“Thinking Through, Talking Back: Creative Theorisation as Sites of Praxis-Theory” – A creative dialogue between Sharlene Khan, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Yvette Abrahams, Neelika Jayawardane and Betty Govinden

abstract

The panel “Thinking Through, Talking Back: Creative Theorisation as Site of Praxis-Theory”, held at the African Feminisms Colloquium at Rhodes University in July 2017, converses on the role of the imagination and creativities in black-African feminisms. Imagination is seen as underlying the important work of identifying everyday lived experiences as sites of knowledge production that has been central to black-African feminisms’ creative theorisation, whether in popular platforms or academic spheres. The panel discussion moves between abstract and personal conversations on the following black feminist epistemological strategies: black women as agents of knowledge; lived experience as “useful embodied interrogation” and “situated critiques”; creativities as sites from which black-African feminist critiques and theorisations emerge; and the role of imagination in our lives as a critical, political force.

keywords:

• Black-African feminisms
• creative theorisation
• South African visual arts
• imagination

ORCID

Sharlene Khan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4192-7465

Panelists

Yvette Abrahams

I have worked at the University of Cape Town and the University of the Western Cape. I have consulted for both government and various non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on issues relating to gender equality in policy and practice. I have published widely both locally and internationally on various topics related to gender equality, queer theory, as well as the history of First Nations South Africans. At the Commission for Gender Equality, I was head of their programmes on poverty, energy and climate change. I am currently nominated Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape, while I continue to consult for NGOs in the age of gender and climate change. My work at present focuses on food security, energy, and climate particularly indigenous economic plants (as they speak to economic development and climate resilience); and climate change economics. As part of that work, I realised that you can write a hundred papers and attend a thousand conferences, but nothing has the impact of actually practicing what you preach. So now I make organic carbon neutral soaps and oils, based on my many years of research and growing indigenous plants. I reckon one bar of soap does more to convince people of the need to act to end climate change than all my words.

Pumla Dineo Gqola

Pumla Dineo Gqola is a feminist author and Dean of Research at Fort Hare University. She works on African feminist imagination, slave memory, Black Consciousness literature, postcolonial literatures and cultures, post-apartheid public culture and feminist sexualities. She holds MA degrees from the Universities of Cape Town and Warwick, and a PhD from the University of Munich. Her books are: What is slavery to me? Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-apartheid South Africa (2010), A Renegade Called Simphiwe (2013), the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction winner for 2016, Rape: A South African Nightmare (2015) and Reflecting Rogue: Inside the Mind of a Feminist (2017).

Devarakshanam (Betty) Govinden

Betty Govinden is a literary and educational scholar and poet. She is the author of the award-winning book ‘Sister Outsiders’: Representation of Identity and Difference in Selected South African Indian Women’s Writings (Unisa Press, 2008) and A Time of Memory: Reflections on South African Writing (Solo Collective, 2008).

Manori Neelika Jayawardane

M Neelika Jayawardane is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York-Oswego, and an Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). She is a recipient of the 2017 Creative Capital Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for a book project on the Afrapix photographers’ agency. She was a founding member of the online magazine, Africa is a Country, where she was Senior Editor and contributor from 2010– 2016. Among published texts, Jayawardane recently contributed the introductory essay for the South Africa pavilion's 57th Venice Biennale catalogue, and essays for The Walther Collection’s publication (2017) and other artists’ catalogues. Her writing is featured in Al Jazeera English, Transition, Aperture, Contemporary Art South Africa, Contemporary Practices: Visual Art from the Middle East, Even Magazine, and Research in African Literatures.

Notes

1 This work was supported by the South African National Research Foundation Thutuka Grant for the project Art on our Mind [TTK160601167174]. Post-graduate student members in 2017 were funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Inclusive Professoriate Fellowship at Rhodes University. The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of the Art on our Mind team in the recording of this dialogue and Hayley Axford in the transcription of the full public talk.

2 This discussion takes for granted black/African/postcolonial feminist perspectives as part of contemporary theoretical discourse that theorises – to paraphrase Nigerian feminist Molara Ogundipe – from the “epicentres of African women’s agency”. There are diverse strains of these thoughts as they respond to geo-specific particularities. The guests were selected on the basis of their sustained scholarship on (South) African/black/postcolonial/womanist perspectives and creativities, which have been influential to the field of South African visual arts and Khan’s understanding of an “art history” that is under contest by the many South African women creatives-of-colour who have been displaced from this authorised body of knowledge. Gqola, Abrahams, Govinden and Desiree Lewis (not available for this panel), have made critical interventions since the 2000s – not least through this Agenda journal – in readings and understandings of women-of-colour creatives. Thus, as a basis for the project Art on our Mind, this group of scholars was asked a series of questions around contemporary black-African feminisms and creative theorisation.

3 Grammar, repetition, etc., have only been minimally corrected.

4 Art on our Mind website: https://artonourmind.org.za; African Feminisms Rhodes University (Afems) website: https://afems2018.wixsite.com/afemsconference

5 This spelling of Bartmann’s name follows Abrahams’ usage in her text “Colonialism, dysfunction and disjuncture: Sarah Bartmann's resistance (Remix)” (2003).

6 Love in the Midst of Climate Change, documentary project directed by Poet on Watch and executive produced by Yvette Abrahams.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sharlene Khan

SHARLENE KHAN is a South African visual artist and scholar. Khan uses masquerading as a decolonising strategy to interrogate the intersectionality of race, gender and class of her South African heritage, and the socio-political realities of a post-apartheid, post-colonial society. She holds a PhD in Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at Rhodes University. She runs the NRF-Rhodes University funded visual arts project Art on our Mind, a bi-weekly black feminist reading group, and is co-convener of the Rhodes University African Feminisms (Afems) Conference. Email: [email protected]