Keyan G Tomaselli
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 82585 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Keyan G Tomaselli |
| PRENOMES | Keyan G |
| SOBRENOME | Tomaselli |
| ASSINATURA | TOMASELLI K G |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Natal |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 59 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 151 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 57 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1980 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Being Sceptical
This is a manifesto composed by Critical Arts editors on the matter of book reviews. The high volume of submissions has necessitated this guide. The patterns that we are detecting suggest: (a) an u...
Towards a Theory of Orality in African Cinema
The direct importation into Africa of methods, theories, ideas, and psychoanalytical assumptions developed in First World and applied to African cinema is not without epistemological problems. Marxist, positivist, or liberal-humanist approaches, among others, do not automatically apply in attempts to understand African films and audiences. The call on mainly Lacanian psychoanalysis as an interpretive framework assumes that African viewers have es…
Media, interactive audiences, and the virtual. Next generation narratives
New Techno Humanities targets the creative aspect of the humanities still to be fully recognized in the established classification and methodology of disciplines. This article embraces the practical extension of the latest scientific and technological methods that are starting to emerge within what is increasingly being called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. As a launching pad for this special edition of this new journal, our article maps a for…
Brand China in the Media
Non-racialism, relationality and no-relation
This article examines the rearticulation of meanings appropriated out of historical and ideological phases of the anti-Apartheid struggle, specifically with regard to race (non-racialism) and Black Consciousness. It compares examples of democrats in contexts radically different from South Africa, deploying “South African-made” meaning into discursive and political-economic contexts for which they had not been designed. The example of Steve Biko’s…
Skollie
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde is an online, peer-reviewed, accredited scholarly journal which publishes original, previously unpublished research and overview articles on theoretical, applied or comparative aspects of African literatures and cultural practices.
San Representation
Media Ownership and Democratization
As has already been indicated in previous chapters, the economic aspects of the media play an important role in assessing what contribution they can make to democratization on the continent. In most places, the challenge is lack of material resources and an inadequate infrastructure. In this chapter, however, that focuses on South Africa, the most significant aspect of the media sector is the dominance of corporate capital. More specifically, it …
Researching the San, San/ding the research
Bureaucratic mechanisms adopted in universities which favour high publication output at the expense of inter-disciplinary collaboration translate into myopic vision within disciplines. Competition for limited resources often leads to academics clearly demarcating and jealously guarding their respective fields in order to justify their line of inquiry and, in the current economic climate, to emphasise the necessity of funding. This article argues …
Virtual Religion, the Fantastic, and Electronic Ontology
Western modes of thinking are usually associated with logic, reason, rationality and the positivist scientific paradigm. This is juxtaposed against “spiritual” ways of perceiving the world and different world views as associated with non-Western contexts. The article explores negotiations of differing ontologies where the positivist paradigm fails to explain phenomena. The possibilities of ascribing truth and reality to such an encounter are soug…
Who owns what? Indigenous knowledge and struggles over representation
Ownership of field research records involving informants and subject communities is discussed with regard to doing research amongst indigenous populations. Intellectual property rights (IPR) law often assumes, for example, that an age-old mythical story retold by a contemporary informant is owned by the legal entity that facilitated its being captured in writing. The implication is that if the story-teller now wants to tell the same story to some…
Nollywood production, distribution and reception
This article outlines and examines the genesis of a pan-African research project on Nollywood that sought to widen current research on the topic to include distribution, exhibition and reception in a variety of African regions, including Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe. ‘South-North Conversations’ was devised by the overarching project to frame analysis. The role of key African satellite distributor, MultiChoice, is brief…
Where Is the Theory in Visual Anthropology
Is there a real theoretical underpinning for visual anthropology? Or are we just borrowing theoretical concepts, as needed, from other disciplines? Here eight visual anthropologists offer their thoughts on this fundamental question succinctly
Visualizing Different Kinds of Writing
Studies of indigeneity can prove particularly important if they focus on how history writes and produces the “indigenous” in multiple ways and at multiple sites. Modes and styles of writing appropriate for communicating the multiple effects and the complex and contradictory forces and assumptions at work in the study of indigeneity are yet to be fully answered. The anthology, Writing in the San/d: Auto-ethnographic Explorations amongst Indigenous…
