Liz Gunner
Biographic Data
| ID | 106537 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Liz Gunner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Liz |
| FAMILY NAME | Gunner |
| SIGNATURE | GUNNER L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Johannesburg |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 106 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Reflections on Voice: Women, Poetry, and Power—Xhosa and Zulu Considerations
Colonialism and a male-dominated print culture in the early twentieth century have occluded a vibrant tradition of Xhosa and Zulu women’s poetry and song. Hidden behind a focus on male practitioners of praise poetry are women’s everyday genres, like songs of marriage and initiation that are archivally present in oral recordings, interviews, and fieldwork notes. These domestic performances have a profound social weight and are a vital political ac…
Lewis Nkosi and the Politics of Voice
Beyond the Static: Women, Voice and Radio Zulu in the 1970s and 1980s
The article argues that radio – in particular, the African-language station initially known as Radio Bantu, and from 1973 as Radio Zulu – became a space that gave women access to a powerful acoustic domain of the airwaves that extended their “voices” in both the private and public spheres. Versatile, multi-operational broadcasters such as Winnie Mahlangu challenged any singular or normative understanding of roles that women could inhabit. They be…
Daniel Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa
Exile: Bloke Modisane and the BBC, 1959–87
Conclusion: Dances of power
Radio Soundings: South Africa and the Black Modern
Zulu Radio in South Africa is one of the most far-reaching and influential media in the region, currently attracting around 6.67 million listeners daily. While the public and political role of radio is well-established, what is less understood is how it has shaped culture by allowing listeners to negotiate modern identities and fast-changing lifestyles. Liz Gunner explores how understandings of the self, family, and social roles were shaped throu…
Ecologies of Orality
With Respect to Zulu: Revisiting ukuHlonipha
Hlonipho is a form of respectful behavior, widespread in southern Africa. Its linguistic manifestation has often been interpreted as a "traditional" verbal taboo, whereby married women must avoid uttering the father-in-law's name. The practice of (uku)hlonipha is not only verbal, however. Its fundamentally somatic meaning—covering, avoiding, and suppressing affect—applies broadly to bodily comportment, clothing, and the physical activity of speak…
Afterword: Thick Time, Heavy Time
The paper sums up and comments on the contributions of the Special Issue edited by Katrien Pype and Richard Vokes. The theme of the papers was the impact of new media and radio on life styles and life worlds in Africa with a focus on regions of postcolonial Africa: Congo DRC
The man from where? Ukhozi FM and new identities on radio in South Africa
The article focuses on the public radio station Ukhozi FM, part of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and operating through the medium of isiZulu. It argues that Ukhozi FM has radically changed in the ‘new dispensation’ of post-1990 South Africa, yet has maintained the creative and resistant identity forged in the apartheid years under the name Radio Zulu. Through an examination of selected programmes and announcers, in particular …
Dissonances from the Global South: Song, Art and Performance in Cultures of Struggle
Taking up the important work of other theorists of performance, social memory and the political in Africa and Latin America we restate the need for a re-configured understanding of how performance – and in particular forms of expressive art – impinges on the practice of politics and is in fact embedded within it. Memory as held in the body can be both replayed within, and can re-form, the present. Thus, history overlays but is also redrawn throug…
Violence, the occult and the everyday: A Radio Zulu drama of the 1980s
This article explores how the medium of radio through the genre of radio drama enables the exploration of issues of power and violence in a way that is both public and intensely private. It argues that through the airing of a topic as feared, as secret and yet as pervasively present – or potentially so – as the supernatural and the occult, radio drama can open up for debate areas of modern life around which there is often official silence. The fo…
Mapping 'performance and social meaning in Africa
Song, identity and the state: Julius Malema'sDubul' ibhunusong as catalyst
This article tracks the entry of Julius Malema and his package of skills as a political persona into the South African public domain. It focuses on his use of song, particularly the Dubul' ibhunu song/chant within the public space and links it to a long tradition of political song. It sets this within a wider context of the aesthetics of power in the postcolony and within older epistemes of performance, language and power. It also discusses the m…
Soft Masculinities,Isicathamiyaand Radio
The paper argues that, beyond the violent masculinities that mark much of the South African social order, there exist several alternative strands that require study, because they show the range of debate on manhood and shifts in centres of gender equity. The role of song and performance in expressing and debating different kinds of masculinity is crucial. This paper explores the genre isicathamiya as a site of ‘soft’ masculinity. The study sets t…
Reconfiguring diaspora: Africa on the rise and the radio voices of Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane
The article focuses on radio as cultural mediator and maker. It discusses a particular moment in the early 1960s when Africa seemed to those closely involved in its cultural and political affairs to be ‘on the rise’. It focuses on the role of Lewis Nkosi, and partly, too, that of Bloke Modisane, in the ‘Africa Abroad’ radio programme run from the London‐based Transcription Centre in the early 1960s. It argues that the programmes reveal a moment o…
Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature
A Problem of Presence: Beyond scripture in an African Church, by Matthew Engelke
This powerful study of the Friday apostolics of the Masowe Church in Zimbabwe takes work on African Christianity in new directions. It does so primarily through its focus on the semiotics of sound, language, and song as part of the presence of God. For me, it is the demonstration of the materiality of language that most marks this book's originality and boldness. Engelke worries about language – the Shona language. He takes language as a gateway …
Burying Lucky Dube1
This article focuses on the murder of the reggae icon Lucky Dube in late 2007 and on the events that followed until his burial a few days later. The article tries to assess why his music carried such power on the African continent and globally – as the instant digital responses to his death made clear. Did he sing to the subalterns of the world across and beyond national boundaries in a tradition that set the anger of reggae within the ‘phatic an…
Jacob Zuma, the social body and the unruly power of song
Journal Article Jacob Zuma, the social body and the unruly power of song Get access Liz Gunner Liz Gunner Liz Gunner ([email protected]) is Professorial Research Associate at WISER (The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research), University of the Witwatersrand. She is also a Fellow (2008) at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The article was written at NIAS and I am most grateful f…
City textualities: Isicathamiya,reciprocities and Voices From the Streets
This paper explores the entwining of city and song with a focus on the genre of isicathamiya in the city of Pietermaritzburg. It argues that the making of song involves the shaping of new subjectivities and it looks in particular at the role of isicathamiya performance in the making and re‐making of a particular urban space. It argues that the life and history of a city or town holds within it the songs and singers that shape it culturally and th…
Introduction: Yvonne Vera's Fictions and the Voice of the Possible
Introduction:Yvonne Vera’s Fictions and the Voice of the Possible Liz Gunner and Neil Ten Kortenaar This collection of papers on the work of the Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, who died in Canada in April 2005, comes, with the exception of one paper, from the colloquium on her writing held at the Centre for African Literary Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in September of the same year.1 We wished to hold an event that in some way hono…
Zulu Choral Music?Performing Identities in a New State
The paper discusses ways in which the song form known as isicathamiya mediates subjectivity on a national and transnational scale in the new post-1994 era, known by isiZulu speakers as uhlel' olusha. Singers are constantly testing the limits of the genre, both through the choice of subject matter for songs and in their performance style. They take it in new directions and through the "embodied knowledge" they display, they engage in emergent and …
Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia
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…
Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia
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…
Jacob Zuma, the social body and the unruly power of song
Journal Article Jacob Zuma, the social body and the unruly power of song Get access Liz Gunner Liz Gunner Liz Gunner ([email protected]) is Professorial Research Associate at WISER (The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research), University of the Witwatersrand. She is also a Fellow (2008) at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The article was written at NIAS and I am most grateful f…
With Respect to Zulu: Revisiting ukuHlonipha
Hlonipho is a form of respectful behavior, widespread in southern Africa. Its linguistic manifestation has often been interpreted as a "traditional" verbal taboo, whereby married women must avoid uttering the father-in-law's name. The practice of (uku)hlonipha is not only verbal, however. Its fundamentally somatic meaning—covering, avoiding, and suppressing affect—applies broadly to bodily comportment, clothing, and the physical activity of speak…
Soft Masculinities,Isicathamiyaand Radio
The paper argues that, beyond the violent masculinities that mark much of the South African social order, there exist several alternative strands that require study, because they show the range of debate on manhood and shifts in centres of gender equity. The role of song and performance in expressing and debating different kinds of masculinity is crucial. This paper explores the genre isicathamiya as a site of ‘soft’ masculinity. The study sets t…
Wrestling with the Present, Beckoning to the Past: Contemporary Zulu Radio Drama
The paper explores aspects of the history of radio drama in Zulu from 1941 to the present. It briefly sketches in the history of radio in South Africa and the oppressive role of apartheid ideology in its formation and development. It also provides a commentary on the role of radio drama as a producer of culture throughout the apartheid years and into the post-apartheid era. Arguing that radio drama in Zulu has become a clearly definable aural gen…
Mapping 'performance and social meaning in Africa
Remapping land and remaking culture: Memory and landscape in 20th-century South Africa
Dissonances from the Global South: Song, Art and Performance in Cultures of Struggle
Taking up the important work of other theorists of performance, social memory and the political in Africa and Latin America we restate the need for a re-configured understanding of how performance – and in particular forms of expressive art – impinges on the practice of politics and is in fact embedded within it. Memory as held in the body can be both replayed within, and can re-form, the present. Thus, history overlays but is also redrawn throug…
Song, identity and the state: Julius Malema'sDubul' ibhunusong as catalyst
