OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Twidle, Hedley"

Browsing by Author "Twidle, Hedley"

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A history of apartheid censorship through the archive
(2018) Lyster, Rosa Frances; Twidle, Hedley; Young, Sandra
Over the course of 26 years, and using 97 different definitions of what the system considered to be “undesirable,” South Africa's apartheid-era censors prevented a vast array of literature from being freely circulated in South Africa. The official and symbolic power that they wielded as the gatekeepers of literature seemed almost unmatched, and the system is still discussed today as one of the most comprehensive the world has seen. The history of apartheid censorship has been told using a variety of approaches, focusing on prominent, legislature-defining cases, on experiences of writers or readers affected, or by discussing it as part of a wider system of suppression. This thesis offers another way to understand the system and its corrosive, ongoing effects: a history which foregrounds the censorship archive itself. The archive is inconvenient, banal, strange, and challenging, containing an extraordinary profusion of documents which seem to serve no clear administrative purpose. The censors left behind a vast body of material relating to their activities, amounting to over a hundred linear metres'' worth of documents: dense reports on “subversive” novels; equally detailed reports on throwaway pulp detective thrillers, erotic mysteries, apparently forgettable works of mass-market fiction; letters from members of the public; letters between censors arguing fiercely over the literary merits of a novel; letters from state officials; newspaper reports, book jackets, and other archival ephemera. Histories of the system tend to centre on spectacular cases or moments, which means overlooking the vast majority of what the archive contains, and thus perhaps misrepresenting the nature of the censors' daily activities. For every report justifying the banning (or passing) of a significant protest novel, there are a hundred reports on works of no literary or political significance whatsoever. An analysis of the paperwork produced by the system reveals fascinating contradictions, conflicts, clashes between high-minded notions of the literary and base ideas of the function of art in apartheid South Africa. We can understand the excess and profound waste of intellectual energy that the archive represents if we view it as the product of a system's struggle to politicise literature while stripping it of all references to contemporary politics, to conflate taste with morality, to define without consensus what literature meant. This thesis will show how these codes and reading strategies developed, examining the complicated connections between censorship, canonisation, validation, and criticism that the censors created. It is reassuring to think that censorship in South Africa ended with the banning of The Satanic Verses in 1989, but immersion in the archive shows how far-reaching and long lasting its effects are. The literary infrastructure the censors helped to create has not been erased out of existence; their definitions of the literary and the laws of what can be said are repeated in official and unofficial ways. Questions over who “owns” the space of the literary, over who should own it, over who has the ability (or even the right) to critique it, continue to reverberate today Finally, by exploring the ways in which the system was embedded within wider public and bureaucratic culture, this thesis offers a means of viewing contemporary debates around freedom of speech in South Africa. The recent furore provoked by the state's attempts to suppress Jacques Pauw's The President's Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma in Power and Out of Prison reveals how fraught these debates continue to be, and this thesis shows how we may understand them in the context of what has come before. Immersion in the archive – a commitment to analysis of that which is unwieldy and apparently irrelevant – yields insight of great contemporary value, enriching our understanding of apartheid censorship and its poisonous legacy.
Open Access
Atrazine: a lively chemical journey
(2023) Dornbrack, Kevin; Twidle, Hedley; Petrik, Leslie
Atrazine is a widely used pesticide, particularly popular in corn plantations for its herbicidal properties of killing and preventing the growth of certain weeds and grasses. Evidence of its neurotoxicity, hormone disruption and reproductive toxicity led the EU to ban the chemical in 2003. Despite long standing evidence of its harm, South Africa continues to use atrazine, the majority of which is imported from the EU. Drawing on South Africa as a case study, I illustrate Atrazine's unique journey through South Africa's political economic landscape, interpreted in relation to those of the USA and EU, highlighting that problems of chemical pollution are political as much as they are molecular. In this project, I have employed biochemical, epidemiological, historical, social and political scientific approaches to form an interdisciplinary understanding of atrazine's biochemical, ecological, and economic effects; how its harm lands unevenly on poor and marginalized people, often in the global south; and how commercial and governmental structures enable and maintain its use. This interdisciplinary understanding of atrazine's uneven effects as well as its varied socio-political figurations illustrates how and why regulatory processes have proved vastly inadequate to curtail the chemical pollution caused by atrazine and many other pesticides. The results of this research should hopefully serve as a case study and cautionary tale of globally increasing and unevenly experienced chemical exposure. This project argues that effects of atrazine within their political and historic contexts should be considered a form of unspectacular violence, that slowly but persistently degrades quality of life. By tracing the networks of atrazine's chemical relations, this project illustrates that the molecular is always political.
