Date/Time
Date(s) - Wed - 18 May
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Categories
Dear friends of the Urban Futures Centre @ Durban University of Technology (UFC@DUT),
The UFC@DUT will be running its 12th seminar of the year. Please join us for yet another interesting seminar presentation entitled Hyperapartheid.
Topic : Hyperapartheid
Presenter: Mvuselelo Ngcoya
Date: Wednesday, 18 May 2016
Time: 12:00 to 13:30
Venue: BS2103, Level 1, S2 Block, Steve Biko Campus. Entrance from gate 1 and 2. 79 Steve Biko road.
About the Presentation
In lieu of an abstract
This is not a happy story. A story of an oppressed and dehumanized people (especially post liberation) is never a happy story. This is in many ways also not a story. It is a dark theoretical musing about the post-liberation period – a lamentation of lamentations – which lies athwart our new postcolony. Many moons ago, Baldwin (1955:25) warned that the black “is a social, not a personal or human problem – for to think of her is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence.” This blanking of the black reigns supreme in the social sciences. Our work as scholars is therefore anchored on a dominant professional language and method that privileges certain places and people as authors, and declares particular ways of knowing universal. How to expand the generally narrow and exclusionary theoretical coda and include other ways of knowing? How can we use narratives, vignettes, and stories to expose and unravel the subterranean scaffolding that keeps apartheid alive? How do we do so in conceptually and theoretically sound ways? What is the place of personal experience in academic research and writing? Who is our audience ultimately? This is what I worry about in this piece. Through the prism of tourist travel, I use autoethnography and the narrative form to interrogate the “thingification” (Fanon) of black subjects in tourism. Tourism has been touted as South Africa’s post-apartheid peace dividend. Indeed, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation has identified tourism as one of the key anchors of its strategies, with contributions to GDP expected to hit R500 billion by 2020. Yet, to many South Africans tourism is illusive and troublesome. Here, I recount my own experiences of tourism beginning with a first encounter on a fateful night in 1993 and my continued struggles with this global phenomenon. I use these experiences to illuminate what I have termed hyperapartheid.
The paper was published in the Journal of Narrative Politics 2, no. 1 (2015), and is attached to this invitation.
About the Presenter
Born in the undulating hills of Phatheni, Richmond, Mvu is essentially a country bumpkin. One who does enjoy fine and fun things though, especially food. His culinary appetite has spiced his academic work with intellectual interest in the social life and political economy of indigenous vegetables (particularly imbuya or amaranth). He wonders how we got to know so much about indigenous medicines, indigenous gardens, and Nguni cattle and so little about indigenous vegetables. Thus, agrarian issues such as land reform, small-scale agriculture, rural development, etc. form the kernel of his research interests. When he’s not thinking about food, Mvu teaches in the Development Studies programme in the School of Built Environment and Development Studies (SBEDS) where he has been since 2010. His other academic interests include investigating the role of subjugated philosophies in International Relations. His is particularly interested in the local and global significance of ubuntu, especially the contested social and political uses of this worldview. His background in International Relations theory sustains an old flame of interest in the relevance of Frantz Fanon to understanding international politics. Prior to joining UKZN, Mvu taught at American University in Washington D.C. and worked as a research analyst for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). He dabbles in poetry, plays beach volleyball and soccer, and struggles through Spanish classes during his spare time.
Please feel free to send this on to others who might be interested. Kindly RSVP your attendance.
Looking forward to seeing you at this seminar.
Kind Regards
Fathima Ally
Durban University of Technology
Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment
Urban Futures Centre
Administrator
031 373 2100/2020/0813528353