicted, history marches inexorably to its own inconclusions.

These were some of the questions that emerged on a conversation re the Crisis in the Humanities.

If it were not for tradition, then how would we know that the Great Books are truly great books? If it were not for epistemes of learning, then how would we know how to read them? If it were not for tradition then why is the philosophical canon organised in the way it is? Who is the subject? What is the postcolonial? What is the role of the intellectual? Why are the Humanities being subjected to instrumentalist discourses and forced into apologias, critics of or producers of nationalism? And how do all these dizzying considerations of location affect the work we do, or seek to do? And so forth ...

As fascinating as that conversation is, to preempt with delicious anxiety the death of one's labor, should we not push the question back on itself. What is the crisis? Why is it that the Humanities, which presumably holds the most prescient thinkers, is not immune from the discourse of crisis that has become so central to the production of modernity? It is crisis after all that holds the capacity to move, to engender capacitation, to accord the threat of extinction to an essential mode of being/operation and thus in realisation of its inexorable value to resuscitate albeit with compromises (in other words, tradition is reasserted in the normal mode of being whilst proclaiming the new). It is crisis, that modality of thinking and talk, that produces the seeming break with the past, unless of course, crisis is the normal mode of operation. And now it seems the tradition that holds sway is perpetual crisis.

We live in a time of crisis. We have psychological crises, energy crises, safety crises. food crises and on and on. The modern subject and its institutions, after all, is instantiated and given value in claiming crisis for itself. The Humanities is clearly not immune from our own panics, moral and otherwise.

So, rather than ask about the Crisis in the Humanities, should we not ask what the Crisis is symptomatic of from our positions in the Humanities? Should we not ask how our methods have devalorised the multidisciplinary endeavors of the Humanities, how we have denigrated our own labor through our traditional use of natural science metaphors and methodologies, how we have historically and traditionally set ourselves up as the poor cousins of the natural sciences and to recognise that for our disciplines to be truly human, we should move them out of the laboratories we toil in, though we might call them by other names (most days my laboratory is called fieldwork and the archive). How in order to be recognised, we produced the zombie subject in laboratories that could not contain their excess? How our very thinking is instantiated by crisis, panic, anxiety: about the disappearing social order, about the retention/disappearance of ordinary modes of being, about holding onto and validating the knowable, about valorising or villifying whoever most speaks loudly to us, and on and on. Whatever urgency you feel about your particular anxiety, congratulations, you have located an urgent crisis in need of several years of your life!

I would like to ask more, new interesting questions but I too am bound by my own disciplinary traditions. There indeed is a crisis if we cannot think ourselves out of orthodoxies boxes.  

Do you want to know?

The space in my skull is reverberating with cliches, academic verbiage about governance and democratic ideologies, fragmented thoughts about dreams deferred, hopes arisen and squashed by neoliberal machineries of greed and fear.

Nostalgia for the moment an oppressed, bloodied populace rejoiced in the release of a man imprisoned for 27 years whose fist was raised in triumph. Deep sorrow that the silences he fought against is rising once more in a new guise.

There are memories of Grant Park, a sated, jubilant electorate walking the streets of Michigan Avenue nursing their dreams of a new global order. We dared to dream the end of murder in the name of an ideology masquerading as safety. We dared to hope that the fear of terror would not reign terror on faraway others who dared to own the fuel that drives an overblown economy. That dream is tainted by the too soon aborted death of 'Yes, we can'.

We are trapped in traditions of suspicion, fear and greed. Fear of the poor, the thieving elite, greedily stroking our own comfort, suspicious of those who dare to sully our pleasures by asking us to recognise their plight. Our governments want to and do limit our right to know.

A young man was shot just this week, another took his own life last week.

I wonder how many wish to know? How many would tear themselves away from the newest celebrity scandal to feel, not the quasi-affect that makes them feel like good moral people, for their others? How many care enough to break the traditions of turning their face up and ahead to the beauty of the mountain when they drive past the fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, lovers, husbands, wives, sons and daughters living without adequate shelter on the highways? How many effect their habitual nod in complacence when human beings, who bleed and love and laugh and cry, are killed and beaten so that their landscapes are not sullied? How many would be grateful if silence once more reigns across this land so they can claim they did not know?  How many would prefer to just not know?

I too am afraid. I do not want to know the answer to these questions. I am suspicious that my greedy need to believe will not be satisfied. 

If we are not careful all the deaths and blighted lives that haunt our collective psyches will be silenced. And when it is one of ours, we will have lost the right to complain for we will have given away our right to know.

If you haven't done so yet, sign the Right to Know petition http://www.r2k.org.za/