AVReQ The Podcast AVReQ

In this episode, Professor Kopano Ratele and Dr. Sophia Sanan engage in a profound dialogue on the intersections of African art, black subjectivity, and African psychology. They explore the challenges of racialized structures within aesthetic and identity theories, particularly against the backdrop of South Africa's colonial legacy. The conversation investigates the radical potential of African psychology for black students, the need to reframe African art as part of the broader art world, and the transformative power of creativity and decolonial thought in redefining African identities and knowledge systems.



Kopano Ratele

Kopano Ratele is professor of psychology at the University of Stellenbosch and head of the Stellenbosch Centre for Critical and Creative Thought. He is the former director of the SAMRC-Unisa’s Masculinity and Health Research Unit and former research professor at the Unisa where he ran the Transdisciplinary African Psychologies Programme. Ratele was a member of the second Ministerial Committee on Transformation of South African Universities, former chairperson of Sonke Gender Justice, and past president of the Psychological Society of South Africa. He is on the national advisory board for the Future Professors Programme. Ratele has published extensively and his latest books are Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity (2022) and The World Looks Like This From Here: Thoughts on African Psychology (2019).

Sophia O Sanan

Dr Sophia Olivia Sanan (nee Rosochacki) holds a master’s degree in Sociology (from the Universities of Freiburg, Germany; Jawaharlal Nehru University, India and the University of Cape Town, 2014) and a PhD in Sociology through the University of Cape Town (2024). Her doctoral dissertation investigated politics of identity, loss and heritage through a study of the African art collection at the Iziko South African National Gallery. She has a professional background in African cultural policy development, education and art related research and has taught university students in South Africa, as well as travelling academic programs in Uganda, the USA, Brazil and India. Since late 2020, she has worked with 12 museums in Africa, South America and South Asia, exploring ideas and practices of museology from Southern perspectives. She publishes on themes related to museology in the Global South; race and arts education; race, inequality and visual culture.


Resources:

https://www.iziko.org.za/news/masterpiece-of-the-month-johannes-phokela/

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.