Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid, by Sarah Nuttall

Abstract

Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009. 198pp. ISBN: 9781868144761

Notes

Y Magazine, which began in 1998 as an offshoot of the radio station YFM, published its last issue in November 2008.

The paucity of its attention to writing and other media in languages apart from English is equally striking. Only the glosses of Tswana and Zulu phrases from Y Magazine (pp. 122–123) suggest to the uninformed reader that there might be a South African urban popular culture that is not primarily in English. And when her fascinating analysis of anti-rape contraptions for young girls cries out for an investigation of media sources in Afrikaans, Nuttall gives ethnic stereotype—‘I recognize [in Sunette Ehlers, a designer of these devices] the extraordinarily pragmatic and at times perverse pioneering spirit of some Afrikaners, taking on its post-apartheid form’—and the speculation, implying against the flow of her own argument that the imagination capable of creating them is not encountered in other groups, that Ehlers's inventions might be ‘a case of a verkrampte gothic’ or ‘examples of the Afrikaner nationalisation of technology … a kind of feudal cyborg invention’ (pp. 140, 146, 148).

See also Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, co-edited by Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, which is very much a companion volume to Entanglement, and contains earlier versions of two of its chapters.

The project is already announced by Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael in their editors’ introduction to Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies, where “creolization” is the keyword for insisting that, despite its history of segregation, “South Africa is also a place striking for its imbrication of multiple identities—identities that mythologies of apartheid, and of resistance to it, tended to silence” (Nuttall and Michael 2000, 1).

Although self-commodification by authors and editors is never brought up in Entanglement, the priority it gives to ‘attention’ (p. 20) suggests that the following formulation, from the introduction to Senses of Culture, may be applicable: ‘The privileging of the image in cultural studies may be read in terms of its focus on the transient. Cultural commodities competing for attention during a limited life-span are heavily imbued with insistent visual markers. Thus the assumption comes to prevail that the most appropriate or encompassing way of reading a cultural artefact might be through its representation as image’ (Nuttall and Michael 2000, 16; own emphasis). In context, these sentences lead into an appeal for equal consideration by cultural studies of senses other than the visual, and a strong plea is made for the aural. Reading a book, of course, has never been restricted to the visual.

A significant earlier intervention in cultural studies in South Africa, Keyan Tomaselli's Rethinking Culture, although tending to identify advertising with capitalist interests and ideology, was nevertheless acutely aware of the need to ‘popularize cultural studies as one means to tackle the vast task of cultural reconstruction that must occur if South Africa is to survive its future,’ and, like some of the forms of advertising it criticized, ‘[t]he design of the book has unashamedly drawn on the signs and representations of ‘the people’ (Tomaselli 1998, pp. 9, 100–101, 104), which produced a fascinating cross between a fanzine and roneographed 1980s struggle workbook.