Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term “empty photographs” into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as “‘bad,’ ‘boring,’ or repetitious” in post-apartheid settings (“The Uneven Citizenry,” 189). This article revisits a subset of such images to contest their seeming emptiness—pallbearers escorting dead activists to their graves during political funerals in late-apartheid South Africa. Focusing specifically on Afrapix photographer, Gille de Vlieg’s images of Themba Dlamini’s funeral in Driefontein in 1990, the paper restores their local history to view and unpacks the visual cultural and material cultural circuits of militant mourning in which they were embedded. It then uses various orders of metonymy in the visual field to comment on the “necropolitics” of the apartheid regime (Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”). The paper concludes with a reflection on Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the “civil gaze” (Civil Imagination) and considers what unfolds when a reckoning with the differential distribution of death that characterizes necropower reorients this faculty away from the individual photograph towards series, genre or corpus.

"I have an African's view of Las Vegas," Denise Scott Brown stated boldly in an oral history interview she gave in 1990, thus characterizing her years growing up in Johannesburg, South Africa, as the formative experience that shaped her approach in her studio Learning from Las Vegas and the subsequent eponymous book she coauthored with Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour, her studio collaborators. This influential work has been considered not only the origin of the "research studio" that takes the city as its object of study but also a cornerstone of postmodernism for its effacement of the barriers between high culture and consumer culture. These two components of that work—its turn toward architectural observation of the city and its breaking down of the city into semiotic signs—can, this chapter argues, be traced to Denise Scott Brown's South African formation—a source of influence largely ignored in previous literature. What is at stake in understanding Scott Brown's view of Las Vegas through her experience growing up in Johannesburg in the 1930s through the early 1950s? This chapter considers the evidence of Scott Brown's autobiographical testimony and photographs, with which she constructed the narrative of her career, as an opportunity to relocate her work in the social life and forms of observation characteristic of apartheid-era South Africa.

South African writer Peter Abrahams’s literary mediation of the Harlem Renaissance is often seen as foundational for black literary production in apartheid South Africa. Abrahams’s exilic trajectories have also been widely noted. Despite scholarly interest in Abrahams’s transnational involvement with pan-Africanism and communism however, existing research has not sufficiently addressed the circulation of his work in the Soviet Union, and particularly that of The Path of Thunder (1948). One of the first works by a black South African to reach Soviet readers, the novel circulated on an unprecedented scale beginning with its initial Russian translation in 1949 and was steadily republished in multiple languages until the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. It inspired a film, an opera, several dramatic plays, as well as a ballet adaptation staged to great acclaim in leading Soviet venues. This 1958 adaptation on the part of librettist Yuri Slonimsky; Gara Garaev, a major Azerbaijani composer; and Konstantin Sergeev, an influential choreographer and dancer at the Kirov Ballet; stands at the center of our investigation. The importance of Soviet ballet to the pedagogical aspirations of “the Soviet cultural project” (Ezrahi, 2012, 3–4) renders the production a particularly engaging “site of contest” where processes of ideological appropriation attuned to Cold War geopolitics stand revealed as they augment, downplay, or sometimes fully erase the South African specificity of Peter Abrahams’ original narrative. Moreover, investigating the economy of representation employed in the adaptation along its various dimensions, textual, performative and musicological offers insights into contesting imaginaries of blackness operating in Soviet space.

This dissertation explores the intersection between music and pan-African ideology in postindependent Africa from 1960 to 1990 by focusing on transnational musical activity that takes place in a regional and continental setting. It analyzes diverse forms of musical pan-Africanism (MPA), including collaborations between musicians from different African countries (either in concerts or in the recording studio), mixings of musical genres of different origins, and pan- African political commentary in songs. The study focuses primarily on cultural production in West Africa, specifically in the countries of Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire, although due to the transnational approach deployed, these locales are analyzed as points of departure for exploring pan-African dynamics that exceed national boundaries. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, including audio recordings, newspapers, magazines, album covers, video clips, state reports, and fieldwork, it demonstrates how pan- African musical activities contributed to the emergence of afromodern aesthetics that are not subsumed under the social categories of nationhood or ethnicity. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that music was pivotal for sustaining a pan-African sentiment in popular culture, as well as contributed to imagining African collectivities during times when political visions of African unity became less attainable due to the entrenchment of the African nation-state established in colonial boundaries.

During Kwame Nkrumah’s years in power (1957-1966), the newly independent state of Ghana became a vibrant cosmopolitan center, drawing politically committed travelers, expatriates, and political exiles, who took an active role in shaping Ghana’s postcolonial project. Ghana’s pronounced cosmopolitanism was a deliberate and significant component of the postcolonial experiment conducted by the ruling Convention Peoples Party (CPP), which was invested in a transnational, pan-African vision for the decolonizing continent. This study is concerned with the ideological, political, and rhetorical exchanges among such political “translocators” and the official ideological articulations and programs promoted by the Ghanaian state. It argues that Nkrumah’s ambitions to “export” local political and ideological formations and render them a model for postcolonial Africa not only created the possibility for Ghana’s cosmopolitan scene, but were constantly being shaped and redefined by Ghana’s engagements with the foreign political actors that it hosted and the foreign audiences it targeted.

This chapter asks what the comic televisual representation of apartheid in the late 1960s tells us about its perception in Britain, and what it reveals about race relations in the country. To achieve this, this chapter focuses on a single episode from the situation comedy Till Death Us Do Part broadcast on the BBC on 12 January 1968. The chapter illuminates how the comic mode helped to circulate an anti-apartheid message to a large audience, and, inadvertently, to subvert the explicit intent to protest apartheid. It demonstrates how the protest against a racist system of governance in South Africa highlights racism in Britain.

The Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 has been widely seen as a watershed moment, marking a fundamental shift in the nature of the resistance to apartheid. Its effect on cultural production was monumental: in the face of a massive government crackdown, almost every black writer and artist of note was forced into exile. The poets who write within the long shadow of the massacre must negotiate its legacy and the fraught question of its commemoration.This article takes as its point of focus two poems by Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile that address the place of Sharpeville in cultural memory. I consider the distinctiveness of the poetics of mourning and commemoration that they fashion in relation to South Africa’s most renowned elegy for the victims of Sharpeville, Ingrid Jonker’s “The Child.” I suggest that Brutus’ anti-poetic, subverted elegy “Sharpeville” re-stages commemoration as an act of resistance that is prospective rather than retrospective. In considering Kgositsile’s poem “When Brown is Black,” I examine Kgositsile’s transnational framing of Sharpeville and its location on a continuum of racial suffering, drawing attention to the significance of the links that Kgositsile forges between Malcolm X and “the brothers on Robben Island,” (42) and between Sharpeville and the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965. This paper suggests that for both Brutus and Kgositsile commemoration is framed as a mode of activism.