Cultural Tourism and Identity
Studies of cultural tourism and indigenous identity are fraught with questions concerning exploitation, entitlement, ownership and authenticity. Unease with the idea of leveraging a group identity for commercial gain is ever-present. This anthology articulates some of these debates from a multitude of standpoints. It assimilates the perspectives of members of indigenous communities, non-governmental organizations, tourism practitioners and academ…
À la rencontre de Sembène
Thirty years of publishing
The year 2009 is witness to Critical Arts' thirtieth year of publishing. It also witnesses the first time that three issues will be published annually. (Our inexperience in the early 1980s did see the intention to publish three to four issues a year. This schedule largely failed, given our lack of capacity at that stage.) At least one of the three issues to be published annually from 2009 will be allocated to a particular theme, with guest editor…
Media in Africa
This article tackles assumptions made by Louise Bourgault in her pioneering book, Mass Media in Sub-Saharan Africa. The article discusses her claims about African journalism in relation to her engagement with western approaches, and with regard to issues of orality, the Shannon and Weaver communication model and to the megadiscipline of media studies. Short case studies are provided of the emergence of print media in several African countries (Ni…
Repositioning African media studies
This article engages with contemporary debates on the state of media studies in Africa. It comments on the dialectic between metropolitan centres of knowledge production and dependent peripheries. A brief discussion of Fordism and post-Fordism and their implications for Africa follows. Nation-building discourses are opposed to hyper-real notions of meaning, calling on Africans to transcend their idealized understanding of culture, African values …
(Re)Mediatizing HIV/Aids in South Africa
Written from a partly autoethnographic perspective, this article investigates current and past South African government stances on HIV/AIDS, grounding them in their larger political and ideological contexts, and examining the broader repercussions. A comparative analysis of South Africa's loveLife and STEPS interventions problematizes the self-branding used by loveLife in favor of the uplifting and humanizing message of STEPS. The author highligh…
Semiotics in an African context
In terms of our approach to the theory of culture, literacy encompasses a collection of talents which people deploy alongside others in their everyday going-on. Following the Peircean-Wittgensteinian ground upon which we develop the discourse of culture, coming-to-be-literate is itself a form of cultural experience in all three dimensions (Experience-First, Experience-Second and Experience-Third) (cf. Tomaselli 1999:39). As First (the encounter),…
Paradigms in South African cinema research
The history of theoretical approaches about South African cinema is discussed from the turn of the twentieth century period of the New Africa Movement, through various other theoretical moments, up to the early 1990s. These include conservative cultural theory, liberal humanism, workerist, Althusserian and Gramscian Marxisms. The discussion examines theoretical interventions either promoting or opposing modernity in the work of Thelma Gutsche, Ha…
Intellectual property rights and the political economy of culture
The domain of intellectual property rights, along with the regulations that govern them, has a steadily, almost visibly incremental bearing these days upon the ordinary lives of people across the globe, in the rich world and the poor and in the North and the South. Its influence has escalated to the point where for some it may mean the difference between life and death; on it are now founded industries in the first rank of corporate power and thr…
Rereading theGods Must be CrazyFilms
Studies of Jamie Uys's Gods Must be Crazy films have tended to focus on his pseudo-ethnographic representation of “Bushmen,” from primarily Western perspectives, both anthropological and anti-apartheid. This study examines critically the wider corpus of Uys's feature films, especially those employing “Bushmen” characters, in terms of intertextual relations. The article offers the comments of many San viewers of the films and also conveys the pers…
Made in China
Jamie Uys's The Gods Must be Crazy and its sequel films are icons of South African entertainment, perceived both as hilarious comedy and blatant apartheid propaganda. Three further sequels, made from Hong Kong by Chinese directors, are hardly known in South Africa. These films are particularly interesting from a cultural point of view, as they portray Orientals (and white South Africans) from an Oriental perspective and San Bushmen from a positio…
Where Is the Theory in Visual Anthropology
Is there a real theoretical underpinning for visual anthropology? Or are we just borrowing theoretical concepts, as needed, from other disciplines? Here eight visual anthropologists offer their thoughts on this fundamental question succinctly
Our Culture’ vs ‘Foreign Culture’
This article discusses debates on the freedom of the press in Africa with regard to professionalism, essentialism and citizenship. The article engages Francis Kasoma’s arguments for an ethics which calls on the ancestors for guidance. It critiques the insistence by many African media academics that the media must exhibit ‘African values’, and it examines the role of authority in determining the way that the media are understood by communication s…
