Doing Human Conference Program

1

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME& BOOK ABSTRACTS

2 3

ABOUT DOING HUMAN 2015 ABOUT WiCDS

The ‘human’ is not a self-evident category but has in fact always been a site of contestation shaped within unequal power relations.

This conference will critically discuss the construct/performance of doing ‘human’. Powerful groups appropriate the right to define ‘human’ in ways that centre themselves and their interests. Perhaps the most pervasive vehicle of this dynamic in modern history has been Western Cartesian paradigms of humanism that have valorised the white European heterosexual able-bodied middle-class man. This privileged global minority has positioned itself as the embodiment of the normal way of ‘doing’ human. Critical scholarship poses important challenges to this hegemonic position through deconstruction of the systems of power, privilege and oppression that have established such exclusive definitions of what it means to be and do human. The conference is hosted by the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies.

The Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (WiCDS) is based in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand. Through interdisciplinary postgraduate education, social engagement, and research, WiCDS aims to build capacity to meet the challenges of diverse societies, especially in post-apartheid South Africa.

The conceptual framework that underpins the work of the Centre differs from approaches generally advocated in relation to issues of diversity, in that it does not focus on demographics --bringing in representative numbers of marginalized groups into the mainstream of organizations -- but rather seeks a deep understanding of how the entire social imaginary needs to shift in order bring about the socially just society that is envisioned in the Constitution.

Work undertaken by WiCDS is conceptualized as deepening iterative cycles of:

i) theorizing contextually grounded understandings of diversity, difference and otherness, as these become salient through the operations of power;

ii) researching how these dynamics are “at work” empirically in specific sites and locations; and

iii) educating, facilitating and engaging in transformational activities.

The Director of WICDS is Professor Melissa Steyn who is the DST-NRF South African Research Chair in Critical Diversity Studies.

For more information about WICDS, visit: www.wits.ac.za/wicds wicdsTwitter: @DiversityCentre

4 5

MONDAY, 13th APRIL 2015

17:00 - 18:00 Registration & cocktail reception

18: 00 - 18: 30 Welcome • Prof Melissa Steyn - Director, WiCDS

• Prof Zeblon Z. Vilakazi - Wits Deputy VC Research and Post Graduate Affairs

18: 30 - 19: 45 Performance: Cantos of a life in exile

Drama for Life

TUESDAY, 14th APRIL 2015

Venue: Wits Club

08:30 - 09:00 Registration

09:00 - 09:20 Welcome & opening Prof Melissa Steyn - Director, WiCDS

Prof Garth Stevens - Wits Faculty of Humanities

09:30 - 10:30 Key note address and Q&A: Sexual difference and the construction of the human: Bodies, property, and bodily properties

Prof Zine Magubane - Boston College (CT)

10:30 - 10:45 Tea

10:45 - 12:15 PANEL 1: Challenging “The Human” Of European Modernity: African Thought Leaders (Part 1)

Panellists Abstracts

Sabelo J. Ndlovu- Gatsheni

Coloniality of Being, Dehumanisation And The Struggle For Decolonial Humanism In Africa: The unfolding of Euro-North American-centric modernity was underpinned by Western Cartesian notions of humanism predicated on social classification and racial hierarchization of human species. In this scheme of things, Europeans monopolized being for themselves while questioning that of others. At times Europeans claimed being (completeness) for themselves and relegated all others to the perpetual status of becoming (incompleteness). The logical outcome of all this was the invention of non-European people as incomplete beings constituted by a catalogue of lacks and a series of deficiencies ranging from lacking souls, history, civilization, development, democracy, human rights and ethics. This panel, which is informed by decolonial thought, grapples with the complex questions of the African subject, subjection and subjectivity, in the process highlighting the complex and protracted struggles for re-making the ‘human’ in Africa

Gabriel-Moroke Letswalo

Lembede And The Utility Of Meat-Eating: A Lembedeian ethic. A refraction of distastefor Union times, the misery of the ‘black-come-animal’ (a retarded ego). A Lembedeian ethic, a politic: perhaps a fantasy for an African future (“a divine destiny”), a future time Of ‘black freedom’ or, in Lembedeian parlance, a time of meat-eating: a critique of white divinity. White divinity: a finality, a ‘culmination’ of white ethics – the adoption of the South African act (1909), for instance, an orgy (festivities), “great in soul and in artistic achievement”, sacrificing an animal-man, an act of destroying “what cannot be used”, the precious (sacrificial value), “the preparation of the offering for a meal, the feast that cheats the act out of its negative significance”….1Thewhite orgy, far from peaceful, nonetheless – for (days on end) the white memory of the dying animal-(hu)man confronts white divinity (justifiably,suspectsa botched sacrifice, the animal-man {the black}, yet to give-in its/his/her breath).

6 7

William Mpofu The African As A Human Being In The Political Rhetoric Of Thabo Mbeki: In the media and in the African academy; the political project and legacy of Thabo Mbeki has been projected in a multiplicity of caricatures of negation and some of affirmation. On the one hand Thabo Mbeki has been described as having participated in a failed political ‘dream’ that was ‘differed’ as well as having practiced racialised politics that bordered on hatred for whites. On the other hand Mbeki has been affirmed as a ‘philosopher king’ and an ‘enigma’ with the gift of ‘native intelligence.’ Away from these emphatic caricatures of negation and affirmation, the present paper argues that from his speeches ‘I am an African’ of 2007 and ‘Great Expectations: from Global Village to Global Neighborhood’ in 1998 Mbeki sought to imagine the African as a subject who besides the dehumanisation of slavery, colonialism and coloniality remains a human being who deserves ‘full liberation.’ In this rebellious imagination of the African subject, Mbeki goes beyond the practice of politics proper to the practice of ‘the political’ that is defined by Chantal Mouffe in 2005 as the action of changing the nature of politics itself and ‘democratising democracy.’ This paper deploys decoloniality as a theoretical and conceptual framework of understanding Thabo Mbeki’s rhetorical and political challenge to the modern and colonial global structures of power, knowledge and being that have consigned the African subject to the ‘zone of none being’ and to the status of ‘dispensable lives’ that are marked by wants, lacks, deficiencies and deformities.

Bongani Nyoka Concerning Mafeje’s Africanity As A Combative Ontology: Archie Mafeje argues that while Afrocentricity (or ‘Afrocentrism’ as he would have it) and Africanity have been used interchangeably, a significant distinction between the two concepts ought to be made. For him, the former is, suitably interpreted, a methodological prerequisite for ‘decolonising knowledge in Africa’ or an antidote to Eurocentrism. It is, secondly, a demand by African scholars to study their societies from within. Thirdly, it is in its essence referential. The latter, on the other hand, has an emotive force with ontological connotations and it is therefore exclusivist. For Mafeje, Africanity has ‘more to do with African meta-nationalism than race or colour’. It is an assertion of an identity that is denied. It is a further question, however, whether race or colour can be dissociated from the question of Africanity. For it will strike many as rather commonplace that the denied identity of Africans has in the first instance everything to do with race and colour. This paper critically evaluates the form and content of Mafeje’s conception of Africanity.