Israel/Palestine is a context in which the term “apartheid” keeps reappearing. As a historical analogy and cultural shorthand, it functions as a powerful Palestinian weapon when used to describe Israeli policy and actions in what amounts to a battle of narratives in the international arena. For a long time, Palestinians have been known primarily for their violent struggle, but employing loaded vocabulary to depict their lives and experiences under Israeli control is more than just using a certain word, it is a strategic choice. The earliest uses of the apartheid analogy have long been placed in the 1970s, however, evidence of its use can already be found before the United Nation’s General Assembly declared apartheid a crime in 1973. The first instances happened simultaneously with the development of the organized Palestinian national movement in the 1960s. Focusing on Fayez Sayegh (1922–1980), an academic and UN special rapporteur to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, I argue such historical analogies need to be read as a non-violent tactic of resistance within the Palestinian struggle. Sayegh was almost singlehandedly responsible for introducing the apartheid analogy at the United Nations – my primary contextual interest. His analyses of racial segregation, however, were thoroughly countered, making his engagement for Palestine seem like a failure. And yet his early attempts to bring the apartheid analogy into wide circulation, along with the increasingly more complicated situation on the ground, show results. Today, the term has become common usage in describing Israel and puts enormous pressure on the country. The spread of the apartheid analogy shows that non-violent forms of Palestinian resistance, which in the 1960s and 1970s were almost invisible internationally, long existed.

This article traces aspects of the history of translation, familiar both in critical works that address South African literature and in South African literary texts, in relation to two poems by the black South African poets Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile. It considers their insinuation of untranslated or translated Afrikaans into an English text as a radical poetic strategy that both reinforces and disrupts established paradigms of the trope of translation. The article focuses on the untitled poem beginning with the line “Here of the things I mark” by Dennis Brutus, published in 1978 at the height of apartheid rule, and the post-apartheid poem “No Serenity Here” by Keorapetse Kgositsile, published in 2009. I consider the ways in which Brutus both confirms and subverts the identification of Afrikaans as the language of apartheid and I suggest that his use of Afrikaans constitutes a practice of resistance that breaches the rigid segregations enforced by apartheid and exposes their permeability. In a close reading of Kgositsile’s “No Serenity Here”, I relate to his use of the trope of translation and of untranslated Afrikaans within the poem as a radical critique both of European colonisation and of post-apartheid South Africa, still unliberated from the perverse legacies of that colonisation. In parsing the anomalies of Brutus’s and Kgositsile’s use of Afrikaans in these poems, I map possible future directions for the historiography of translation in South African poetics.

This special issue proposes to juxtapose accounts of anti-apartheid protest and solidarity efforts with the field of celebrity studies in order to deepen our understanding of both through their conjunction. As our contributors show, opponents of apartheid in South Africa and beyond were cognisant of the importance of cultivating ties with local and global media, as well as with individuals who enjoyed easy access to the media as a consequence of their “celebrity capital” (Olivier Driessens, “Celebrity Capital: Redefining Celebrity using Field Theory,” Theory and Society 42 (2013)). This introduction to the special issue revisits the notion of “networked celebrity” (F. Turner and C. Larson, “Network Celebrity: Entrepreneurship and the New Public Intellectuals,” Public Culture 27, 1 (75) (2015)) in order to set the stage for the case histories that follow. Rather than considering the actions of individual women and men of renown with respect either to their individual “consecration” as celebrities in Pierre Bourdieu's well-known sense, or their capacity to extract individual benefit from it, the emphasis falls on understanding various manifestations of celebrity culture that take their bearings from the collaborative and decentred nature of the global protest against apartheid. The special issue challenges the individualising emphasis of celebrity studies and its predominantly metropolitan orientation, while offering a new set of perspectives on the transnational dimensions of the global anti-apartheid struggle.

Celebrity culture was a crucial, though unrecognised, component of the early anti-apartheid struggle. Between 1948 and the foundation of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) in Britain in 1960, activists discovered celebrity to be a valuable political tool. The strategic use of celebrity secured media coverage, mobilised support for the struggle, and built a transnational network of activists and collaborative institutions. By analysing celebrity as a tool of protest in the pre-Sharpeville era, this article will illuminate its centrality in the future “war of representation” between South African authorities and global anti-apartheid protest. I focus on British Anglican priest and anti-apartheid activist Trevor Huddleston who reached international fame in the early 1950s as a leader of the moral crusade against apartheid. The South African state increased its offensive on Huddleston as his reputation grew, leading to his recall to England in late 1955. The Huddleston affair instructed both sides about the promises and perils of the use of celebrity in the global war over public opinion. I argue that this standoff was a precursor of the 1970s campaign of propaganda and disinformation that the South African government launched to counter anti-apartheid movements in the West.

Table of Contents Celebrity and Protest in the Anti-Apartheid Movement Louise Bethlehem & Tal Zalmanovich Nelson Mandela’s “Show Trials”: An Analysis of Press Coverage of Mandela’s Court Appearances Martha Evans “Trevor is ‘News’”: Celebrity as Protest in the Early Anti-Apartheid Struggle, 1948–1960 Tal Zalmanovich Not Merely a Newsworthy Commodity: Jean-Paul Sartre's Engagement in the Struggle Against Apartheid Tal Sela “A Black Rather Well-Known South African Recently Arrived in London”: Critical Responses to Todd Matshikiza’s Chocolates for My Wife Andrea Susan Thorpe Literary Celebrity and Political Activism: Wole Soyinka’s Nobel Prize Lecture and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle Karin Berkman The Gods must be Crazy, or the Rhetoric of Apartheid: A (Re)evaluation of Jamie Uys's Film in the Context of French Anti-apartheid Solidarity Namara Burki From South Africa to South Central L.A.: Transnational Black Protest, Celebrity, and the Cultural Boycott Myra Ann Houser

Jean-Paul Sartre's renown and intellectual celebrity grew as a function of his engagement in Third World struggles. Sartre's public image as a champion of the oppressed is so entrenched that it might seem self-evident that he played a leading role in the anti-apartheid struggle. However, his actual contribution to the South African struggle appears to be at odds with the way it is inscribed in collective memory. This article examines the incongruity between Sartre's actual involvement in the struggle against apartheid and his enduring image as a champion of the anti-racist struggle in South Africa. Archival research into Sartre's publications, public appearances and travels in France and abroad notes only three occasions on which Sartre made a direct reference to apartheid—the first in June 1963, the second in October 1964 and the third in November 1966. Tracing Sartre's involvement chronologically, the article seeks to map more precisely the nature of Sartre's contribution, commitment and responsibility to the French anti-apartheid movement, to uncover different facets of Sartre as a celebrity and a public intellectual, and to offer a better understanding of the period following the Algerian War in France with regard to Third World struggles.

In 1986, the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. This article considers the role of the Nobel Prize in the construction, promotion and cementing of literary celebrity, addressing the ways in which the prize augments Soyinka’s literary and political renown, already substantial at the time of the award. The article takes as its focus Soyinka’s Nobel Prize lecture and his decision to leverage the global platform afforded him to highlight the struggle against apartheid. The lecture is structured around a refusal to concede the exceptionalism of the South African state, and around a framing of apartheid as a pan-African catastrophe. In the Nobel Prize lecture, Soyinka levels a comprehensive accusation against European racism which he conceives as directly implicated in the ideological underpinning of apartheid policies. Dedicating the address to Mandela and taking his life as a paradigm, Soyinka uses his own presence in Stockholm as a subversive supplement to Mandela’s absence and addresses the crimes of apartheid both within their particular temporal and geographical context and as a means to expose the global scourge of racism.

