Browsing by Author "Mtshali, Mbongeni"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Making “Quare” Spaces: Re-membering Childhood as a Queer Practice of Indigenous African Place-making
    (2022) Mbatsha, Tandile; Mtshali, Mbongeni; Pather, Jay
    Queers of colour are in real and constant danger as they are not seen to belong neatly to either Western queer culture (due to their blackness) or African culture (due to their queerness). This discursive violence legitimizes actual violence on black queer bodies. This research project uses performance as a tool to address black queer erasure and aims to debunk the tired claim that queerness is un-African. In my final thesis production and its accompanying explication, I engage with memory and practices of queer self-fashioning as a means of contesting oppressive, hegemonic, and heteronormative ideologies of gendered racial belonging. Memory thus serves as both a critical concept and an aesthetic impulse in my practice of queer space making. I use performances of intimate childhood memories of shame and othering to articulate how black queer subjects emerge in distinct relation and/or contra-position to the white Euro-American identity construct that dominates understanding of queer citizenship and politics. In so doing, I work towards naming and enacting a “quare” (Johnson, 2001, p. 8) politics that attends to the specificity of black queer lifeworlds. Producing a counterhegemonic queer space that is attentive to the potentially generative tensions between “queerness” and black African indigenous ontologies enables the envisioning and affirming of black African queer subjectivity in all its complexity. I use Johnson's critical reframing of ‘queer' as ‘quare' as the basis for my engagement with queerof-colour critiques of hetero- and homonormativity. Quare in this research study is deployed as part of various contemporary endeavours to locate racialised and class knowledge in identity. It is also used to articulate genderqueer and sexually non-conforming subjectivities such that ways of knowing are viewed both as “discursively mediated and as historically situated and materially conditioned” (Johnson, 2001, p. 13). The practice of self-reflexivity through performance is posited as a method for self-image fashioning in this study. Further, I show in my performance work that Johnson's (2001) construal of self-image-making and performativity have potential for restoring subjectivity and agency through the performance of self.
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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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    Performing Methods of Undress towards a Re-Imagined African Masculine Identity
    (2019) Mabitsela, Lesiba; Mtshali, Mbongeni
    In a continent built on competing patriarchal cultures and traditions, the Eurocentric perspective is dominant. The suit/blazer has become a symbol of morality, power, and class that has centred its position via the violent legacy of colonialism and slavery or as Edward Said defines these legacies, via notions of “cultural imperialism”. The purpose of this paper is to inquire whether an aesthetic change from this ideological legacy would ultimately lead to a change in African masculine embodiments. The research identifies and applies multiple references from different applications of embodied resistance: sartorial displays, fashion design, drapery and theories around the gendered body and its relation to clothing for such a purpose – performed hereas „methods of undress‟.
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    (Re)storing and (Re)storying men with broken wrists: using intsomi as critical fabulation to refute the notion of queerness as un-African
    (2025) Nyezi, Freddy Junior Sikhanyiso; Mtshali, Mbongeni; Mbothwe, Mandla
    My research attempts to challenge the contemporary perception of homosexuality as “un-African”. This misconception is often grounded in the perceived absence of queer people of colour from the “archive” of black African (hi)stories that shape our collective understandings of who is and who is not properly “African”. Given that what we do know of how gender is conceived among African societies comes to us predominantly via the colonial archive with all its attendant elisions and lacunae, there is a strong case to be made for treating these histories and the authority they assume in defining our contemporary politics of belonging with some scepticism. Accordingly, I (re)turn to the archive of indigenous African folktales as a means to challenge cultural myths of queer black (un)belonging. In my final thesis project, I take the Xhosa ntsomi (folktale) seriously as a mode of producing and transmitting cultural knowledge and appropriate its formal aesthetics to create queer speculative fictions/myths that subvert neocolonial heteropatriarchy and the attempted erasure of black queer personhood from the story of Africa. Using the culturally embedded formal and narrative tropes of intsomi alongside techniques of biomythography and critical fabulations to queer the neocolonial archive, I work to “(re)store” and “(re)story” black queer African personhood, affirming its complicated place in African society and the visions of freedom and belonging animated by our shared histories of anti-/decolonial struggle.
