The course is intended to introduce students to a Global South (specifically, a contemporary South African) perspective on the afterlife of violence as it manifests in representation and body politics, particularly as Black women’s bodies move across borders in transnational exchange. Through an African womanist lens, the course reads various texts from the African continent and diaspora, as well as from the Global North, for an understanding of how the colonizing gaze became trained on the Black African body, and its subsequent relationship to decolonial and liberation movements and contemporary regimes of nation building and identity formation.
Most prominently, the course will focus on contextualizing the legacy of Sarah Baartman—the indigenous South African woman who was exhibited in freak shows in England, Ireland, and France in the 1800s. Through various means of surrogation, Baartman became a subject of erotic projection as well as scientific interest, as she was studied as a specimen in prominent French scientific journals that deduced theories on the inferiority of some human races. These acts of surrogation form a nuanced understanding of representational violence against Black African bodies, tracing its trajectory from this significant 19th-century instance and following its far-reaching implications for global politics and transnational justice in the contemporary world.
The course integrates works that critically engage with these themes, including works by Saidiya Hartman which explore the afterlife of slavery, and Christina Sharpe, which examines the ongoing resonance of the Middle Passage. Pumla Dineo Gqola’s What is Slavery to Me? and Tina Campt’s Listening to Images ground these discussions within African and diasporic contexts, while Joseph Roach’s concept of surrogation offers a theoretical framework for performance and memory. Tonia Sutherland’s Resurrecting the Black Body explores the intersections of race, technology, and memory in shaping the legacies of violence and representation. These written texts, alongside other texts which include performances, films (The Return of Sara Baartman by Zola Maseko), photography and visual art (the works of Zanele Muholi, Berni Searle and donna Kukama), poetry (works by Malika Ndlovu, M. NourbeSe Philip, Makhosazana Xaba and Koleka Putuma), and gestures of protest (The #AmINext movement, the covering of Willie Bester’s Saartjie Baartman sculpture, #RhodesMustFall and the protest work of Qondiswa James) will provide students with a multi-dimensional understanding of how Sarah Baartman’s legacy continues to shape global dialogues on colonial gaze, representational violence, gendered violence, and justice.
Incorporating performance analysis, the course emphasizes the development of skills to articulate and critically engage with embodied practices of storytelling and meaning-making onstage and in media, offering students an opportunity to explore performance as a method of scholarly inquiry and a form of research publication.
- Kursleiter/in: Balindile Ngcobo