In Gilbert’s article about Anne Frank’s image in South Africa she describes how Ahmed Kathrada – an anti-apartheid activist imprisoned for eighteen years on Robben Island – secretly recorded in his prison notebooks inspiring quotations from The Diary of Anne Frank, among other quotations from smuggled books and newspapers. On November 2014, I visited the University of Western Cape–Robben Island MayiBuye Archives and located Kathrada’s seven secret prison notebooks. Notebook number three contains thirteen entries from The Diary, carefully chosen by Kathrada when he read the diary in prison in the late 1960s.

Keith Feldman argues that an analogy is never perfect, because two given events are never identical. Nonetheless, he continues, “the ‘likeness’ or ‘parallel’ [...] juxtapose[s] unique historical formations, ideological concepts, or geographies – relations not objects – which are then linked together via the radically unstable ‘like’ or ‘as.’” Feldman recognizes that at the core of the analogy lies a difference “always on the verge of collapse into identity, socially produced under contextually specific conditions that are always on the verge of conflation.” However, it is these permanent conditions that “holds an analogy together and produce its rhetorical effectivity.”

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.