This article tracks the entry of Julius Malema and his package of skills as a political persona into the South African public domain. It focuses on his use of song, particularly the Dubul' ibhunu song/chant within the public space and links it to a long tradition of political song. It sets this within a wider context of the aesthetics of power in the postcolony and within older epistemes of performance, language and power. It also discusses the m…
Reconfiguring diaspora: Africa on the rise and the radio voices of Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane
The article focuses on radio as cultural mediator and maker. It discusses a particular moment in the early 1960s when Africa seemed to those closely involved in its cultural and political affairs to be ‘on the rise’. It focuses on the role of Lewis Nkosi, and partly, too, that of Bloke Modisane, in the ‘Africa Abroad’ radio programme run from the London‐based Transcription Centre in the early 1960s. It argues that the programmes reveal a moment o…
Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature
Afterword: Thick Time, Heavy Time
The paper sums up and comments on the contributions of the Special Issue edited by Katrien Pype and Richard Vokes. The theme of the papers was the impact of new media and radio on life styles and life worlds in Africa with a focus on regions of postcolonial Africa: Congo DRC
City textualities: Isicathamiya,reciprocities and Voices From the Streets
This paper explores the entwining of city and song with a focus on the genre of isicathamiya in the city of Pietermaritzburg. It argues that the making of song involves the shaping of new subjectivities and it looks in particular at the role of isicathamiya performance in the making and re‐making of a particular urban space. It argues that the life and history of a city or town holds within it the songs and singers that shape it culturally and th…
Introduction: Yvonne Vera's Fictions and the Voice of the Possible
Introduction:Yvonne Vera’s Fictions and the Voice of the Possible Liz Gunner and Neil Ten Kortenaar This collection of papers on the work of the Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, who died in Canada in April 2005, comes, with the exception of one paper, from the colloquium on her writing held at the Centre for African Literary Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in September of the same year.1 We wished to hold an event that in some way hono…
Supping with the Devil: Zulu Radio Drama under Apartheid-The Case of Alexius Buthelezi
This paper sets out the case of a gifted and innovative individual, Alexius Buthelezi, who was part of a talented team of black radio producers, scriptwriters, actors and announcers at the SABC in the 1960s. All worked in the section of the SABC known as Radio Bantu, a structure set up to implement the apartheid ideology of control of the lives and mindsets of the black subjects of the South African state. I argue that within this unpromising med…
Introduction: African imaginaries and transnational spaces
Hidden Stories and the Light of the New Day: A Zulu Manuscript and Its Place in South African Writing
South Africa has eleven official languages, yet what does it mean in reality for the literature of the country if so many languages are given theoretical parity but only one is a world language? Virtual eclipse, constant poor relation status for the other ten? Perhaps the recognition of so many official languages provides the opportunity for expanding their interrelatedness rather than agonizing over their pecking order. Perhaps this new, officia…
Introduction: New representations out of neglected spaces: changing paradigms in South African writing
(1995). Introduction: new representations out of neglected spaces: changing paradigms in South African writing. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 21, South African literature: paradigms forming and reinformed, pp. 557-560
Introduction: Forms of popular culture and the struggle for Space
Introduction: Forms of popular culture and the struggle for Space
Power, popular consciousness, and the fictions of war: Hove's Bones and Chinodya's Harvest of Thorns
Mothers, Daughters and Madness in Works by Four Women Writers: Bessie Head, Jean Rhys, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Ama Ata Aidoo/ الأمهات والبنات والجنون في أعمال أربع روائيات
Musho! Zulu Popular Praises
In Musho! Zulu Popular Praises Elizabeth Gunner, an authority on Zulu literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and Mafika Gwala, a South African teacher and poet, have translated, transcribed, and annotated a wide variety of Zulu izibongo poetry. In so doing, they have revealed the incredible breadth of this traditional genre, which is usually equated with nineteenth-century epic traditions that celebr…
Remaking the warrior: The role of orality in the liberation struggle and in post‐apartheid South Africa 1
Introduction: New representations out of neglected spaces: changing paradigms in South African writing
(1995). Introduction: new representations out of neglected spaces: changing paradigms in South African writing. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 21, South African literature: paradigms forming and reinformed, pp. 557-560
Politics and Performance: Theatre, Poetry, and Song in Southern Africa
Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature
Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature
Hidden Stories and the Light of the New Day: A Zulu Manuscript and Its Place in South African Writing
South Africa has eleven official languages, yet what does it mean in reality for the literature of the country if so many languages are given theoretical parity but only one is a world language? Virtual eclipse, constant poor relation status for the other ten? Perhaps the recognition of so many official languages provides the opportunity for expanding their interrelatedness rather than agonizing over their pecking order. Perhaps this new, officia…
Wrestling with the Present, Beckoning to the Past: Contemporary Zulu Radio Drama