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    Reflections on a body of work/water: re-membering the post-slave female body through performance practice
    (2017) Abrahams,Rehane; Stopford, Clare; Mtshali, Mbongeni
    This study attempts to ‘re-member' the post-slave South African female body through personal performance practice. It addresses re-membering both as an embodied activity of Recalling erased memory and as a recuperation of the dis-membered post-slave female body. Through reflecting on two examples of personal performance practice, What the Water Gave Me (2000) and Spice Root (2005), I use my own post-slave body as the locus of Intersection between the private and the political, the biological and the historical. The transmission of cultural memory through performance is traced through Joseph Roach's (1996) ‘surrogation' and Diana Taylor's (2003) ‘Repertoire'. Specifically, I employ a syncretic spirituality and objects of cultural memory to re-member a diasporic narrative continuity and recuperate embodied feminine agency. Gabeba Baderoon's (2014) perspective on the Indian Ocean as site of colonial slavery and cultural memory across diaspora and Raissa De Smet Trumbull's (2010) monograph on ‘Oceanic liquidity' inspire a figuration of the Ocean as an embodied, affective, anti-colonial presence. These modalities also inflect the style of writing in my inquiry, thus privileging the material/maternal, cyclical, leaky and excessive qualities of water a counter-hegemonic practice.
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    Umthonyama
    (2023) Lallie, Lungile; Mtshali, Mbongeni
    Umthonyama explores the politics of black queer visibility and contested belonging within the evolving culture of amaXhosa people. Black queer performance practitioners, are practically and theoretically foregrounded in this thesis to demonstrate the sophisticated ways in which we become visible, create space, and locate ourselves within the culture. Black queer erasure is furthermore complicated by examining how Xhosa contemporary popular culture and music is influenced by Xhosa religious practice, which then becomes a fertile site for both the subversion and reimagining of new cultural identities and belonging. I draw chiefly on José Esteban Muñoz's concept of 'disidentification' and Viktor Shklyovsky's concept of 'defamiliarization' as theoretical and formal approaches in my enquiry. To these ends, my thesis production, Umthonyama --cyclical, durational live-art installation, work -- is stylized as a queer 'homily' that rehearses and celebrates a queer genealogy of black Xhosa identity felt and contested at the level of the intimate body. Citing the aesthetics and politics of black artists such as Athi-Patra Ruga, Thandiswa Mazwai, Camagwini, and Ntombethongo, the installation acts as the central site of experience, encounter, collision, for reframing neocolonial codes of spiritual, traditional, and popular modes of emerging Xhosa culture
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    Utopia in performance: re-imagining a coloured identity narrative
    (2019) Wentworth, Raezeen; Mtshali, Mbongeni
    In this study I explore how coloured identity has been historically produced as a monolithic racial category, focussing on how performance offers critically generative ways of addressing and contesting the politics and meanings of colouredness in post-apartheid South Africa. This study explores the politics of naming in so far as its impact both from an intrinsic and extrinsic perspective in relation to a personal identity narrative. It is the interest of this study is to disrupt normative ideological and cultural constraints and investigate the performance of coloured identity through the use of individual and collective memory construed from the established theatrical canon. The desired outcome is to unearth a series of practical reference points towards the performance of a progressive coloured identity narrative within the current socio-cultural and political landscape. The theoretical body though which this practice is located is framed though a critical definition of 'Utopia’, in an attempt to mobilise how the narrative of coloured identity could be explored in the realm of theatrical performance. I propose that it is within a utopian performative space; one that is reflexive of the past and that is non-coercive; that a re-imagining of a coloured identity narrative is made accessible.