Browsing by Subject "Grahamstown"

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    Extinctions: Past and Present Week 2 - A fossil ecosystem
    (2017-03-17) Chinsamy-Turan, Anusuya; Guess, Rob
    In this video, Professor Anusaya Chinsamy-Turan interviews paleontologist Dr Rob Gess about the Devonian fossil site called Waterloo Farm in Grahamstown, South Africa. He discusses the unique nature of the site given how it contains rare fossils with soft tissue preserved and he goes on to describe several interesting examples of these fossils.
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    Negotiating whiteness: a discourse analysis of students' descriptions of their raced experiences at Rhodes University, Grahamstown,1 South Africa
    (2020) Msomi, Zuziwe Nokwanda; Nyamnjoh, Francis; Garuba, Harry
    Questions of the dominance of cultures of whiteness are pre-imminent issues in historically white South African universities. Even when historically white universities – such as Rhodes University, the site of study for this thesis – have a predominantly black student body post 1994, there are still reports of students experiencing such institutions as alienating and excluding due to the privileging of whiteness. This thesis draws on the significant role played by discourse in how the world is constructed and reconstructed, to better understand how whiteness may continue to be produced and reproduced in everyday interactions at a historically white South African university, and how some students may feel less at home than others within such institutions. The thesis seeks to answer the following research question: what discursive strategies do Rhodes University students use to describe their raced experiences, and what role do these strategies play in either reinforcing and or challenging a culture of whiteness? The thesis engages with and is informed by literature on whiteness as constitutive of both social aspects and phenotypical essence. Drawing primarily from discourse analysis tools, and from interviews with Rhodes University students completed between 2014 and 2015, the thesis argues that whiteness is far from being a zero-sum game of winners and losers. Rather, there are gradations of whiteness where speakers draw upon whatever capital (social, phenotypical or a combination of both) to attain the best possible outcome for themselves. The thesis therefore takes seriously the idea that whiteness is a social construct which can, through socialisation be acquired, lost and, in some cases, decanted partially into other vessels. Whiteness, the thesis argues, is ever incomplete and subject to change as the context changes in order to ensure that it remains associated with privilege, opportunity and power. If whiteness is not limited to white bodies only, as suggested by both the data and literature review, then it must be studied in relation to blackness as well. The interactional, inter-relational and inter-racial construction and use of whiteness both methodologically and conceptually is one of the key contributions to the field of whiteness studies made by this thesis. This open-ended, permanent work in progress approach to whiteness can be the beginning of conversations about race that are not necessarily bounded by phenotype or essence – especially in South Africa, where race and a fixation of rigid social categories continue to be a central part of how South Africans navigate and understand the world around them.
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    “Wars are won by men not weapons”: the invention of a militarised British settler identity in the Eastern Cape c. 1910–1965
    (2019) Ovenstone, Georgina; Van Sittert, Lance; Field, Shaun
    This thesis is concerned with the invention of South African Anglo identity, and aims to provide a new perspective on how this identity was constructed in the Eastern Cape from c.1910 to 1965. In particular, it considers the ways in which the museum developed to construct South African Anglo identity in the Eastern Cape town of Grahamstown. In the nationalisms of the postcolonial states, independent countries possessed museums in their capitals. These institutions constituted an essential part of national heritage, were crucial for the advancement of education, and operated as a means through which the ‘imagined community’ of the nation state was itself curated and sustained. Postcolonial nationalisms are imagined through the grammar provided by empire. In other words, they are imagined in terms of the administrative and archaeological evidence that colonialism has ‘gathered’ and displayed in its museums. The visual representation of the artefact became a powerful signifier for national identity because of everyone’s awareness of its location in an infinite series of identical symbols. This thesis’s primary focus is on how South African Anglo identity was invented in two key sites in Grahamstown, namely, the school and the museum. It will illustrate how rifles, which were used by the cadet corps at St Andrew’s College, and which were carefully selected and displayed in the 1820 Settlers’ Memorial Museum’s Military Gallery, came to play a central role in symbolizing and militarizing Anglo identity in the eastern province in the twentieth century. In particular, this study will argue that although English identity was reinvented following the 1820 settlers’ centenary in Grahamstown, it was not imagined as a military identity until after the Second World War, and the return of the veterans to St Andrew’s College and the cadet corps. Importantly, it will indicate that the school and the museum comprised key sites through which South African Anglo identity was constructed to reflect images of the British soldier, who in the Eastern Cape, could adapt to local conditions.