OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Sitas, Ari"

Browsing by Author "Sitas, Ari"

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Open Access
Alternatives to the economic rationalisation of renewable energy transitions: The Tsitsikamma Community Renewable Wind Farm Story
(2023) Pressend, Michelle; Matose, Frank; Sitas, Ari
Within the climate mitigation discourse, renewable energy technology is understood as vital to reduce coal energy reliance. This discourse which is deeply anthropocentric in its approach understands 'green' energy transitions largely as reliant on reductionist techno-scientific 'solutions' and green economic growth rationalisation. If energy transitions are not engaged with critically, ongoing injustice and extractive relationships are likely to be perpetuated. The aim of this thesis is to show that alternative renewable energy transitions as responses to global warming need to be informed from a relational perspective. Values that are respectful, regenerative, and reciprocal to nature and each other constitute the concept of relationality. This study focused on the Tsitsikamma Community Wind Farm (TCWF) in the Eastern Cape (South Africa) as a site to explore the implementation of a renewable energy project. The site on which the wind farm is built has a colonial land dispossession narrative and the return of the Tsitsikamma Mfengu community to reclaimed land in 1994. The community was a willing partner in the investment of a wind energy public-private partnership. While the beneficiaries were promised improvements to their well-being, instead, the material well-being of this community remains unchanged and the commercial agricultural land degraded. The inequalities and the social-ecological relations of the past persist. The so-called 'win-win' rhetoric is an illusion in climate mitigation approaches and largely serves capital accumulation at the expense of community well-being and restoration of the soil. This study drew inspiration from Moore's (2003) world-ecology framing - history is part of rather than separate from the web of life - a non-dualist version of world history. In the research, a multisited ethnography was used and included tracing the relationships that recognised land history, memory (patterns of material nature of the land) and the entangled relationships between humans and non-humans. The conceptual framing and methodology illuminated erasures consistently overlooked in the anthropocentric climate discourses. As a consequence of those revelations openings for more relational and decolonial conceptualisation(s) based on the profound interrelatedness of life became evident. Relational energy transitions are needed in response to the climate crisis that consider the regenerative possibilities of nature-human interrelatedness. Through this argument, the study contributes an important insight for the uptake of methodology and analysis which transcends the 'resource' logic.
Open Access
An analysis of study-abroad students: how the 'self' articulates experiences and encounters in different cultural settings
(2016) Chingore, Tatenda Millicent Nichole; Sitas, Ari
Twenty-first century globalisation has brought with it, distinction among students through the Internationalisation of Higher Education (IHE). The effects of globalization and the IHE has been categorised as "preparing students for the globalizing world, suggesting new pedagogies and institutional settings that nurture 'global consciousness'" (Mansilla & Gardner, 2007: 56.) With the increase in mobility and hyper-connectivity, an education has become more than what is taught within the confines of a classroom or university. Studying abroad has become a significant component within the academic arena that allows students the privilege and opportunity to develop intercultural competence through first-hand experience This study seeks to explore the articulation of experiences and encounters from the perspective of the study abroad student exposed to cultural settings different from their own. This dissertation will place particular emphasis on the articulation of the responses and approaches taken by individuals of their respective encounters and experiences, using the Circuit of Culture as a link drawing together the themes (Re)Construction of Self Identity; 'Fitting In' and Adaptation; Developing Intercultural Competence and Society as we now know it, to give a holistic, interpretive understanding into the meanings and outcomes produced by the relationship between the constructions and perceived ideologies of both the study abroad student and the hosts collective. The study is amalgamation of responses from personal narrations given by eight participants, as well as a discussion with four individuals in a focus group from different countries. They reveal the importance of the self, from both the personal and social viewpoint to be able to comprehend the actions and reactions taken to construct, adapt, assimilate and learn from the experience. Discoveries uncover difference as a component that exists between the self and the other in a number of ways through how they classify and identify each other. As a result, slight but significant changes in perceptions can be noted.
