Browsing by Author "Davids, Nadia"

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    Inherited memories : performing the archive
    (2007) Davids, Nadia; Erasmus, Zimitri; Banning, Yvonne
    This thesis explores the way in which words, memories, and images of District Six are mediated and performed in an attempt to memorialised a destroyed urban landscape. It expands the borders of 'performance' to include oral (re)constructions of place by ex-residents, which in turn opens a space for a reflective analysis in which Marianne Hirsch’s psychodynamic theory of ‘postmemory’ is explored through the phrase ‘Children of District Six’. It traces the role and influence of ex-residents in shaping the politics and poetics of the District Six Museum and argues that orality and performance are singularly sympathetic in evoking and remembering the aesthetic, cultural, and political realms of District Six. It then shifts towards an analysis of two creative projects; Magnet Theater's Onnest’bo and the Museum’s Re-Imagining Carnival in which the themes of place, home, loss, exile, resistance, advocacy and restitution rotate around experiences of forced removals in general and District Six in particular. A thematic cord is created between these performance pieces and oral testimonies and their combined mediation of the many archives of District Six. Through an engagement with the performative odysseys and attendant archives of Re-Imagining Carnival and Onnest’bo the thesis examine metaphysical enactments of material loss, engages with tactics of re-construction of place and experience through memory, connects the psychic worlds of memory and performance and suggests an ideological flow between oral history, witnessing, and theatre. It is an exploration underpinned by the question of the role of performance in memorialising national narratives and the potential of creative mobilisations of memory in enacting psychic restitution. Both Onnest’bo and Re-Imagining Carnival are linked to the District Six Museum, and as such the Museum, its methodologies, ethics, ethos, and work with tangible and intangible heritage serve as an essential ideological foundation from which these creative visions emerge.
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    Literature and the littoral in South Africa: reading the tides of history
    (2022) Geustyn, Maria Elizabeth; Davids, Nadia; Young, Sandra; Samuelson, Meg
    This thesis explores representations of the littoral in South African literature. It analyses literature published in three broad historical periods with the specific focus on the littoral as a setting from which authors imagine histories differently, often as a corrective, to challenge and wrestle with the racialized categorization of bodies in space. Littoral settings are present throughout the history of South African literature and, when placed on a linear, progressive timeline, feature as a place of first encounters, a site of segregation, and the unmaking of these boundaries. This thesis argues, however, that sequencing representations of the littoral according to this model would subsume histories by those without the power to control official narratives, or whose histories are not well represented in official archives, under rigid nation-based paradigms of typical western historiography. By employing Kamau Brathwaite's theory of “tidalectics” as a method, metaphor and model, I conduct a recursive reading of the littoral's presence in South African literature to show that littoral moments resonate with each other across different historical moments. As such, tidalectics attend to multiple temporalities in a more open, fluid way. I argue that this manner of attending to history surfaces from and sits alongside formal historiography, gently disrupting its premises by offering alternative models for recognising and recording marginal narratives. The primary texts for this thesis include Portuguese expansionist texts, novels by prominent South African authors such as Olive Schreiner, Nadine Gordimer, Peter Abrahams, Zoë Wicomb, Lewis Nkosi, and Yvette Christiansë, and a poetry collection by Douglas Livingstone. In these texts, the littoral is presented as a space which is governed by the spatial politics of that era, but also challenges them, playing a valuable part in constructing spatial politics, and in turn racial politics, in South Africa. A tidalectic reading of these literatures therefore demonstrates that the littoral allows for a different spatio-temporal approach to the long history of social injustice in South Africa.