14:15 - 13:15 Lunch


13:15 - 13:45 Performance: Becoming inhuman: A tactic in body activism

Dr Myer Taub

13:45 - 15:15 PANEL 2: Constructing “The Human”: Some Contemporary Sites

Panellists Abstract

Patricia Pinky Nkete Being A Female Taxi Driver In Post-Apartheid South Africa: The mini-bus taxi industry in South Africa is a male dominated space emerging from informality to formality. However, there are now few female mini-bus taxi drivers in this male dominated space. This paper poses the question of what does it mean to be a female mini-bus taxi driver in South Africa? The paper posits that the situation of ‘genderedness’ of the mini-bus taxi industry, which makes it discriminate against women, is compounded by class, ethnic and cultural factors. What has emerged in the mini-bus taxi industry is a phenomenon known as ‘queen bee’ constituted by females who enjoy reflected power from males dominating this space. The second phenomenon that has emerged is that of ‘glass ceiling’ for women aspiring to become entrepreneurs in the mini-bus taxi industry. The third phenomenon is that of sexual harassment that is somehow normalized in this male dominated space. Conceptually, this paper adopts a sociological understanding of the perceptions and experiences of women working in the mini-bus taxi industry.

Robert Maseko Being And Becoming A Miner In Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Decolonial Perspective: Since the advent of Euro-American modernity black mineworkers have been subjected to inhuman treatments at the hands of colonial mine owners. Therefore, being a miner is a market determined identity and a working poor category, a mineworker can be disciplined and his labour withdrawn at anytime. Black mineworkers have continued to live in the zone of non-being in a post-apartheid South Africa despite 20 years of democracy. In general, the argument presented in this paper is that being and becoming a miner in the post-apartheid South Africa is part and parcel of the generic experience of being and becoming racialized colonial subalterns within a racist global power structure of the modern world-system that is predicated on the dominance and hegemony of Western-centred modernity. This means being a miner is symbolic of the experience of being on the darker side of Western-centred modernity, of wretchedness and in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, of continuing to suffer the colonial wound in the absence of formal colonialism and apartheid. To fully understand the predicament on black mineworkers today, this paper presents a decolonial perspective on the experience of being and becoming a miner in the post-apartheid South Africa. It seeks to explain what it means to be a ‘miner’ beyond the ordinary definition of a ‘miner’ by unmasking the invisible power structure of coloniality which produced and continues reproduce the identity of miner as the sub-ontological being within the modern world system. The paper is about the existential conditions of black mineworkers in South Africa. It is about the making of a mineworker as a poor category and the conditions under which they live.


8 9

Morgan Ndlovu Cultural Villages And Their Idea Of The Human: a decolonial critique: Despite the fact that many of the representations of what are supposedly the cultural identities of the non-Western subject such as the cultural villages of South Africa take place within the context of tourism development, they also reproduce colonial-type power relations between the ‘observer’ and the ‘observed’ as well as re-imaginations of being and becoming that complicate the meaning of the idea of the ‘human’. Thus far from being sites of genuine inter-cultural exchange and education, representations of culture and identity such as the cultural villages of South Africa are rituals of domination and/or resistance in their imaginations of the ‘human’ and the ‘non-human’ within the structural system of modernity/coloniality that transversally divides humanity in terms of the categories of superior versus inferior beings. This paper is a decolonial decoding of the meaning of ‘human-ness’in the cultural village establishment of South Africa where being and becoming human is subject to relations of domination and resistance between the dominant and the dominated subject in the scheme of the colonial differential. Thus, the paper argues that representations of identity and culture such as the cultural villages of South Africa are not merely physical expressions of cultural tourism but are philosophical texts that reproduce colonial knowledge about what it means to be and not to be ‘human’ in the present age of Western-centred modernity.

Carolyn Barnett When Granny Went On The Internet: An old woman’s odyssey across the digital hierarchy, explored in the form a screenplay: What does it mean to be old, female and an outsider to digital technology? These are questions that are explored in a feature-length screenplay written about Granny, a 75-year old grandmother who suddenly finds herself alone and without the necessary know-how to operate New Media. The screenplay When Granny Went on the Internet explores the notion that acquiring digital technological expertise can lead to an expanded definition of self and can empower the individual to break free from expectations around their role in the family and in society. Thus, a major attribute of the storyline is that it offers a challenge to stereotypes about age and gender and suggests that New Media may provide a portal through which definitions of self can be re-imagined. The dialogue is deliberately constructed to include references to the protagonist as old, rather than with euphemisms such as ‘senior citizen’, or innocuous terms such as ‘older woman’. This contrasts with the choice of name for the protagonist - ‘Granny’ - which conjures up the stereotype of the benign, inconsequential individual whose uses do not extend much beyond child-minding. The events of the plot spring from the multiple opportunities provided by New Media, especially the Internet, and the storyline rests on a bed of both realities and possibilities related to New Media and its affordances, particularly in how these apply to old women. As subtext, the screenplay poses the question that once Granny has access to a connected computer, and the ability to operate it, what difference will it make in her life? Through the screenplay a link is created between the concept of the digital outsider, the value of New Media affordances and the question of identity. Granny’s journey is one that takes her across the digital spectrum and up the digital hierarchy as she traverses DiMaggio and Hargittai’s (2001) five dimensions of digital inequality. Factors other than the overly deterministic conditions of age and class are presented and stereotypes about where, how and by whom new media are used are interrogated through the fabric of the story and the lives of the characters. Granny’s story disrupts the traditional alignment between technology, patriarchy and sexism and re-imagines it.