Blue Is Hot, Red Is Cold
This article is a theorized diary of three field trips to a remote part of South ern Africa. It develops a reflexive argument for a reverse cultural studies in discussing problems in fieldwork, globalization, academic access, and research accountability. Academy-bound scholarship claiming to be study ing the popular is questioned. The narrative aims to forge a space in the global publications industry for kinds of cultural studies done in Africa,…
Video, realism and class struggle
Psychospiritual ecoscience
The relation between knowledge and the visual, on the one hand, and knowledge about peoples on the other, is a prime concern in visual anthropology. The impact of the visual on the everyday life of the Ju/'hoansi is my concern here. This paper is offered in two parts: this article and the one which follows. The results of a field‐trip in July 1996 to Otjozondjupa (previously known as Bush‐manland) in Namibia are discussed in terms of the question…
Nollywood production, distribution and reception
This article outlines and examines the genesis of a pan-African research project on Nollywood that sought to widen current research on the topic to include distribution, exhibition and reception in a variety of African regions, including Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe. ‘South-North Conversations’ was devised by the overarching project to frame analysis. The role of key African satellite distributor, MultiChoice, is brief…
Repositioning African media studies
This article engages with contemporary debates on the state of media studies in Africa. It comments on the dialectic between metropolitan centres of knowledge production and dependent peripheries. A brief discussion of Fordism and post-Fordism and their implications for Africa follows. Nation-building discourses are opposed to hyper-real notions of meaning, calling on Africans to transcend their idealized understanding of culture, African values …
Dit is Die here Se Asem
This article continues Tomaselli's Kalahari story on issues of representation, research methodology, and reverse cultural studies. He discusses relationships between observers and observed in terms of dependency, inclusions/exclusions, and borders and Othering. Continuing with an auto-ethnography, Tomaselli reflexively analyzes tensions and contradictions set in motion by the writing of this article within both the San communities themselves and …
Encounters in the Kalahari
Visualizing Different Kinds of Writing
Studies of indigeneity can prove particularly important if they focus on how history writes and produces the “indigenous” in multiple ways and at multiple sites. Modes and styles of writing appropriate for communicating the multiple effects and the complex and contradictory forces and assumptions at work in the study of indigeneity are yet to be fully answered. The anthology, Writing in the San/d: Auto-ethnographic Explorations amongst Indigenous…
Special Issue
Paradigms in South African cinema research
The history of theoretical approaches about South African cinema is discussed from the turn of the twentieth century period of the New Africa Movement, through various other theoretical moments, up to the early 1990s. These include conservative cultural theory, liberal humanism, workerist, Althusserian and Gramscian Marxisms. The discussion examines theoretical interventions either promoting or opposing modernity in the work of Thelma Gutsche, Ha…
Restructuring the industry
Contemporary film policy generally focuses on questions concerning content, representation, and profitability. Content in this case covers narrative, documentary, educational and other kinds of film and television. Representation is somewhat stickier, as if debates about content are not themselves subject to more than their fair share of controversy. What or who is represented in the content? Does this representation do justice or injustice to so…
Contradictory Subjectivity
Most of the author's writing and film/video making until the mid-1990s was couched within an antiapartheid, explicitly Marxist framework. But, like all individuals, he has his contradictions. These are derived from his class, eth nic, and racial determinations. This reflexive article negotiates the author's experiences during the apartheid and postapartheid eras, from modernism to postmodernism. This chapter examines some of these influences on h…
Orality, rhythmography and visual representation
This paper explores the epistemological problems which occur in analysis of orality through visual images. Narrow disciplinary orientations are argued to impede understanding of what the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce calls the final interpretant, that which would be agreed by the scholarly community to be the ultimate opinion. When filmmakers or scholars take the imaging medium for granted they fail to “see” the visual codes which structure …
Who owns what? Indigenous knowledge and struggles over representation
Ownership of field research records involving informants and subject communities is discussed with regard to doing research amongst indigenous populations. Intellectual property rights (IPR) law often assumes, for example, that an age-old mythical story retold by a contemporary informant is owned by the legal entity that facilitated its being captured in writing. The implication is that if the story-teller now wants to tell the same story to some…
(Re)Mediatizing HIV/Aids in South Africa
