Uhuru Portia Phalafala
Biographic Data
| ID | 642517 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Uhuru Portia Phalafala |
| GIVEN NAMES | Uhuru Portia |
| FAMILY NAME | Phalafala |
| SIGNATURE | PHALAFALA U P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stellenbosch University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 11 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The present is a dangerous place
No abstract
Rebirth | Revolt | Resurrect – A Conversation about Uhuru Phalafala’s "Mine Mine Mine" (Creative Intervention)
Helene Strauss (HS): Thanks again for allowing me into the intricate spiritualmaterial work of "unburying" (2023, p. 55) that you do in Mine Mine Mine.The sacred alchemy by which you've turned the dust of South Africa's mines into this miracle of memory, rhythm, and sound, signals histories-in-waiting, an arrival in print of truths long ready to be told.The volume invites longoverdue scrutiny of mining as a site of racial, gendered, and environme…
Decolonial opacities
Bhakti Shringarpure’s important and groundbreaking Cold War Assemblages (2020) is timely for varied reasons, and a welcome addition to the politics of decolonisation in these parts of the world whe
Polyglot Internationalism and the Matriarchive
In this essay, I make a case for oral traditions passed on from matrilineal members of the family to their (grand)children as a key system of knowledge that has informed and shaped black intellectual culture and the black radical imagination in South Africa and its transnational iterations. I focus on the work of Keorapetse Kgositsile, who attributes his cultural and political consciousness to his grandmother and mother, and asserts that they equ…
The Matriarchive as Life Knowledge in Es’kia Mphahlele’s African Humanism
Prominent South African writer of the black diaspora Es’kia Mphahlele attributes his humanist consciousness to his grandmother and mother. His various forms of life writing (blurring the boundaries of fiction, memoir and scholarship) suggest how decolonizing the mind entails a voyage into the self, which is simultaneously a return to the source. Referring to examples of Mphahlele’s writing, I make a case for oral traditions passed on from matrili…
Cultural solidarities
Continuing the investigation of networked cultural responses in the Global South construed as “cultural solidarities” that was embarked upon in the first special issue of this two-part series, “Cultural Solidarities: Apartheid and the anti-colonial commons of world literature,” Safundi Vol. 19, no.3, the introduction to this, its second volume, investigates how the cultural imagination animates transnational solidarities across a variety of media…
Cultural solidarities
STOPS."Our claims across this series of interventions center on the contention that the conflictual experiences of decolonization in the mid-twentieth-century were to an exceptional extent addressed within a transnational cultural domain-one that to no small degree crosses contemporary debates on world literature. 1 While the global resonance of anti-apartheid expressive culture presents a paradigmatic example of this dynamic, we argue that the m…
Home is where the music is
My generation grew up listening to a lot of both South African jazz and its African-American counterpart. The older musicians, like the late Ntemi Piliso, came in contact with African-American musi
Time is Always NOW
This paper explores Keorapetse Kgositsile's re-ordering of time through his coined concepts of “NOW,” “future memory,” and the “coil of time” in his poetry. In his reckoning, colonial modernity's time imposed a temporal order that is not congruent with his African worldview and understanding of time and space. Further, being of South African descent and living in the diaspora meant occupying two realities concurrently. Being informed by southern …
Black music and pan-African solidarity in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s poetry
The African American revolutionary poetry outfit and purported grandfathers of rap The Last Poets coined their name from Keorapetse Kgositsile's poem “Towards a Walk in the Sun”. This is relatively common knowledge. However, no sustained academic research has been conducted on this crucial exchange in diasporic studies. In this paper, I show how Kgositsile's poem in question harvested the rich oral, aural, and literary practices of his native Set…
Setswana Roots en Route in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s Poetry
In Keorapetse Kgositsile’s work we can see an example of Setswana roots and oral traditions remaining alive and being reinvigorated, providing a resource that is then carried across the Atlantic and renewed in translation. This paper centralizes Setswana language in his work, and demonstrates how its presence recalibrates identity as an ongoing production of collective memory, entangled in his ongoing becoming in the black diaspora. His work inte…
The Matriarchive as Life Knowledge in Es’kia Mphahlele’s African Humanism
Prominent South African writer of the black diaspora Es’kia Mphahlele attributes his humanist consciousness to his grandmother and mother. His various forms of life writing (blurring the boundaries of fiction, memoir and scholarship) suggest how decolonizing the mind entails a voyage into the self, which is simultaneously a return to the source. Referring to examples of Mphahlele’s writing, I make a case for oral traditions passed on from matrili…
Cultural solidarities
Continuing the investigation of networked cultural responses in the Global South construed as “cultural solidarities” that was embarked upon in the first special issue of this two-part series, “Cultural Solidarities: Apartheid and the anti-colonial commons of world literature,” Safundi Vol. 19, no.3, the introduction to this, its second volume, investigates how the cultural imagination animates transnational solidarities across a variety of media…
Time is Always NOW
This paper explores Keorapetse Kgositsile's re-ordering of time through his coined concepts of “NOW,” “future memory,” and the “coil of time” in his poetry. In his reckoning, colonial modernity's time imposed a temporal order that is not congruent with his African worldview and understanding of time and space. Further, being of South African descent and living in the diaspora meant occupying two realities concurrently. Being informed by southern …