In March 1960, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) under the leadership of Robert Sobukwe, and the African National Congress (ANC) initiated a national cam-paign against South Africa’s pass laws. Under the provisions of the Pass Act of 19523, severe restrictions had been imposed on the free movement of black South Africans. The bearing of the hated pass which authorized or prevented the presence of black South Africans in so-called ‘white’ areas, was made man-datory, effectively reducing black South Africans to foreigners within their own country. On 21 March, the PAC instructed its followers to refuse to carry their passes and to present themselves for arrest at local police stations. In response to a largely peaceful protest of 5000 to 7000 black protestors in the black town-ship of Sharpeville, on the outskirts of the white town, Vereeniging, the South African police opened fire, killing at least 69 people. Many were shot in the back while fleeing; more than 180 protestors were injured. Unrest spread rapidly to other areas of South Africa and in the townships of Langa and Nyanga the death toll rose to 83.

As our research project draws to a close, I thought I would revisit some of its founding assumptions and reflect on its findings and consequences. In my blog entry on this platform (December 2016), I wrote of how I came to the conclusion that: “Apartheid moved things.” Indeed, the conceptual foundations of the research project that emerged there were bound up with displacement—my own voluntary displacement from apartheid South Africa certainly, but much more significantly, the myriad forms of exile, internal banishment and migration associated with the apartheid regime. Taking the South African government’s exiling of political activists, intellectuals, writers, photographers, and musicians as one point of departure, the project tracked the outward trajectories of South African cultural agents and cultural formations beyond the borders of that country in order to investigate how apartheid functioned as a catalyst for transnational cultural production.

Kier Schuringa served as a full-time activist in the Dutch Anti-Apartheid and southern Africa solidarity movement from the early 1970s until its dissolution in 1994. He subsequently coordinated the Library, Information and Documentation Center of the Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa (NIZA). He joined the International Institute of Social History in 2008, working with its southern African collection which was transferred from NIZA that year. He was interviewed by Louise Bethlehem and Roni Mikel Arieli on 25 January 2017. The interview has been edited slightly for clarity.

The contemporary mobilization of the apartheid-Israel analogy on the part of activists and academics alike obscures the fact that it has a long history of use on the part of Hebrew-speaking writers and intellectuals. Some of the earliest comparative references to apartheid arose from the Hebrew translation and stage adaptation of Alan Paton’s celebrated 1948 novel Cry, the Beloved Country. Departing from the performative focus of Eitan Bar-Yosef who uses blackface in the stage adaptation to reflect on Jewish whiteness in the nascent state of Israel, we analyse critical intellectual responses to the prose translation on the part of figures who were very differently positioned in relation to the hegemonic Zionist ideology of the period. Analysis of the commentary by the socialist Rivka Gurfein, the liberal Ezriel Carlebach, and the revisionist Yohannan Pogrebinsky, allows us to position apartheid as a heuristic device through which to chart debates internal to Israeli politics in the early years of the Zionist state. These help to expose the constitutive ambivalence of Israel as a “colonial post-colony” in Joseph Massad’s reckoning, thus touching on the very self-definition of the Jewish state.

Race is one of the more ubiquitous, yet least explored, shifts in twentieth-century international law. From law that was founded in key areas and concepts on racial distinctions, international law quickly came to denounce various manifestations of race theories and racial discrimination. The establishment of the UN reflected a racialized understanding of the international society assumptions of the League of Nations mandate system. The 1948 Universal Declaration addressed entitlement to human rights without distinction of race, yet the Genocide Convention extended protection to racial (identity of) minority groups. In South Africa, race policies provided both the impetus and multiple occasions for formulating claims about a new, de-racialized international law from 1946 onwards. At these struggles against apartheid, binary political confrontations could take form as competing visions of international law, both old and new. This chapter charts the sites of contestation over apartheid and its effects on international law.

On 22 December 1989, the anti-apartheid activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu conducted a Christmas pilgrimage to Israel and the Occupied TerritOn 22 December 1989, the anti-apartheid activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu conducted a Christmas pilgrimage to Israel and the Occupied Territories. Tutu used his visit to relay political messages in support of the Palestinian liberation struggle and to criticize Israeli-South African ties, and his statements evoked sever criticism on the part of Zionist Jewish constituencies. Through a tighter focus on Tutu’s various public statements and their reception in the years leading up to the visit, this article traces the history of different sets of interlocking analogies in Tutu’s thought, positioning his 1989 visit to Israel-Palestine—neglected thus far in the critical literature —as a landmark in his thinking. In so doing, it offers a critical analysis of another instance of the Israel-apartheid analogy in the political struggle against the Israeli occupation. At the same time, it points to the genesis of the analogy in Tutu’s ongoing engagements with the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust.

It is difficult to condense my understanding of the contribution of the ERC project, “Apartheid— the Global Itinerary: South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation,” both to my personal development as a researcher, and I hope to the field of South African studies. While the focus of my research has been South African exilic literature, the structuring of the project has meant that my area of study was integrated into an ever-ramifying historical scrutiny of apartheid South Africa in its global context.

This article traces a transnational cultural genealogy of postwar and early Cold War liberalism specifically shaped by prisons. Central to this genealogy is Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, the South African novel that became a metonym for the tradition of South African political liberalism and liberal anti-apartheid fiction. The novel’s carceral aspects have never been discussed in relation to Paton’s prison reform articles from the same period, or within the framework of carceral studies. Reading the novel alongside Paton’s prison writings highlights the constitutive role of the carceral state – a regime of modern power spread across different sites – in liberal reformist agendas of the 1940s and 1950s. This case study traces Cold War carceral state building on a cultural terrain and provides opportunities to reflect on evolutions of present day “carceral solidarities” – modes of culture and politics mediated by an expanding and globalized carceral state.

This article examines the Notting Hill Consultation on Racism organized by the World Council of Churches (WCC), held in London in May 1969. The meeting framed racism as an urgent global problem. Its innovative “Program to Combat Racism” (PCR) acknowledged the historical complicity and benefit of the Church with imperial conquest. The Program’s special fund for liberation movements signaled a shift from verbal protest against apartheid to actions such as disinvestment in South Africa and material support for resistance movements. I use a rich archive of WCC reports, correspondence, speeches, and press coverage to offer the first major examination of the Notting Hill Consultation and its influence on the wider historical development of anti-apartheid protest. I demonstrate how a host of challenges from black power activists in Britain and the USA, nonwhite WCC delegates, and from British white supremacists made during the week-long consultation, shaped the WCC’s methods of protest and its PCR.

From the mid-1960s onward, compilations of the speeches and trial addresses of South African opponents of apartheid focused attention on the apartheid regime despite intensified repression in the wake of the Rivonia Trial. Mary Benson’s novel, At the Still Point, transposes the political trial into fiction. Its “stenographic” codes of representation open Benson’s text to what Paul Gready, following Foucault, has analyzed as the state’s “power of writing”: one that entangles the political trialist in a coercive intertextual negotiation with the legal apparatus of the apartheid regime. Through a form of metaleptic rupture, however, the novel is also opened to constructs of Holocaust memory. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s paradigm of “multidirectional memory,” the article investigates how the novel stages other contestations over racialized suffering at the end of a decade that began with the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann.

