Danai S Mupotsa
Biographic Data
| ID | 1160161 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Danai S Mupotsa |
| GIVEN NAMES | Danai S |
| FAMILY NAME | Mupotsa |
| SIGNATURE | MUPOTSA D S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Witwatersrand |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5338-3904 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 37 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Memory Work Alerts Consciousness’: Danai S. Mupotsa and Mbali Mazibuko in Conversation
Black transnational feminisms and the question of structure
Black common sense
This article explores ‘uhuru’ as a critical noun through a reading of the 2020 music video of Sun El-Musician (featuring Azana), ‘Not Yet Uhuru’. A form of rendition of Letta Mbulu’s (1993) ‘Not Yet Uhuru-Akhamandela’, various other echoes of this, conjured in Makhosazana Xaba’s (2019 Xaba, M 2019, The Alkalinity of Bottled Water, Botsotso, Johannesburg. [Google Scholar]) poem of the same name, are double speak, elegy, repetition and onomatopoeic…
Framing notes – Covid-19: The intimacies of pandemics
Cinematic imaginaries of the African city
This special issue unpacks the broad affective, aesthetic and material dimensions of African visuality, spatiality and temporality in cinematic imaginaries of the African city. The submissions evoke issues of specificity and materiality, reading the African city as cinematic form. They are situated within an interdisciplinary matrix that contributes to intellectual engagement with African cinemas through, among others, affect theory and the city …
A Queering-to-Come
This introduction outlines the idea of the queer customary and how various African articulations of it engage, contest, and nuance central concerns of queer theory produced in the global North, particularly around ideas of normativity-hetero and homo. It speculates on the customary's reworking of temporality and what that reworking does to historical time and the problems and possibilities in reading the colonial archive in the search for a useab…
Conjugality
The wedding is often observed as performing a narrative closure, for instance, as a ritual that acts as a rite of passage to proper sex, or proper gendered and sexuated statuses framed in the terms of heteronormativity and homonormativity. The aims of this article are to sit beside recent scholarship that examines marriage, as well as the law/legal infrastructure and language that offer conjugal rights, that is, social, economic, and legal rights…
Knowing from loss
In South Africa, student calls for free quality decolonized education have been coincident with demands for the transformation of the canons, curricula and pedagogies of their disciplines. At the height of the protests assembled around #feesmustfall since 2014, some students at the University of the Witwatersrand formed their own reading groups, attempting to develop their own curricula, but also presenting their departments with memorandums dema…
Stammering tongue
‘Stammering tongue’ is the governing metaphor we offer in our reading of the border. The border, we read as a central technique of both the modern state and the violence that produces it. Our project is a diffractive encounter with the modality of implicating and complicating reading and writing. The paper offers a reading of two recent texts, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being that draws from the metaphor/practice of the Midd…
Feeling backwards: Temporal ambivalence in An African City
The turn to optimism makes figures of progress, consumption, self-making and empowerment appear in various genres of chick-lit. These narratives, however, are often still shaped by a depressive tone that is distinct from one that says that women have more options than happy-ever-after, even while heterosexual romance remains a structuring force. This article takes the Ghanaian web-series An African City as its example to explore this ambivalence.…
Xenophobia, nationalism and techniques of difference
This special issue on ‘Xenophobia, nationalism and techniques of difference’ begins with a provocation: a series of flags which can be construed as the legitimate narrative around organisation, cel
Food challenges: Feminist theory, revolutionary practice
The call for papers for this issue opened with several statements that emphasise the need for an intersectional approach to food, ecology and governance. By intersectional, it refers to intersectio
Visual Interruptions
In this themed issue we explore images that unsettle, disrupt, disqualify, and transgress the visual and affective expectations visited upon contemporary girls. The articles here suggest new ways of seeing, visualizing, and representing the girl, and of feeling and thinking about her. We begin from the recognition that girls are seduced into qualifying and passing in normative, intersecting ways that work along the various axes of sex, gender, ag…
Becoming Girl-Woman-Bride
Diepsloot
The promise of happiness: Desire, attachment and freedom in post/apartheid South Africa
This article examines wedding photographs. The wedding day is read as a staging of the achievement of desire and love, articulated through the use of space, objects and artefacts to project a vision of the self. The wedding ritual is not only framed by the presence of the camera, the gaze of the camera actually makes sure that the script is followed. This staging of romance is read through the notion of the ‘bridal gaze’, which places the figure …
The subject, real bodies and the performative in the political: A review of Dispossession: The Performative in the Political by Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou
The promise of happiness: Desire, attachment and freedom in post/apartheid South Africa
This article examines wedding photographs. The wedding day is read as a staging of the achievement of desire and love, articulated through the use of space, objects and artefacts to project a vision of the self. The wedding ritual is not only framed by the presence of the camera, the gaze of the camera actually makes sure that the script is followed. This staging of romance is read through the notion of the ‘bridal gaze’, which places the figure …
Conjugality
The wedding is often observed as performing a narrative closure, for instance, as a ritual that acts as a rite of passage to proper sex, or proper gendered and sexuated statuses framed in the terms of heteronormativity and homonormativity. The aims of this article are to sit beside recent scholarship that examines marriage, as well as the law/legal infrastructure and language that offer conjugal rights, that is, social, economic, and legal rights…
A Queering-to-Come
This introduction outlines the idea of the queer customary and how various African articulations of it engage, contest, and nuance central concerns of queer theory produced in the global North, particularly around ideas of normativity-hetero and homo. It speculates on the customary's reworking of temporality and what that reworking does to historical time and the problems and possibilities in reading the colonial archive in the search for a useab…
Framing notes – Covid-19: The intimacies of pandemics
Knowing from loss
