In honour of Women’s Month, the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) proudly presents the Women of Impact Series. This series celebrates the outstanding achievements of our female graduates, partners, and project leaders in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We showcase the groundbreaking research, extraordinary dedication, and inspiring visions of these accomplished women. Through their innovative work and unwavering commitment, they have advanced in their respective fields and shaped a more inclusive and diverse future. Join us in celebrating their remarkable contributions and stories.
1. Can you share a bit about your journey and experiences as a project leader with the NIHSS, and how this has influenced your work and personal growth?
My first encounter with the NIHSS was through the Centre for Humanities Research’s (CHR) participation in the sector-wide consultation process that led to the historic Charter for the Humanities and Social Sciences some ten years ago. This was followed by the NIHSS’s award to the CHR for a catalytic project on Hidden Voices in Arts and Music, which inaugurated the CHR’s research platform in Aesthetics and Politics and its Factory of the Arts in aesthetic education, an inquiry into manufacturing an arts education from the historical site of UWC, an HDI that had been denied the possibility of a taught program in the arts during apartheid. The CHR has now launched its Iyatsiba Lab in the heart of the city, the culmination of the collective efforts of its scholars, students, artists, and institutional partners, with the support of the NIHSS, DSI, and NRF. It has been a special privilege to work with the dynamic and committed team at the NIHSS under the leadership of Professor Mosoetsa towards building the CHR’s public program through collaborative and interdisciplinary research and artmaking.
A deeply humanistic sensibility animates the NIHSS, which translates into a granular understanding of the complexities of large humanities research projects. On reflection, such a sensibility is enabling a closer articulation between academic research and the infrastructure and administration required to support and make the research possible. Globally, humanistic scholarship and scholars face increasingly punishing administrative and bureaucratic demands. In contrast, the NIHSS has succeeded in holding onto the nature of humanistic inquiry and the scholars and students at the core of its work. This approach has offered research project leaders the latitude to implement and report on our research, enabling the implementation of our enquiries unencumbered by often unnecessary and punitive administrative demands.
2. How does your research and projects address the unique challenges and opportunities in your field, and what key insights or findings do you believe can drive meaningful change and impact in society?
The hard-won political liberation that enabled the transition to democracy in South Africa has often been overwhelmed by a sense that apartheid’s legacies might be more difficult to overcome than anticipated. Rather than being overwhelmed by a deepening techno-determinism, social fragmentation, and narratives of apocalypse, the CHR’s NIHSS supported projects have attempted to revisit the worldmaking possibilities that exist in the arts for educating “the whole human” (W.E.B. Du Bois) and undoing what Njabulo Ndebele has called “apartheid’s laws of perception." These projects have brought together humanities scholars and postgraduate students, artists associated with the erstwhile community arts movement, and established arts practitioners, alongside rural and peri-urban communities, in an ongoing effort to re-imagine the meaning of the postapartheid and the promise of freedom the struggle against apartheid gave to our society as well as to the rest of the world. In this sense, we have come to understand that the concept of the postapartheid is neither the exclusive terrain of South Africa nor of the "West," but a differently yet shared systemic, social, sensory, and psychic condition marked by the inheritance of the idea of race (and racial capitalism).
Drawing from the ambitions for an aesthetic education that Gayatri Spivak offered towards “abusing” the epistemological inheritances that have shaped our interconnected contemporary world, as well as from the idea of “studious play” from jazz improvisation that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten elaborated, our NIHSS supported projects have been committed to opening humanities spaces for thought, the exchange of ideas, and making as a practice of freedom. Our recently completed project on “Aesthetic Education: Puppetry, Documentary Film, and Sound," for example, culminated in the first sound art exhibition of southern African sound artists, composers, and musicians at the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin, Germany, and through radio broadcasts on Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Germany’s national public radio station.