Continuing the investigation of networked cultural responses in the Global South construed as “cultural solidarities” that was embarked upon in the first special issue of this two-part series, “Cultural Solidarities: Apartheid and the anti-colonial commons of world literature,” Safundi Vol. 19, no.3, the introduction to this, its second volume, investigates how the cultural imagination animates transnational solidarities across a variety of media, and against the backdrop of the Cold War. Taking the interplay between the local and the global in apartheid South Africa of the 1950s and 1960s as its point of departure, this special issue is particularly attuned to diasporic or exilic arenas of South African cultural production. As they consider figures including Mary Benson, Johnny Dyani, Mongezi Feza, Chris McGregor, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Dudu Pukwana, Oliver Tambo, and Trevor Huddleston, our contributors, Louise Bethlehem, Lindelwa Dalamba, and Tal Zalmanovich, draw attention to the imbrication of local histories with global movements engendered by the itineracy of these figures. Transnationalism figures differently in two additional contributions. Sarika Talve-Goodman explores the carceral imaginary of Alan Paton’s writing to sketch out intersections between racialized carceral state-building in South Africa and the United States, while Gautam Chakrabarti’s reflections on the Soviet-Indian axis in the formation of “committed” networks of theater practitioners in India lends additional impetus to the interrogation of the conditions of possibility underlying the establishment of long-distance solidarity that was broached in the previous special issue in this series.

One of the less researched aspects of postcolonial India’s “progressive” culture is its Soviet connection. Starting in the 1950s and consolidating in the 1960s, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics invested in building up “committed” networks amongst writers, directors, actors, and other theater- and film-practitioners across India. Thus, an entire generation of cultural professionals was initiated into the anticolonial solidarity of emerging Afro-Asian nations that were seen, and portrayed, by the Soviets as being victims of “Western” imperialism. The aspirational figure of the New Soviet Man was celebrated through the rise of a new form of “transactional sociality” (Westlund 2003). This paper looks at selected cases of cultural diplomacy—through the lens of cultural history—between the USSR and India for two decades after India’s Independence, exploring the possibility of theorizing it from the perspective of an anticolonial cultural solidarity that allowed agency to Indian interlocutors.

Table of Contents Cultural solidarities: itineraries of anti-apartheid expressive culture—introduction to the special issue Louise Bethlehem, Lindelwa Dalamba & Uhuru Phalafala Cold War carceral liberalism and other counternarratives: the case of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country Sarika Talve-Goodman “What is needed is an ecumenical act of solidarity:” the World Council of Churches, the 1969 Notting Hill Consultation on Racism, and the anti-apartheid struggle Tal Zalmanovich Stenographic fictions: Mary Benson’s At the Still Point and the South African political trial Louise Bethlehem The Blue Notes: South African jazz and the limits of avant-garde solidarities in late 1960s London Lindelwa Dalamba From Moscow with love: Soviet cultural politics across India in the Cold War Gautam Chakrabarti

In 2010, Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia argued for a very short history of human rights. Against the grain of celebratory accounts of the rise of human rights, Moyn dated their birth to the 1970s. To support his claim of extreme discontinuity, Moyn demonstrated why earlier episodes, concepts, or vocabularies were not and could not be about human rights. ‘The drama of human rights’, he asserted, was ‘that they emerged in the 1970s seemingly from nowhere’. Chapter 3 of Moyn’s book was titled ‘Why Anticolonialism Wasn’t a Human Rights Movement’ and asserted that ‘anticolonialist forces were more committed to collective ideals of emancipation—communism and nationalism—as the path into the future, not individual rights directly, or their enshrinement in international law’. Moyn added, as evidence, that ‘postwar anticolonialists … rarely invoked the phrase “human rights,” or appealed to the Universal Declaration of 1948’. Jan Eckel, in a 2010 Humanity review essay, noted similarly that colonial and postcolonial leaders ‘simply did not refer to human rights.’

This paper is part of a larger study exploring cultural and discursive performances of Holocaust memory in South Africa under the apartheid racist regime (1948–1994). During the years of apartheid rule, South Africans of diverse backgrounds regularly invoked the memory of the Holocaust. In his 2004 memoirs, the Indian South African anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada briefly narrates the course of his European odyssey (1951–1952), where he witnessed first-hand the destruction left by the Second World War and by the Holocaust in particular. Using Kathrada’s memoirs; an interview I conducted with him in August 2016, and archival records concerning the cultural events he attended while in Europe, I tease out Kathrada’s insights on the Jewish Holocaust through a distinctively internationalist perception of colonialism. In addition, I address specific threads of communist thought that shaped his worldview. Despite his communist background, records of his visits to the Auschwitz concentration camp and to the Warsaw Ghetto reveal Kathrada’s unique perception of the Holocaust – in marked distinction from Soviet approaches to the Holocaust and its memorialization. Moreover, an analysis of Kathrada’s public speeches delivered over the 1950s repositions Kathrada’s little known sojourn in Europe as central in shaping his insights regarding the consequences of racism. These insights, gleaned in Europe, are brought home to South Africa. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s paradigm of multidirectional memory, this paper explores how Kathrada interweaves different narratives, structuring his own imaginaries and identities by negotiating between different practices of commemoration and memorialization, in a search for justice and solidarity, and as a means of articulating his own position as a victim of apartheid South Africa.

Throughout the twentieth century, interracial intimacies have been an especially dense and contentious theme in protest writing by authors of color. These relationships are often represented as indicative of the race problem of society at large. As such, the theme is commonly politicized for purposes of social critique and for advocating social change. This paper seeks to explore the use of this theme in the works of two pivotal yet often neglected black writers of the mid-twentieth century: Chester Himes (1909-1984), an African American author, and Peter Abrahams (1919-2017), a biracial South African author, both of whom explore the theme of interracial intimacies to formulate their respective positions on racism and racial identity. To identify the writers’ positions, the paper will perform a historicized, comparative close reading of two novels: If He Hollers Let Him Go by Himes (1945), and Abrahams’ The Path of Thunder (1948). While Himes proposes that interracial intimacies are detrimental to the mental and physical wellbeing of the African American man, Abrahams shows how interracial intimacies have an inherent potential to function as vehicles for social change. The paper will show how each author’s contribution to the theme, while unique, equally promotes non-racialist identities; furthermore, the paper will show how both authors are in an intertextual discursive dialogue with each other’s works and with global formations of black identity.