Written from a partly autoethnographic perspective, this article investigates current and past South African government stances on HIV/AIDS, grounding them in their larger political and ideological contexts, and examining the broader repercussions. A comparative analysis of South Africa's loveLife and STEPS interventions problematizes the self-branding used by loveLife in favor of the uplifting and humanizing message of STEPS. The author highligh…
Structured absences
(1999). Structured absences: Shot logs on the Marshall family expeditionary films, 1950–1958. Visual Anthropology: Vol. 12, No. 2-3, pp. 289-338
Rereading theGods Must be CrazyFilms
Studies of Jamie Uys's Gods Must be Crazy films have tended to focus on his pseudo-ethnographic representation of “Bushmen,” from primarily Western perspectives, both anthropological and anti-apartheid. This study examines critically the wider corpus of Uys's feature films, especially those employing “Bushmen” characters, in terms of intertextual relations. The article offers the comments of many San viewers of the films and also conveys the pers…
"Textualizing the san "past
The anthropology of conservation and the way that visual media, especially documentary film, contribute to mythical Tourist perceptions of the San, are discussed in relation to categories of conservancy, living museums, cultural ecology and the marketing of ecological legitimacy. The central metaphor of dance as a mythical tourist image of Africa is the vehicle through which the analysis is undertaken
Made in China
Jamie Uys's The Gods Must be Crazy and its sequel films are icons of South African entertainment, perceived both as hilarious comedy and blatant apartheid propaganda. Three further sequels, made from Hong Kong by Chinese directors, are hardly known in South Africa. These films are particularly interesting from a cultural point of view, as they portray Orientals (and white South Africans) from an Oriental perspective and San Bushmen from a positio…
The semiotics of anthropological authenticity
This study examines the relationship between media constructions of First and indigenous peoples, and the “performative primitives” who are employed in “cultural” villages in the South African province of KwaZulu‐Natal (KZN), with specific reference to Shakaland where the TV series, Shaka Zulu, was filmed in the late 1970s. A Perceian‐derived semiotic method is applied in analysis of the nature of tourist encounters with performers, the relations…
African’ Cinema — Theoretical Perspectives on Some Unresolved Questions
For a South African reader a slightly disconcerting feature of Manthia Diawara's book on African cinema is the total exclusion of South Africa (except for a few passing references) from the discussion. There are clear historical reasons for this, of course, not the least important of which are the facts that South Africa was not colonised and decolonised in precisely the way that the rest of Africa was. Edwin Hees (1993)
Class and Ideology
Until rece~tly, c~iticism of South African cinema has been couched predominantly 1 ~ aesthetlc or llterary terms. Local offerings are generally compared with f11m ema~ating from the commercial circuits of Europe and Hollywood. Consequ~ ently, l~ttle attem~t has been made to study it in terms of indigenous images, 1ts own lnner dynamlcs or as an expression of South African social history. More typically, it continues to be regarded as disreputable…
Non-racialism, relationality and no-relation
This article examines the rearticulation of meanings appropriated out of historical and ideological phases of the anti-Apartheid struggle, specifically with regard to race (non-racialism) and Black Consciousness. It compares examples of democrats in contexts radically different from South Africa, deploying “South African-made” meaning into discursive and political-economic contexts for which they had not been designed. The example of Steve Biko’s…
Class and Ideology
Until rece~tly, c~iticism of South African cinema has been couched predominantly 1 ~ aesthetlc or llterary terms. Local offerings are generally compared with f11m ema~ating from the commercial circuits of Europe and Hollywood. Consequ~ ently, l~ttle attem~t has been made to study it in terms of indigenous images, 1ts own lnner dynamlcs or as an expression of South African social history. More typically, it continues to be regarded as disreputable…
Popular Memory and the Voortrekker Films
The South African political discourse of the 1980s roots itself in absolutes -facts, objectiveness and the 'hard, tangible and exploitable images of reality'-but paradoxically, it also implies degree o& fact: fact, true facts and hard facts. This semantic contradiction hides a welter of political machination as language and other forms of semiotic sign locate the site of struggle between dominant and opposing ideologies
Race, class and the South African progressive press
Community and Class Struggle
This article was written in collaboration with P. Eric Louw, Ansuya Chetty and students of the CCSU. It reflects many points raised during the popular writing workshop organized by the Centre for Adult and Continuing Education of the University of Western Cape. The workshop was part of the 1986 Association for Sociology in Southern Africa Conference
Soviet media in the age of glasnost
Video, realism and class struggle
African’ Cinema — Theoretical Perspectives on Some Unresolved Questions
For a South African reader a slightly disconcerting feature of Manthia Diawara's book on African cinema is the total exclusion of South Africa (except for a few passing references) from the discussion. There are clear historical reasons for this, of course, not the least important of which are the facts that South Africa was not colonised and decolonised in precisely the way that the rest of Africa was. Edwin Hees (1993)
African Stars
Media In and On Africa