15:15 - 15:30 Tea


15:30 - 17:00 PANEL 3: The Body And “The Human”: Some Contemporary Sites

Raimi Gbadamosi Do You Mind My Question, What Are You? Albinism And The Stigmatised Body: On Thursday, 03 March 2015, it was reported that four men had been sentenced to death for the 2008 killing of a 22-year-old woman, Zawani Mangidu, in Tanzania. One of the four men, Nassoro Charles, was her husband. She had been killed because they wanted part of her body, and her body parts were valuable to them because she was a woman with albinism.The Tanzanian government have apparently vowed to end the killing of people with albinism, even as it continues to occur. It is arguable that the continuation in the killing has more to do with the relative value of human life than the efforts of the government. It takes a lot to get over the taboo of killing another human being.One way of achieving this upsetting of the taboo on murder is to see the person about to be killed as less than, or not, human. If the humanity, or human-ness of anyone is formed from an understanding, or recognition from the humanity of the self, then there has to be such an effective distance created between the self and the other as to allow for the destruction of another person without essentially destroying the self for where the recognition emerges. One of the ways in which this distance can be created is a use of stigma, in this instance it has to be stigma which is created along with identification, long before the individual comes to an understanding of the status of the eventual victim as human.I will investigate the role of stigma, how it is used in the construction of people with albinism, ideas of humanness, and issues of identification beyond simple similarity

Philip Ademola Olayoku

The Intersections Of The Political Economy Of Bare Life And Nietzsche’s Proclamation Of The Death Of God Through The Spectrum Of Boko Haram Abductions In Nigeria: The theorisation of certain living experiences by Georgio Agamben as ‘bare living’ in his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life aptly captures the contradictions of the biopolitical realities undergoing transformations in line with the paradigmatic shifting standards of life’s valuation in modern societies. The challenge of these shifting standards of the value attached to life and living is replicated amidst the global threats of terrorism, which in turn calls for a revaluation of global ethical standards of man’s existence within the 21st Century. The study proposes an adaptation of the Nietzschean verdict on the demise of God to the challenge of religious contradictions of the devaluation of human existence to bare life by multiple layers of sovereign actorsredefining the confrontation of ‘pure life’ with raw power. It draws from the Nigerian example of the activities and actions of the Boko Haram in which the continuous threats, abductions, disappearances and the destruction of lives and properties in the name or religion arguable has a multidimensional intersections with the passive intervention of government reflecting the lack of political will in ensuring the protection of the fundamental rights to life and freedom.The study therefore contends that there is a causal relation between bare life and the changing ethical values within diverse contextual layers of multiple actors redefining the perception of doing human.


10 11

Senayon Olaoluwa The Human And The Non-Human: African Sexuality Debate And Symbolisms Of Transgression: Siding with the conceptual assumption that in sexuality discourse, there can be no exclusive affirmation of divisive categories of male and female, this paper contributes to the now burning debate by centralizing cultural, linguistic and spiritual symbolisms which articulate everyday staging of “transgressions” and reinforce the limits of human assumptions of absolute dichotomization in African sexuality discourse. Against this backdrop, the paper privileges everyday and periodic rites of passage among the Ogu-speaking people of Southwestern Nigeria. It contends that the rites are mediated by human communicative interactions that blur, and in some cases, reverse sexual roles while sometimes investing humanity with neutrality and hermaphroditic orientations, regardless of more popular affirmations to the contrary on the African continent. Relying on an experience of embodied ethnography, I argue that communicative interactions among the Ogu reference the realms of both the spiritual and the secular. Attention is additionally given to interactive and discursive processes that reinforce the necessary interaction of the human and the inanimate, ranging from the environment to the imaginations of divinity both in theistic and pantheistic categorizations. I further argue that the imaginations interface and articulate with parallel symbolisms of transgression in Christian redemptive affirmations. Therefore, while close-reading the textual data that reference the blurring of gender lines in Ogu ontological dynamics, the discussion reinforces how the parallels in Christian spirituality fuse with the indigenous assumptions of sexuality to contest the rigidity of exclusive dichotomization in African and global sexuality discourses


Public Event: ‘A Different Kind of Human’Venue: Wits Threatre

On the evening of the 14 April 2015, WICDS will be hosting a Public Event “A different kind of Human” which will include an imminent panel of artists, writers, filmmakers, and other Intellectuals. Each panellist will speak briefly about how their work relates to the topic of “doing human”, specifically how their work problematizes/resists/deconstructs the notion of the human in terms of those represented in their work or why they are represented the way they are. This event is open to the public

19:00 - 21:00 Welcome Prof Melissa Steyn

Panellists • Chair: VC Wits Prof Adam Habib• Panellist 1: Prof Rozena Maart • Panellist 2: Prof Achille Mbembe • Panellist 3: Xoliswa Sithole • Panellist 4: T O Molefe• Panellist 5: Dr Mumbi Mwangi

CHAIR: Professor Adam Habib is the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand, and has served in this position from the 1st of June 2013. He is an academic, an activist, an administrator, and a renowned political media commentator and columnist. A Professor of Political Science, Habib has more than 30 years of academic, research, institutional and administration expertise. His experience spans five universities and multiple local and international institutions, boards and task teams. His professional involvement in institutions has always been defined by three distinct engagements: the contest of ideas; their translation into actionable initiatives; and the building of institutions.

Professor Rozena Maart is the Director of the Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity at the University of Kwa Zulu Natal. She is a South African writer and Philosopher and author of several books of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction and novels. She took her Phd in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies [CCCS], University of Birmingham, UK. She won the Journey Prize in 1992 for her short story No Rosa, No District Six, which later appeared in her debut short story collection Rosa’s District Six. Her book Rosa’s District Six made the weekly bestseller list in Canada in 2006 and the HOMEBRU 2006 list in South Africa. At age 24, Maart was nominated for the “Woman of the Year” award hosted in Johannesburg, for her work opposing violence against women and for starting, with four women, the first Black feminist organization in Cape Town, Women Against Repression (WAR). Prof. Maart also sits on the Scientific Committee of the UNESCO South South Philosophical Dialogues.

Professor Achille Mbembe is a philosopher, political scientist, and public intellectual. He was born in Cameroon, obtained his Ph.D in History at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). He was Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, New York, from 1988-1991, a Senior Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., from 1991 to 1992, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania from 1992 to 1996, Executive Director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) in Dakar, Senegal, from 1996 to 2000. Achille was also a visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001, and a visiting Professor at Yale University in 2003. He has written extensively in African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996). On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation has been published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001.


12 13

Xoliswa Sithole is an Award winning South African filmmaker. She is the first South African to be awarded a British Academy Television Award for her work on Orphans of Nkandla. She is a producer/director making films about women and children in Africa with a focus on justice, human rights, and poverty. She began her career as an actress in anti-apartheid films before moving behind the camera as a director and producer where her work has garnered critical praise and several awards including the prestigious Peabody Award.

T.O Molefe is the author of For Blacks Only and Other Ways of Being Black, a forthcoming collection of essays on blackness and botho (ubuntu). He is also the author of Black Anger and White Obliviousness, a longform essay on how and why race and political expediency influence the perceived legitimacy of public criticism in post-apartheid South Africa. His social commentary appeared most recently in publications such as the International New York Times, City Press and ARTsouthAfrica.