This study seeks to explore cultural and discursive performances of Holocaust memory in South Africa during the apartheid years and during the transition to democracy (1948-1994). It focuses on local Jewish investment in commemorating the Holocaust under apartheid rule and reveals a fascinating case of a diasporic community in an ambivalent state, which I address as a borderline community. By tracking the social position of the Jewish community within the apartheid order, as part of the white population, though as a separate and inferior religious group none the less– a minority within a privileged minority– this research examines the Jewish construction of the memory of the destruction of the European Jews since 1942. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including speeches and rabbinic sermons, reports of communal organizations, Jewish and non-Jewish press, literature, historiography, memoirs, plays, films, exhibitions, and monuments, the research points to the ongoing efforts made by the Jewish community in mediating the memory of the extermination of the European Jews to the South African white hegemonic communities.

It’s a little more than a year since the death of Keorapetse Kgositsile, South Africa’s first post-apartheid poet laureate. Kgositsile, born in Johannesburg in 1938, became a prominent and vocal activist for the African National Congress (ANC). In 1961, at the behest of the ANC, he went into exile, initially to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and subsequently to the US where he became involved in the Black Arts Movement. In 1990 he returned to South Africa and in 2006 was appointed Poet Laureate. In the many volumes published during his exile and after his return, Kgositsile repeatedly and fearlessly addressed the crimes both of apartheid and of global racism, advocating a revolutionary politics of resistance. Kgositsile’s death in January 2018 was mourned across South Africa and indeed across the globe.

This short piece is intended to serve as an introductory bibliographic guide to researchers interested in the career of South African singer Miriam Makeba with a special emphasis on her sojourn in Guinea. I am writing it with the Guinean reader in mind, and for that reason most the primary sources are available in the Guinean National Archives, where I worked during two research trips in November 2016 and January 2018. My thanks are sent to the archive staff led by director Seydouba Cissé, for their immense help. My research was supported by a European Research Council project “Aparheid-Stops”, directed by Prof. Louise Bethlehem (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel).

The article examines the circulation of speeches against South African apartheid (1948-1990) in the literary and cultural sphere in Cuba and Latin America, taking as a case study two texts by the Afro-Caribbean author Nancy Morejón: the poetry book Baladas para un Sueño (1989) and the essay-chronicle Trip to South Africa ​​(1995). These texts have received practically no critical attention so far. The article contextualizes, in a novel way, the internationalist anti- apartheid cultural movement, in its relationship with the Cuban and Latin American decolonial culture. The text analysis focuses on a pertinent intertextual study and identifies an intertextual field composed of discourses of political resistance from various historical-literary moments. Finally, the article argues that the aforementioned works reinforce the author's pan-Africanist poetic identity.

Table of Contents Cultural solidarities: apartheid and the anticolonial commons of world literature Stefan Helgesson, Louise Bethlehem & Gül Bilge Han Addressing an Afro-Asian public: Alex La Guma’s report to the 25th anniversary conference of the Afro-Asian Writers Association in 1983 Christopher J. Lee & Alex La Guma Nazım Hikmet’s Afro-Asian solidarities Gül Bilge Han “I slipped into the pages of a book”: intertextuality and literary solidarities in South African writing about London Andrea Thorpe “The island is not a story in itself”: apartheid’s world literature Ashleigh Harris Refusing interpellation: a double bind of African migrant writing Mohammad Shabangu Reading for hope: a conversation about texts and method Julia Willén & Andrew van der Vlies

In October 1969, a debate between anti-apartheid activist Bishop Trevor Huddleston and Tory MP Enoch Powell was broadcast on British television. It presented viewers with opposing ideas about immigration, dignity and duty. This article claims that Huddleston's invocation of apartheid as an extreme case of racism turned the debate into a key moment for educating Britons about apartheid and about resistance to it. The paper argues that the debate presents an opportunity to address the absence of television from current scholarship concerning the role of culture in the global anti-apartheid struggle. In addition, it shows that Huddleston used the emerging genre of the televised debate as a platform to appeal for solidarity. Thus this event and the public reaction to it serve as a case study to explore solidarity as it was recently framed by David Featherstone. Huddleston and Powell's screened encounter fused domestic and post-imperial concerns: its analysis thus helps to problematise artificial divides between domestic and imperial historiographies. From a methodological point of view, the analysis of the debate as text and performance is juxtaposed with letters from viewers as well as newspaper coverage. This method illustrates first, the growing place of television as a site of political debate. Second, it positions television recordings as a new archive for scholars working both on the anti-apartheid movement and on racism in Britain. Third, it serves as a lens onto the impact of Powell's and Huddleston's policies on the lives of Britons.

This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers historiographic traction over other Cold War settings. Throughout the international antiapartheid struggle, South African expressive culture was channeled through local paradigms of reception in the world beyond, in taut negotiation with aesthetic, institutional, linguistic, and political considerations. Instances of cultural translation, catachresis, and slippage resulting from the deterritorialization of South African cultural formations can thus be contextualized, historicized, and turned back reflexively on other conjunctures, to defamiliarize existing scholarship. Makeba’s long exile in Ahmed Sékou Touré’s Guinea between 1969 and 1986 is examined in the light of these claims. Here, Makeba crosses a theater of intense ideological contestation following Touré’s 1968 socialist cultural revolution, illuminating some of its constitutive features. The article concludes with a consideration of Makeba’s agency as performer at the interface between militant cultural nationalism and state prohibition in revolutionary Guinea.

In 1929, at the tenth annual exhibition of the South African Academy held in Johannesburg, eight works by Moses Tladi (1903-1959) were displayed. Two years later, in 1931, two of his landscape paintings were included in the exhibition that formally opened the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. In both instances Tladi was the first black painter to have his work publicly exhibited in these venues. Tladi, the “native artist” was a curiosity, arousing wide interest. Benny Lewis, the art critic of The Star, reviewed the two National Gallery paintings: “I must refer to two landscapes . . . by Moses Tladi, a Basuto houseboy in Johannesburg, who is quite untaught. They are something of a portent. In a naive technique all his own, Tladi tells the stark truth in a poetic way. The atmosphere of the Witwatersrand is in these pictures unmistakable to all who know the Transvaal” (Cape, December 11, 193, quoted in Read Lloyd, 2013, 11).

This article seeks to reassess the role of pan-Africanism within the national imagination of postcolonial Guinea under the presidency of Ahmed Sékou Touré. By focusing on the interplay between transnational and national dynamics within two cultural festivals – the First Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers in 1969 and the Guinean National Festival – pan-Africanism is recast as a constitutive component of Guinean nationalism, enduring long after independence. Through an analysis of political discourse, discourse about music and recorded music in the context of these festivals, and primarily about the participation of non-Guinean musicians, the essay identifies state-activated forms of pan-African cultural citizenship that serve the Guinean state in imagining itself as directed towards the broader political horizons of Africa. At the same time, it suggests that, under the nation-state, pan-Africanism was entangled with the nation-building project and national patriotism.

On June 25th, 2018, Noa Ben-Sadia presented a paper (in Hebrew) in the framework of the "Minheret HaZman" Conference, hosted at Beit Berl College. Ben-Sadia discusses the influence of African-American spirituals in the Israeli musical sphere during the 1950s and 1960s. She traces their growing popularity in choral and solo performance thanks to their Biblical content but also suggests that they were misunderstood both musically and politically. Their popularity, she argues, may also be attributed to the renown of the African-American singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson who was highly appreciated in Israel at the time. Ben-Sadia contextualizes questions of local “Blackness” in Israel, and the irony that arose from the fact that the main performers and audiences of African-American spirituals were Ashkenazi Jews.