Theoretical perspectives on cinema in Africa
The study of African cinema is often assumed to be the study of black film. This paper examines this notion with respect to definitions of Africa, questions of identity, and different historical discourses of resistance. Western psychocentric approaches to film criticism are criticized. The issue of authorship is revisited with the question: Can a white director make a film reflecting the “black” experience? This question is explored with referen…
Chopi Music of Mozambique
Film and human rights
(1997). Film and human rights: Whose rights, whose interpretations, what consequences? Visual Anthropology: Vol. 9, No. 3-4, pp. 353-365
Orality, rhythmography and visual representation
This paper explores the epistemological problems which occur in analysis of orality through visual images. Narrow disciplinary orientations are argued to impede understanding of what the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce calls the final interpretant, that which would be agreed by the scholarly community to be the ultimate opinion. When filmmakers or scholars take the imaging medium for granted they fail to “see” the visual codes which structure …
Structured absences
(1999). Structured absences: Shot logs on the Marshall family expeditionary films, 1950–1958. Visual Anthropology: Vol. 12, No. 2-3, pp. 289-338
"Textualizing the san "past
The anthropology of conservation and the way that visual media, especially documentary film, contribute to mythical Tourist perceptions of the San, are discussed in relation to categories of conservancy, living museums, cultural ecology and the marketing of ecological legitimacy. The central metaphor of dance as a mythical tourist image of Africa is the vehicle through which the analysis is undertaken
Psychospiritual ecoscience
The relation between knowledge and the visual, on the one hand, and knowledge about peoples on the other, is a prime concern in visual anthropology. The impact of the visual on the everyday life of the Ju/'hoansi is my concern here. This paper is offered in two parts: this article and the one which follows. The results of a field‐trip in July 1996 to Otjozondjupa (previously known as Bush‐manland) in Namibia are discussed in terms of the question…
Powering popular conceptions
The paper develops a theoretical framework for the study of ethnographic film out‐takes in relation to material that is included in released ethnographic film, in this case, the films by John Marshall on the Kalahari San. The significance of what is included in relation to that which is excluded is called the theory of structured absences. This theory is then applied to the study of the 700,000 feet of 16 mm out‐takes not used by Marshall in his …
Encounters in the Kalahari
Blue Is Hot, Red Is Cold
This article is a theorized diary of three field trips to a remote part of South ern Africa. It develops a reflexive argument for a reverse cultural studies in discussing problems in fieldwork, globalization, academic access, and research accountability. Academy-bound scholarship claiming to be study ing the popular is questioned. The narrative aims to forge a space in the global publications industry for kinds of cultural studies done in Africa,…
Contradictory Subjectivity
Most of the author's writing and film/video making until the mid-1990s was couched within an antiapartheid, explicitly Marxist framework. But, like all individuals, he has his contradictions. These are derived from his class, eth nic, and racial determinations. This reflexive article negotiates the author's experiences during the apartheid and postapartheid eras, from modernism to postmodernism. This chapter examines some of these influences on h…
The semiotics of anthropological authenticity
This study examines the relationship between media constructions of First and indigenous peoples, and the “performative primitives” who are employed in “cultural” villages in the South African province of KwaZulu‐Natal (KZN), with specific reference to Shakaland where the TV series, Shaka Zulu, was filmed in the late 1970s. A Perceian‐derived semiotic method is applied in analysis of the nature of tourist encounters with performers, the relations…
Rock art, the art of tracking, and cybertracking
Louis Liebenberg. A Field Guide to the Animal Tracks of Southern Africa. Cape Town: David Philip, 1990; 320 pp., photographs, illustrations, maps, diagrams, index. Louis Liebenberg. A Concise Guide to Animal Tracks of Southern Africa. Cape Town: David Philip, 1992; 104 pp., photographs, sketches, maps. Louis Liebenberg. The Art of Tracking: The Origins of Science. Cape Town: David Philip, 1995; 192 pp., drawings, index. J. D. Lewis‐Williams. Disc…
Ethics
This kind of preamble to any Code of Ethics overcomes all those hoary old arguments about the public's right to know, the so-called free-flow of information, and the conflict between Eurocentric and Afrocentric values
State of the discipline communication studies in South Africa
This article is an abridged version of a longer report commissioned in 1999 by the National Research Foundation (NRF) on the State of the Discipline: Communication Studies. The study reports on the challenges facing the discipline during the post-apartheid, post-disciplinary era. The report deals with communication in general, but focuses on journalism and mass communication teaching. The findings examine how practitioners teaching the discipline…
Romancing the Kalahari
Sociology (44 obras) · Political science (36 obras) · Law (25 obras) · Law (24 obras) · Epistemology (22 obras) · Art (21 obras) · African history and culture studies (19 obras) · Anthropology (19 obras) · South African History and Culture (18 obras) · History (17 obras)