Dr Mungi Mwangi is a professor in the Women’s Studies Program at St Cloud State University. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in education from Kenyatta University, Kenya, and later obtained her Ph. D in Education with a minor in Women’s Studies from Iowa State University. She is currently the 2015 Carnegie African Diaspora Fellow at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in addition to doing a one year Policy Fellowship in 2011 at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. Her scholarly and research interests include curriculum and pedagogy, international education, feminist methodology, qualitative methodology, and women and education. Her scholarly and research interests include curriculum and pedagogy, international education, feminist methodology, qualitative methodology, and women and education. Dr. Mwangi has published articles in the areas of feminist methodology and feminist scholarship of teaching and learning and is also the author of a book entitled, “We will have gained ourselves: Narrative experiences of African women pursuing higher education in the U.S.”. She has presented her work in numerous local, national, and international conferences. Dr Mwangi is also the founder and chief editor of the Journal of Global Gender Studies.

TUESDAY, 14th APRIL 2015 WEDNESDAY, 15th APRIL 2015

Venue: Wits Club


09: 00 - 10:00 Key Note Address and Q&A: Migrant as the abnormal figure of our time

Prof Ranabir Samaddar - The Calcutta Research Group (India)

10:00 - 10:15 Tea

10: 15 - 11:15 Key Note Address and Q&A: Monologues, dialogues and doing/being human in a modern world underpinned by vanquished humanity

Prof Zondi Sphamandla - Institute for Global Dialogue (JHB)

11:15 - 13:00 PANEL 4: Doing Human And Situated Knowledges, Beliefs And Imaginaries


Ingrid B. Pavezi Indigenous Politics In Bolivia: Decolonialism Or Effectiveness Of ‘Western’ Democratic Institutions?: In the first decade of the XXI Century, many countries in South America have experienced, for its first time, left wing governments. It has been expressed in different ways, according to the specific configuration of each country. This is an innovation due the fact that during the past centuries, the stereotype of people in politics in the region was the heterosexual, white, middle-age upper-class man, who usually performed the worst of coloniality. People who is not included in this strict stereotype, as woman, black, indigenous, homosexuals, young and the poor; were automatically excluded from politics and from public sphere. In some way, it is possible argue that the politics in South America, for centuries, were made from white man to white man. It started to change in the last decade, in some countries more shyly and in other more vigorously. One taboo in the region that remain until nowadays is the presence of indigenous people in power. The indigenous people are present in all countries in South America, but they still do not have power neither political representation in majority of South America nations.This paper will analyze the political changes in the only country in South America that has an indigenous as president, and one of the few that has trying adopt indigenous principles in laws and politics: Bolivia. What means the inclusion of indigenous cosmologies in Bolivian politics? How it operates? It means more quality of life for its indigenous peoples, if yes in which directions? It is a case of ‘decolonization’ in politics or one more step in the effectiveness of the western democratic institution? These are some of the following question that this presentation intent arise, from the point of view of Bolivia as case study.

14 15

WEDNESDAY, 15th APRIL 2015

Nadira Omarjee Zwartepiet: A Case For Anti-Humanist Thought: For me, the process of dehumanising the other is to peel-off the human within the self. If racism is manifest at the level of perception itself and in the very domain of visibility, then an amelioration of racism would be apparent in the world we perceive as visible. A reduction of racism will affect perception itself, as well as comportment, body image, and so on. Toward this, our first task, it seems to me, is to make visible the practices of visibility itself, to outline the background from which our knowledge of others and of ourselves appears in relief. From there we may be able to alter the associated meanings ascribed to visible difference. (Linda Martin Alcoff, “Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self”, 2006, p. 194). I would like to reflect on the representations of blackface in the traditional Dutch celebration of Sinterklaas and ZwartePiet (Black Piet), occurring annually on the evening of the 5th of December. I will show that these representations of blackface perpetuate racial bias through ‘the level of perception’ (ibid) of blackness as subordinate. Michel Foucault purported that the archaeological excavation of knowledge is based on the interrogation of the system of signs. Foucault’s main departure point on knowledge is that knowledge is in relation to power (McNay, 1992: 13). In Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1977: 29, 62, 65, 87, 100, 118, 158, 203) he purports that the arbitrary system of signs is influenced by the relationship of power to knowledge or the power/knowledge nexus. The power/knowledge nexus is the relationship between theory and practice or discourse and materiality (McNay, 1992). The exit for Foucault from the hierarchical binary implicit in the power/knowledge nexus is through resistance. Resistance as Linda Alcoff (2006) suggests can be by way of challenging perceptions through new representations. Within this frame, ZwartePiet is discussed, firstly, in how the representation masks the hidden past of slavery, secondly, how to make visible the perceptions of racism within the representation of ZwartePiet and, finally, by way of conclusion to offer new representations that can rethink the tradition of Sinterklaas. This then means that the claims on truth or rather knowledge production are not a priori but that they require a critical examination. Thus the critique of ZwartePiet shows how some forms of knowledge production lend themselves to perceptions that perpetuate racists tradition.

Benson A. Mulemi Ethnographic Perspectives On Folk Theorizing On Albinism And The Human In Tanzania: Albinism is a genetic condition characterised by a deficit in melanin production and partial or complete absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes. Eighteenth and nineteenth century ethnologists considered the African albino as a degenerated variant of the genetically and culturally superior white race. The discourse on the predicament of African persons with albinism (PWA) today emphasise the consequences of albinism as a biological anomaly and local misconceptions about it. This paper sets out to argue that the construction of superior human forms derive from a universal cultural tendency in time and space, to distinguish between more and less human forms. Albinism is one among many phenotypes that elicit ambivalent reactions about what being human is. The experience of African PWA thus depicts a species of universal socio-cultural perspectives on normal human and superior versus inferior human types that the eighteenth and nineteenth century Western ethnologists theorized about. This embodied attempts to understand, create, and explain the existence of different forms of perceived minority races, ethnic and social groups globally. This paper draws on ethnography in Tanzania to explore livelihood uncertainty as both a cause and consequence of the debated humanity of PWA. It presents a rapid appraisal the folk theories of personhood and linguistic usages that dehumanize PWA in Tanzania. The paper shows how stigma, socio-economic exclusion and extermination experiences of PWA in East Africa today embody a more dramatic re-emergence of global traditional practices affecting rights of minority groups distinguished by ‘abnormal’ phenotype. The paper illustrates that quests to understand phenomena lead to creative ways of knowing, which affect the lives of vulnerable groups. The ways of knowing include theorizing human difference, pioneered by early western ethnologists, and found in African indigenous imaginations characterised by mystical beliefs and superstitions. PWA in Tanzania are therefore the convenient embodiments of beliefs in magical power and witchcraft, scapegoats for perceived misfortunes in the collective life course, or victims of the quests for power in the context of increasing socio- economic inequalities.