Noa Ben-Sadia is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she earned her M.A. degree under the supervision of Professor Ruth Hacohen Pinczover and Professor Louise Bethlehem. She was an MA Research Fellow in the ERC project APARTHEID_STOPS, and is a music teach and musician.

A recording of the lecture (in Hebrew) is available here.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex recently attended the opening of “Nelson Mandela: The Centenary Exhibition” in London. It was one of many global events to celebrate Mandela’s 100th birthday and his legacy. What shouldn’t be forgotten is that establishment support for Mandela and the struggle he represented was not unanimous during the apartheid years. For example, under Margaret Thatcher the British government supported Pretoria and secured Britain’s economic and political interests in the region. Yet a network of organisations and activists, anti-colonial groups, students, trade unionists and anti-nuclear groups on the left offered support for the struggle. Local authorities – in big cities such as London as well as smaller towns such as Ipswich and Chatham across the UK – were part of the mix of anti-apartheid protests. Located between government and grassroots organisations, local authorities paved the way for an official rejection of apartheid. Their legacy of resistance is worth revisiting for two reasons. Firstly, because this form of politics is often overlooked when we concentrate on the demonstrations, sanctions and concerts in Mandela’s name. And secondly, because it could be seen as a precursor to contemporary movements calling to remove statues commemorating the colonial past in South Africa and in the UK.

Table of Contents Cultural solidarities: preamble Louise Bethlehem, Lindelwa Dalamba, Gül Bilge Han, Stefan Helgesson & Uhuru Phalafala Cultural solidarities: apartheid and the anticolonial commons of world literature Stefan Helgesson, Louise Bethlehem & Gül Bilge Han Addressing an Afro-Asian public: Alex La Guma’s report to the 25th anniversary conference of the Afro-Asian Writers Association in 1983 Christopher J. Lee & Alex La Guma Nazım Hikmet’s Afro-Asian solidarities Gül Bilge Han “I slipped into the pages of a book”: intertextuality and literary solidarities in South African writing about London Andrea Thorpe “The island is not a story in itself”: apartheid’s world literature Ashleigh Harris Refusing interpellation: a double bind of African migrant writing Mohammad Shabangu Reading for hope: a conversation about texts and method Julia Willén & Andrew van der Vlies

This special issue considers networked cultural responses loosely figured as “cultural solidarities” in the Global South, on the understanding that mid-twentieth century struggles to end colonialism were addressed within a transnational domain. It takes apartheid South Africa as its point of departure, positioning literature from South Africa within a broadly anti-colonial commons. As they consider works by Alex La Guma, Nazim Hikmet Ran, Athol Fugard, and Todd Matshikiza, among others, our contributors—Christopher J. Lee, Gül Bilge Han, Ashleigh Harris and Andrea Thorpe—question the role of aesthetic forms in constructing long-distance solidarities in a Cold War setting. Mohammad Shabangu’s assertion of the necessity of “opacity” as a counter to the recuperation of the African writer brings such questions into the present, intersecting contemporary debates on world literature. Finally, solidarity is framed in temporal rather than geographical terms in Andrew van der Vlies and Julia Willén’s dialogue on “reading for hope” in the aftermath of failed revolutionary projects.

This essay attempts to locate the music festival known as Zaire ’74 within a continuum of Pan-African festivals by reading it as an ‘idiosyncratic laboratory’ in relation to the agency of exiled South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela. Masekela was one of the producers of the 1974 event held in Kinshasa. Yet his expertise here draws on his prior participation in the foundational Monterey International Pop Festival (1967), which helped constitute rock music as the soundtrack of choice for a predominantly white American counter-culture. In Monterey, Masekela featured as a conduit for exoticizing tropes of “African ecstasy.” While the production of Zaire ’74 was largely based on Masekela’s experiences in Monterey, it was the representation of the African continent as a musical – cultural construct that rendered Masekela’s vision of Zaire ’74 into the junction between soul power, black power, anti-imperialism, Pan-Africanism, and Zairean nationalism. The agency of Masekela in both events draws attention to the multiple roles played by exiled South African cultural agents in the transnational circulation of texts, sounds, and images against the backdrop of Cold War divisions. Musical analysis of samples from this formative period in Masekela’s career locates Zaire ’74 as a pivotal moment of maturation in his transformation from an exiled African jazzman in America into a politically committed cultural producer who played a crucial role in the international explosion of the culturally and politically entangled musical genre known as Afropop.

The centenary of the birth of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela offers a rich opportunity to reflect on the life of South Africa’s extraordinary political leader and on the legacies of the struggle against apartheid that he and his cohort of fellow activists shaped. Mandela’s life-writing offers a great deal of inspiration for such reflection across a range of themes, including as scholars have pointed out, the question of Madiba’s own mortality. Poetry is an under-explored source of additional reflection. Across the arc of Mandela’s defiant resistance to apartheid, through his incarceration, release and presidential term, his life became poetry. The scope of this corpus is enormous, spanning decades and continents alike.

Works dealing with Israel’s African policy, or with its relations with South Africa, commonly argue that ‘in the 1960s Israel took part in the international struggle against apartheid’. Such claims point to Israel’s votes in the United Nations (UN) and, often, to Foreign Minister Golda Meir’s speeches at the world organisation. In these speeches, Meir invoked Israel’s Jewish identity and experience in resistance to South African race policies. The Jewish state, she told the General Assembly in 1963, felt ‘deep abhorrence for all forms of discrimination on the grounds of race, colour or religion’, stemming ‘from our age-old spiritual values, and … long and tragic historical experience as a victim’. Israel, she concluded, ‘naturally oppose[s] policies of apartheid, colonialism and racial … discrimination’.

The world continues to pay tribute to the legendary Hugh Ramapolo Masekela who died on 23 January 2018. His journeys have reminded us that the itineraries of South African exiles — writers, journalists, performers, photographers, and political activists — have much to offer transnational histories of anti-apartheid resistance. Masekela knew some formative moments during his own long exile. Radical black internationalism, pan-Africanism and anti-apartheid resistance were all woven into the texture of his sound. Masekela traversed these universes without ever relinquishing his claims to musical autonomy and creative agency as a black artist who made a living through his art.