The exhibition, titled "Oscillations,” emerged out of a two-year transhemispheric investigation on unmaking received assumptions about history, race, culture, and geography, attending to the complex interplay of knowledge production and sound with the act of critical listening. “Oscillations” encouraged listening to unfamiliar sonic landscapes, questioning the implication of spatial imaginaries in cultural and economic hegemonies, and inhabiting unanticipated modes of auditory perception and its translations to reimagine politics, power, and the materiality of sound to develop shared conceptual vocabularies and soundworks. This method of “doing the humanities” drew in different publics and multiplied audiences, resituating intellectual inheritances of liberation to undergird a more international distribution and worldly interpretation of the postapartheid. Similarly, the CHR’s resident arts company, the Ukwanda Puppetry Collective, worked for two years with scholars such as Thozama April and others on the historiography of the life of Charlotte Maxeke in a collaborative research process to develop a puppetry production entitled “Maxeke: This Work is Not for Ourselves." The production was viewed by audiences, including matinee shows for schoolchildren in the Western Cape, gave rise to the first puppetry theatre review in IsiXhosa, and won Ukwanda a Fleur du Cap award. For the production, the figure of Charlotte Maxeke was approached as a thinker of the trans-Atlantic world whose critical engagements with ideas from the civil from the civil rights struggle in North America and from struggles for voting rights for women in Britain shaped her ideas about political freedom and its struggles in South Africa. In this sense, the projects have been committed to inventing an aesthetic and political orientation for an anti-racist non-racialism founded on the shared study of intellectual inheritances from diverse political and philosophical itineraries of freedom.
3. What does the celebration of Women’s Month mean to you?
As someone of the “transition generation” who came of age politically in the early nineties, during the transition to democracy, I have maintained a commitment to rethreading the historical significance of the postapartheid national commemorative calendar through broader questions of the past that register through our contemporary predicaments. Women’s Month offers an opportunity to commemorate the women involved in the 1956 women’s anti-pass march from Johannesburg to the Union Buildings in Pretoria against the heinous apartheid pass laws. It is therefore an opportunity to grapple with the extent of how truly transformative change has been shaped by the collective and transgenerational work of many women and men, as well as genders not inscribed in these two names, across a much longer duration. Of course, this transgenerational prompt again recalls Charlotte Maxeke as a figure and thinker of the transatlantic who led women’s protests in South Africa against the unspeakable brutality of the pass laws and established the first women’s organisation in South Africa to take this up, some forty years prior to the women’s protest march in 1956. But Women’s Month is also an opportunity to reflect on the complex relationship between national liberation, nationalism, and gender. For example, white womenhood and, by extension, white women were actively implicated in the system of racial subjection and domination that produced, maintained, and reproduced apartheid, as Christi van der Westhuizen has argued. Various intellectual currents of the liberation movement offered a vision connecting the liberation of women in South Africa to the liberation of its people, drawing on the Women’s Charter of 1954 to inform the argument. Other intellectual currents of liberation saw the anti-apartheid struggle as one for the freedom, equality, and dignity of persons rather than as one inflected by the intertwined struggles of Black women, as Shereen Hassim has shown in her book on the entanglements of women’s movements and the struggle for democracy. Women’s Month, beyond the many significant critiques made of it, offers an opportunity to engage these complexities and understand the contradictions with which the politics of gender are inscribed in our contemporary moment.
4. What role do you see interdisciplinary collaboration playing in your work, and how has it enhanced the outcomes of your research and projects?
As a humanities centre, the CHR is a plural formation and cannot, nor should it be reduced to any single idea or discipline. A humanities centre needs to remain open. To the vital force of ideas, which are always collaboratively conceived. We pursue this through stimulating research and artistic and cultural production through an experiment in arts education that may catalyse new approaches, methodologies, and assemblages that connect the arts and humanities to creatively reimagine transformation in postapartheid society. Local, national, continental, and international partnerships, as well as research and artistic collaborations, enable constellations of communities of scholars, postgraduate students, and artists across disciplines, institutions, and sites of public intervention. As such, inter-, trans-, and non-disciplinary collaborations are at the very heart of the CHR’s work. These give form and expression to our commitment to holding an open space for robust engagement with ideas while ensuring that knowledge may be pryed away from mastery and servitude or hardened ideological positions.