Dr F. Fiona Moolla “The Camel Can Never See Its Own Hump”: Metahumanism In The Fiction Of Ibrahim Al-Koni: The fiction of Libyan writer, Ibrahim al-Koni, well-known in the world of Arabic letters, is being introduced into the English literary world through translation of an ever-increasing number of novels. In English translation, ecological and animal-studies perspectives on the author are being foregrounded, in the context of the broader constitution of the figure of the “ecological Bedouin” in contemporary Arabic literature. This paper highlights the relationships between human beings and animals in four of the novels in English translation. The analysis presented introduces the concept of “metahumanism” which points to the ways in which the novels incorporate human and animal existence into a broader transcendental cosmic scheme which guarantees consideration for both. This is an understanding of the human which appears common to most non-modern approaches to existence. Thus, Al-Koni’s “desert ethic”, in which the Sahara connects rather than divides Africa, fuses the animist, pantheist and monotheist mythologies of continental Africa. In these apprehensions of the world, the human and non-human worlds are interconnected in various ways, the precise configuration of which is determined by the different cosmologies and cosmogonies which constitute them. Four of the novels translated into English will be considered. These are Anubis: A Desert Novel, The Seven Veils of Seth: A Modern Arabic Novelfrom Libya, Gold Dust and The Bleeding of the Stone. Each of these novels approaches the idea of the species boundary from a slightly different angle. Al-Koni’smetahumanism presents a critical departure from explorations of human and animal lives in posthumanist debates, which remain internal to the humanism they seek to challenge. Posthumanist critiques of humanism implicitly assume the immanent epistemological framework of the humanism it rejects, a double-bind which Al-Koni’smetahumanism and the metahumanism of non-modern cultural conceptions, generally, seem to avoid.

13: 00 - 14:00 Lunch


16 17

14:00 - 14:30 Performance: The Stories We Share and the Heroes We Create

Petro Janse van Vuuren & Sibongile Bhebhe

14:30 - 16:00 PANEL 5: “The Human” & The System: Legal And Educational Settings


Charmika Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara

The Fiction Of The Juristic Person: Reassessing The ‘Personhood’ Of Juristic Persons In Respect Of ‘Other People’: The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (“Constitution”) boldly mandates Constitutional supremacy. A significant aspect of this supremacy is the application of the Bill of Rights not merely between the state and persons but between persons, including juristic persons, inter se. This intended permeation of the Bill of Rights of the Constitution (“Bill of Rights”) into all aspects of law and between all legal subjects appears to collapse the public law and private law dichotomy. This recognition of the rights in the Bill of Rights as emphatically fundamental is especially relevant in the context of systemic inequalities. Entrenched practices that directly or indirectly violate human rights contribute to the perpetuatio§n of systemic inequality. The composite manifestation of these systemic inequalities may be described as poverty. The Constitutional values of human dignity, equality and freedom cannot exist in harmony with poverty. In order to live these Constitutional values and meaningfully respect, protect and promote the rights in the Bill of Rights the systemic nature of poverty necessitates a solution that does not simply address the symptoms of poverty but rather the system, and the actors within that system, that contribute towards its perpetuation. The capacity for juristic persons (that is business entities such multi-national corporations and trusts) to impact human rights both negatively and positively through direct and indirect actions has been receiving growing local and international attention. The massive wealth and influence attributable to many local and international juristic persons, which sometimes equal to or exceed that of many states, has brought into sharp focus the manner in which juristic persons conduct themselves in the process of deriving wealth and influence. Moreover the obligations, or absence of obligations, of juristic persons towards the natural persons and communities affected in this process has been brought into focus. In this paper I explore the origins of the recognition of the juristic person as an independent legal entity separate from its constituent natural persons through the lens of critical legal theory. In so doing I will critically reflect on the arguments for and against this recognition. I will attempt to analyze the relationship between natural persons and juristic persons particularly in light of the crystallization of the fiction of the juristic person culminating, in many jurisdictions including our own, in the juristic person becoming a bearer of ‘human’ rights. It is from this point of departure that I will highlight how global and local discourse around the juristic person as a rights bearer does not translate across to the obligations of the juristic person in respect of the human rights of natural people. Furthermore I will expand on how the personhood of some classes of natural people has been, and continues to be,peripheryin the law to the recognition of the ‘personhood’ of juristic persons in the historical jurisprudential process. I will attempt thereafter to comment on what thissuggests about the lawmakers who define personhood and the societies that accept and perpetuate such definition. After having analyzed the formulation of the recognition of the ‘personhood’ of juristic persons I will reflect on whether the law approaches the personhood of natural and juristic persons in the same manner and attempt to establish the reasoning behind the similarities and differences in treatment.


In addressing whether it is appropriate and legitimate for juristic persons to be treated the same as natural personsI will draw on the significance of the cyclic nature of the provision on the application of the Bill of Rights with regard to juristic persons. I will, in conclusion, attempt to illustrate how the exaggeration of the ‘personality’ and ‘personhood’ of the juristic person has severely hampered both efforts towards the realization of human rights to the extent that juristic persons are allotted equal personhood/status as natural people; andthe accountability of, and facilitated human rights abuse by, natural persons who control (or are invested in) the juristic person that causes human rights violations (directly or indirectly). This will be established within the context of the inequality and poverty of natural persons in contrast to the growing wealth and influence of juristic persons. Ultimately I will comment on how the prevailing legal construction of the juristic person, and concomitant legal consequences thereof, have the continuing effect of detracting from the humanity of certain classes of natural people.

Joel Modiri Law, Identity And The Critical Problem Of The Human: This paper reflects on this author’s attempts to develop a course on what could broadly be called “critical identity theory”. The aim of such a course would be to interrogate the relationship between law, power and identity through recasting “identity politics” as a problem of the Human. In these reflections, I seek to explore an argument suggesting that the problems of identity and the development of critical race, feminist, queer and other theories centered on politicized identity are best understood through an examination of the fragmentation of the Human into a multiplicity of hierarchies and categories – a fragmentation which although having pre-modern roots takes definitive juridical form in modernity. From the triad of “race, class and gender” as core analytical foci of identity, to complications of unitary notions of identity through “the death of the Subject”, intersectionality and multiple consciousness, to the insertion of culture, nationality, disability and HIV and AIDS into the discourse, and finally to the posthumanist exposure of anthropocentrism – these are all instantiations of a progression in thinking and unthinking “the problem of the Human”. If the “critical identity theories” then can be read as a response to Western legal modernity and its relentless fragmentation and decimation of the integrity of the Human (both materially through oppression as an ideal), could they also then be read through the prism of (an unavoidable) nostalgia – as attempts to recuperate and recover a Human that perhaps never was? Taking into account the ethics and politics underlying African Philosophy, Black Consciousness and one critical account of neoliberalism, this paper suggests that “our” very conceptions of be-ing Human, and “our” understandings of humanity, humanism and the humane, are in a state of disorientation – one not yet fully apprehended by existing theories of justice and liberation. In short, this paper seeks to engage in the complexity not only of doing, but being and thinking, Human.


