Keywords public memory, Rhodes Must Fall, ethical demands, extractivist gaze, Black redaction
EN
This paper examines the ways in which the Rhodes Must Fall and subsequent Fees Must Fall movement (hereafter ‘Rhodes Must Fall’) produced images at the University of Cape Town (UCT) main campus over the 2015 - 2017 period in South Africa. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork during the period, selections of images, and subsequent artwork from my own visual archive concerning the renaming of Sarah Baartman Hall in 2019. Building on the work of Black, Indigenous, Queer/Trans* and African Studies, the paper draws on my doctoral research on decolonial imaging practices to explore redaction as a form of ecological expansion against extractivist modes of seeing, gazing and reading images.
Long abstract:
“What happens when we look at and listen to these and other Black girls across time? What is made in our encounters with them? This looking makes ethical demands on the viewer; demands to imagine otherwise; to reckon with the fact that the archive, too, is invention.” (Sharpe 2016: 51)
While Rhodes Must Fall has been studied as a social, political movement for decolonization of knowledge and educational approaches broadly, in this paper I examine its features as a performative, aesthetic movement which produced a set of images. Although the movement was largely set in the urban and built-environment, I bring out its ecological features, particularly around housing, sanitation/shit-management, urbanity/slum spatialities and labour conscriptions, which the movement sought to re-imagine through a re-constitutional imaging of the Black body at/as the centre of modern space. In this way, they produced a set of theoretical images, which I argue issued “ethical demands” (Sharpe 2016; Hartman 2008) upon the user (the viewer of the image; the member of the society; the custodian of institutions, and so on). In the paper I attempt to expand on this set of ethical demands, as ecological demands. My inquiry is organized around the questions: “What kinds of work did these images do? What was the style(s) in which they were produced? What ecological demands did/do they make?”
I focus on three kinds of artistic moments and images which bear counter-institutional theoretical impulses to bring out the ethical-ecological demands:
The first set are iconic and catalytic moments such as that of Rhodes Must Fall where Chumani Maxwele threw shit/excrement onto the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, and the ‘culminating moment’ where Sethembile Msezane performs Chapungu – The Day Rhodes Fell as the statue was removed. Other images of moments include the Shackville protests (wherein an informal tin-shack-and-toilet was built on the main-campus and inhabited) and the burning of UCT artworks/paintings.
The second set involves naked protests, and I take up three moments of ‘altering the naked body’: the UCT Trans-Collective’s moment of “Trans Capture” in a naked protest at an art-exhibition of Rhodes Must Fall in 2016, the covering/clothing up of a ‘nude sculpture’ of Sarah Baartman at UCT’s library in 2016, and a naked protest of Qondiswa James and Nsovo Shandlale in 2017 in which they were both dragged-away by state police into the back of vans, violently and obscenely.
As the third set I examine the politics of ‘images that were never supposed to be’ of a moment in the afterlife of Rhodes Must Fall, when façade building of UCT was being renamed, but it was done ‘off-the-record’. However, I documented this moment and created a digital visual artwork, so mine is the only footage and archive of images covering the de-lettering of the old ‘Jameson Memorial Hall’ as a hidden-historic moment by the institution, which they subsequently requested the footage off. I released the timelapse for public memory during covid-19 pandemic, surrounded by ‘other images of nature and story-telling’ related to Sarah Baartman in a ‘fake zoom meeting’.
Building on the Black and Indigenous studies work of Christina Sharpe (2016), Saidiya Hartman (2008), Sylvia Wynter (1983), Harry Garuba (2003), and Trans* Studies approaches to visuality (2017), I ask about the ethical demands that rise through these images and moments, which can form ecological impasses that force institutions to change the terms of reference that governs the imaged/represented. My analysis suggests that it was through key image-work that the success of Rhodes Must Fall negotiated with various institutions of power, without which the political and social ambit of the movement may not have been actualized. I suggest that it may be a ‘Fallist aesthetic motif’ to pose performances and images bearing significant weightings of “Black redaction” (Sharpe 2016: 117) as ethical imperatives/ecological impasses that insist upon us to imagine otherwise, to ask ‘What exceeds the hold?’ (Terrefe and Sharpe 2016), to make it possible for Black, Queer and other minoritised bodies to live more breathably in modern ecologies.
PT
Vikram Kershan Pancham Vikram trabalha como pesquisadorx PhD no Centro de Estudos Africanos da Universidade de Leiden como parte de um iniciativa de doutorado conjunto entre Leiden e o Centro de Estudos Africanos da Universidade de Edimburgo, que visa explorar os estudos urbanos de novas maneiras. Vikram ensinou e pesquisou durante vários anos em universidades sul-africanas, incluindo a South African BRICS Think Tank. Possui mestrado em filosofia em Estudos de Diversidade pela Universidade da Cidade do Cabo (2017), um bacharelado em artes pela Escola Sul-Africana de Cinema e Performance ao Vivo (AFDA, 2010), e um bacharelado em Ciência da Computação pela Universidade de KwaZulu-Natal (2005). Seu estudo explora histórias conectadas de práticas de imagem documental na produção Identidades/memórias políticas e incorporadas ‘Khoi’ e ‘indianas’ na África Austral a partir do Cabo Holandês no período RhodesMustFall. Dá atenção metodológica à produção de imagens nas práticas arquivísticas e museológicas na produção dessas categorias e as conecta às metodologias contra - e decoloniais - do contexto sociopolítico estudantil contemporâneo, queer e indígena, movimentos que procuraram trazer justiça epistêmica e corporificada (mais notavelmente, RhodesMustFall). A abordagem é interdisciplinar, baseada em histórias orais, métodos baseados em arte, trabalho de arquivo e apresenta novas conexões globais entre raça, casta e métodos documentais ("dados") pensando a África a partir do lugar. No centro de toda a dissertação está a discussão do debate entre “quem fala” e “o que está sendo dito”, e um tratamento metodológico fundamental do papel da experiência na formação tanto de quem e do que está envolvido em tais debates negociativos.
EN
Vikram Kershan Pancham Vikram works as a PhD Researcher at the African Studies Centre at Leiden University as part of a joint-doctorate initiative between Leiden and the Centre of African Studies at Edinburgh University, which aims to explore urban studies in new ways. Vikram has both taught and researched for a number of years at South Africa universities, including the South African BRICS Think Tank. They hold an MPhil Diversity Studies from the University of Cape Town (2017), a BA. and BA. Honours from the South African School of Motion Picture and Live Performance (AFDA, 2010), and a BSc. Computer Science from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (2005). Their study explores connected histories of documentational-imaging practices in producing ‘Khoi’ and ‘Indian’ political and embodied identities/memories in Southern Africa from the Cape Dutch to the RhodesMustFall period. It pays methodological attention to the production of images in archival and museum practices in producing these categories and connects them to counter- and decolonial- methodologies of the contemporary student, queer and indigenous socio-political movements which have sought to bring about epistemic and embodied justice (most notably, Rhodes Must Fall). The approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on oral histories, art-based methods, archival work, and poses new global connections across race, caste, and documentational ("data") methods by thinking Africa from place. Central throughout the dissertation is a discussion of the debate between ‘who speaks’ and ‘what is being said’, and a key methodological treatment of the role of experience in shaping both who and what is involved in such negotiative debates.