Sarah Nuttall
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3594063 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Sarah Nuttall |
| NOMBRES | Sarah |
| APELLIDO | Nuttall |
| FIRMA | NUTTALL S |
| AFILIACIONES | University of the Witwatersrand |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 47 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 516 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 44 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1991 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Conversation
On the publication of Your History with Me: The Films of Penny Siopis (2024), the editor Sarah Nuttall asks the artist and filmmaker Penny Siopis about aspects of her film practice and the conceptual rubrics she has long drawn from in her thinking
Publishing from the African South
Disarranging Narrative
Review of: Louise Green, Fragments from the History of Loss: The Nature Industry and the Postcolony. AnthropoScene: The SLSA Book Series. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. 7 b&w illus. x + 193 pp. $29.95 (pb
Planetary Hinterlands
Reading for Water
This introduction provides a wide-ranging framing for a set of essays that explores the topic “Reading for Water” in southern African literature. The introduction begins by demonstrating this method through snapshots of three seminal South African novels: Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006), A. C. Jordan’s The Wrath of the Ancestors (1980) and J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983). This is followed by a discussion of Sarah Nuttall’s ess…
On Pluviality
Pluviality, a term I have developed in relation to heavy rainfall and flooding – its timescapes and material and textual conditions – is the focus of this analysis of Namwali Serpell’s magisterial 2019 novel, The Old Drift. Located largely in Zambia, it is nevertheless a novel of the Zambezi watershed, and of hydrocolonial and southern African regional proportions. Encompassing both human and non-human narrators and protagonists, its centrepiece …
The university in techno-rational times
This concept note was produced for a symposium held under the banner of Critical University Studies – South Africa (CUS-SA) at the University of Johannesburg in August 2022. The opening plenary session was addressed by Profs. Premesh Lalu, Sarah Mosoetsa and Sarah Nuttall. A summary of a paper prepared for this symposium by Michael Peters on the university in techno-rational times was presented as part of the panel. The rest of the symposium feat…
The Time Sea
In conversation with Sarah Nuttall's earlier essay ‘Pluvial Time/Wet Form’ and drawing on Isabel Hofmeyr's concept of hydrocolonialism and the works of, among others, Julia Kristeva and Robert Macfarlane, this essay juxtaposes readings of J G Ballard's 1962 novel The Drowned World and Pitchaya Sudbanthad's 2019 novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain to offer a meditative analysis of sea, rivers, and rain as complex temporal and narrative forms. Moving from …
Introduction
Pluvial Time/Wet Form
This article explores representations of rain, and particularly intense, climate-change induced heavy rainfall and flooding, in three novels published in 2019—from India, Thailand, and Zambia, respectively. The term I use to denote this explorative terrain is taken from the earth sciences: the "pluvial" refers to rain that causes flooding, often in sea rivers and estuaries, and is a denotative field that has received little sustained attention in…
Afterword
At the University of Cape Town in 2016, student protesters burned works of art, torn down from their long-established positions on University walls. A large bonfire was made in front of the empty plinth that had held, until he was forcibly removed, the statue of Cecil John Rhodes. Amongst the paintings burned were portraits of patrons of the University, largely white, over the previous decades. Also burnt were works of black resistance art, “coll…
Robyn Autry. Desegregating the Past
In Desegregating the Past: The Public Life of Memory in the United States and South Africa, Robyn Autry argues that after the civil rights movement in the U.S. and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, citizens and governments have had to confront what she calls “the desegregation of the past.” The ability to create a shared past, she argues, relies on the capacity “to settle the historical record” (3). This in turn requires the production…
A Questionnaire on Monuments
A Questionnaire on Monuments" features 49 responses to questions formulated by Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty: "From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monuments and other markers involving histories of racial conflict. How do these charged situations shed light on the ethics of images in civil society today? Speaking generally or with specific examples in mind, please consider any o…
Selves in Question
Wide-ranging and engaging, Selves in Question considers the various ways in which auto/biographical accounts situate and question the self in contemporary southern Africa.The twenty-seven interviews presented here consider both the ontological status and the representation of the self. They remind us that the self is constantly under construction in webs of interlocution and that its status and representation are always in question. The contribut…
Secrecy's Softwares
In this paper, we reflect on the many deaths as well as the new lives of secrecy in our political and cultural age. We consider through five rubrics (statehood, security, finance, urbanity, and selfhood) the complicated and constantly shifting scales of relation between secrecy, transparency, conspiracy, and intimacy. We explore the paradox of publics and states asking for both transparency and security in an age of heightened suspicion. Moreover…