Black music and pan-African solidarity in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s poetry
The African American revolutionary poetry outfit and purported grandfathers of rap The Last Poets coined their name from Keorapetse Kgositsile's poem “Towards a Walk in the Sun”. This is relatively common knowledge. However, no sustained academic research has been conducted on this crucial exchange in diasporic studies. In this paper, I show how Kgositsile's poem in question harvested the rich oral, aural, and literary practices of his native Set…
Setswana Roots en Route in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s Poetry
In Keorapetse Kgositsile’s work we can see an example of Setswana roots and oral traditions remaining alive and being reinvigorated, providing a resource that is then carried across the Atlantic and renewed in translation. This paper centralizes Setswana language in his work, and demonstrates how its presence recalibrates identity as an ongoing production of collective memory, entangled in his ongoing becoming in the black diaspora. His work inte…
Home is where the music is
My generation grew up listening to a lot of both South African jazz and its African-American counterpart. The older musicians, like the late Ntemi Piliso, came in contact with African-American musi
Home is where the music is
My generation grew up listening to a lot of both South African jazz and its African-American counterpart. The older musicians, like the late Ntemi Piliso, came in contact with African-American musi
Time is Always NOW
This paper explores Keorapetse Kgositsile's re-ordering of time through his coined concepts of “NOW,” “future memory,” and the “coil of time” in his poetry. In his reckoning, colonial modernity's time imposed a temporal order that is not congruent with his African worldview and understanding of time and space. Further, being of South African descent and living in the diaspora meant occupying two realities concurrently. Being informed by southern …
Black music and pan-African solidarity in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s poetry
The African American revolutionary poetry outfit and purported grandfathers of rap The Last Poets coined their name from Keorapetse Kgositsile's poem “Towards a Walk in the Sun”. This is relatively common knowledge. However, no sustained academic research has been conducted on this crucial exchange in diasporic studies. In this paper, I show how Kgositsile's poem in question harvested the rich oral, aural, and literary practices of his native Set…
Setswana Roots en Route in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s Poetry
In Keorapetse Kgositsile’s work we can see an example of Setswana roots and oral traditions remaining alive and being reinvigorated, providing a resource that is then carried across the Atlantic and renewed in translation. This paper centralizes Setswana language in his work, and demonstrates how its presence recalibrates identity as an ongoing production of collective memory, entangled in his ongoing becoming in the black diaspora. His work inte…
Cultural solidarities
STOPS."Our claims across this series of interventions center on the contention that the conflictual experiences of decolonization in the mid-twentieth-century were to an exceptional extent addressed within a transnational cultural domain-one that to no small degree crosses contemporary debates on world literature. 1 While the global resonance of anti-apartheid expressive culture presents a paradigmatic example of this dynamic, we argue that the m…
Cultural solidarities
Continuing the investigation of networked cultural responses in the Global South construed as “cultural solidarities” that was embarked upon in the first special issue of this two-part series, “Cultural Solidarities: Apartheid and the anti-colonial commons of world literature,” Safundi Vol. 19, no.3, the introduction to this, its second volume, investigates how the cultural imagination animates transnational solidarities across a variety of media…
Polyglot Internationalism and the Matriarchive
In this essay, I make a case for oral traditions passed on from matrilineal members of the family to their (grand)children as a key system of knowledge that has informed and shaped black intellectual culture and the black radical imagination in South Africa and its transnational iterations. I focus on the work of Keorapetse Kgositsile, who attributes his cultural and political consciousness to his grandmother and mother, and asserts that they equ…
The Matriarchive as Life Knowledge in Es’kia Mphahlele’s African Humanism
Prominent South African writer of the black diaspora Es’kia Mphahlele attributes his humanist consciousness to his grandmother and mother. His various forms of life writing (blurring the boundaries of fiction, memoir and scholarship) suggest how decolonizing the mind entails a voyage into the self, which is simultaneously a return to the source. Referring to examples of Mphahlele’s writing, I make a case for oral traditions passed on from matrili…
Decolonial opacities
Bhakti Shringarpure’s important and groundbreaking Cold War Assemblages (2020) is timely for varied reasons, and a welcome addition to the politics of decolonisation in these parts of the world whe
Rebirth | Revolt | Resurrect – A Conversation about Uhuru Phalafala’s "Mine Mine Mine" (Creative Intervention)
Helene Strauss (HS): Thanks again for allowing me into the intricate spiritualmaterial work of "unburying" (2023, p. 55) that you do in Mine Mine Mine.The sacred alchemy by which you've turned the dust of South Africa's mines into this miracle of memory, rhythm, and sound, signals histories-in-waiting, an arrival in print of truths long ready to be told.The volume invites longoverdue scrutiny of mining as a site of racial, gendered, and environme…
The present is a dangerous place
No abstract
Art (7 works) · History (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · History (6 works) · Literature (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Law (4 works)