Open Access
Being dark and foreign: a study of race in New Delhi's African student population
(2014) Rosochacki, Sophia Olivia; Sitas, Ari
This thesis presents a qualitative study of the experience of social discrimination faced by a group of African students living and studying in New Delhi, India. The question of whether the cause of discrimination is that the students are 'foreigners', or that they are 'dark', or that they are 'dark foreigners', frames the research process. What is of issue here, is whether the theoretical framework of the research opens, in the first place, a productive means of enquiry into these social issues, and in the second place, whether it leads to an effective way of articulating policies that serve to alleviate the problem of discrimination faced by African students in Delhi. I will show that by framing the problem within discourses on xenophobia, this phenomenon is placed on the agenda of established global migration policy research. While the broader context of global migration forms an integral part of understanding this phenomenon, the complex construction of racial, cultural and existential difference which emerges from the data, requires a reading which exceeds the analytic framework offered by contemporary understandings of xenophobia. Discourses of race, in turn, place the experience of the African participants in India in relation to national problems of caste discrimination, colonial categorisation and contemporary reservation politics. Such a line of enquiry enables an engagement with a layered history and culture of struggle politics in India which reveals the structural similarity of experiences of discrimination across various cultural and historical domains (Randeria, 2006;; Viswewaran, 2010). The discourse of race allows connections to be made between vernacular understandings of difference rooted in Hindu mythology, which themselves are inflected by global discourses of race (Amin, 2010). The Indian cultural phenomenon of a preference for light skin indicated by a rapidly growing cosmetics industry, is shown to carry purchase within global consumer capitalist culture and contemporary discourses of development (Couze, 2010). By treating race as a living practice, this thesis is able to engage with anticolonial thinkers like Franz Fanon and Anibal Quijano. Fanon's thinking on the topic of discrimination remains grounded in experience, and as such, provides a critical tool to re-engage the histories that the project of imperialism undermined, as well as the agency of those who experience discrimination. I argue that ultimately, the anti-colonial arguments offered by Fanon and Quijano enable a way of thinking beyond a colonised position. Finally, I argue that race, as a category of self-identification, should not be discarded in the name of assimilation or non-racialism. In this way, the dissertation asserts Winant's claim that "race and racism also work from below, as matters of resistance (racism continues as something to be resisted), and as frameworks for alternative identities and collectivities" (Winant, 2014: 3). This thesis will demonstrate that the concept of race, though ambiguous, remains indispensible in an analysis of overlapping forms of discrimination in a post-colonial and emerging trans-national context.
Open Access
Bonded: Legacies of Captivity and Fugitivity from Enslavement to Incarceration in the Cape
(2022) Perez, Javier Ernesto; Sitas, Ari; Pande, Amrita
The contemporary hyper-incarceration of ‘Coloured' South Africans is re-situated within the broader historical dialectics of racialisation and creolisation, traversing from colonial slavery to the modern prison regime. This study uses theorisations of marronage, fugitivity, and hauntology to posit novel understandings of the links between runaway slaves (‘droster1 gangs') and the contemporary ‘Coloured' criminal figure. This dissertation approaches the latter as engaged in traditions of opacity-making, initiated by the former as a production of complex structures of density and unknowability against the epistemic violence of the colonial gaze that seeks to ‘discover', categorise and control. As such, this study proposes to understand collectives of fugitives beyond the lexicons of criminality, on the one extreme, and resistance, on the other. Applying emerging qualitative and arts-based methods, it further offers an innovative methodological framework to strategically listen for the poetics and sonicity of fugitive narratives, highlighting the incondensable movements therein of dense temporalities, opacities, and personal and collective narration. Specifically, through a poetry- and performance-based workshop series, this study collaborates with formerly-incarcerated men to engage with the Cape's history of slavery and marronage, exploring the meanings and relevance of this history through creative writings, group discussions, and performance.
Open Access
Contesting 'xenophobia' through civic education: explorations with ARESTA in Khayelitsha
(2016) Kraak, Shaun; Sitas, Ari; Pande, Amrita
This thesis suggests that out of the work of ARESTA, a new notion of citizenship and belonging was developed, as a result of their workshops. This notion is furthermore articulated in various communities. In this notion, citizenship is no longer linked to indigeneity, but rather escaping war and hardship, the need to work, and place of work. It is further justified by the concept of Pan-Africanism and a common humanity. Contradictions in the findings of the thesis point to the limitations of this workshop and the importance of broader societal issues. This thesis concludes that ARESTA's intervention makes a significant contribution in opposing xenophobia, in the light of what is possible in South Africa today. However, its work is ameliorative rather than radical structural change, what may be needed is far more elusive at present.
