Keyan Tomaselli
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 105040 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Keyan Tomaselli |
| NOMBRES | Keyan |
| APELLIDO | Tomaselli |
| FIRMA | TOMASELLI K |
| AFILIACIONES | University of KwaZulu-Natal |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2995-0726 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 191 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 369 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 190 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1980 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Political economy, identity, cultural, and media studies in South Africa
Curating Remembrance in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Until his death, South Africa’s Sam Nzima was known for his iconic photograph of the 1976 Soweto Uprising on 16 June. This photo, capturing the fatality of the 13-year-old Zolile Hector Pieterson, heralded the representational turning point in the global community’s commitment to opposing apartheid. While Nzima was never memorialized as an anti-apartheid hero, the subject of his photograph is honored with the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum …
Being Sceptical
This is a manifesto composed by Critical Arts editors on the matter of book reviews. The high volume of submissions has necessitated this guide. The patterns that we are detecting suggest: (a) an u...
African cinemas and the global stage
This is a short introduction to two short essays, the first one authored by an academic reproduced from The Conversation that discusses Netflix and cultural appropriation. The second essay was specifically commissioned from a practicing producer as response to the first essay. The objective is to generate a debate between scholars and practitioners on the issue of representation, how these are arrived at, and to assess assumptions about Africans …
San, Sovereignty and the Unpredictability of Messy Fieldwork
Multiphrenic Identities and Cultural Theory in Post-Apartheid Literary Adaptations
Cultural Studies with Communities in South Africa
This article theorizes the role of local and indigenous culture in its intersection with development initiatives. It argues that Communication for Development and Social Change (CDSC), through a cultural studies framework, strengthens the potentiality of democratization and participation within community-based development and social change settings. We advocate that applied cultural studies can facilitate agency (through voice and self-representa…
Diasporic Identity, Intellectual Nomadism and its African Theorists
A dynamic framework for debating diasporic African identity draws on Ntongela Masilela's work on the New African Movement. Linking the global to the local, the argument connects theorists who have applied similar dialectical arguments in other expressive sites as they try to make sense of their own cultural origins and subsequent diasporic nomadism. Drawing on the nomadic ideas of Teshome Gabriel, other travelling scholars engaged in pluriversal …
Ntongela Masilela and the New African Movement
This article examines the intellectual legacy left by the late literary historian, the well-travelled Ntongela Masilela, a hitherto under-studied cultural and literary scholar whose analytical significance skyrocketed soon after his death in 2020. Partly a biography, the analysis draws on, and assesses, the vast unpublished online archive he wrote and curated, in relation to his published works, lectures and the paradigmatic influences which he e…
Towards a Theory of Orality in African Cinema
The direct importation into Africa of methods, theories, ideas, and psychoanalytical assumptions developed in First World and applied to African cinema is not without epistemological problems. Marxist, positivist, or liberal-humanist approaches, among others, do not automatically apply in attempts to understand African films and audiences. The call on mainly Lacanian psychoanalysis as an interpretive framework assumes that African viewers have es…
Interview with Anna-Marie Jansen van Vuuren on her experience as an organizer of the Tshwane University of Technology (Tigritudes) Film Festival
Journal of African Cinemas interviewed Professor Anna-Marie Jansen van Vuuren about her experience of organizing the Tigritudes and TUT Film Festival that took place as part of the 2023 Tshwane University of Technology’s Annual Arts Festival
A word on Ken Harrow
Kenneth Harrow, a distinguished scholar of African cinemas, was known to many through his exemplary works. This is, without doubt, a highly merited recognition given his prolific efforts and great labour in popularizing the study of African cinemas and spearheading its theoretical breakthroughs. I, however, have known him beyond his scholarly profile, having enjoyed a lengthy acquaintance at personal and professional levels. I have been in contac…
Rapid Communication
Cultural Studies in Interhemispherical Perspective. China, Africa, Asia and Australasia