Open Access
Becoming with the dog in South Africa Reflections on family, memory, and human-animal relations in post-apartheid South Africa
(2022) Ndaba, Mpho Antoon; Twidle, Hedley
Can the relationship White people have with the figure of the dog, in what currently exists as South Africa, be free of antiblackness? Following instances where I saw black women who worked as domestic workers walk dogs belonging to their White employers, I write these letters addressed to you, my sister, Palesa – meditating on the dog-Human relationships as sites of racial violence. The core analytic framework and theory I employ to explore these extreme, mundane, and in-between forms of violence, is Afro-Pessimism.
Open Access
Black Bodies in the Open City: Precarity and Belonging in the work of Teju Cole
(2019) Watson, Luke; Twidle, Hedley
This dissertation attempts to read Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole’s fiction and essays as sustained demonstrations of precarity, as theorised by Judith Butler in Precarious Life (2004). Though never directly cited by Cole, Butler’s articulation of a shared condition of bodily vulnerability and interdependency offers a generative critical framework through which to read Cole’s representations of black bodies as they move across space. By presenting the ‘black body’, rather than ‘black man’, as the preferred metonym for black people, Cole’s work, which I argue can be read as peculiar travel narratives, foregrounds the bodily dimension of black life, and develops an ambivalent storytelling mode to narrate the experiences of characters who encompass multiple spatialities and subjectivities. Through close analysis of the novels Open City (2011) and Every Day is for the Thief (2007), and essays from the collection Known and Strange Things (2016), principally “Black Body” and “Unmournable Bodies”, I argue that Cole’s work subverts certain tropes in the tradition of black literary cosmopolitanism, as exemplified by James Baldwin, at the same time as Cole self-consciously situates himself within that tradition. It is the insistence on the black body as site of publicity at once desirable and vulnerable, to paraphrase Butler, that allows Cole to make these interventions. A tentative critical consensus on Cole’s work has begun to emerge: his oeuvre is read alongside a cohort of contemporary African and black diasporic writers whose works navigate the tenuous boundary between Western centers and peripheral Africa. It is not my intention in this dissertation to argue against those readings, but rather to offer the concept of precarity as productive framework that allows for readings that other spatio-temporal frameworks may occlude.
Open Access
“Brightly Colored Magic and Weird Worlds”: Sylvia Plath’s Creation of Personae Through Her Visual Poetics
(2019) Sholto-Douglas, Alice; Young, Sandra; Twidle, Hedley
In this dissertation, I extend existing acknowledgments of the impact of Sylvia Plath’s visual arts training on her writing in order to argue that her painterly sensibilities are central to her character construction. Specifically, I contend that Plath draws upon a set of visual techniques, which I categorise as hallucinations, mental images, dreams, blurriness, and visual-to-verbal re-inscription. The ability to control subjective experience through the imagination, a philosophy Plath discusses in her journals, acts as a framework for her narratives, and visual techniques become, for Plath’s personae, a method of manipulating their experiences through a blurring of the divide between individual imagination and subjective reality. Plath’s visual techniques further function to represent her personae’s psychic interiority in ways that not only illustrate the limits to expression of the traditionally literary but also offer a means of overcoming these limits through an alternative system of meaning-making. Thus, her personae’s agency exists at the level of form, through self representation that is not stymied by the limitations of the written word, as well as at the level of narrative, through her personae’s control of experience. Moreover, because these visual techniques appear frequently in narratives that are preoccupied with a gendered power dynamic, I contend that we should understand Plath’s moments of resistance to textual tradition as enabling her personae’s escape from patriarchal limitations to freedom and selfexpression. While this recognition of the significance of Plath’s visual techniques should not necessarily constitute a panacea to the constraints of traditional language, it does offer a new way of reading Plath which acknowledges her painterly sensibilities as crucial to the way in which she gives her personae agency and writes back to her literary forefathers.
