Cultural dialogues for feminist creatives: Southern voices

In one of her seminal works, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre (1984), cultural theorist and feminist bell hooks initiated debates around what it means for women, for people of colour, for feminists, to read and to think from the margins as a space of power and as a claiming of identity. This issue of Agenda takes on hooks’ notion of speaking from the margin, and has asked all participating authors, cultural producers, contemporary cultural theorists, artists and arts practitioners of the geographical South, to take this space to articulate, write and speak about creative practices that advance debates around increasingly complex notions of intersectional identity (Collins, 1998: Crenshaw, 1989). This is supported by Raewyn Connell’s ideas of “Southern Theory” (2007) and what we, as the guest editors, identify as the necessity of pushing contemporary feminists of the South writing themselves.

Working with the ethnographic notion that theory comes from lived experiences and from the body as both corporeal and as imagined (see, for example, Holman-Jones, 2005; Clandin and Connelly, 1990), this issue of Agenda engages cultural feminist dialogues that allow for an interrogation and navigation of feminist creativity that opens comment on intersectional identities which, as Budgeon (2003:50) further offers, should be seen as “events that are continually in the process of becoming – as multiplicities that are never just found but are made and remade”.

Cultural identity, as Stuart Hall (1990) has argued, is not something which is innate, and which thus transcends time, history, location and context. It is, in fact, subject to a continuous interplay between culture and history and these, for Hall, are themselves always discourses that negotiate power relations. As Hall (1990:225) states: “Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by and position ourselves within the narratives of the past”. Also key to Hall, and germane to our issue, is the idea that identities are actually future-oriented, they are about becoming (Hall, 2017), emphasising the idea of creative reimagination as a key metatext of this special edition. In light of this, this focused edition of Agenda seeks to interrogate, evaluate, celebrate and reflect upon feminist contemporary cultural production of the geographical South. With reference to the axis of tradition and contemporality, this journal has offered feminist artists, cultural workers and authors, an opportunity to negotiate how art and cultural production is used (and can be used) to interrogate the growing intersectionalities of our dynamic and shifting identities; identity not being a thing to be acquired, but understood as a living and experiential state of being that is constantly in flux and negotiated.

This is evidenced in the writing of Makau Kitata who offers an interesting analysis of popular culture in Kenya by re-visiting the twerk dance form and how Kenyan female youth have claimed this street and club dance as a voice of resistance. Kitata argues that the twerk is a way of re-politicising the African female body, and decolonising it from a male, western influenced gaze. Continuing the negotiation of gender identities in flux, Noma Pakade interrogates women in stand-up comedy with a special case study of South Africa’s Celeste Ntuli. Placing Ntuli’s own brand of vernacular comedy as an exploration of Black African cultural reproduction, Pakade argues that stand-up comedy becomes (for Ntuli and other female comedians) a subversive counternarrative performed through self-reflective anecdotes. Lebogang Disele picks up on ideas of shifting identities by looking specifically at how theatre making provides an opportunity to foreground women’s lived experiences in the public space. Theatre, Disele argues, inserts women’s voices and stories into the public archive as a process of delegitimating patriarchal narratives of nationhood that have, and continue to, exclude women. Disele’s ideas are supported by her own autoethnographic account of her ‘performance-as-research’ adaptation of ‘Baleti’ in 2019. Further to this, Karabelo Lekalake Plaatjie offers reflections on a female curated theatre festival, Camagu Theatre and Dance Festival (based in the Free State, South Africa) and how its effort to make space for theatre and dance work that is done and told in indigenous languages is an essential progress of (feminist) decolonial practice.

Within the very large ambit of feminist cultural production in the South, this issue also gives voice to cultural and creative activists and practitioners whose creative voices are often marginalised. This issue set out to invite dialogue and critical interrogations from artists, scholars and various feminist practitioners/writers who live and work in the geographical South, to add to the growing lexicon of how art and art making (in all its myriad manifestations – fine art, digital art, film and filmmaking, live performance, poetry, writing, dance, music, applied theatre practices, museums and curation) contribute to increasingly complex notions of identity, belonging and citizenship.

Devaksha Moodley, tackles the cultural representation of Indian women within Hindu mythology and how this continues to impact on the Indian diaspora around the world, and specifically in South Africa. Starting from her embodied self, Moodley interrogates her own personal layered sense of identity, nation and citizenship as a Hindu South African Indian woman by reconsidering the myth of the goddess Sita. She negotiates her sense of shifting self with an in-depth analysis of the 2011 theatrical work by South Africa’s Yael Farber and her production of The Abduction of Sita into Darkness.

Refiloe Lepere and Mamaki Patience Mlangeni, framing their writing as a conversation, begin to ask what a Black Feminist theatre aesthetics might look like, and, significantly begin to imagine the cultural tools needed for the making of Black Feminist theatre. Their profound dialogical negotiation of race and gender, continues this issue of Agenda’s engagement with cultural production as a critical tool towards negotiating citizenship and ideas of belonging among marginalised voices, in this case domestic workers.