The paper explores aspects of the history of radio drama in Zulu from 1941 to the present. It briefly sketches in the history of radio in South Africa and the oppressive role of apartheid ideology in its formation and development. It also provides a commentary on the role of radio drama as a producer of culture throughout the apartheid years and into the post-apartheid era. Arguing that radio drama in Zulu has become a clearly definable aural gen…
Exile and the Diasporic voice: Bloke Modisane's BBC Radio plays 1969–1987
The article explores a hitherto undocumented aspect of the writing of Bloke Modisane, namely three radio plays which were produced by the BBC and which span almost two decades, the first being in 1969 and the last being played shortly after his death, in 1987. Modisane is seen as an exilic figure, but also as a member of the black diaspora of artists from Africa and the Caribbean who were based in London during the 1960s in particular. He is also…
Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia
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…
Still Beating the Drum: Critical Perspectives on Lewis Nkosi
Lewis Nkosi is one of South Africa’s foremost writers and critics, and one of the few survivors of the exile generation dating from the Drum era. Up until now, however, no full length study has been done on his work. This is a gap in South African literary history and criticism that this book is intended to fill. Besides his well known earlier works, Nkosi is still very much an active writer as the publication in 2002 of his novel, Underground Pe…
Remapping land and remaking culture: Memory and landscape in 20th-century South Africa
Supping with the Devil: Zulu Radio Drama under Apartheid-The Case of Alexius Buthelezi
This paper sets out the case of a gifted and innovative individual, Alexius Buthelezi, who was part of a talented team of black radio producers, scriptwriters, actors and announcers at the SABC in the 1960s. All worked in the section of the SABC known as Radio Bantu, a structure set up to implement the apartheid ideology of control of the lives and mindsets of the black subjects of the South African state. I argue that within this unpromising med…
Introduction: African imaginaries and transnational spaces
Zulu Choral Music?Performing Identities in a New State
The paper discusses ways in which the song form known as isicathamiya mediates subjectivity on a national and transnational scale in the new post-1994 era, known by isiZulu speakers as uhlel' olusha. Singers are constantly testing the limits of the genre, both through the choice of subject matter for songs and in their performance style. They take it in new directions and through the "embodied knowledge" they display, they engage in emergent and …
Introduction: Yvonne Vera's Fictions and the Voice of the Possible
Introduction:Yvonne Vera’s Fictions and the Voice of the Possible Liz Gunner and Neil Ten Kortenaar This collection of papers on the work of the Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, who died in Canada in April 2005, comes, with the exception of one paper, from the colloquium on her writing held at the Centre for African Literary Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in September of the same year.1 We wished to hold an event that in some way hono…
Jacob Zuma, the social body and the unruly power of song
Journal Article Jacob Zuma, the social body and the unruly power of song Get access Liz Gunner Liz Gunner Liz Gunner ([email protected]) is Professorial Research Associate at WISER (The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research), University of the Witwatersrand. She is also a Fellow (2008) at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The article was written at NIAS and I am most grateful f…
City textualities: Isicathamiya,reciprocities and Voices From the Streets
This paper explores the entwining of city and song with a focus on the genre of isicathamiya in the city of Pietermaritzburg. It argues that the making of song involves the shaping of new subjectivities and it looks in particular at the role of isicathamiya performance in the making and re‐making of a particular urban space. It argues that the life and history of a city or town holds within it the songs and singers that shape it culturally and th…
Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature
A Problem of Presence: Beyond scripture in an African Church, by Matthew Engelke
This powerful study of the Friday apostolics of the Masowe Church in Zimbabwe takes work on African Christianity in new directions. It does so primarily through its focus on the semiotics of sound, language, and song as part of the presence of God. For me, it is the demonstration of the materiality of language that most marks this book's originality and boldness. Engelke worries about language – the Shona language. He takes language as a gateway …
Burying Lucky Dube1
This article focuses on the murder of the reggae icon Lucky Dube in late 2007 and on the events that followed until his burial a few days later. The article tries to assess why his music carried such power on the African continent and globally – as the instant digital responses to his death made clear. Did he sing to the subalterns of the world across and beyond national boundaries in a tradition that set the anger of reggae within the ‘phatic an…
Reconfiguring diaspora: Africa on the rise and the radio voices of Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane
The article focuses on radio as cultural mediator and maker. It discusses a particular moment in the early 1960s when Africa seemed to those closely involved in its cultural and political affairs to be ‘on the rise’. It focuses on the role of Lewis Nkosi, and partly, too, that of Bloke Modisane, in the ‘Africa Abroad’ radio programme run from the London‐based Transcription Centre in the early 1960s. It argues that the programmes reveal a moment o…
Sociology (24 works) · Art (23 works) · History (23 works) · South African History and Culture (19 works) · Aesthetics (17 works) · Linguistics (17 works) · Political science (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Politics (12 works)