Transformations - 2003 Conference Session 8

Session 8: Emerging Horizons
Chair: Albert de Plazaola

Paradigms of Collaboration in Postcolonial Aesthetics
Kalli Paakspuu
University of Toronto, Part-time Faculty at York and Western University of Ontario, Canada

This paper will examine the various ways that Native subjects undo a modernist aesthetic through an appropriation of imagery through photography. After revisiting early 20th Century image production practices, we will examine how an industry based on commodification utilized photography as a new art form to promote discourses about culture. The long exposures required by early photographic technique made particular demands on the subject, which also offered opportunities for them to express their desires and participate creatively in cultural production. Beginning with the early photography of Canadian Harry Pollard and American E. S. Curtis and their work with Native peoples, this paper will develop a comparison of different approaches to the use of pictorial space as a site of resistance through collaborative photographic practices.
Using a poststructuralist framework, we will explore the relations between European and Native in the production of culture and define a new de-colonializing aesthetic that contests space, place and positionality. Through recent examples like the Nunavut film, "Atanarjuat", and museum exhibitions by Native curators, we will delineate how modernist conceptions get overwritten by Native readings into distinct alterities. This paper will thus offer a critical perspective on de-colonializing discourse in a new continuum of new media.

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Disengagement and Transitions: Stories of Tensions and Dilemmas in an Emerging Democracy
Ruksana Patel
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

What happens to the lives of former activists when the revolution ends in a negotiated settlement? This question underpins the cultural discourse on revolutionaries as losing their purpose in life when the cause for which they fought ends. In order to understand whether this cultural discourse reflects the trajectory of the lives of former activists, this paper seeks to understand the meanings former freedom fighters make of their lives and how rapid socio-political change impacts on historical and social agents, who played a crucial role in contributing to the social change. This paper draws on empirical work on members of a political generation of former youth activists in South Africa. Using biographical research methods, the focus was on life stories of members of a political generation of former youth activists who formed part of the liberation struggle in South Africa. Interviews followed the trajectory of political actors' lives in terms of understanding how they reconstruct their experiences of political conscientization during their formative years under apartheid, engagement in resistance during the 1980s and disengagement during rapid socio-political change. In this paper, I will specifically discuss how the members of this generation of former youth activists construct their lives under rapid societal change and how they negotiate transitions in their personal and political lives in an emerging democracy and the meanings they make of their past from a post-apartheid perspective.

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Black South African Academics Experiences in a Transforming Educational Landscape
Cheryl-Ann Potgieter
Department of Psychology, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

South African institutions of higher learning are undergoing major revisions in the areas of policy, leadership, staffing and student enrolment. Some aspects of these revisions may be understood as responses to recent shifts in student populations, whilst others are responses to policy imperatives to overcome the constructed divisions and inequities of the apartheid past. Research indicates, however, that not only is there a paucity of Black academics at most institutions, but that they still for the most part occupy the lower ranks within academia. In 2001 the author of this paper was one of only two Black academics at the professorial level at the University of Pretoria , which is the largest residential university in South Africa . New Black academic staff has usually been employed at one end or the other of the employment spectrum - at the lecturer level or at the senior management level.
An interesting and indeed worrying phenomenon is the fact that Black academics are moving between institutions of higher education or leaving academia. The notion that there cannot be an African or a South African renaissance without an Africa focused Black intelligentsia has been widely accepted. One of the aims of the research which this paper is based on was to determine why Black academics are choosing to leave academia or stay for rather short spells at particular institutions. A secondary aim was to determine what changes should take place at institutions that might encourage faculty to remain at institutions of higher education at to contribute to the “African renaissance”.
Some of the main contributing factors for their movement such as institutional racism, responding to the new political environment, the labour market and funding are discussed.
The final section of the paper will explore proposed strategies for addressing the issue.