The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela was one of the most revered figures of our time. He committed himself to a compelling political cause, suffered a long prison sentence, and led his violent and divided country to a peaceful democratic transition. His legacy, however, is not uncontested: his decision to embark on an armed struggle in the 1960s, his solitary talks with apartheid officials in the 1980s, and the economic policies adopted during his presidency still spa…
Surface, Depth and the Autobiographical Act
In drawing together aspects of South African autobiographical and fictional works with images by contemporary artists, this essay pursues the question of how the notion of surface and depth—and the visible and the hidden—is explored and experimented with. Literature's investment in symptomatic readings is placed in conversation with strategies used by artists to represent skin surface and bodily interior. This enables me to revisit the question o…
Wound, Surface, Skin
The essay draws on four recent artworks which have been highly controversial or visible in South Africa since 2010, in order to explore concepts of wounding and political autopsy on the one hand, and of skin surface on the other. The discussion aims to elaborate on and render increasingly complex both the wounds that won't heal, and which erupt into public life through responses to artworks, and the healing over of a wound along a skin surface wh…
The humanities unplugged
Penny Siopis's scripted bodies and the limits of alterity
I would like to think about ‘scripted bodies’ in relation to Penny Siopis’s work, especially three of her recent painting series. For Siopis, painting is a powerful physical means to materialise an
An unrecoverable strangeness
In conversation with Penny Siopis SN: Penny, I think you will agree that we have had a long struggle in this country over the ethics of representing, speaking for and speaking to 'the Other'. One consequence of such debates seemed to be that, at least by the 1980s and 1990s, South African artists came increasingly to feel only comfortable imagining and speaking for themselves, and with turning to their own bodies as their subject. I wanted to ask…
Entanglement
Johannesburg
Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis is a pioneering effort to insert South Africa's largest city into urban theory, on its own terms. Johannesburg is Africa's premier metropolis. Yet theories of urbanization have cast it as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations and segregationist policies, and a city that responds to but does not contribute to modernity on the global scale. Complicating and contes…
Afropolis
On saturdays we sometimes drive across the city to buy fish. We stand at the counter and try to choose fresh fish in a land-locked city—pink salmon, gray sole, yellow kabeljou, silver red roman. Delicious fish, at least six hours from the nearest coast. After that, we're back in the car, on the road. If we take the highway around the city, we see the mine dumps, man-made hills of gold dust, yellow in the winter sun, relics of the old gold mines o…
A Politics of the Emergent
This essay attempts to track the changing shape of cultural studies in South Africa, drawing on both local and global reference points. In the first part of the essay, I account for the preoccupations of South African cultural studies from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. In the second part, I reflect on further shifts since 2000. Here I argue for a politics of the emergent, an increasing turn towards the negotiation of the possible, the drawing…
Writing the World from an African Metropolis
There is a manner about Johannesburg, it makes the impression of a metropolis
Stylizing the Self
Research Article| September 01 2004 Stylizing the Self: The Y Generation in Rosebank, Johannesburg Sarah Nuttall Sarah Nuttall Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2004) 16 (3): 430–452. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-16-3-430 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sarah Nuttall; Stylizing the Self: The Y Generation in Rosebank, Johannesburg. Public…
City forms and writing the 'now' in South Africa
This article considers ways of theorising the now, or the contemporary, in South Africa. It seeks a method of reading that offers unexpected and defamiliarising routes through the cultural archive. The article discusses notions of race, class and space both in a general and historical sense and, in the second part, as they relate to new literatures of the city now emerging in South Africa. By focusing on urban 'philosophies' of the street it exam…
Text, Theory, Space
Subjectivities of Whiteness
Cet article se concentre sur les constructions de la notion de blancheur dans les autobiographies Sud-Africaines et autres recits narratifs du soi. Nous essayons de comprendre comment, dans ce contexte, est attribue un sens a cette categorie de blancheur-raciale, sociale, politique et economique. Cet article se demarque des etudes sur la race blanche basees aux Etats Unis et au Royaume Uni, ainsi que des etudes africaines des colons. Notre but es…
Pluvial Time/Wet Form
This article explores representations of rain, and particularly intense, climate-change induced heavy rainfall and flooding, in three novels published in 2019—from India, Thailand, and Zambia, respectively. The term I use to denote this explorative terrain is taken from the earth sciences: the "pluvial" refers to rain that causes flooding, often in sea rivers and estuaries, and is a denotative field that has received little sustained attention in…
A Politics of the Emergent
This essay attempts to track the changing shape of cultural studies in South Africa, drawing on both local and global reference points. In the first part of the essay, I account for the preoccupations of South African cultural studies from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. In the second part, I reflect on further shifts since 2000. Here I argue for a politics of the emergent, an increasing turn towards the negotiation of the possible, the drawing…
Secrecy's Softwares
