Browsing by Subject "Identity"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Fabulous Khoisan:the politics of apoliticality in the indigenous Khoisan revivalism movement in South Africa; an exploration of sincerity,stickiness and fabulation in the emergence of a missing people
    (2025) Wong, Eve; Burgess, Marlon
    This dissertation critically reimagines postcolonial marginality, challenging the traditional 'before' and 'after' dichotomy to explore marginality as a dynamic, ongoing process of identity formation and resistance. Focusing on the Indigenous “Khoisan Revivalism” movement in South Africa, it examines how young, urban, and working-class individuals claiming Khoisan identity navigate intersections of cultural sincerity, political disengagement, and social justice. The work highlights the emergence of a resilient and marginalised “missing people.” whose identities are continuously shaped through historical struggles and contemporary aspirations. Rejecting essentialist notions of race, “mixedness,” and authenticity, this study positions “sincerity” as central to understanding identity production. Linking sincerity to Sara Ahmed's “stickiness” of affective flows and Gilles Deleuze's “fabulation” demonstrates how marginalised communities transform erased histories into tools for agency, actionable hope, and collective empowerment. Fabulation, in particular, enables the reimagining of suppressed identities, bridging historical realities with speculative futures. Tracing the historical contexts of “coloured” and “Khoisan” peoples, the dissertation troubles the boundaries of these definitions through interdisciplinary ideas. It reveals how gaps and incompleteness provide fertile spaces for identity reimaginings, offering fresh perspectives on how individuals claim and redefine belonging. Methodologically, the research combines ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and cultural analysis while addressing the ethical complexities of representation. It also investigates how Khoisan identity is appropriated, authenticated, and politicised in legal frameworks, traditions, and state policies, exposing tensions between cultural revitalisation and sociopolitical alienation. With its focus on “cultural, not political” investments, the study challenges dominant, elite-driven identity discourses. By shedding light on South Africa's “missing people,” this work reframes marginalisation as a negotiation of identity and agency and a suspension between fear and desire. It is a compelling call to recognise the vibrancy and creativity of Khoisan revivalists as they reclaim belonging and craft new visions for social justice in an increasingly fragmented world.
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    Living heritage in the historic urban landscape: a case study of the Grand Parade Market
    (2020) Wilson, Wendy M; Roux, Naomi
    This study examines the long-established bi-weekly market held on Cape Town's Grand Parade to see if it constitutes living heritage. If it does, how is it connected with the urban landscape it inhabits, and how might it be acknowledged or safeguarded? Heritage practice in South Africa has long focused on the fabric of the historic built environment (not on the people using it or the uses to which it is put) with conservation methods tailored to that end. The importance of living heritage—or intangible cultural heritage—is increasingly accepted, particularly as a form of redress for the imbalance caused by the prioritisation of coloniser history. There is a growing sense of urgency, driven by those whose living heritage has been overlooked or ignored, to address this. In this study, I combine on-the-ground analysis of today's Wednesday/Saturday market drawn from interviews with traders, with a deep reading of various official and academic archives. This is interpreted through the most recent theoretical thinking regarding living heritage, together with the international charters, national laws and local policies that apply to the real world of Cape Town today. I determine that the market is, indeed, living heritage, and that it is important to recognise it is such. I argue that the heritage binary of intangible and tangible represents a false dichotomy, and that it is essential to consider heritage as a whole, with living heritage being indivisible from the urban landscape in which it exists. However, I identify the potential pitfalls that formal protection might bring to a living, dynamic system, and find that the significance values of tangible and living heritage require different actions to conserve and safeguard them. I show how, while the will to identify and acknowledge South Africa's living heritage has been expressed at the highest policy levels, the ensuing legislation, implementation policies and working practices of heritage practitioners are insufficient to deliver on this. I suggest that, to reflect this better in our management of heritage resources, a more trans-disciplinary approach is needed, one with processes and methodologies that accommodate diversity in the interpretation of cultural value and emphasise stakeholder involvement.
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    Student identity and the need to make classroom mathematics relevant to engineering practice
    (South African Society for Engineering Education, 2015-07-29) Craig, Tracy S
    Cobb and Hodge’s (2005) identity theoretical framework suggests that learning is facilitated if normative identity (realised and co-constructed in the classroom by lecturer and student) is reconciled with core identity (the trajectory of who the student is and where he feels he is going). The cohort of students involved in the study discussed in this article largely embodies trajectories of social mobility, with a great willingness to study engineering for its role in providing a way out of poverty rather than for the sake of the discipline itself. The pedagogic implication is that teaching must proceed sensitive to the reality of the students which is that they potentially have little idea what engineering entails other than a route out of a disadvantaged background.
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    (Un)Homely in Cape Town: contested space and the post-apartheid urban narrative
    (2021) Mahatey, Ayesha; Moji, Polo
    Negotiation of urban space is particularly pertinent to South African history as a site of social and spatial conflict resulting from the legislative practices and social engineering of the apartheid government in the form of the Group Areas Act (1950). As a postcolonial and post-apartheid city, Cape Town has the distinction of evolving from pre-apartheid's least segregated city to apartheid's most segregated city, with many of the injustices of the past perpetuated in the post-apartheid era by its current neoliberal order. Yet, in The Rediscovery of the Ordinary (1991), South African writer Njabulo Ndebele asserts that Johannesburg has always been, the centre of South African resistance and “spectacle” – and the object of studies such as Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2008). Located at the intersection of urban and postcolonial studies, this study is grounded by the framework of ‘critical urban theory' (Michel De Certeau, Henri Lefevre, Neil Brenner), which frames urban space as a “site, medium and outcome” of histories of social power. It therefore reads the post-apartheid narratives of The Woman Next Door (2016) by Yewande Omotoso, Thirteen Cents (2001) by Sello Duiker and Living Coloured: Because Black and White Were Taken (2019) by Yusuf Daniels, as representations of the city as “politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested and therefore malleable” space, by drawing on Sarah Nuttall's assumption of place – specifically the city – as a constitutive subject of certain narratives as well as Homi Bhabha's notion of the “unhomely”. The concepts of home, unhoming and homelessness are therefore used to establish how history and space collide to create a palimpsestic reading of Cape Town. Thus, the study maps spatial contestation in central and peripheral locations of the city and raises questions of racialised and class-based (un)belonging as representative of the post-apartheid South African city.