As the body must appear

Contemporary performances in post-Marikana South Africa

Datos Bibliográficos

ID14816618
AutoresSofle de Smet (Ghent University), Marieke Breyne (Ghent University)
Año2017
Volumen30
Número1
Páginas11-29
Fecha de publicación2017-02-26
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAVRUG-bulletin/Afrika Focus (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0772-0793 • E-ISSN: 0772-084X
EditorialWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1163/2031356x-03001003
OpenAlexW4248565103
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas9

On the 16th of August 2012 34 Lonmin miners lost their lives at Marikana in South Africa. Marikana bears witness to the socio-economic inequality and precarious work and living conditions in South Africa’s new globalized state. Two site-specific contemporary performances Mari and Kana (2015) and lqhiya Emnyama (The black cloth, 2015) voice this sad event in a remarkable way. In this article we critically reflect on the performances’ avenues of creating transformative encounters between performers, spectators and the performance sites in South African society. Both performances invoke for the audience members a remarkable awareness of the performance site as the spectator is obliged to navigate him- or herself in a politically induced public landscape in Cape Town’s Company Garden. We concur that Mari and Kana and Iqhiya Emnyama both elicit a profound reflection on the daily life struggle of mourning women against inhumanity and socioeconomic inequality in a neoliberal South Africa. Unsettling the dominant focus on resilient subjects, the omnipresence of women’s vulnerability in the two performances nurtures a rethinking process on structural justice. In doing so, we more closely analyse the performances’ intention to subvert the constructed category of ‘the mourning South African woman’ via multiple representations of mourning precedents as cultural elements. We conclude that both performances entail unique driving forces that question existing power systems that impact on SA and the problematic structural injustice at the heart of the massacre

Aesthetics · Dehumanization · Inequality · Injustice · Political science · Precarity · Sociology · Transformative learning · Witness · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Law · South African History and Culture