Open Access
Fear, dislike and hate : what constitutes xenophobia? : (an analysis of violence against foreigners in De Doorns, South Africa November, 2009)
(2010) Davis, Alexandra; Sitas, Ari
This paper provides an analysis of xenophobic violence in South Africa. By examining the root of the term 'xenophobia' it is possible to show how the term has evolved to mean something entirely different in the present day. De Doorns, a small farming town in the Western Cape of South Africa is used as a case study, showing how the xenophobic violence that occurred there in November 2009 arose and manifested. Through informal interviews, analyses of available local and regional statistical data a picture of the xenophobia in De Doorns emerges and is then examined in terms of the current theories on xenophobia. The resulting finding provide some new insight into xenophobia in South Africa and how it is evolving. Past assumptions that locate the root of xenophobic sentiment leading to xenophobic action in a 'hatred' of foreigners may be mistaken as xenophobia can (and does) occur in areas with low levels of prejudice towards foreigners. It does so because dissatisfaction with the government sometimes results in a new form of protest that is, to all appearances, xenophobia, but is not necessarily motivated by xenophobic intent. Rather an underlying xenophobic sentiment that exists throughout the nation has opened the door for poor South Africans to target foreign Africans a tool of protest in order to gain government attention. The whole concept of 'xenophobia' has evolved far beyond its roots to refer to actions that are taken against foreigners for the simple reason that they are foreign. As attacks on foreigners occur with increasing frequency in South Africa it is ever more important to gain a deep understanding of each individual outbreak in order to create a holistic and informed picture of South African xenophobia. This research suggests that some of the basic questions underlying research into xenophobia to be questioned.
Open Access
Grey zones: performances, perspectives, and possibilities in Kashmir
(2015) Dinesh, Nandita; Baxter, Veronica; Sitas, Ari
This doctoral project investigates the use of theatre practice to engage across the'victim'/'perpetrator' binary in the Kashmir valley; a binary that is framed in this project as a tripartite division between Civil Society, Militants/Ex-Militants, and the Indian Armed Forces. Using Primo Levi's (1988) concept of "grey zones" to investigate how narratives from these spaces might be given theatrical form, this thesis utilised six concepts to frame the aesthetic, pedagogic, and ethical principles of a practice-based-research undertaking: Immersive Theatre, Documentary Theatre, devised theatre workshops, affect, situational ethics, and performance auto-ethnography. With one Kashmiri theatre company operating as my central collaborator, the first two phases consisted of devised theatre workshops and performances with Civil Society and Ex-Militants in Kashmir. Exploring instances from these projects through thick description, critical analyses, and auto-ethnographic writing, the grey zones of Civil Society in Kashmir are situated as being within acts of aggression that occur between civilians who are differently privileged, while it is Ex-militants who are discovered as occupying a liminal space when studying narratives of militancy in the region. By contrasting these two phases of practice-based research with the third phase of 'failed' attempts to engage with the Indian Armed Forces, this thesis postulates that the grey zones within the experience of government soldiers might only be accessed by making theatre with cadets at military academies. By drawing out the parallels and disjunctures between the manifestations of the three phases of theatre practice, this project offers outcomes that contribute to scholarship around theatrical interventions in times and places of war. The concluding outcomes are framed by one question: if an outside theatre maker were to create one performance piece that contains cross-community narratives from Kashmir, what ethical, pedagogical, and aesthetic considerations might arise as a result. Amongst the strategies that are put forward to answer this question, there are three outcomes that are particularly significant: a re-articulation of grey zones as existing both between and within each of the three groups; the proposal of a process-based spectatorship when utilising novelty in form and content; a re-framing of the discussion around affect and effect by considering artists' intention and spectators' response vis-à-vis a theatrical creation.