In South Africa, student calls for free quality decolonized education have been coincident with demands for the transformation of the canons, curricula and pedagogies of their disciplines. At the height of the protests assembled around #feesmustfall since 2014, some students at the University of the Witwatersrand formed their own reading groups, attempting to develop their own curricula, but also presenting their departments with memorandums dema…
Food challenges: Feminist theory, revolutionary practice
The call for papers for this issue opened with several statements that emphasise the need for an intersectional approach to food, ecology and governance. By intersectional, it refers to intersectio
Becoming Girl-Woman-Bride
Cinematic imaginaries of the African city
This special issue unpacks the broad affective, aesthetic and material dimensions of African visuality, spatiality and temporality in cinematic imaginaries of the African city. The submissions evoke issues of specificity and materiality, reading the African city as cinematic form. They are situated within an interdisciplinary matrix that contributes to intellectual engagement with African cinemas through, among others, affect theory and the city …
Xenophobia, nationalism and techniques of difference
This special issue on ‘Xenophobia, nationalism and techniques of difference’ begins with a provocation: a series of flags which can be construed as the legitimate narrative around organisation, cel
Feeling backwards: Temporal ambivalence in An African City
The turn to optimism makes figures of progress, consumption, self-making and empowerment appear in various genres of chick-lit. These narratives, however, are often still shaped by a depressive tone that is distinct from one that says that women have more options than happy-ever-after, even while heterosexual romance remains a structuring force. This article takes the Ghanaian web-series An African City as its example to explore this ambivalence.…
The subject, real bodies and the performative in the political: A review of Dispossession: The Performative in the Political by Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou
Visual Interruptions
In this themed issue we explore images that unsettle, disrupt, disqualify, and transgress the visual and affective expectations visited upon contemporary girls. The articles here suggest new ways of seeing, visualizing, and representing the girl, and of feeling and thinking about her. We begin from the recognition that girls are seduced into qualifying and passing in normative, intersecting ways that work along the various axes of sex, gender, ag…
Becoming Girl-Woman-Bride
Diepsloot
The promise of happiness: Desire, attachment and freedom in post/apartheid South Africa
This article examines wedding photographs. The wedding day is read as a staging of the achievement of desire and love, articulated through the use of space, objects and artefacts to project a vision of the self. The wedding ritual is not only framed by the presence of the camera, the gaze of the camera actually makes sure that the script is followed. This staging of romance is read through the notion of the ‘bridal gaze’, which places the figure …
Xenophobia, nationalism and techniques of difference
This special issue on ‘Xenophobia, nationalism and techniques of difference’ begins with a provocation: a series of flags which can be construed as the legitimate narrative around organisation, cel
Food challenges: Feminist theory, revolutionary practice
The call for papers for this issue opened with several statements that emphasise the need for an intersectional approach to food, ecology and governance. By intersectional, it refers to intersectio
Stammering tongue
‘Stammering tongue’ is the governing metaphor we offer in our reading of the border. The border, we read as a central technique of both the modern state and the violence that produces it. Our project is a diffractive encounter with the modality of implicating and complicating reading and writing. The paper offers a reading of two recent texts, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being that draws from the metaphor/practice of the Midd…
Feeling backwards: Temporal ambivalence in An African City
The turn to optimism makes figures of progress, consumption, self-making and empowerment appear in various genres of chick-lit. These narratives, however, are often still shaped by a depressive tone that is distinct from one that says that women have more options than happy-ever-after, even while heterosexual romance remains a structuring force. This article takes the Ghanaian web-series An African City as its example to explore this ambivalence.…
A Queering-to-Come
This introduction outlines the idea of the queer customary and how various African articulations of it engage, contest, and nuance central concerns of queer theory produced in the global North, particularly around ideas of normativity-hetero and homo. It speculates on the customary's reworking of temporality and what that reworking does to historical time and the problems and possibilities in reading the colonial archive in the search for a useab…
Conjugality
The wedding is often observed as performing a narrative closure, for instance, as a ritual that acts as a rite of passage to proper sex, or proper gendered and sexuated statuses framed in the terms of heteronormativity and homonormativity. The aims of this article are to sit beside recent scholarship that examines marriage, as well as the law/legal infrastructure and language that offer conjugal rights, that is, social, economic, and legal rights…
Knowing from loss
In South Africa, student calls for free quality decolonized education have been coincident with demands for the transformation of the canons, curricula and pedagogies of their disciplines. At the height of the protests assembled around #feesmustfall since 2014, some students at the University of the Witwatersrand formed their own reading groups, attempting to develop their own curricula, but also presenting their departments with memorandums dema…
Framing notes – Covid-19: The intimacies of pandemics
Cinematic imaginaries of the African city
This special issue unpacks the broad affective, aesthetic and material dimensions of African visuality, spatiality and temporality in cinematic imaginaries of the African city. The submissions evoke issues of specificity and materiality, reading the African city as cinematic form. They are situated within an interdisciplinary matrix that contributes to intellectual engagement with African cinemas through, among others, affect theory and the city …
Black transnational feminisms and the question of structure
Black common sense
This article explores ‘uhuru’ as a critical noun through a reading of the 2020 music video of Sun El-Musician (featuring Azana), ‘Not Yet Uhuru’. A form of rendition of Letta Mbulu’s (1993) ‘Not Yet Uhuru-Akhamandela’, various other echoes of this, conjured in Makhosazana Xaba’s (2019 Xaba, M 2019, The Alkalinity of Bottled Water, Botsotso, Johannesburg. [Google Scholar]) poem of the same name, are double speak, elegy, repetition and onomatopoeic…
Memory Work Alerts Consciousness’: Danai S. Mupotsa and Mbali Mazibuko in Conversation
Sociology (12 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Art (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · History (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Psychology (6 works)