Orthodox historiographies on Israel’s early policies in ‘black’ Africa and its relations with ‘white’ South Africa commonly, if disjointedly, assert that the state’s Jewish identity had played, in the early 1960s, a key role in Israel’s participation in the international ‘struggle against apartheid’. Revisiting this assertion, I examine Israel’s involvement in early United Nations debates on South Africa’s race policies. I trace the making of Israel’s position on South Africa’s treatment of persons of Indian origins in preparation for the 1950 General Assembly; present Israel’s voting praxis in that session; and demonstrate the persistence of both position and praxis in the 1952 Assembly session where apartheid first appeared on the UN agenda. Against the grain of existing accounts, I argue first that, on Africa, Israel’s multilateral diplomacy preceded its bilateral diplomacy; Israel’s encounter with Africa began not in the early 1960s but with its 1949 UN admission, compelling its envoys to vote and reflect on African and colonial questions, including apartheid. Secondly, I demonstrate that Israel approached apartheid with equivocation; at the UN, its diplomats devised and acted on a formula allowing them, in their words, ‘to have our cake and eat it’—even if, on the whole, Israel’s diplomatic praxis was far more progressive than that of Western states. Thirdly, I demonstrate how Jewish identity, constructed through the prism of Israel’s foundational ideology, affected such equivocation: it defined Israel’s dilemma on apartheid but, at the same time, also offered a route out of that conundrum. Finally, I illustrate that the elasticity of Jewish identity displayed by Israel’s envoys drew on sensibilities that were often formed in South Africa itself by their own previous encounters with racially-managed society and, later, with apartheid.

This article reveals the communist transnational infrastructure that connected South African communists with socialist regimes in the early 1950s. Before the establishment of a global anti-apartheid movement after Sharpeville, this network enabled the circulation of people and ideas outward from South Africa. Communist education and institutions in the country opened up avenues for protest, mobility and community for political dissidents. When state persecution of communists increased in 1948, activists used this infrastructure to escape the country, procure employment or continue their political engagement abroad. I demonstrate this by tracing the journey of the South African communists Pauline Podbrey and H.A. Naidoo who were forced to leave the country in 1951 due to their political activity against the regime as well as apartheid legislation that outlawed interracial marriages such as theirs. Once in Britain, the couple were sent by the British Communist Party to Hungary to participate in the Cold War battle over hearts and minds as radio broadcasters. This case-study demonstrates how the intersection of Cold War politics, apartheid and race shaped the escape routes and future trajectories of communist anti-apartheid activists. Reconstructing the couple's itineraries between dissent and disillusionment, it questions the dominant post-apartheid narrative of the struggle as a heroic tale of survival and triumph, and highlights the fragmentation and failure of political lives.

Michael Titlestad has suggested that jazz serves “to mediate, manage and contest” what he terms a “staggered, but also cruel and unusual South African modernity.” His volume Making the Changes (2004) uses the “pedestrian” as a chronotope to describe the “local peripatetic appropriations of global symbolic possibilities” that jazz affords there. This paper proposes a different “chronotope”: that of the train. This substitution facilitates the reading of jazz history in South Africa in tandem with histories of labour migration and other forms of displacement – including trajectories of exile that intersect my account elsewhere of the “global itinerary” of South African cultural formations under apartheid. The deterritorialisation of South African works of expressive culture and social actors associated with anti-apartheid resistance, I have argued, affords the cultural historian strong historiographic purchase over conjunctures outside of South Africa. The present discussion explores this claim in relation to Miriam Makeba’s memoir Makeba, My Story (1988), written during her stay in Guinea. Makeba’s life-writing shows the strategies of the black South African performer in exile to be embedded in the conviviality that shaped jazz performance culture during its emergence in urban South African. Conviviality can be shown to offer an implicit critique of nativist imaginaries in decolonising Africa – including in this instance, the doctrine of authenticité promulgated by Guinea’s controversial leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré.

This article focuses on the multidimensional sound event in order to articulate certain transnational vectors of political power, anti-imperialism and black power. It proceeds from Louise Bethlehem’s research methodology which recasts the anti-apartheid struggle as an apparatus of transnational cultural production through charting the movement of texts, sounds and images in a cold war setting. At the core of the paper is the analysis of the black music festival “Zaire ’74,” associated with the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” heavyweight boxing match. Taken together, the two events brought “black power” into contact with “soul power” in Mobutu’s Zaire when both configurations were at their peak. Analysing this historical junction with reference to the type of affect it produced, demonstrates something of the tensions which existed between its various audiences. Concurrently, attending to the sounds it generated helps to shed light on the intersection between anti-colonial ambition and African-American resistance. The article introduces the concept of the “transnational sound event” which uses voice and sound to translate moments of disconnection into arenas for hope and solidarity. The analysis nevertheless reckons with the dark underside of the music festival as well as the political and material conditions under which it was held.

This article revisits the cultural history of Guinea in the three decades following independence through focusing on the musical activity of Miriam Makeba, the exiled South African singer who resided in the country between the years 1968 and 1986. Recent scholarship has illuminated the vast investment of the Guinean state in developing modern national culture as part of the process of decolonisation as well as the limited freedom of expression, imposed by the state, that subjugated local cultural production. While these studies have concentrated primarily on Guinean cultural agents, this paper explores transnational dimensions within the cultural politics of Guinea. It highlights Makeba’s emplacement in Guinea in the context of nation building, Pan-Africanism, cold war politics and black transnational cultural exchanges. By focusing on the disparity between textual sources and musically embedded meanings extracted from Makeba’s music recorded in Guinea, this paper recasts Makeba as a conduit of African-American musical influences in the Guinean scene. By doing so, it uncovers cultural spaces that were not subordinated to official state ideology mediated through print culture, and thus have hitherto been unrecognised in mainstream historiography.

Listening to music is not the action most commonly associated with the work of the historian. While the history of music is certainly studied in musicology departments, music is rarely considered a legitimate source for studying non-musical social and cultural dynamics. After all, music does not convey meaning in the way words do: it often does not seem to have a concrete message beyond the lyrics of the song. So, what kind of historical work could music do that texts cannot?

In 1949, in the newly founded state of Israel, South African architects Norman Hanson and Roy Kantorowich planned the city of Ashkelon and, within it, the exclusive neighbourhood unit Afridar. Managed by the South African Jewish Appeal, which initiated and funded the project, Afridar presented a radical exception to Israel’s centralized planning approach during that period. An early example of a semi-private settlement initiative for an ethnic and class-based enclave reserved for ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Jewish immigrants, it functioned as a ‘model town’ for the immigrant population from the Middle East and North Africa, which was housed by the government in the rest of the city of Ashkelon. Afridar’s enclave reproduced planning practices from South Africa, which had been coloured by race since the 1920s. Despite its exclusive image, it was modelled after progressive experiments in the design of Native Townships. Their main objective of such experiments was to improve the standards of housing of racially discriminated populations yet, in practice, they served as a tool to implement apartheid policies. This paper interrogates this ambivalence of social aspirations and complicity with state segregation practices through examining the translation of apartheid’s planning practices to the Israeli context, and the negotiations and conflicts this translation entailed.

The recent conference staged as a collaboration between our ERC project, APARTHEID-STOPS, The World Literatures: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics Research Programme at Stockholm University and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) in Johannesburg presented the opportunity for participants to enter into dialogue concerning our different localized and ongoing political struggles. Upon arriving in South Africa, we learned that a massive stay-away was being organized to remove Jacob Zuma from office.

On the morning of April 9, 2017, I landed in a sunny Amsterdam. After a quick stop at the hotel to drop off my luggage, I set out for the Museumplein where three notable museums are located- the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum. Last February, a new exhibition examining the Netherlands' relationship with South Africa over the past 400 years opened at the Rijksmuseum. One of the main goals of my trip to Amsterdam was to visit this exhibit and interview one of its curators. Though my interview was only scheduled for the next morning, I was eager to see the show on my own for the first time.