Open Access
It’s in the out sides: An investigation into the cosmological contexts of South African jazz
(2019) Gamedze, Asher; Sitas, Ari
This dissertation is an exploration of some of the philosophical thought and spiritual practices which constitute and are present and represented in and through certain instances of South African jazz. Amilcar Cabral’s revolutionary thought on liberation culture, which allows for thinking the radical impulse of cultural production, forms the foundation of the dynamic frame which we use to hear and think through the music’s content and the context by which it is composed. Through an engagement with the thought and music of the following artists - the Blue Notes, Miriam Makeba, Malombo, Nduduzo Makhathini, Zim Ngqawana, and a few others - we find ourselves in the presence of a liberatory tradition rooted in the cosmological worlds of Southern African people. Musical and spiritual practices of sangomas, the frequency of the maternal, medicinal relationships with plants and the land, and the communion and communication with ancestors are all channels of South African jazz. And the spirit of liberation that emerges in the music is situated in and dances through an encounter between these practices and aesthetics of the Black radical tradition. I provoke and elaborate on this encounter, considering the ambivalent, sometimes invisible, place of Africa in that tradition. Africa’s epistemological absence in much of the Black radical tradition, beyond minor essentialised and, at times, romanticised notions of an irretrievable source, a point of origin, or a site generally relegated to the past, is mirrored by the possibility of a productive synthesis which is improvised through the music. Moving with and for the music, listening to its critique of much of the writing about it and what that writing misses, I make the claim for jazz as a cosmologically-rooted African art form, forming part of a broader liberatory tradition which needs to be heard in relation to the spiritual and philosophical traditions which it extends.
Open Access
Jewish converts, their communities and experiences of social inclusion and exclusion in post-apartheid South Africa
(2017) Kriel, Elli; Sitas, Ari
Set in a small minority community in South Africa, the Orthodox Jewish com-munity in Johannesburg, this study explores why a person would actively and volun-tarily seek minority status by converting into an ethnic-religious minority group. Taking a social constructionist approach to understanding religious conversion, it is argued that religious conversion to Orthodox Judaism is also a social process of becoming ethnically "Jewish". In this study, two types of converts are considered, namely con-verts who come to Judaism through marriage and converts for religious purposes. Through in-depth-interviews with rabbis and converts, experiences of social inclusion and exclusion, and the meaning of conversions is understood. This study finds that regardless of the path to conversion, belonging and identity are key reasons for con-version, and that it is an ethnic process that serves group and individual needs recip-rocally. At an individual level, becoming Jewish through conversion helps avoid social exclusion and achieves other social inclusions by acquiring membership in new com-munities and by forming new social identities. At a group level, the research shows that religious conversion is part of the group's broader concern for maintaining ethnic boundaries and is therefore an element of the politics of belonging. The research shows how conversion to a minority ethnic group in a plural environment becomes a social means to protect ethnic identity and avoid assimilation. By understanding con-version as the politics of belonging, the research explores the subjective experiences of citizenship at a group and individual level.
Open Access
Locating Malangatana: decolonisation, aesthetics and the roles of an artist in a changing society
(2019) De Andrade Pissarra, Mario; Sitas, Ari
This thesis responds to the dearth of detailed studies of pioneering African modernists; and the need for fresh theoretical frameworks for the interpretation of their art. Building on recent scholarship that applies decolonisation as an epistemic framework, it argues that a productive decolonial discourse needs to consider concurrent forms of nationalism and cultural agency in both the anti/colonial and postcolonial periods. Central to this approach is an analysis of the aesthetic responses of artists to the experiences and legacies of colonialism. This thesis is grounded in a study of Malangatana Valente Ngwenya (1936-2011), Mozambique’s most celebrated artist. It draws substantially on archival material and rare publications, mostly in Portuguese. The artist’s career is located within changing social and political contexts, specifically the anti/colonial period, and the promise and collapse of the postcolonial revolutionary project, with the pervasive influence of the Cold War highlighted. Following the advent of globalisation, the artist’s role in normalising postcolonial relations with Portugal is foregrounded. Parallel to his contribution to Mozambican art and society, Malangatana features prominently in surveys of modern African art. The notion of the artist fulfilling divergent social roles at different points in time for evolving publics is linked to an analysis of his emergence as a composite cultural sign: autodidact; revolutionary; cultural ‘ambassador’; and global citizen. The artist’s decolonial aesthetics are positioned in relation to those of his pan-African peers, with four 6 themes elaborated: colonial assimilation; anti-colonial resistance; postcolonial dystopia; and the articulation of a new Mozambican identity. Key to this analysis is an elaboration of