Open Access
Gone with the shining things
(2013) Horler, Vivien; Twidle, Hedley
The lure of gold in the great reefs of Johannesburg near the end of the 19th century not only attracted the famous mining barons such as Cecil John Rhodes, Alfred Beit and Barney Barnato: working men also came from far and wide to feed their families with their labour. Among them was my great-grandfather, the miner from the Isle of Man, William Cogeen. He arrived via the tin mines of Cornwall and the silver mines of Colorado, and was among those Uitlanders who flocked in those early days to the Transvaal as skilled artisans - wheelwrights, farriers, bricklayers and, especially, experienced hard-rock miners. It was their labour, as well as of black tribesmen from all over southern Africa, that laid the financial foundation for what became the rich city of Johannesburg. It was also their influx that was the excuse that precipitated the Anglo-Boer War. His wife and daughters joined him in what was still a rough boom town, and they stayed on, until forced to flee as refugees from Johannesburg at the start of the war in 1899. Intrigued by the stories my mother and grandmother told me as a child, I began to research my family’s history and travelled to the Isle of Man, Cornwall and Colorado to trace their origins - and my own. This is the remarkable story of what happened to an ordinary working-class family who lived in extraordinary times, and my journey in their footsteps.
Open Access
I Know Him Not, and Never Will: Moby Dick, The Human and the Whale
(2021) Harris, Katherine; Twidle, Hedley
In this thesis, I argue that Herman Melville's Moby Dick depicts the ocean and whales in a way that develops aesthetic theory into a proto-environmentalist message. Melville draws on theories of the mathematical and dynamic sublime as outlined by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, while also employing Goethe's Theory of Colours in his depictions of the ocean setting. Goethe posits that opposing phenomena require one another to signify and to function, and Melville dramatises this idea throughout a complex and often self-contradictory novel. Moby Dick depicts whale hunting in a paradoxical, unstable way which both defends the practice and highlights its cruel nature. In considering this, I trace how depictions and cultural representations of whales have changed over time, shifting from the whale as icon of the monstrously non-human to the whale as touchstone for environmental humanism. Melville, despite the image of Moby Dick as a monster, also portrays whales in a way which humanises them and allows the reader to empathise with them, so allowing for a counter discourse against whaling to emerge. The industrial consumption of marine animals is highlighted in Moby Dick, as Melville notes the various ways in which whales and similar creatures are used for food and other products. Unscrupulous methods of acquiring resources are paid particular attention in the chapter, ‘Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,' which I use as a guide to the contradictory ideologies at the heart of the text. I argue that the aesthetic theory embedded in the novel enables a nascent environmentalist consciousness, and I place such moments in dialogue with more recent accounts of whales and work from the field of the oceanic humanities.
Open Access
In a Country where You couldn't Make this Shit up?: Literary Non-Fiction in South Africa
(2012) Twidle, Hedley
In the last few years, several critics have suggested that the most significant contemporary writing in South Africa is emerging in non-fictional modes. The work of authors like Antony Altbeker, Antjie Krog, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavić ‘almost convinces one’, in the words of one acclaimed novelist, ‘that fiction has become redundant in this country’. This piece sets out to ask why such claims are being made now, and what they can tell us about the status of the literary in contemporary South Africa. From Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism (1973)to J. M. Coetzee’s ‘The Novel Today’ (1988) – and, more recently, David Shields’s Reality Hunger (2010) – the relation between ambitious non-fiction and the serious novel has often been portrayed as one of antagonism and rivalry. Yet while not wanting to dismantle the different kinds of truth-claim made by fictive and documentary modes, I suggest that instances of fiction and non-fiction from South Africa have in fact for a long time been in an unusually intense, intimate and one might even say constitutive dialogue with each other. Offering a survey of how various critics have tried to conceptualise the space of the literary in South Africa – whether as ‘field’, ‘archipelago’, ‘dream topography’, ‘marketplace’ or ‘seam’ – the piece argues for the need to read novels, poems, plays and other traditionally ‘literary’ forms alongside more topical, documentary modes. I deepen these lines of enquiry by examining two encounters: the first a panel on non-fiction at the 2010 Cape Town International Book Fair (from which the chapter takes its name), and the second a revealing reading, or as I will argue, misreading, of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace by the acclaimed non-fiction writer Jonny Steinberg.
