Browsing by Author "Monoa, Thabang"

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    Browning the archive: troubling normative formations of South African *Indian Identity
    (2025) Singh, Zenaéca; Monoa, Thabang; Searle, Bernadette
    My study engages South African *Indian historiography through a gendered lens. Available archival material is largely owed to the colonial governance of the immigration of Indians as indentured labourers and passengers. Accordingly, *Indian women were sidelined and defined by colonial and patriarchal structures that constructed them as chaste and subservient wives and daughters. However, they were also exoticized and deemed as deviant and immoral for causing outbreaks of gender-based violence, venereal diseases, and infant mortality in indentured communities. Therefore, notions of *Indian womanhood was largely overdetermined by the colonial and male gaze. Decolonial strategies of destabilization are critical to this study to subvert the visual and discursive regimes of *Indians. This study responsively centers the position of women to decipher their sense of agency as opposed to passivity. I therewith consider an artistic practice that combines an engagement with archival and personal material to expose the sublime violence and erasures of the past whilst filling in these gaps of history. Browning is an alternative term for referring to the complexity and hybridity of the South African *Indian identity outside of its normative formations. Through the indenture narrative and the aesthetics of sugar I work through historic and familial events that can help visualize and speculate a sense of the lived experience of South African *Indians or being Brown.
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    Jazz and Visual Abstraction: The Artworks of Mongezi Ncaphayi
    (2025) Kanyane, Thabang; Monoa, Thabang
    This study aims to theorize the intersections between jazz music and abstraction in the visual arts. Its focus is to analyse phenomenological aspects in the selected works of South African contemporary visual artist and jazz saxophonist Mongezi Ncaphayi (b.1983), as a means to understand the nature of the relationship between the 'visual' and 'sonic' in his work. This includes: locating visual art practice within a wider constellation of imagery production, which I refer to as jazz visual culture, encompassing album cover art, photography, and graphic scores, to outline a culturally informed and constructed view of jazz and visual art practices. By paying particular attention to Ncaphayi's iconography and the explications of his work, this study aims to clarify the resonances between the visual and the sonic, while demonstrating the significance of both in the realm of signification. Although non-figurative abstraction lacks the conventional motifs found in figurative works, such as the depiction of instrumentation and portraiture, or even the symbolic stability of music notation, it continues to play a role in mediating the musical, aesthetic, and cultural meanings of jazz, despite its idiosyncrasy. This study is conducted by examining existing literature on jazz visual histories, criticism, music theory, and interviews with Mongezi Ncaphayi as research tools. Additionally, specific artworks are analysed to support an investigation of the cross- modal encounters between visual and sonic elements. These are then interpreted through the lenses of phenomenology, formalism, iconography, and black studies.