Thematic assessment is offered with regard to Critical Arts's incorporation into various Chinese trajectories and networks of cultural and media studies. The predominance of discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and comparative empirical studies of Western and Chinese media is addressed for the period 2016–2023, as is the recent location of Critical Arts within the global discourse analysis publishing sector, that is mapped in Wang and Sun (202…
Comic Con Africa (2022). Cosplaying Identities
Media, interactive audiences, and the virtual. Next generation narratives
New Techno Humanities targets the creative aspect of the humanities still to be fully recognized in the established classification and methodology of disciplines. This article embraces the practical extension of the latest scientific and technological methods that are starting to emerge within what is increasingly being called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. As a launching pad for this special edition of this new journal, our article maps a for…
Serving Africa
This essay introduces this number, reflects on the future of African cinemas and the nature of the ‘de-colonial’ relation to global industries
Memoir and media
Anant Singh is South Africa’s most prolific film producer. The publication of his memoirs in 2021 occasioned an assessment of this genre in relation to published scholarly research and some other biographies and autobiographies written by contemporary South African filmmakers, radio and television broadcasters. This article mobilizes the Singh story as a framing window through which to make connections with other such works, including studies on …
Dan Georgakas
Preview this fast track article: Dan Georgakas: Obituary, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/10.1386/jac_00073_7/JAC_FT_Obi_Tomaselli-1.gif
The Alternative Press in South Africa
Developments in the conventional and presses, 1980-1989, P.E. Louw, K. Tomaselli an historial overview of the black press, S. Johnson moderation and militancy in African nationalist newspapers during the 1920s, L. Switzer the struggle for legitimacy - state pressures on the media 1950-1991, P.E. Louw, K. Tomaselli from newsroom to the community - struggle in black journalism, L. Raubenheimer popularize, organize, educate and mobilize - culture an…
Drawn to See
In 1977 I co-edited a new media anthology, Media and Change [McGraw-Hill], in which I penned the phrase, “The illiterate of the future will not be those who cannot read, but those who cannot see.”
Where the Roads all End
The Complete Sol Worth
Filming Real People
Far too much film theory is developed by theorists, and far too little of it is written by practitioners. This is the nexus from which visual anthropology has developed.Visual anthopologists are a
Anthropology and apartheid
Where Is the Theory in Visual Anthropology
Is there a real theoretical underpinning for visual anthropology? Or are we just borrowing theoretical concepts, as needed, from other disciplines? Here eight visual anthropologists offer their thoughts on this fundamental question succinctly
Narrating the Crisis
Ownership and control in the South African print media
This study attempts to offer a political economic framework through which to understand the complexity of media industry restructuring in terms of processes unleashed by the demise of apartheid between 1990 and early 1997. The article offers: analysis of the historical relations between apartheid language and the media discourses of opposing ideologies; brief discussion of oppositional discourses from black movements in relation to struggles betw…
Our Culture’ vs ‘Foreign Culture’
This article discusses debates on the freedom of the press in Africa with regard to professionalism, essentialism and citizenship. The article engages Francis Kasoma’s arguments for an ethics which calls on the ancestors for guidance. It critiques the insistence by many African media academics that the media must exhibit ‘African values’, and it examines the role of authority in determining the way that the media are understood by communication s…
Alter-egos
A periodised case study is offered of a number of engagements undertaken by the Centre for Communication, Media and Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, between 1985 and 2012, in facilitating resistance, policy, development and analysis. How cultural and media studies travelled to South Africa and how the centre negotiated the intersections between the humanities and social sciences, health and the physical sciences, is examined in terms…
The Cinema of Apartheid
Doing cultural studies
Literacy in the context of cultural studies (CS) in Africa concerns less the ability to read and write than the quotidian practice of doing. This intervention argues that CS as taught and as its texts are imagined, in general terms, is the source of a continuing institutionalized limitation. CS for Africans is first and foremost a lived practice, before it is a discipline or ready-for-study academic subject. We discuss the notion of lived CS to c…
Blue Is Hot, Red Is Cold
This article is a theorized diary of three field trips to a remote part of South ern Africa. It develops a reflexive argument for a reverse cultural studies in discussing problems in fieldwork, globalization, academic access, and research accountability. Academy-bound scholarship claiming to be study ing the popular is questioned. The narrative aims to forge a space in the global publications industry for kinds of cultural studies done in Africa,…
