Gary Minkley

Leslie Witz

Ciraj Rassool

An engrossing look at how history has been produced, contested, and unsettled in South Africa from Mandela's release to 2010.

Making South African Public Pasts

Unsettled History

Patricia Hayes

Wendy Woodward

Most of the 13 essays presented here were originally presented at the January 1997 "Gender and Colonialism" conference held at the U. of Western Cape (South Africa). Presented by Woodward (English and cultural studies, U. of the Western Cape), Hayes (history, U. of the Western Cape), and Minkley (history, U. of the Western Cape), the contributions address both colonial and postcolonial issues of identity in Southern Africa from a variety of perspectives within contemporary critical and feminist theories. Topics include slave women's rhetoric and the Eastern Cape courts, ideologies of domesticity and the British construction of the "primitive," Dutch- Afrikaans women's entry into the public sphere in the Cape Colony, male nursing in the mines of 20th-century South Africa, and "gender- blending" and "code-switching" in the South African novel. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa

Deep Histories

Going beyond photography as an isolated medium to engage larger questions and interlocking forms of expression and historical analysis, Ambivalent gathers a new generation of scholars based on the continent to offer an expansive frame for thinking about questions of photography and visibility in Africa. The volume presents African relationships with photography—and with visibility more generally—in ways that engage and disrupt the easy categories and genres that have characterized the field to date. Contributors pose new questions concerning the instability of the identity photograph in South Africa; ethnographic photographs as potential history; humanitarian discourse from the perspective of photographic survivors of atrocity photojournalism; the nuanced passage from studio to screen in postcolonial digital portraiture; and the burgeoning visual activism in West Africa. As the contributors show, photography is itself a historical subject: it involves arrangement, financing, posture, positioning, and other kinds of work that are otherwise invisible. By moving us outside the frame of the photograph itself, by refusing to accept the photograph as the last word, this book makes photography an engaging and important subject of historical investigation. Ambivalent‘s contributors bring photography into conversation with orality, travel writing, ritual, psychoanalysis, and politics, with new approaches to questions of race, time, and postcolonial and decolonial histories. Contributors: George Emeka Agbo, Isabelle de Rezende, Jung Ran Forte, Ingrid Masondo, Phindi Mnyaka, Okechukwu Nwafor, Vilho Shigwedha, Napandulwe Shiweda, Drew Thompson

Gary Minkley

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