Browsing by Author "Kar, Bodhisattva"

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    Designed to divide: public toilets in Cape Town, 1880-1940
    (2018) Argent, Lucienne; Kar, Bodhisattva
    This dissertation seeks to explore the frequently overlooked site of public toilets in relation to the politics of production and maintenance of social hierarchies in Cape Town between 1880 and 1940. In particular, it examines how public toilets both reflected and operationalised new understandings of demarcation of space, and disciplining and distribution of bodily functions. Rather than providing a comprehensive history of this municipally provided facility, this dissertation aims at exploring the ways in which the scanty, scattered and seemingly technical archive on public toilets can be used to understand the co-production of the built environment and social values.The emphasis on the spatial and the corporeal aspects of this history not only allows us to challenge the abstraction of the ‘public’ with which historians usually operate, but also to recognize how, for the city officials, the human body’s capacity to generate waste was both a source of anxiety and a means of constructing “inferiority” among particular groups of people. The dissertation consists of a chapter-length introduction, followed by three chapters based on primary research. In conversation with a range of conceptual and comparative academic literature, the introductory chapter identifies and examines the key theoretical questions underlying a possible history of public toilets in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Cape Town. Chapter One interrogates the public-ness of the so-called public toilets, by Abstract critically engaging the intersections of race, class and gender, and by calling attention to their role in the maintenance of social hierarchies. Chapter Two focuses primarily on the question of infrastructure and design, trying to place the relationship between material designs and physical bodies at the centre of a history of practices. Chapter Three is concerned with the use and control of public toilets, and traces the ways in which both toilet users and attendants negotiated the values and habits that city officials tried to enforce in and through this institution. This research has drawn on a variety of archival sources, including Mayor’s Minutes, Reports of the Medical Officers of Health, correspondence between the city council and members of the public, Select Committee Reports, articles in and letters to the press, maps of the city, architect’s plans, as well as contemporary fictional literature.
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    Politics and prosthesis : representing disability in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
    (2016) Price, Neroli; Field, Sean; Kar, Bodhisattva
    This dissertation aims to put two seemingly stable and unchanging categories, namely the 'nation' and the 'body', into conversation with each other in order to interrogate how the disabled body, in particular, became a site for nation building in South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy in the 1990s. More specifically, this dissertation aims to explore how, framed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), different bodies took on disparate meanings that both affirmed and challenged the emergence of the euphemistically termed, 'New Nation'. Relying on insights from disability studies, postcolonial scholarship and critical race and gender studies, this dissertation endeavours to interrogate how the emergent post-apartheid state relied on the collective memory and identity generated through particular ideas of violence and politics evidenced by the injured bodies on display at the TRC. Drawing on the TRC transcripts, the TRC Final Report and the Truth Commission Special Report coverage of the proceedings, this dissertation seeks to ask new questions about the shifting and uneven sites of embodied meaning-making in post-apartheid South Africa.
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    Producing the Precolonial: Professional and Popular Lives of Mapungubwe, 1937-2017
    Ramji, Himal; Hamilton, Carolyn; Angier, Kate; Kar, Bodhisattva
    This thesis is a study of the changing meanings of the thing that is 'Mapungubwe' (most often considered as a thirteenth-century southern African state) within and outside the academy from 1937 and 2017, deliberately excluding meanings that might have existed prior to 1937, analysing the socio-political work Mapungubwe has been made to do in this period. The study explores the shaping and positioning of evidence in the production of narratives that ascribe and/or enforce particular truths or regimes of truth. To do this, I consider the politico-cultural associations that convert an object into evidence of something and make that evidence meaningful. Under what conditions, and for what reasons does this conversion occur? And, what specific meaning is imposed into the object? This is, therefore, an analytical disaggregation and political assessment of the particular signs and symbols through which the composite and contested imaginaire of Mapungubwe has been historically constructed. Necessarily, it is also an unpicking of the languages of evidence. The work is divided into three parts, each dealing with a different strut in the making of Mapungubwe. The first chapter covers the archaeological production of Mapungubwe, from the first excavational work conducted in the 1930s, until more recent work, during the 2010s. During the early twentieth century, the topic of Mapungubwe was cloistered within academic archaeology, particularly at the University of Pretoria. It was only after the end of apartheid that the 'trope' of Mapungubwe began to be deployed in an increasingly wider social realm and integrated into multiple educational and heritage projects, with particular encouragement from the state. The second chapter looks at the introduction and development of the theme of Mapungubwe in the South African national history education curriculum after 2003, when it was also made a UNESCO World Heritage Site and harnessed as name of the Order of Mapungubwe. The chapter analyses the narrative presentation of Mapungubwe in the existing curriculum, and the attending conceptual devices through which this narrative is constructed and sustained. The third chapter scans the explosion of Mapungubwe in popular discourses, about a decade after its strategic foregrounding in school education and institutionalisation as heritage. In this chapter I examine several literary narratives, artistic productions and promotional activities of tourism in conjunction with the current political and economic developments in the area. I make use of sources from various different academic disciplines, including archaeology, history, politics, education and history education, literary theory, as well as relevant samples from fictive writing, sculpture, poetry, touristic longform writing, and advertisements. In bringing together such diverse orders of discourse, the thesis attempts to map the expanding topographies of Mapungubwe - a venture that, I submit, has methodological and topical significance beyond the immediate field of inquiry. Through this work, the reader will be able to see how the language used to describe and inscribe meaning in Mapungubwe has changed over time, exposing the malleability of (precolonial) history in the hands of both professionals and non-professionals. The thesis makes clear to the reader the importance of 'popular' representations of history in the development of modern culture, both in terms of reproducing existing conditions, as well as resisting them. Finally, the thesis troubles the concept of the 'precolonial', and considers what changing purpose the period has had over time, how it shapes our view of history, and how we could alternatively envisage the precolonial and, thus, history.
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    The Visual Syntax of a Postcolony: Photographs in Zambia, 1930s – 1980s
    (2022) Moronell, Sebastian Alfredo; Kar, Bodhisattva
    This dissertation investigates how photographs and photographic practices have both shaped and have been shaped by the political, cultural and performative demands of the project of postcolonial nation building in Zambia. Drawing on both visual and textual materials from the 1930s to the 1980s, collected from the National Archives of Zambia as well as several private collections, including that of the Fine Art Studios in Lusaka, this dissertation attempts to understand the different ways in which critical attention to the role of the mechanically reproduced images can allow us to reconsider the given boundaries between the colonial and the postcolonial, the public and the private, and the nation and the individual. The first chapter explores the methodological possibilities and the archival limits of writing a social history of photography in Zambia that still remains largely undocumented. The second chapter sifts through thousands of images haphazardly stored in the National Archives of Zambia, reflecting on the shift from the ethnographic mode of observation in the late colonial period to the concerted imaging of developmentalist spectacles in the early postcolonial period. The focus of the third chapter is on the politics of official images of Kenneth Kaunda, the first president of independent Zambia. This dissertation combines uses of photographs, archival documents, semi-structured interviews and brief auto-ethnographic observations.