Anti-Apartheid Cultures

Catalog description

In this course, we will study a broad set of texts from and about South Africa to explore how the literary, visual, and performative arts crafted and cultivated resistance to apartheid and the highly racialized structures that continue within the polity of the “rainbow nation.” By exploring a collage of South African fiction, film, photography, performing arts, and activist modes produced from roughly 1960 to the present, students will examine how artists and activists responded to systems of racial capitalism with expressive and embodied practices. As we analyze how race, gender, sexuality, and place/space were central to making of apartheid cultures, we will investigate how South African artists, performers, writers, and activists sought to document the violence of everyday life and/or attempt(ed) to reimagine nation and citizenship beyond the domains of coloniality.