the concept of the polemic sign, initially proposed by Jean Duvignaud (1967), adapted here to interpret the artist’s predilection for composite visual signs that, in their ambivalence and often provocative significations, resist processes of definitive translation. It is argued that through a juxtaposition of disparate forms of signs, and the simultaneous deployment of semi-realist and narrative pictorial strategies, the artist develops a complex, eclectic and evocative aesthetic that requires critical and open-ended engagement. The thesis concludes with provocative questions regarding the extent to which the artist’s aesthetics reflect hegemonic national narratives, or act to unsettle these. of a new Mozambican identity. Key to this analysis is an elaboration of the concept of the polemic sign, initially proposed by Jean Duvignaud (1967), adapted here to interpret the artist’s predilection for composite visual signs that, in their ambivalence and often provocative significations, resist processes of definitive translation. It is argued that through a juxtaposition of disparate forms of signs, and the simultaneous deployment of semi-realist and narrative pictorial strategies, the artist develops a complex, eclectic and evocative aesthetic that requires critical and open-ended engagement. The thesis concludes with provocative questions regarding the extent to which the artist’s aesthetics reflect hegemonic national narratives, or act to unsettle these.
Open Access
Modelling Land Use in The Gold Belt Territories of Iron Age Southern Zambezia
(2022-08-29) Nyamushosho, Robert T; Chirikure, Shadreck; Sitas, Ari; Maṱhoho, Eric N
Throughout the world, the entanglement of humans and landscapes varies from area to area depending on the time scale. In southern Africa, the impact of humanity on the physical environment is largely discussed in the context of modern rural and urban societies, and, usually, most contributions come from human geography, agriculture, and earth sciences. Very limited research is usually extended into the deep past, yet the archaeological record is replete with valuable information that gives a long-time depth of past human land use practices. Consequently, the contribution of the physical environment to the development of complexity over time remains poorly understood in most parts of Iron Age (CE 200–1900) southern Zambezia, particularly in Mberengwa and other gold-belt territories that have often received cursory research attention. What remains obscured is how did inhabitants of these gold-belt territories transform their landscapes in the long and short-term and how did these transformations intersect with their everyday lives? In this study, we combined archaeological, historical, and anthropological data of the Zimbabwe tradition societies that lived in ancient Mberengwa to probe these issues. The preliminary outcome suggests that despite vulnerability to high temperatures, tsetse-flies, and low rainfall, Later Iron Age societies that inhabited this gold belt territory were innovative risk-takers who successfully adapted a mix of land use practices to achieve longevity in settlement and prosperity in agropastoralism, mining, crafting, and much more. This proffers useful lessons on sustainable land use. Hopefully, with modification to suit the present, such solutions may help policy makers and modern societies living in similar environments to combat current global challenges related to environmental change.
Open Access
A Museum of Bottled Sentiments: the ‘beautiful pain syndrome’ in twenty-first century Black South African theatre making
(2014) Mahali, Alude; Morris, Gay; Sitas, Ari
This study is about contemporary black theatre makers and theatre making in the 'now moment'; this moment of recovery and gradual transition after the fall of apartheid in South Africa. The 'now moment', for these theatre makers, is characterized by a deliberate journey inward, in a struggle towards self-determination. The 'now moment' is the impulse prompting the 'beautiful pain syndrome', and through performances of uncomfortable attachments and rites of passage, generates and dwells in the syndrome. Uncomfortable attachments are unsettlement and anxiety wrought by the difficulty of the 'now moment'. These manifest in the work of Black South African-based contemporary theatre makers, Mandla Mbothwe, Awelani Moyo, Mamela Nyamza and Asanda Phewa, within the duality of the 'beautiful pain syndrome'. The 'beautiful pain syndrome' is a cultural dis-ease revealed by the individual theatre makers through the aesthetic interpretation, or beautiful consideration of inherently painful material – a condition or predicament that best contains and yet attempts to unpack this shifting impulse of the 'now' moment. The works around which this study revolves, namely Mbothwe's Ingcwaba lendoda lise cankwe ndlela (the grave of the man is next to the road) (2009), Moyo's Huroyi Hwang – De/Re Composition (2007), Nyamza's Hatched (2009) and Phewa's A Face Like Mine (2008) are rites of passage works, representing a passage or transition from one phase of life to another, which occurs on multiple levels. Through guiding thinking tools, which include intuition, my own positioning, observation and comparative and cultural performance analysis, the four selected works are described, probed and, interrogated; with their purposes and poetics investigated and articulated in different ways. The study does not complete the assignment of unpacking the four works but continues to wonder and worry at them, while investigating a particular aesthetic of dis-ease through the artistic assemblage of symbolic categories. These rites of passage works reflect or echo the transitions in the country's shifting identity, along with the identities of the individuals who inhabit it.