18 19

Olayinka Akanle Child Rights Law, Cultural Construction Of Childhood And Child Rights Realities In Nigeria, Africa: Children are the most vulnerable group in the world today according to the State of the World’s Children, (2013). This is more so in developing countries particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Children are dependent on adults and weak in defending their rights. Children are often considered immature and inexperience in facing life so they have to be guided and guarded and have their rights violated with impunity in the process. This is why developing nations have been encouraged to have laws to safeguard children’s rights. Most developing countries however also have deeply entrenched socio-cultural, values and practices that often compromise child rights. While some African nations lack laws to protect children’s rights, a few have the laws. Nigeria is among the few African nations with Child Rights Act (2003) and some states in the country have domesticated the Child Right Act into Child Rights Law. Even with the Act/Laws however, positive changes are yet to be seen relative to improved rights of children in Nigeria, as the biggest nation in Africa and among the biggest in the world. What is the reason for this disjuncture between the effectiveness of the Act/Laws and child rights realities in Nigeria? This is the central research question of this paper. This paper will present unique case study of Nigeria. Nigeria is a good case study to understand the interface of the law and cultural ramifications generally and, particularly, of child rights in Africa. This paper will bring policy and practical/pragmatic inputs into the conference.

Clive Kronenberg The Humanist Dimension Of Cuban Education: Cuba’s educational achievements and successes have elicited much international scrutiny of the past three to four decades, where focus has concentrated particularly on policy goals and instructional strategies. The fact that Cuba can be considered relatively poor, gives credence to the assumption that positive economic indicators are not necessarily key determinants in high educational attainment..In other words, neither, policy, strategy, nor adequate economic provision, seems to have the final say in the island’s remarkable educational achievements and outputs over the last 50 years or so. This paper argues that there is deep, underlying ethical philosophy driving and steering the island’s educational project, one which often is neglected or goes unseen, even by high ranking scholars and researchers. My recent educational field research project conducted on the island corroborates the theory that Cuban educational triumphs can ultimately best be explained from an examination and analysis of the humanist philosophy born from the anti-colonial struggle, that underpins its teaching and learning endeavours. The paper draws on established literary sources as well as up-to-date, original data. The overall findings and conclusions of this paper propose that the transfer of a universal values system, is, ultimately, the most important factor in knowledge production and transfer, a lesson South Africa can greatly benefit from.

16:00 - 16:15 Tea


16:15 - 17:45 PANEL 6: Doing “The Human” Better

Zimitri Erasmus Two ways of ‘doing human’: genealogical and sociogenic: Most social scientists agree there is a relationship between ways of knowing and forms of social and political practice. ‘Doing human’ is understood here as a process of becoming more human through social and political practice. Contrary to a bio-centric species-conception of humans, Lear (2009) reminds us that being human is not just about being a member of the species. Instead, it involves living up to an ideal of human excellence. This aspirational task is difficult because it demands affective civility toward other humans, all sentient beings, and to resources that sustain all life. Moreover, in Fanon’s conception of societies with colonial histories, this already difficult task is compounded by the ways meanings of race become the grave in which empire buried – alive – the very notion of humanity (Sekyi-Otu 1996). The challenge in these contexts is to wrest the human from the grasp of race and to make new meaning outside this colonial code. This presentation explores some of the implications for ‘doing human’ of genealogical ways of knowing on the one hand, and on the other hand, of sociogenic coming(s) to know. It posits that genealogical knowing and ‘doing human’ through classification (racial or otherwise) are mutually constitutive. In contrast, sociogenic coming(s) to know rely on Relation (Glissant 1992, 1997) rather than classification.

Chimusoro Kenneth Tafira

The “Human” In Black Liberation Thought: Since the advent of colonial modernity and its invidious accompaniments: slavery, subjection, alienation, epistemic racism and violence and colonialism, the human has had an increasing importance. This presentation attempts to define the basic premises of what characterises the human. The major achievements of colonial subjection were to produce a binary subjectivity: the human and the nonhuman or sub-human, based on superiority and inferiority. The realisation that colonialism reduced other people, on the basis on race, to dehumanisation and debasement, and their confinement to zones of human and non-human, the quest for liberation has placed the human and recovery and rediscovery of self and consummation of humanity, life and being, on a higher pedestal and as a necessary prerequisite for decolonisation. It is for this reason that black liberation thought and practice espoused by Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora who share similar historical experience, has always been a humanist endeavour.

Terblanche Delport The Ethics Of Becoming Human? The history of theories of liberation has always been a history that unfolds on the side of the oppressed and marginalized in any given society. An ethics of liberation does not differ from this approach; it instead takes it further by asking what the ethical implications are for a specific understanding of liberation? In this aforementioned formulation, the two important concepts that presents itself for analysis is liberation and ethics. What is liberation? What does ethics entail? How does a liberatory ethics look like? This paper will explore these questions in relation the conference theme of ‘doing the human’. The idea of ‘doing the human’ indicates an action, an agency, on the part of the subject of the sentence. It is not the human doing the action, becoming human is the goal of the action being done. There is thus a subject before there is a human; there needs to be a subject that performs the actions to become human. The idea of ‘doing human’ then stands in a tenuous relationship with most constructivist and post-modernist theories that have systematically attempted to think and theorise away the human subject and, in the process, also its ethical responsibilities. If there is not a subject that is ‘doing’ theory then there is no subject able to ‘do’ the human. I want to argue that this ‘doing’ indicates an ethical orientation towards the world. This ethical orientation needs to moreover be one of an ethics of liberation that is able not only to (re)construct the idea of the human, but also (re)construct the world in which this human lives.


20 21


Ndumiso Dladla Ubuntu As A Philosophy Of Liberation: Over the past two decades an enormous rise in interest in both academic a public discourse can be noticed on the subject of Ubuntu. This productive rise has brought to birth research chairs, professorships, volumes of books, articles and prestigious status for many white South African, European and American scholars. It is however the contention of this paper that these “Ubuntus” which have taken hold are curiously “Ubuntus” without abantu (the Bantu speaking people whose philosophy it is) or isintu (the culture which is the basis for their philosophy). It is perhaps for this reason that these emergent versions Ubuntu void of abantu and isintu continue to be employed in the sustaining of the dubious right to conquest as well as the constitutional order which like its predecessors, Apartheid and British Colonialism are erected upon that same dubious right. This paper seeks to retrieve Ubuntu as understood by the indigenous people conquered in the unjust wars of colonisation in their continued resistance against the unethical doubt concerning their humanity or its quality - the evidence of which is their continued dispossession, poverty and vulnerability to death. The Ubuntu we seek to retrieve is the one which was the basis of Shaka Zulu’s wars of resistance, Bambatha’s rebellion and the formation of the Azanian People’s Liberation Army. It will in this paper employed as a critical apparatus to read South Africa in 2015.

