Browsing by Author "Hamilton Carolyn"

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    Oudano as praxis: archives, audiotopias and movements
    (2023) Sakaria, Nashilongweshipwe; Mtshali, Mbongeni; Hamilton Carolyn
    Several Namibian studies have looked at Oudano as an expansive Oshiwambo and Rukwangali concept that implies utterances of play, performance, and performativity in spheres of culture, sports, religion, and politics. This thesis offers experiments that explore the critical usefulness of Oudano. I embark on these experiments in a deliberately undisciplined way, crossing media, time periods, ethnicities, geographies, and emphasising embodiment and mobility. In the process I show how Oudano is a practice of critical orientation in various respects, by looking at cultural work that questions institutional constraints and exclusions. This study departs from the disjuncture between cultural work that is authorised by hegemonic national heritage discourse and unauthorised cultural work in action, offering other ways of knowing with different aims that slide into the cracks, between and outside of power. The disjuncture endorses structural disparities that are a direct result of a cultural hegemony, its aims and exertion of power. I was motivated by a deep anxiety caused by Namibia's post-apartheid dominant epistemologies that fundamentally exclude indigenous and subaltern methods of knowledge production. This thesis was aimed at finding a range of conceptual and methodological approaches for critical consciousness and radical imagination across place and time. I made a choice to focus on a set of ‘unrelated objects' which include my cultural practices and those of other cultural workers in Namibia. African queer and performance theories are interfaced with Oudano to demonstrate the relatedness of these objects. The objects gathered and analysed in this study were given status of archive to point to their role of memory making in social and cultural movements. Methodologically, I relied on Archival research and Practice-as-Research (P-aR) to interweave my (performance and curatorial) practice and historical research. The thesis is a collection of six papers divided in two movements which offer specific insights about the various objects of analysis. These objects include lino-cut prints, rock art, colonial photography and sonic archives, performance art, museum theatre, site-related performance, jazz, struggle music, HipHop, Kwaito, Shambo, documentary film, orature, oral history, protest action, as well as curatorial practice. Given its epistemic potential, Oudano is a generative approach of decolonising our understandings of performance cultures. Through close reading and listening to works of Oudano produced in Namibia, I demonstrate how people have historically practiced Oudano to construct audiotopic imaginations and build social movements. While this offers decolonial lessons for both performance and archivality, Oudano is an indigenous framework of preserving and queering knowledge. In that sense, a queer understanding of Oudano exceeds geo-political and ethnic borders, signifying how it has historically accompanied historic migrations of artists and material culture, as well as activists and non-normative ideas. By reading Oudano across time allowed this study to interrupt periodisation, showing Oudano's potential as a trans-temporal practice. Overall, this study contributes to the long- existing gap of performance studies as a field in Namibian studies. It pays attention to overlooked archives of cultural work, most of which have hardly received any scholarly attention. The thesis exceeds my disciplinary training of drama and theatre, demonstrating Oudano as an intellectual praxis that is leaky, slippery, and undisciplined.
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    The wider KwaZulu-Natal region circa 1700 to the onset of colonialism: a critical essay on sources and historiography
    (2020) Fagan, Henry Allan; Mulaudzi, Maanda; Hamilton Carolyn
    This dissertation is an extended essay dealing with historical productions on the late independent era (the late “pre-colonial” epoch) of the wider KwaZulu-Natal region. The project pays particular attention to the development of the historiography and examines how it has shaped and in turn been shaped by the source material over time. Attention is also drawn to issues with terminology and disciplinary convention, including the distinction which is traditionally made between ‘primary' and ‘secondary' sources. The dissertation's scope extends beyond the discipline of history to interrogate how influences from the fields of anthropology, art history, archaeology, and literary criticism have shaped the production of history. It also examines the productions of African intellectuals whose works were excluded from the discipline of history during the late colonial and apartheid eras. Among other things, this essay draws attention to historiographical breaks in the literature and considerers where paradigm shifts and epistemic ruptures can be discerned.
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    Township refusals (for containment): engaging the cultural production of Sepitori s Amapiano through a Black (Sonic) Studies curatorial lens
    (2024) Maledu, Amogelang; Malatjie, Portia; Hamilton Carolyn
    Amapiano is one of South Africa's most popular musical exports. As a musical practice, Amapiano falls under the “genre” of Electronic Dance Music (EDM), more specifically, House music. Amapiano's global acclaim and exponential growth is aided by how popular culture is consumed in the 21st century: the internet. Its musical reverberations can be heard from the local minibus taxi to the ubiquitous viral internet sensations and dance crazes on social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). The popular, collective musical practice named Amapiano, is a musical osmosis, referencing a plethora of other sounds and musical traditions, many contextual to South African music history, some global in their innovations. This research explores Amapiano that specifically comes from Pretoria in relation to a Black Sonic Studies lens. The research looks at Amapiano from Pretoria within the scope of the city's lingua franca, Sepitori, to also consider the sociolinguistics embedded in the cultural praxes inherent in Amapiano from Pretoria. The research is not interested in a genealogical historical study of Amapiano, nor is it interested in an ethnomusicological approach to the music. The research exists within an interdisciplinary framework of visual culture studies where Amapiano is investigated through its phonic materiality within the broader paradigm of critical discourses such as Black Sonic Studies, curatorial practice and the dynamism of contemporary digital media and how it influences artistic cultural production in South Africa. The lens in which the research looks at Amapiano moves beyond the music as just entertainment or party/dance music (which is often how it is referred to) and treats the musical practice as part of a complex series of sonic ontologies of Black being. Here, the idea of sonic Black ontologies is investigated through township refusals read in the innovations of Amapiano, embedded within Pretoria's sociosonic cultural character.