In this paper, we reflect on the many deaths as well as the new lives of secrecy in our political and cultural age. We consider through five rubrics (statehood, security, finance, urbanity, and selfhood) the complicated and constantly shifting scales of relation between secrecy, transparency, conspiracy, and intimacy. We explore the paradox of publics and states asking for both transparency and security in an age of heightened suspicion. Moreover…
Girl Bodies
Research Article| March 01 2004 Girl Bodies Sarah Nuttall Sarah Nuttall Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2004) 22 (1 (78)): 17–33. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-1_78-17 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Sarah Nuttall; Girl Bodies. Social Text 1 March 2004; 22 (1 (78)): 17–33. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-1_78-17 Download citation file: Zotero Reference…
A Questionnaire on Monuments
A Questionnaire on Monuments" features 49 responses to questions formulated by Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty: "From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monuments and other markers involving histories of racial conflict. How do these charged situations shed light on the ethics of images in civil society today? Speaking generally or with specific examples in mind, please consider any o…
The university in techno-rational times
This concept note was produced for a symposium held under the banner of Critical University Studies – South Africa (CUS-SA) at the University of Johannesburg in August 2022. The opening plenary session was addressed by Profs. Premesh Lalu, Sarah Mosoetsa and Sarah Nuttall. A summary of a paper prepared for this symposium by Michael Peters on the university in techno-rational times was presented as part of the panel. The rest of the symposium feat…
An unrecoverable strangeness
In conversation with Penny Siopis SN: Penny, I think you will agree that we have had a long struggle in this country over the ethics of representing, speaking for and speaking to 'the Other'. One consequence of such debates seemed to be that, at least by the 1980s and 1990s, South African artists came increasingly to feel only comfortable imagining and speaking for themselves, and with turning to their own bodies as their subject. I wanted to ask…
Planetary Hinterlands
Reading, Recognition and the Postcolonial
In this essay I discuss representations of reading in African literature and in particular the relationship between reading and recognition in these texts. Reading may often be about recognizing the self as known, identifiable or acknowledged by a text, as if for the first time. Certainly, recognition, or the lack of it, has dominated and generated much post-colonial theorizing. I discuss ways in which post-colonial critics have understood the te…
The Time Sea
In conversation with Sarah Nuttall's earlier essay ‘Pluvial Time/Wet Form’ and drawing on Isabel Hofmeyr's concept of hydrocolonialism and the works of, among others, Julia Kristeva and Robert Macfarlane, this essay juxtaposes readings of J G Ballard's 1962 novel The Drowned World and Pitchaya Sudbanthad's 2019 novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain to offer a meditative analysis of sea, rivers, and rain as complex temporal and narrative forms. Moving from …
Afterword
At the University of Cape Town in 2016, student protesters burned works of art, torn down from their long-established positions on University walls. A large bonfire was made in front of the empty plinth that had held, until he was forcibly removed, the statue of Cecil John Rhodes. Amongst the paintings burned were portraits of patrons of the University, largely white, over the previous decades. Also burnt were works of black resistance art, “coll…
Surface, Depth and the Autobiographical Act
In drawing together aspects of South African autobiographical and fictional works with images by contemporary artists, this essay pursues the question of how the notion of surface and depth—and the visible and the hidden—is explored and experimented with. Literature's investment in symptomatic readings is placed in conversation with strategies used by artists to represent skin surface and bodily interior. This enables me to revisit the question o…
The humanities unplugged
Penny Siopis's scripted bodies and the limits of alterity
I would like to think about ‘scripted bodies’ in relation to Penny Siopis’s work, especially three of her recent painting series. For Siopis, painting is a powerful physical means to materialise an
Self and text inYmagazine
In this essay I would like to pursue two ideas: first, that a new culture of ‘self-stylisation’ is emerging in South African middle class youth cultures and second, that cultural texts, including l
Books reviewed
Democracy in Botswana, edited by John Holm and Patrick Molutsi, (Macmillan Botswana Publishing Company (Pty) Ltd on behalf of the Botswana Society and the University of Botswana: Gaborone, 1989), 296pp. Available in the United States from the Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio. Randall Packard, White Plague, Black Labour: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa (University of California Press: Berkeley and Lo…
Reading J.M. Coetzee politically
David Attwell, J.M Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (University of California Press, Berkeley; David Philip, Cape Town), 1993
Reading in the lives and writing of black South African women
Black South African women writers in South Africa have generally written for foreign audiences and this raises interesting questions about black South African women readers, who are unlikely to be reading many of these texts. Taking this as a starting point, this article discusses interviews the author has done with black South African women readers about their reading lives. The interviews focus as much on reading as an ‘act’ in women's lives as…
Reading and recognition in three South African women's autobiographies
(1996). Reading and recognition in three South African women's autobiographies. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 1-18
Popular Stories of Apartheid
Text, Theory, Space
Re-imagining South African Cultural Studies