Venue: Wits Club


09:00 - 10:00 Key note address and Q&A: ‘Animals like us’: ‘Doing human’ in Zoopolis

Prof Harry Wells - VrijeUniversiteit Amsterdam

10:00 - 10:15 Tea

10:15 - 11:45 PANEL 7: Challenging “The Human” Of European Modernity: African Thought Leaders (Part 2)

Panellists Abstract

Grace Khunou and Edith Phaswana

Doing Human Through Forgiveness And Un-Forgiveness: The Dehumanising Of Winnie Mandela: Over the past two decades, Nelson Mandela’s ability to forgive those who engineered, and perpetrated apartheid has positioned him as the personification of humanness throughout the world. Following his release, after 27 years of incarceration by the White minority government in South Africa, Nelson Mandela sent shockwaves across the globe by embracing the architects of apartheid in a reconciliatory manner that left the world in awe. In this process, Mandela took great risks and demonstrated leadership. He risked his support base from the black majority who suffered immensely under apartheid, who instead of forgiveness were looking forward to ‘payback’ time for perpetrators of apartheid. As a symbol of de-colonial ethics and servant leadership, Nelson Mandela persuaded the black majority to forgive and reconcile with their former oppressors thus doing what is expected of a ‘human’ as opposed to what a ‘barbarian’ would do. However, a few years later, Mandela ended his long term marriage to his most loyal supporter Winnie Mandela, the woman who kept his name alive and bore hardships under apartheid. The news of the divorce was well received by the world media who saw Winnie as unbefitting to be the wife of the ‘humanist’ and world icon. This rejection was partly due to her involvement in the killing of StompieSeipei as revealed during the TRC. This paper thus explores the complexities and irony of forgiveness in ‘doing’ human. We try to understand the meaning of forgiveness and its value in our considerations of humanness. We interrogate the question of who is human through the exploration of gendered and racial issues raised in the issue of forgiveness/un-forgiveness that played a role in the making of Mandela as a humanist.

THURSDAY, 16th APRIL 2015

22 23

Faisal Garba Thinking Africa Differently: The Challenge Of Diop: In this paper I seek to critically engage the works of Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop. I concentrate particularly on his Civilization or Barbarism and Precolonial Black Africa, respectively, in order to tease out his attempts at doing an historical sociology of Africa on its own terms, a radical rupture from the Africa of ‘’lack’’, ‘’ Africa of exceptions’’ and Africa ‘’pre’’. I argue that the importance of Diof is fourfold. Firstly, he mounted a challenge to the incoherence and contradictory application of the so-called Hamitic hypothesis which identifies all aspects of pre-colonial Africa that fits European delineation of ‘’civilization’’ to the influence of Caucasians. Diop challenged a major mast on which Africa has been casted by arguing that that the Wolof, theMasai, and the Berber are firmly African, in spite of differential complexions, stature, dietary patterns and economic arrangements. Africans, Diop maintains, are not phenotypically uniform1. Secondly, and flowing from the first, he contextualizes the precolonial ideational, trade and migratory movements that cuts across all four corners of the continent and connects Africa to nodal points in different world historical times. Thirdly, Diop’s method of scholarship opened up sources beyond the narrow confines of Europeanliterature. He drew on Arabic manuscripts in West and North Africa, oral traditions and artefacts to understand Africa as a ‘’differentiated unity’’. By doing this, he utilized the strengths of archaeology as the dominant tool of understanding Africa’s past but made a strong point of transcending it with creative tools.Fourthly, Diop helps us to question how we think of the past beyond colonialism. A toxic combination of European imperialist and colonial interests, arrogance and stark historical ignorance casted Africa as a static space, always dependent. Reactions to this violent fiction was and remains varied. The weight of colonialism means that it marked the basis of the reactions and the rebuttals. Liberal precepts became the departing points. Africa’s modernityand similar adapted liberal doctrines became dominant ways of responding to Europe and its accoutrements of othering and dehumanization. To stake a claim for Africa essentials or cradles are regularly sought. Diop himself could not completely extricate himself from this. I argue that we are best able to develop Diop’s path breaking work by understanding the contingencies that informs pre-colonial African societies, and not take them as givens. I do this by drawing on ongoing research I am involved in which looks at connection within Africa and between Africa and rest of the world in the decisive epoch of 12th century and the 17th century in order to: 1). better understand the tenacious nature of the rise of European imperialism, its colonialism and their new avatars; 2). Further understand the extent to which colonialism remains a phase, in the long history of Africa, its internal contacts and external linkages.

Tendai Sithole Césaire’s Meditations: The Human And Dehumanisation: Aime Césaire scandalised the question of the human by exposing the deceit and hypocrisy of humanism which is the myth of modernity. The question of the human is foundational and constitutive in Césaire’s meditations which originate from the site of the dehumanised and also railing against the Cartesian meditations of the human. The human is interrogated here in the light of the distance and proximity with regards to the inhuman. As such, it is the world where the Western subject is the rational being who is driven by the impulses of Reason which propels the mastery of the self, the mastery of the world and the mastery of the ‘other’ through the processes of dehumanisation. In the ontological formation and the constitution of the subject, the Western subject in the dichotomy of self-other relations determined the politics of life and even death which Césaire exposes in his meditations. This paper argues for the shift of the geography of reason with regards to the question of the human where the articulation of the human does not originate from Carterisian meditations but Césaire’s meditations. Also, the presence of the colony in the postcolony means the absence of humanism in that there is continued dehumanisation which Césaire calls attention to. The scandal of humanism has been the tendency of preaching humanism while engaging in dehumanisation practices. The self-other relation is asymmetrical and is informed by subjection. This form of asymmetric relationality is apparent in three issues that will be engaged from the Césaire’s position—that is, the human and humanism.


11:45 - 13:15 PANEL 8: Undoing “The Human”

Panellists Abstract

Paul Chappell ‘I’m Doing Well, Despite My Disability’: (Re)Positioning The Disabled Body As A Post-Human Condition In The Global South: Although feminist and queer theorists have made links between heteronormativity with gender, patriarchy and race in the construction of normativity, little attention has been given to constructs of able-bodiedness. As denoted by McRuer (2006: 1), ‘able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a non-identity, as the natural order of things’. As a result, the disabled body is often positioned as an undesirable other, a negative identity, and something that needs to be overcome. To a certain extent, this negative positioning of the disabled body is also promulgated within the rhetoric of the disability movement in the global south. Through using queer theory and critical disability studies, the aim of this presentation will be to reposition the disabled body within social theory in the global south. The presentation also contends that by bringing the impaired body back in to discourse, disabled people have the potential to disrupt hegemonic discourses of compulsory able-bodiedness and to redefine what it means to be human.