Open Access
Museums and the construction of race ideologies: the case of natural history and ethnographic museums in South Africa
(University of Cape Town, 2020) Kasibe, Wandile Goozen; Mangcu,Xolela; Sitas, Ari; Garuba, Harry
This enquiry investigates the entanglement of the Natural History and Ethnographic museums in the construction of racist ideologies, the perpetuation of colonial reasoning and its continuities in South Africa today. It draws our attention to the fact that the museological institution was complicit and colluded in the perpetuation of colonial "crimes against humanity", thereby rendering its own institutionality a colonial "crime scene" that requires rigorous "de-colonial" investigation in the "post-colonial" era. In the attempt to shed more light into the miasma caused by colonial and apartheid rule, I turn to the practices of 'scientific enquiry' and public exhibitions to advance an argument that these museum exhibits were a precursor to genocide. The study further argues that, these public exhibits of Africans were instrumental in popularizing theories of racial ideology and white 'supremacy', dehumanizing Africans and thereby creating public justification for colonial dispossession of Africans. To support my argument I discuss the underpining politics that informed the making and dismantling of the South African Museum's "Bushman" diorama. Further to the discussion about dioramas, human zoos and other forms of racializing spectacles, I make reference to the haunting narratives of the African Diasporas to provide context and perspective. These African individuals are: Sarah Baartman ('The Hottentot Venus') and El Negro 'object 1004' and then Ota Benga, the "Congolese Pygmy", who was displayed with an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo in America in 1906, and labelled "the Missing Link". Part of my attempt to understand the story of Benga, I set on a journey to track him to the United States (US). To point out and expose these human wrongs I incorporate and discuss images of decapitated heads, prepared skulls and images of emaciated Africans, not to reproduce colonial traumas, but to unveil the gravity of the violence that was emitted against those who were deemed 'lesser' beings, namely the black Africans and KhoiSan in particular. The colonial museum collected these human remains for race 'science' under politically motivated circumstances to feed to the idea that black 'inferiority' and white 'superiority' as a new global socio-political order. The evidence of diverse materials (photographs, manuscript letters etc) that I have used here point to the toxic collusion between the colonial administration and the museological institution in the perpetuation of racial violence in South Africa. The contribution among many other contributions of this study is the interrogation of these colonial traces in the museological institution and the proposal of a decolonial project framed in the form of a Museum Truth, Repatriation and Restitution Commission (#MuseumTRRC). The MuseumTRRC as both a socio-political and museological tool sharply invokes the interplay between the construction of race and the establishment of the colonial museum in a way that helps us understand how the museological institution influenced laws of racial separation that South Africa's apartheid past was built on. The MuseumTRRC is presented as the sine qua non in the framing of the 'new museum' of the future. In a nutshell, the study presents to us new ways of seeing museums and their sociological impact of their collections on people's lives today. It presents what I term in this thesis as 'museumorphosis', a process of radical epistemological shift that should take place in the museum in order for the museological institution to effectively respond to the sensibilities of the 21st Century and beyond.