Open Access
It was raining
(2013) Ramano, Kambani; Anderson, Peter; Twidle, Hedley
Open Access
Re-imagining the past, negotiating the present: the lived diasporic experience in S.J. Naudé and Jaco van Schalkwyk's fiction
(2018) Smith, Alé Elizabeth; Twidle, Hedley
S.J. Naudé's collection of short stories, The Alphabet of Birds, foregrounds the diasporic experiences of its marginalised, transnational subjects. The stories unearth profound grief and a deep sense of loss and displacement. The title of the collection suggests that the content grapples with issues that are central to the discourse of diaspora: movement, freedom, borders, home, dwelling, meaning, and identity. Jaco van Schalkwyk's debut novel, The Alibi Club, is structured around the story of a young man's efforts to build a new life in an unfamiliar country. Although very different in style, tone, and form, Naudé and Van Schalkwyk both ask questions about the nature of belonging, pain and loss associated with the diasporic experience: How does one come to terms with one's past?; How does one navigate oneself in an increasingly estranging global world?; Is it possible to re-imagine the past, to rewrite the stories one tells about oneself? Naudé and Van Schalkwyk are not the first South Africans to give thought to these questions; in fact, our country has a rich history of pre- and post-apartheid diasporic writings. What I find compelling, however, is how a new generation of authors - a group of writers that faces unique challenges - draws on the literary form to engage with and relate to the past and present, their country of birth, and their language. I consider in what ways the literary form allows these two authors to articulate and re-imagine the lived diasporic experiences of their Afrikaans-speaking, contemporary transnational subjects who inhabit multiple identities.
Open Access
Reading smallness: micro-spatial constructions in South Africa's literature of the interregnum
(2023) Henning, John; Twidle, Hedley
Twentieth-century South African literature is a subject often oversimplified by familiar binaries. These include the categories of apartheid and post-apartheid, metaphors of death and birth, and pre-occupations with the tensions between public and private life, township and suburb, and oppressor and oppressed. Such patterns of signification continue to chase their target – a centuriesold national symptomology – with dwindling degrees of success. This dissertation, in response, seeks out literary micro-spaces from the country's transition (or ‘interregnum') and reads them in terms of their incursive potential on the grand historical and spatial discourses in which they lie. To this end, the project takes its reader on a tour of small places. On one side is a compost hole from Ivan Vladislavić's Missing Persons (1989) – an evocator of the neuroses at the ‘heart of apartheid' – and, on the other, a one-room shack from Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying (1995) – an ostensible symbol of an early post-apartheid imaginary. The discussion stretching between these two points, as it moves from nests and tortoiseshells to graves and train carriages, advocates reduced frames of reading. In so doing, it draws attention at once to the claustrophobia of apartheid pettiness and, in the literary sensitivities that it precipitates, to growing associations between smallness and protest, smallness and vocality, smallness and poetry. I argue that micro-spaces are not only abundant in the literature of South Africa's political transition but also yield unique insights into the stubborn extension of its interregnum.