Video, realism and class struggle
Internationalising Media Studies
A discussion of the history of journalism and mass communication studies, in relation to its alter ego, media studies, provides the backdrop to an analysis of the role played by the South African Communication Association (SACOMM) during the 1980s and after apartheid, up to 2006. The central argument is that SACOMM was criss-crossed by a particular kind of internal family argument in which specific contradictions were being negotiated: (1) pro-ap…
Psychospiritual ecoscience
The relation between knowledge and the visual, on the one hand, and knowledge about peoples on the other, is a prime concern in visual anthropology. The impact of the visual on the everyday life of the Ju/'hoansi is my concern here. This paper is offered in two parts: this article and the one which follows. The results of a field‐trip in July 1996 to Otjozondjupa (previously known as Bush‐manland) in Namibia are discussed in terms of the question…
Mandela, MTV, Television and apartheid
Broadcasting in South Africa
Nollywood production, distribution and reception
This article outlines and examines the genesis of a pan-African research project on Nollywood that sought to widen current research on the topic to include distribution, exhibition and reception in a variety of African regions, including Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe. ‘South-North Conversations’ was devised by the overarching project to frame analysis. The role of key African satellite distributor, MultiChoice, is brief…
Repositioning African media studies
This article engages with contemporary debates on the state of media studies in Africa. It comments on the dialectic between metropolitan centres of knowledge production and dependent peripheries. A brief discussion of Fordism and post-Fordism and their implications for Africa follows. Nation-building discourses are opposed to hyper-real notions of meaning, calling on Africans to transcend their idealized understanding of culture, African values …
Dit is Die here Se Asem
This article continues Tomaselli's Kalahari story on issues of representation, research methodology, and reverse cultural studies. He discusses relationships between observers and observed in terms of dependency, inclusions/exclusions, and borders and Othering. Continuing with an auto-ethnography, Tomaselli reflexively analyzes tensions and contradictions set in motion by the writing of this article within both the San communities themselves and …
Encounters in the Kalahari
Visualizing Different Kinds of Writing
Studies of indigeneity can prove particularly important if they focus on how history writes and produces the “indigenous” in multiple ways and at multiple sites. Modes and styles of writing appropriate for communicating the multiple effects and the complex and contradictory forces and assumptions at work in the study of indigeneity are yet to be fully answered. The anthology, Writing in the San/d: Auto-ethnographic Explorations amongst Indigenous…
Special Issue
Paradigms in South African cinema research
The history of theoretical approaches about South African cinema is discussed from the turn of the twentieth century period of the New Africa Movement, through various other theoretical moments, up to the early 1990s. These include conservative cultural theory, liberal humanism, workerist, Althusserian and Gramscian Marxisms. The discussion examines theoretical interventions either promoting or opposing modernity in the work of Thelma Gutsche, Ha…
Restructuring the industry
Contemporary film policy generally focuses on questions concerning content, representation, and profitability. Content in this case covers narrative, documentary, educational and other kinds of film and television. Representation is somewhat stickier, as if debates about content are not themselves subject to more than their fair share of controversy. What or who is represented in the content? Does this representation do justice or injustice to so…
Journalism education
Journalism is more than an ensemble of newsgathering and writing techniques. It is, firstly, a way of viewing and writing about the social world for the public benefit. Similarly, journalism is a means of fomenting conversations in the public domain about events and issues of immediate public interest. While much of journalism training concerns the techniques of text production, too little attention is given to educating students in the ontology …
Contradictory Subjectivity
Most of the author's writing and film/video making until the mid-1990s was couched within an antiapartheid, explicitly Marxist framework. But, like all individuals, he has his contradictions. These are derived from his class, eth nic, and racial determinations. This reflexive article negotiates the author's experiences during the apartheid and postapartheid eras, from modernism to postmodernism. This chapter examines some of these influences on h…
Recovering praxis