The threat of commoditization – the process by which commodities lose their singularity and are then regarded in the eyes of consumers as undifferentiated from other similar brands – poses a constant challenge to manufacturers of goods and brings many of them to hire the services of brand designers. They hope that by rebranding their goods, customers will perceive them as unique and somehow better, and as a result will choose their brand over others.

In 1996, Leon de Kock and Ian Tromp published an anthology entitled The Heart in Exile: South African Poetry in English, 1990-1995. The volume included a poem by Denis Hirson, “The Long-Distance South African,” recounting Hirson’s experience of viewing the televised broadcast of Nelson Mandela’s triumphant release from prison at a long geographical remove from South Africa. Hirson, a poet and writer, is the son of the anti-apartheid activist, physicist and later historian, Baruch Hirson, who was a key figure in the Armed Resistance Movement (ARM) in South Africa in the early 1960s. The family left South Africa following Baruch Hirson’s release from prison in 1973. I had gone to primary school in Johannesburg with Denis’s younger sister, Zoë. But by the time I encountered the poem, I had been living in Israel for over a decade. Unlike the Hirsons, my displacement was self-imposed. I had no official genealogy of political exile to claim. But Denis Hirson’s phrase—the long-distance South African—gripped me then, and continues to do so today.

In the opening paragraph of Shirli Gilbert's (2012) article about representations of Anne Frank in South Africa, she describes how Ahmed Kathrada—an anti-apartheid activist imprisoned for eighteen years on Robben Island—secretly recorded inspiring quotations from The Diary of Anne Frank in his prison notebooks, among other quotations from books and newspapers smuggled into prison. In November 2014, I visited the Robben Island Archives and located the handwritten words that Kathrada recorded from The Diary, passages that were very much oriented to Anne Frank's longing for freedom and optimistic hope, on the one hand, and to Jewish suffering and the morbidities of the war, on the other.

This July, I arrived in Johannesburg for the first time. A historian of Modern Britain, I had recently begun researching British activists who participated in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and their influence on the discourse of race relations in Britain. After several visits to archives in Britain and months poring over documents I had gathered there, I was eager to follow in the footsteps of some of my protagonists. My first stop was the Sophiatown Heritage Centre dedicated to the memory of a ghost neighbourhood. Sophiatown was an abnormality in South African terms – a neighbourhood in which black South Africans could own their houses, where a local culture was forged in jazz clubs, in shebeens, in crowded rooms and dark allies. The cultural production of its inhabitants had a lasting impact on literature, journalism, fashion, music and speech. It was the product of Johannesburg’s rapid urbanisation in all its gore and glory. In 1955, the state executed its removal plan: Sophiatown was razed to the ground and its 70,000 inhabitants were forcefully removed to an improvised township 12 kilometres away. It was then rebuilt, populated by whites and renamed Triomf. The ruin of Sophiatown spelled out the meaning of the government’s policy of “separateness.” The Group Areas Act, three acts of Parliament from 1950, 1957 and 1966, under which the removal in Sophiatown was facilitated, gave license to removals around the country. The legislation allocated residential and business sections in urban areas according to racial groupings. It excluded non-whites from city centres and condemned them to hours-long commutes to work. In exchange for premium locations residents were assigned peripheral, smaller and undeveloped areas, lacking proper housing and infrastructure such as running water, electricity or access to health, care or education facilities.

From 1961 to 1965, Julian Beinart, an architecture lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, embarked on a series of basic design workshops in Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Rhodesia, and Kenya. Inspired by his MIT instructors Kevin Lynch and Gyorgy Kepes, Beinart was interested in the development of a new popular visual language, one that would mediate African societies’ transition to postcolonial modernity. Concurrently, Beinart documented and analyzed wall decorations made by the residents of the government-built houses of Western Native Township in Johannesburg. Home to black Africans who were subject to racial segregation and displacement policies that predated the apartheid regime, the Township’s residents faced another eviction in the early 1960s. By using photography, analytical drawings, and diagrammatic maps, Beinart created a counter-archive against the state, in which he interpreted the residents’ beautification and improvement of their houses as acts of resistance; an expression of civic pride where the urban poor performed citizenship under extreme social-economic duress. Analyzing the decorations as a system of communication that transcended ethnic traditions, Beinart used them as an “index of de-tribalization” that could set the ground for the creation of an African urban modernity.

This thesis traces the ways in which apartheid as a signifier had been mobilized by Zionist and anti-Zionist conversations in the 1950s-1970s, transforming the postcolonial organization of urban space. I initiate my historiographic narrative by viewing how apartheid was circulated as a trope during Israel’s early state-building years, shaping the ways in which Zionist spatial control could be discussed. I then move from mobilizations of apartheid as a trope to its use as a mode of analysis, presenting the case of how Palestinian discourses at the UN in the mid-60s had leveraged apartheid both as an analogical trope and as a human rights based analysis geared at international condemnations of Israel. Within this framework, I argue that early Palestinian analyses of Zionism as a style of apartheid were paradoxically limited in their capacities to render extreme segregation in Israel-Palestine legible. Finally, I posit that in the civil rights era, the relation between apartheid and events in Israel-Palestine was re-articulated by urban communities that were themselves struggling against extreme sociospatial control. This leads to a discussion of how the parallel movements of Black Consciousness and the Palestinian resistance had exchanged ideas while formulating divergent approaches to the contested ideologies of integrationism and separatism. In conclusion, my thesis advances knowledge-power-space as a helpful medium through which to read historical and ongoing Zionist and anti-Zionist mobilizations of apartheid as a trope and mode of reference.

This work revisits the cultural history of Guinea-­‐Conakry in the three decades following independence (1958) by applying a historiographic heuristic that relies on musical materials and the political and cultural meanings that are embedded within the sonic formations. Through the Guinean case study, this thesis demonstrates how music can expose latent cultural dynamics that are not discernible in textual sources, and can therefore contribute to cultural-­‐historical knowledge. First, existing scholarship that links music and history is reviewed, with an emphasis on research that does not subordinate musical meanings to historical context and social categories. In what follows, the cultural history of Guinea is presented with respect to two parallel cultural processes -­‐ the establishment of a national culture and the expression of pan-­‐African solidarity. Following a general introduction to Guinean culture, the case study of this thesis is presented: the musical activity of the South African singer Miriam Makeba in Guinea between the years 1968-­‐1986. The figure of Makeba is examined through both her representation in the written media and music analysis of her recorded output from the same period. Investigating her recordings exposes political and social meanings that are mediated by the sonic formations, and the dual role of Makeba in the Guinean cultural scene is revealed: a contributor to the hegemonic discourse that was dictated by the Guinean state and a cultural agent who brought subversive musical elements to Guinean music. Specifically, the incorporation of African-­‐ 3 American stylistic elements, which were uncommon in the Guinean music scene, is discussed and interpreted. These musical elements function as an expression of affective structures that deviate from the limitations of the explicit state ideology and trigger connections with cosmopolitan cultures.