Open Access
Seeing ghosts: The absented presence of black lesbian women in mid-2000s Kwa-Thema and the legacies of trauma
(2022) Mabogwane, Kamohelo Bohlale; Twidle, Hedley
This project is about connections. Connections made from the body, from the personal, and from the spiritual. Putting into practice the concepts of autoethnography and affective research as methodologies that are lived, I use my body as an archive of experiences and geographic knowledges. In this approach, my personal subjective nature is not only recognised but also essential to the study of my own trauma as a living black lesbian woman and the vicarious trauma I experience in relation to the long list of assaulted and murdered black lesbian women in South Africa: specifically, the ones from my hometown of Kwa-Thema, Springs, in the mid-2000s, as well as the trauma of the black lesbian women I study in Jabulile Bongiwe Ngwenya's “I Ain't Yo Bitch” and Koleka Putuma's No Easter Sunday for Queers (in poem and play form). By analysing key moments in Zanele Muholi's documentaries Difficult Love and the Human Rights Watch's Zanele Muholi, Visual Activist, I foreground the “unbearable wrongness of being” and separation from citizenship and Africanness that black lesbians have experienced and continue to experience in this country.2 It is my position that the purpose of trauma is to ask questions about the past and the present. The absenting of black lesbian womanhood in the mid-2000s in Kwa-Thema was a massacre that shifted the social spatiality of the township from a queer haven for people in Johannesburg to a graveyard. Prioritising memory work through the Sojan trialectic of historicality, spatiality, and sociality, the Wynterian-McKittrickean demonic and geographic knowledges, and Gordonic hauntology leads me to the potential answers: what the process of seeing and witnessing allows as a Thirdspace for the hope of arriving at joy. This project is an exploration of what is absent and absented yet simultaneously present, and how it exists as such.
Open Access
States of displacement: voice and narration in refugee stories
(2015) Braam, Marilyn Elizabeth; Twidle, Hedley
This thesis probes three texts to explore pathways between narration and refugee voices. In Dave Eggers’ text What is the What (2008), the words ‘novel’ and ‘autobiography’ on the title page set a framework for an exploration of the displacement of both genres. As Achak Deng, the Sudanese refugee-exile claims to have “gone out in search of a writer,” so this thesis has sought textual manifestations of the voices of those labeled “refugees”. In Eggers’text a temporarily-gagged narrator presents the question as to how the writer-refugee collaboration allows the voice of a refugee to be heard. In Little Liberia: an African Odyssey in New York (2011), Jonny Steinberg’s placement of himself inside the text demonstrates a different narrative approach to this question as he opts to share subject-space with refugee-exiles, Rufus Arkoi and Jacob Massaquoi. Unsettling the idea of ‘protagonist’, the text challenges borders between story and history, telling and writing. Through a narrative relationship Steinberg probes acts of recounting, listening, reviewing in the routes he takes to the text eventually written. By contrast, Luxurious Hearses, a novella by Uwem Akpan, places the extreme fate of the refugee-protagonist in the hands of a third-person narrator to wrestle with the distinctions between voice, mediation and representation. Through Jubril and his co-commuters, the text investigates forms of “rupture” (Bakhtin, 2000) that occur when identities are opportunistically exposed to social labeling. Writer, reader and displaced person emerge as subjects of an economic framework which positions them within the powerful confines of terms such as citizen, refugee, exile. Said’s affirming insight thus presents a challenge to all on this continuum to “cross borders, (to) break barriers of thought and experience” (Said, 2000:185). Reading the text then becomes associated with interpreting events through the collaborative work of relating, and through reviewing the frames of reference. This thesis examines narrative approaches to refugee voices with the question ‘How do voice and narration inflect the transitions in these texts involving refugees?" Rather than the easy transference this may seem to involve, acts of entrusting the timbre of such stories to texts require political vigilance and a sensibility cognizant that a globalized environment implicates all in the crises creating refugees.