Opening up the concept of citizenship further, to find emancipatory practices for feminist creativity, is also the articulated need for this issue of Agenda to re-think the concept of ‘space’ from being only physical (land, housing etc.), to include political, ideological, social, and economic spaces as well. While spaces for feminist dialogue and indeed creative, feminist dialogue is limited, we believe this issue of Agenda questions and celebrates how art and cultural production have indeed found room for manoeuvre for liberatory practices and thinking.

Sara Matchett and Phoebe Mbasalaki, for example, journey into applied theatre and dance practice when they share the work they are doing with the Sex Workers’ Theatre Group in Cape Town. Offering workshops in the contemporary Japanese dance and theatre form of butoh, their article details how art/theatre/dance can be used as a methodological approach to investigate gender, cultures of (in)equality and wellbeing.

Precious Simba and Nuraan Davids tackle an analysis of Nandipha Mntambo’s wide corpus of sculptural art making. The writers argue that Mntambo gives materiality to cultural critic Homi Bhabha’s conceptions of the ‘Third Space’ by ushering the viewer into ‘the beyond’ – a site of the re-imagined, and a way of (re)theorising the now. Simba and Davids argue that Mntambo’s artwork (specifically her Cowhide Series, 2007, 2009, 2018) offers one of many liberatory practices for African Feminisms. Further feminist liberatory cultural dialogue is engaged in this issue with a beautiful and lyrical ‘perspective’ from Nigerian poet, Ijeoma Umebinyuo. She tells of the lineage of Igbo women in her life; and this is done as an act of memory to counter the ongoing erasure of black African women’s stories in history.

In titling this issue Cultural Dialogues we have been mindful that we curate a journal of writings and reflections from women that indeed set up dialogue; between academia and artist and cultural production, between praxis and theory, and between the gendered being and doing of the cultural domain in the geographical South. To this end we are particularly excited that what has emerged in the abstract submissions and consequent editorial process, is a plethora of deeply personal voices. At a time in history when the grand narratives of globalisation and capitalism are co-opting cultural spaces, this journal has deliberately supported single female artistic voices of resistance and power, which have used this space to write about their own cultural process of being art makers, which can be read as a return to the personal as a form of resistance, and thus to the political echoing of the second wave feminist slogan, "The Personal is Political".¹

In particular we draw your attention to the autoethnographic writing of Philisiwe Twijnstra who reflects on her role as a black female director in South Africa and her deeply personal re-imaging of the work of Athol Fugard for contemporary (feminist) actors and audience. Arts activist and indigenous musician, Thobekile Mbanda, offers a very moving account of her own journey as a young black artist-scholar. She relates how she confronted barriers in both academia and within patriarchal community gatekeeping in her educational and praxis journey to access archival knowledge around women’s indigenous music in South Africa. Sarita Ranchod has offered a visual essay of her hand sculpted work ‘Khadi’, that is an exploration of her Indian heritage as a South African. Her sculptural and reflective work is set against what she calls “slave herstories in the intimate space of home”. The essay is underpinned by various feminist scholars that have also engaged ‘herstories’ of slavery in the Cape and thus Ranchod offers a continuum on the ongoing Black Feminist conversation on slavery. And further, celebrating the power of authentic individual voices as a feminist strategy of speaking truth to power, Lliane Loots, Yvette Hutchison and Ongezwa Mbele interview three significant African women creatives: Tosin Jobi-Tume (Nigeria) – playwriting/theatre; Germaine Acogny (Senegal) − dance and choreography, and Buhlebezwe Siwani (South Africa) – fine art/performance art and photography. Each of these interviews allow the artists’ ‘voices’ – across ages and artistic disciplines − to be heard and honoured as the artists speak to what it means to be female and a creative on the African continent. Also from the African continent, and kicking open the often contested (and often closed) door that is feminist erotica written by LBTQ+ and non-binary African women and people, Sheena Gimase Magenya offers this issue a review of the collection Dark Juices and Afrodisiacs: Erotic Diaries Vol.1 (2019). Magenya raises the important question of how queer imaginations of sex and sensuality push back against normative ideas of Black and African women and queer people’s bodies.

We would also like to note that this journal was born out of a difficult and complex moment in Africa and the world’s history. The call for papers went out in the middle of 2019 and as proposed abstracts for papers started coming in at the beginning of 2020, we began to hear rumours of a city in China called Wuhan facing containment issues around a virus called ‘corona’. On the 26^th March 2020, South Africa (following on from many countries) instigated a very severe lockdown to begin to curtail the spread of COVID-19 and to essentially get hospitals ready for the infected and the dying. Our sense of ourselves and our word changed overnight. We were asked to isolate in our homes and to practise social distancing; both being very complex survival strategies in a country and a continent where poverty, high density living, access to clean water and viable sanitation, food security and indeed gender security are some of the everyday issues still faced by millions. In South Africa, our economy came to a halt and it became clear as the lockdown progressed, that the inequality and poverty gaps in our country were arguably going to kill more than COVID-19.² Instant job losses – especially for a large primarily black and female labour force – meant struggling families were without food and resources. Given that 55% of South Africans live below the poverty line,³ this meant (and still means) that COVID-19 offers not just an on-going health crisis, but a socio-economic and indeed, gendered, confrontation with survival and its relation to the politics of livelihoods. That this is profoundly gendered, we hope Agenda will take up in a specially focused issue in the future.