Despite the contribution by Handel Wright (1998) in the first issue of this Journal, seminal work within Africa and other non- Western countries remains largely unnamed by the corporatizing enterprise that cultural studies is becoming in the Western North. The push to publish, linked as it is to markets, money and power, has displaced praxis, with its threats of danger, detention and death. Cultural studies has largely affiliated itself with publ…
Orality, rhythmography and visual representation
This paper explores the epistemological problems which occur in analysis of orality through visual images. Narrow disciplinary orientations are argued to impede understanding of what the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce calls the final interpretant, that which would be agreed by the scholarly community to be the ultimate opinion. When filmmakers or scholars take the imaging medium for granted they fail to “see” the visual codes which structure …
Ideology and Censorship in South African Film
Follow That Rainbow
Class and Ideology
Until rece~tly, c~iticism of South African cinema has been couched predominantly 1 ~ aesthetlc or llterary terms. Local offerings are generally compared with f11m ema~ating from the commercial circuits of Europe and Hollywood. Consequ~ ently, l~ttle attem~t has been made to study it in terms of indigenous images, 1ts own lnner dynamlcs or as an expression of South African social history. More typically, it continues to be regarded as disreputable…
View Two
Ideology/Culture/Hegemony and Mass Media in South Africa
The South African press has been the subject of numerous books and art icles in recent years, couched within a wide range of paradigms (1). In contrast, studies of broadcasting are less p lent i fu l and much more frag-mented (2). Journalism has been taught at the University of South Africa and four Afrikaans language universit ies, the f i r s t of which launched a course in 1960, and at only one English language university since 1970. Until rec…
The Semiotics of Alternative Theatre in South Africa
Although s t i l l regarded with considerable suspicion, the academic study of black South African theatre has recently become a respectable activity in some South African universities. This recognition, however, is tempered by a fear that classical 'civi l izing ' influences on humankind wil l be invaded and vitiated by an inevitable mixing of 'art1 with 'pol i t ies '. The more traditional approach which over-emphasises textual analysis comfort…
How to Set Your House in Order’
The Economics of Racism
Popular Memory and the Voortrekker Films
The South African political discourse of the 1980s roots itself in absolutes -facts, objectiveness and the 'hard, tangible and exploitable images of reality'-but paradoxically, it also implies degree o& fact: fact, true facts and hard facts. This semantic contradiction hides a welter of political machination as language and other forms of semiotic sign locate the site of struggle between dominant and opposing ideologies
Race, class and the South African progressive press
A contested terrain
Culture’ as Theatre-Going, ‘Arts’ as Buildings
(1987). ‘CULTURE’ AS THEATRE-GOING, ‘ARTS’ AS BUILDINGS: A CRITIQUE OF ‘DIFFERENCE’ IN A SOUTH AFRICAN PROPAGANDA FILM. South African Theatre Journal: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 63-75
Technology, technique and society
At a conference on technological change, I get a little unsettled to talk about technology in isolation of its use and application.
Community and Class Struggle
This article was written in collaboration with P. Eric Louw, Ansuya Chetty and students of the CCSU. It reflects many points raised during the popular writing workshop organized by the Centre for Adult and Continuing Education of the University of Western Cape. The workshop was part of the 1986 Association for Sociology in Southern Africa Conference
Moves Toward the Registration of South African Journalists
During 1988 the South African government proposed a scheme for the registration of news agencies and journalists. Although public pressure and opposition from the Press resulted in the Government withdrawing its demand that all news agencies register by end of June, the history of calls for registration goes back to 1950. This paper offers a chronological overview of government controls on the Press and journalists from a critical perspective
Annoying Anthropologists
Freedom Square/ The Bride Market oflmilchil & Morocco, Body and Soul
Soviet media in the age of glasnost
Video, realism and class struggle
Whatever happened to struggle part 2
Review: Seventh International Conference on Culture and Communication, Philadelphia, 1989
Maids and Madams-Apartheid and Servants
Maids and Madams—Apartheid and Servants 1985. film by Mira Hamermesh. 52 minutes, color. Purchase $1,200 (16mm), $195 (video); rental $150l $75 from Filmmakers Library, 124 East 40th St., New York, NY 10016. (212)808–4980
The Cinema of Apartheid
Popular Communication in South Africa
(1991). Popular Communication in South Africa: “Mapantsula” and its Context of Struggle. South African Theatre Journal: Vol. 5, South African Film, pp. 46-60
Broadcasting in South Africa
Narrating the Crisis
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