Open Access
The Sacrificial Altar of Development: Critiquing Narratives of Developmentalism in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction
(2022) Field, Gemma; Twidle, Hedley
Since its inception, sf in China has served dual critical and didactic purposes. On the one hand to spread modernism and scientific education whilst entrenching Chinese nationalism with visions of technological miracles and the inevitable rise of China as a global power. On the other hand, it has always served as a medium of criticism against the Chinese state and Confucian values. As China is the world's fastest growing economy, it is inevitable that issues of uneven development and the problematic of development play out in the Chinese public forum. Given the pervasive degree of government intervention in everyday life, normal channels of communication are obstructed or monitored. Thus, sf provides an ideal medium for such a discussion. Moreover, in the context of modern China, where any critique of the one-party state is required to walk a teetering tightrope to avoid censorship, sf's outlandish stories and settings allow it to pass state censorship when realist critiques would not. With its focus on investigating the possible consequences of technological and social development via fantastic and estranging means, sf's enduring popularity and inherent political entropy in the Chinese context speaks to the Chinese people's concern with and refiguration of those issues.
Open Access
Uneasy reading : resistance and revelation in Willem Boshoff's "Verskanste Openbaring"
(2016) Edy, Alice; Twidle, Hedley
In 1978, South African conceptual artist Willem Boshoff retyped the Book of Revelation onto a single sheet of paper; reinserting the same page into his typewriter, layering the language upon itself. This project sets out to "read" the product of Boshoff's performance - a rectangle of superimposed text entitled "Verskanste Openbaring" ("Entrenched Revelation"). Entirely illegible, this page is immediately resistant to conventional strategies of reading. However, perhaps the text's provocation might also be an invitation of sorts; in the absence of discernible language, can we read the text's act of resistance? "Verskanste Openbaring" oscillates unpredictably between image and text. Rather, then, than imposing a rigid mode of interpretation, I situate the poem flexibly within the theoretical frameworks of concrete poetry, book history and conceptual writing. I begin at the surface of the page, approaching the the text in aesthetic and material terms. Here, specific attention is paid to considerations of the authorial performance, temporality, sound and typography. Having considered the author's performance of writing, I consider his medium: Afrikaans. Might we "read" a language aesthetically? Finally, focus is shifted from the ink to the book that is hidden within: Revelation. Looking back two thousand years, I explore the socio-political context in which John of Patmos produced this strange and deeply violent prophesy. Guided by the material conditions of Boshoff's piece, this paper seeks to respond to the provocations of both "Verskanste Openbaring" and its source text. Might the plagiarism be productively put into conversation with the original - and vice versa? In producing "Verskanste Openbaring" Boshoff foregrounds the performance of writing. In response, this project takes the shape its own self-conscious interpretive performance; an exploration of the possibilities of reading - via a single illegible page.
Open Access
Unsettling whiteness : Kipling's Boers and the case for a white subalternity
(2013) Retief, Zed; Twidle, Hedley
The 'Bard of Empire' Rudyard Kipling's Boer War (or South African War) writing has largely been dismissed as jingoism. Yet these texts may well have something to contribute both to existing discourses around colonialism, as well as to our understanding of South Africa's deeply intertwined racial and political history. While his Indian writing is also informed by an imperial ideology, Kipling's South African writing is more overtly dogged by imperial contradictions and a lack of thematic and narrative clarity. As such, his Indian writing provides a useful touch-point throughout this thesis. Of particular interest here is the seeming tension between Kipling's representations of the Boers as both 'degenerate' and as 'white'. Broadly, in the course of this thesis this tension is approached in two ways. This first of these considers the motivating forces behind Kipling's racialization of the Boers, specifically in terms of the anxieties provoked by the colonisation of another 'white' race. As such, this anxiety is read as stemming largely from a perceived cultural trangression on the part of the Boers - an inversion of the dynamic that typifies many of Kipling's Indian texts. Following this, some of the rhetorical devices by which Kipling (re)enforces notions of 'white loyalty' and, more broadly, a strict visually marked racial hierarchy, are considered. In so doing, some of Kipling's Boers are read as, somewhat surprisingly, representing a silenced subaltern voice who are made to speak exclusively in support of the empire. Through the commingling of these representations Kipling seems to participate in a discursive conflict over the conception of whiteness both within the empire and South Africa.

Browsing by Author "Twidle, Hedley"

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