Truth, Reconciliation, and Amnesty in South Africa
Visual representations of reading in South African painting and photography
The book in Africa
(2001). The book in Africa. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 1-8
Reading, Recognition and the Postcolonial
In this essay I discuss representations of reading in African literature and in particular the relationship between reading and recognition in these texts. Reading may often be about recognizing the self as known, identifiable or acknowledged by a text, as if for the first time. Certainly, recognition, or the lack of it, has dominated and generated much post-colonial theorizing. I discuss ways in which post-colonial critics have understood the te…
Subjectivities of Whiteness
Cet article se concentre sur les constructions de la notion de blancheur dans les autobiographies Sud-Africaines et autres recits narratifs du soi. Nous essayons de comprendre comment, dans ce contexte, est attribue un sens a cette categorie de blancheur-raciale, sociale, politique et economique. Cet article se demarque des etudes sur la race blanche basees aux Etats Unis et au Royaume Uni, ainsi que des etudes africaines des colons. Notre but es…
Self and text inYmagazine
In this essay I would like to pursue two ideas: first, that a new culture of ‘self-stylisation’ is emerging in South African middle class youth cultures and second, that cultural texts, including l
City forms and writing the 'now' in South Africa
This article considers ways of theorising the now, or the contemporary, in South Africa. It seeks a method of reading that offers unexpected and defamiliarising routes through the cultural archive. The article discusses notions of race, class and space both in a general and historical sense and, in the second part, as they relate to new literatures of the city now emerging in South Africa. By focusing on urban 'philosophies' of the street it exam…
Writing Biography
Girl Bodies
Research Article| March 01 2004 Girl Bodies Sarah Nuttall Sarah Nuttall Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2004) 22 (1 (78)): 17–33. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-1_78-17 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Sarah Nuttall; Girl Bodies. Social Text 1 March 2004; 22 (1 (78)): 17–33. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-1_78-17 Download citation file: Zotero Reference…
Stylizing the Self
Research Article| September 01 2004 Stylizing the Self: The Y Generation in Rosebank, Johannesburg Sarah Nuttall Sarah Nuttall Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2004) 16 (3): 430–452. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-16-3-430 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sarah Nuttall; Stylizing the Self: The Y Generation in Rosebank, Johannesburg. Public…
Writing the World from an African Metropolis
There is a manner about Johannesburg, it makes the impression of a metropolis
Text, Theory, Space
Text, Theory, Space is a landmark in post-colonial criticism and theory. Focusing on two white settler societies, South Africa and Australia, the contributors investigate the meaning of 'the South' as an aesthetic, political, geographical and cultural space. Drawing upon a wide range of disciplines which include literature, history, urban and cultural geography, politics and anthropology, the contributors examine crucial issues including: * defin…
A Blasé Attitude
Research Article| January 01 2005 A Blasé Attitude: A Response to Michael Watts Sarah Nuttall; Sarah Nuttall Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Achille Mbembe Achille Mbembe Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2005) 17 (1): 193–202. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-17-1-193 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share F…
Dark Anatomies in Arthur Nortje's Poetry
Liberté de style. Cultures de consommation chez les jeunes de Johannesburg
Johannesburg est la quintessence de la métropole africaine. Une dimension essentielle de cette cité dans l'ère post-apartheid est « Y », une culture centrée sur la jeunesse (« youth ») qui embrasse la mode, la musique, la publicité. Cette culture est revendiquée au-delà des frontières de classe, d'instruction et de couleur, et rompt avec le passé par l'adoption d'une manière d'être sophistiquée. Inspirée un moment par la culture noire américaine …
A Politics of the Emergent
This essay attempts to track the changing shape of cultural studies in South Africa, drawing on both local and global reference points. In the first part of the essay, I account for the preoccupations of South African cultural studies from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. In the second part, I reflect on further shifts since 2000. Here I argue for a politics of the emergent, an increasing turn towards the negotiation of the possible, the drawing…
Afropolis
On saturdays we sometimes drive across the city to buy fish. We stand at the counter and try to choose fresh fish in a land-locked city—pink salmon, gray sole, yellow kabeljou, silver red roman. Delicious fish, at least six hours from the nearest coast. After that, we're back in the car, on the road. If we take the highway around the city, we see the mine dumps, man-made hills of gold dust, yellow in the winter sun, relics of the old gold mines o…
Johannesburg
Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis is a pioneering effort to insert South Africa's largest city into urban theory, on its own terms. Johannesburg is Africa's premier metropolis. Yet theories of urbanization have cast it as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations and segregationist policies, and a city that responds to but does not contribute to modernity on the global scale. Complicating and contes…
Art (23 obras) · South African History and Culture (22 obras) · Sociology (21 obras) · History (20 obras) · Political science (19 obras) · Law (16 obras) · African history and culture studies (14 obras) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (13 obras) · Philosophy (11 obras) · Politics (11 obras)