Marius Henderson How The Words Undo: Reflections On The Poetical Undoing Of The Hegemonically “Human”: Many branches of critical cultural theory that have emerged in the context of theorizations of the “anthropocene,” “post-humanism,” and “new materialisms” seem to have been constructed in opposition to previous theoretical approaches which emerged in the context of the so-called “linguistic turn.” Due to the recent theoretical turn towards matter, affect, animality, and the non-and post-human, a certain turn away from a presumed focus on everything that can be associated with language and representation, as ostensibly genuinely “human” properties or acquirements, seems to have taken place. By letting contemporary theoretical from the fields of feminist (affect) theory and queer (of color) theory interact with readings of a small corpus of poetic and other artistic works (e.g. by Bhanu Kapil and Dawn Lundy Martin), I will try to show how in these theoretical approaches and artistic works language does not appear as “human” and “representational” per se; but rather as an ambiguous material, as an ambivalent “anthropocene” artifact that touches upon the Real, and which is capable of touching and being touched by bodies of all sorts. Moreover, by reaching back to deconstructive conceptualizations of (written) language as carrying traces of “inhuman” and “undead” matter, I would also like to invoke and explore examples of fairly recent renditions of “the undead” and “necro aesthetics,” for instance in the works of the artists M. Lamar and Matana Roberts. Drawing on both Achille Mbembe’s notion of “necropolitics” and the notion of the “necro,” as used in the para-academic field of Black Metal Theory, the “undead” and the “necro” might be understood as forms of negativity in the sense of a negation even of negation, which move beyond sheer oppositions, and which combine relational and anti-relational, destructive and reparative tendencies.I would like to discuss emergences of (poetic) language as “undead” and “inhuman” material which holds the potential of both undoing hegemonic notions of “the human” and of always already providing space for the exploration of instances of “being-with” among those who are excluded from the field of hegemonic humanity, e.g. “the undercommons” (Fred Moten) or the “socially dead” (Jared Sexton).


24 25

Dr Ruth Lipschitz Jane Alexander’s Animot: Spectres Of The Inappropriate/D: Recent literature on Jane Alexander’s mixed media installations terms her hybrid, interspecies sculptural figures ‘humanimal,’ and claims that their apparent blurring of human-animal binaries forges an ethical openness to otherness and difference that begins by troubling the limits of ‘the human.’ While Alexander’s work does indeed pose ethical questions of violence, thresholds and borders, the rhetoric of ‘the humanimal’ is, in fact, sustained by what Derrida elsewhere calls the violence of ‘the animal.’ This violence leaves the anthropocentric axis of the human-animal hierarchy intact and dilutes any claim to an ethics of difference. In contrast, I want to take seriously the idea of un-doing ‘the human’ in Alexander’s work. My paper considers the ethical, psychoanalytic and political effects of the imbrication of radical alterity and an uncanny foreignness in Alexander’s installations and reads the limitrophy produced in terms of the monstrous promise heralded by Haraway’s feminist figure of “the Inappropriate/d” and Derrida’s animot. I draw on Kristeva’s work on abjection and the trope of the foreigner, as well as on the deconstructive ethics of Derrida’s “metonymy of eating well.” In proposing a more complex reading of the interrelation of species, alterity and violence in Alexander’s work, my paper also responds to Achille Mbembe’s desire to articulate a [post-apartheid] subject beyond the framing of ‘the human’ inherited from the West. In “Democracy as a Community of Life,” Mbembe laments the ethico-political failure of the promise of ubuntu as the constitutional ground for a postapartheid “ethics of mutuality.” Bankrupted by poverty, xenophobia, corruption and the historical legacy of the black body as ‘waste,’ the subject, Mbembe argues, has become spectral – in his terms, devoid of life and possibility. Since in his argument ‘the human’ is another name for ‘the future,’ his desire to reanimate a ghostly subject in effect asks after the conditions for a “radical future-oriented politics” in South Africa. Since Mbembe’s question is a philosophical gambit rather than a programmatic statement for political action, I offer a challenge to its anthropocentric premise by way of the provocation of Alexander’s animot. Analysing the intersection of species, violence and alterity in selected works by Alexander offers an imaginative answer to Mbembe’s implicit appeal for a regenerative politics of possibility that is also an ethics, for at base is the question of an excess that Derrida would call the ethical incalculability before whom/what we must answer: how to live with ghosts?

Sacha Knox Afrikological Aesthetics: Spectres Of Becoming And Combat Breathing As Irruptions In The Prosthetics Of Empire: This paper turns on modern sovereignty as a state of emergency through which the postcolonial-neocolonised world (Spivak) is constituted and through which the law of politics becomes the law of death. As Agathangelou makes explicit, “the tension that guides the reproduction and regeneration of interstate, colonial and racist structures is a political ontology that depends on gratuitous violence in which a body is rendered dead flesh to be expended repeatedly” (2011). It is proposed that this rendering operates through instrumental, mimetic theories of representation- that central to projects of modern ‘nation’ building is ‘imperso-nation’, which produces subjects as citizens through the construction of their bodies as whole and totalised; through the creation of prosthetic bodies: “pre-given vessels in which the nation may reside” (Axel, 1999). In response to these suffocations, these annihilations, this paper takes up the aesthetics of Afrikology and proposes spectres of becoming and Fanon’s combat breathing as transformative forms of politics concerned with altering ontology, with irrupting integration into suffocating forms of political sovereignty. It is proposed that these Afrikological strategies operate beyond given modes of political representation and turn in face of logics of mastery and domestication (Agamben): in deconstructing the prosthetics of empire they choose, instead, “to wrestle for the vitality of life” (Agathangelou, 2011).

13:15 - 14:15 Lunch


14:15 - 15:15 Performance: ‘Playback’ Drama for Life

15:15 - 15:30 Final thanks Prof Melissa Steyn - Director, WiCDS

Closing Dinner, Moyo Zoo Lake19:00 - 21:00 Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Advancement, HR and

TransformationProf Tawana Kupe (Wits, JHB)

Final thanks Prof Melissa Steyn - Director, WiCDS


26

Emergency Numbers

WICDS office: 011 717 4418 Wits Emergency: 011 717 4444/6666 Wits Campus Health: 011 717 9111/13 Milpark Hospital: 011 480 5600 Ambulance: 10177 or 082 911 Maxi Taxi/Cab Services: 011 648 1212

Venues

Wits Club WITS West Campus - Empire Road North Gate Entrance 7 (Yale Road) Johannesburg Tel: + 27 11 717-9365

Moyo Zoo Lake Zoo Lake Park Prince of Wales Drive Parkview Johannesburg Tel: +27 11 646 0058

32

Wits Centre for Diversity Studies 13th Floor, University Corner (corner Jorissen Str and Bertha), University of the Witwatersrand, Braamfontein, Johannesburg +27 (0) 11 717 4418 | [email protected] Twitter: @DiversityCenter

Doing Human Conference Program

Documents

Transcript of Doing Human Conference Program