Open Access
Poverty alleviation, development and philanthropy in contemporary South Africa
(2012) Mutsekwa, Tatenda Hilda; Sitas, Ari
This project was concerned at looking at philanthropy with regards to poverty alleviation and development. This was achieved by looking at the literature around philanthropy and fieldwork. The literature helped in providing an understanding of philanthropy and the politics around it. Most of the literature that was used was internationally based and this did not look at South Africa. This was a problem because the South African situation is different to what is happening internationally. But the literature with the South African context in mind helped in providing a context specific understanding. I used post-development theory to understand philanthropy within development. The reason for choosing post?development was because it best explained how philanthropists go about doing development. The project used the case study methodological approach in order to get a deep insight into the how philanthropists operate in South Africa. This approach helped to understand who the philanthropists were. This was important in trying to establish how philanthropy works within the South African context.
Open Access
Spaces of contestation: the everyday experiences of ten African migrants in Cape Town
(2012) Azari, Sepideh Alwand; Sitas, Ari
Xenophobia in South Africa is so overt that it has take a covert form. The 'xenocide' events that took place in 2008 were called xenophobic acts. It is the recurrent denialism of xenophobia on an everyday basis that this project has explored through the narrative accounts of ten African migrants in Cape Town. The lived everyday experiences of ten African migrants have brought forward the central argument of this thesis. From the data, it is evident that as a reponse to everyday pressures of prejudices and xenophobia in social and physical spaces, African migrants have developed mutable, unsettled and vagrant identities in order to cope with everyday low level violence. This argument emerged as four key stressors have been identified as the components of a more substantial explanation of xenophobia in South Africa. The four key components are: the enforcement of identity (national and group), the demarcation of spaces of belonging, the experiences of economic insecurity, and lastly a 'culture of violence' in South Africa. This thesis argues that these four stressors are the result of an on-going active process of xenophobic attitudes.
Open Access
The [un]knowing director: a critical examination of directing within the context of devising performance
(2022) Thulo, Kabi; Fleishman, Mark; Sitas, Ari
This thesis is a critical examination of directing within the context of devising performance practice. It emanates from my need to make sense of the particular ways in which I work as a theatre director who engages with devising performance coupled with an identified lack in the literature that speaks to directing and devising performance from a Southern African perspective. The notion of the [un]knowing director is posited as the central concept that is evidently plausible for the particular context of devising performance practice argued for in the thesis. The key argument expressed in this thesis is that [un]knowing is a way of knowing realised through intuition and collaboration as co-constitutive or symbiotic aspects applicable to the study's particular contexts of directing and devising performance practice. To be more specific, the study investigates how the [un]knowing director makes artistic discoveries and decisions/choices during the moment-to-moment unfolding of a devising process. The notion of the [un]knowing is conceptually explicated by drawing from Tim Ingold's ideas of wayfaring and wayfinding (2000 & 2011), Henri Bergson's (1907) philosophical conception of time understood as duration, and Leopold Senghor's Africanist philosophy that speaks of rhythmic attitude, reason-eye and reason embrace (Diagne, 2019). This thesis is located within the sphere of nonrepresentational theory and purports for knowledge, within the context of directing and devising performance, as an undertaking that is non-predetermined and emergent in character. In terms of its methodology, this study is generally located within the methodological terrain of qualitative research and specifically employs practice as research. Specifically, its methodology entailed a structured questionnaire responded to by seven Southern African devising performance directors. The questionnaire's general research aim was to identify the plausibility of the [un]knowing director concept based on other director's experiences of devising performance. Thereafter, three creative research projects in the form of devising performance processes, were undertaken. These projects served as related case studies constituting an investigative cycle. The research method of autoethnographical devising session note-taking and reflective accounts was used in generating the necessary data through the creative research projects. Essentially, this thesis concludes that the [un]knowing director knows through intuition and collaboration in ways that are particular to its critical examination of directing and devising performance. These two ways of knowing are complex in their nature and characterised by the elements of initiation, facilitation and decision making during the moment-to-moment unfolding of a devising session. Relatedly, this thesis refers to the [un]knowing director's momentary undertakings as the molecular, micro and macro levels of artistic activity. Ultimately, this thesis concludes that the [un]knowing director has a complex genealogy emanating from the Southern African oral performance tradition. Thus, the [un]knowing director's practice is story-like and significantly affected by time.

Browsing by Author "Sitas, Ari"

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