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.

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr's anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths that have shaped influential recent accounts of the city? This article outlines the contours of a “hydrocolonial Johannesburg” though combining Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall's invitation to “read for water” with existing methodologies that read for infrastructure. It sets these strategies to work in the context of Lauren Beukes' second work of speculative fiction, Zoo City (Beukes, Lauren. 2010. Zoo City. Johannesburg: Jacana Media). The novel propels its readers into a noiresque fantasy world whose spatial coordinates closely reflect the extra-textual city of Johannesburg. Taking my cue from Beukes' infrastructural allusions, I mobilize her text to provide the struts for my own as I explore the intertextuality of Zoo City with works by William Kentridge and Sarah Gertrude Millin. Alternately foregrounded or barely perceptible until deliberately sought out, water helps to distinguish the various locales of the novel from one another. My essay turns to Zoo City to offer three vignettes that trace the flows of water and the contiguous presence of infrastructures in Johannesburg, pursuing their intersection beyond the boundaries of the novel into a larger expressive cultural archive to reflect on the relations between privilege and forms of anthropogenic degradation in the life of the city.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.