As guest editors, into this zeitgeist, we were faced with multiple intersections in curating, supporting, nurturing and growing this important issue of Agenda. Firstly, this issue was curated before the COVID-19 crisis and the abstracts that were selected and which eventually were included in this issue, were written around a cultural space that existed before the virus. As guest editors we felt that these significant Southern feminist voices held profound and important gender discussions of a myriad of cultural confluences, and thus held onto the focus originally started pre-COVID-19. As the editorial process progressed under lockdown, we could not, however, ignore the way in which lockdown and COVID-19 has intimately changed our arena of cultural praxis and research. Banning of gatherings, social distancing, self-isolations, no physical and body contact … all of these – while viable health strategies − have in fact annihilated the arts and cultural sector at this time. Any cultural and artistic practice that works in live performance or in embodied somatic practice has been shut down and, even with the cautious lifting of restrictions, will be the very last social sector to be opened up. The COVID-19 crisis continues to expose and heighten the unfair treatment of artists and various unregulated art and cultural sectors. In South Africa most artists, cultural performers, and theatre technical staff and backstage crew have received little or no government relief funding. In South Africa artists have taken to social media to form movements such as the Im4theArts to address these ongoing struggles.

This said, many artists have taken their work on-line and into digital platforms at this time, but very few are earning a living and an income from this. Artists are globally being lauded as offering free concerts, free dance works, free poetry readings … we have looked to the cultural sector to remind us of our connected humanity while in isolation – but very few artists are generating a livelihood. Thus, as guest editors − post the curation of this issue’s content − we approached two feminist writers who work in cultural production to add to our issue with a reflection on art, gender and COVID-19. South Africa’s Betty Govinden offers a moving argument for the need for us to consider artists as “essential works” at a time when access to art and cultural productions is so needed for our own gendered sense of mental health. Chicago (Illinois, USA) dance and theatre critic, Lauren Warnecke, makes a very passionate plea for this time of lockdown and social distancing to be a time of reflection on where arts should journey – and with a very insightful request to look at how issues of race and gender have been, and could be, situated anew.

They have re-iterated the central concerns that have emerged in our Agenda issue; that engaging and negotiating cultural and artist production is – profoundly – deeply personal and thus gendered political engagement in critical dialogue around identity. As artists and creatives grapple with complex issues surrounding race, ethnicity, gender, and political affiliation within the polarising circumstances of our age, the academic and artists/scholar reflections in this journal offer a way for the reader to come (hopefully) anew to the value of methodologies of (amongst other important arenas) praxis as research, and of the importance of deeply personal voices that offer feminist reflection – for this issue − on women’s creativity and women’s work in the creative and cultural sectors of the geographical South.⁴

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lliane Loots

LLIANE LOOTS holds the positions of Lecturer in the Drama and Performance Studies Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She has a Master’s degree in Gender Studies, and completed her Ph.D. in 2017 looking at contemporary dance histories on the African continent. As an artist/scholar her PhD research is framed within an ethnographic and autoethnographic paradigm with a focus on narrative as methodology. Loots founded her FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY as a professional dance company in 2003 when it grew out of a dance training programme that originally began in 1994. As the artistic director for FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY, she has won numerous choreographic awards and commissions and has travelled extensively in Europe, America and within the African continent with her dance work. Email: [email protected]

Ongezwa Mbele

ONGEZWA MBELE is an applied theatre practitioner, storyteller, and published poet. She is a lecturer at University of KwaZulu-Natal, Master’s graduate and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cape Town. Her professional interest is in using theatre techniques and storytelling to engage with diverse communities about their relevant matters. For her Master’s research, she received the “spirit ‘68” award. This award celebrates the spirit of the 1968 sit-in, which defended the appointment of Archie Mafaje to University of Cape Town academic staff against the apartheid government’s demand to withdraw the job offer on grounds of his race. She is currently researching the relationship between township youth culture and violence, and how applied theatre practices can be a tool of social and political healing. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 The slogan was first used by Radical Feminist Carol Hanish in 1969. See: http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html (accessed 5 June 2020).

2 While a lot has been written on this idea, the following offers an interesting analysis: https://socialistproject.ca/2020/05/pandemic-kills-the-poor-inequality-will-kill-more/ (accessed 5 June 2020).

3 http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=10334 (accessed 5 June 2020).

4 As guest editors we offer a heartfelt thanks to Lou Haysom for being our guide in this editorial process − she has reminded us of the meaning of generosity and of sisterhood.