AVReQ The Podcast

In this instalment of the masterclass, Professor Dennis Francis is in conversation with Professor Shirley Anne Tate discussing decoloniality, intersectionality as a framework, and anti-racist interventions in higher education. Prof Tate shares an extract from an upcoming edited volume on decolonization and anti-racism in settler colonial states of which South Africa is a part of. She positions the discussion within the context of absolute exhaustion from the violence that we saw during Black Lives Matter, and other incidences, within and outside of the University. These are events, she states, that brought us face to face with the horror of black and indigenous death on a virtual loop, unbridled white supremacy and conceptualizations of freedom by black and indigenous people.

Shirley Anne Tate

Shirley Anne Tate is a Jamaican descendant of African enslaved people. She is Professor and Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Feminism and Intersectionality, Sociology Department, University of Alberta, Canada, and an Honorary Professor in the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) at Nelson Mandela University. Previously, she was a Professor of Race and Education, the first appointment of its kind in the UK, and founding Director of the Centre for Race, Education, and Decoloniality (CRED) at Leeds Beckett University. She is a qualitative researcher interested in intersectional thinking, drawing on Black feminist, gender, critical ‘race’, and Caribbean decolonial theory within her focus on Black Atlantic Diaspora Studies.

Dennis Francis

Professor Dennis Francis is a South African-based scholar and activist whose work engages with questions related to gender, sexualities and schooling. Dennis is a former Dean of Education and currently a Professor of Sociology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Their research, located in the sociology of education, focuses on how educational structures, discourses and practices reproduce cisheteronormativity and social inequality in schools and how these are also resisted and challenged. Their most recent books are Troubling the Teaching and Learning of Gender and Sexuality Diversity in South African Education (PalgraveMacmillan, 2017) and Queer Activism in South African Education: Disrupting Cis(hetero)normativity in Schools (Routledge 2022). Professor Francis is also the recipient of several distinguished teaching and researcher awards, including the South African Education Research Association (ERASA) and the Stellenbosch Distinguished Teacher Award.

On May 24, 2022, a mass shooting occurred at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, United States, where 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, a former student at the school, fatally shot nineteen students and two teachers, while seventeen others survived despite being injured. The words "The sound of Children Screaming has been removed," were an editor’s note attached to a video, published by the Austin American-Statesman of Uvalde of the shooting. As a response to this note, Professor Anthony Collins delivers a theoretical conceptual lecture on representations of violence.

ANTHONY COLLINS 

Professor Anthony Collins is an interdisciplinary social scientist and social justice activist. Their work integrates a range of disciplines including criminology, cultural studies (including gender and decolonial studies) and psychology, with attention to culture and identity. Their primary focus is on violence and trauma, with specific attention to South Africa, both in terms of developing better critical conceptualization of violence in postcolonial settings, and more effective violence reduction interventions. Prof Collins has a specific interest in gender-based violence, including GBV in universities, and community interventions for reducing GBV. Their work also focuses on secondary and vicarious trauma amongst people researching and supporting survivors of violence, and further extends to the broad topic of globalization, consumer culture and youth identities.

Rabia Abba Omar is a researcher and curator working towards a MA in Visual Studies from Stellenbosch University’s Visual Arts Department. She likes to think with/of the ocean, memory, archives, and is currently exploring the body as an archive of violence. She is a MA Fellow of Imagining Futures of Un/Archived Pasts project (Exeter University) and based at AVReQ. She holds a MA in Heritage Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand, where she was part of the Oceanic Humanities of the Global South and is an alumni of the UnSchool of Disruptive Design’s Emerging Leaders Fellowship.

In this episode, Rabia speaks about her research on the slave ship São José, expanded and developed upon through the AVReQ reading group sessions. This paper was recently presented at the South African Visual Arts Historians conference at DUT and is based on a section of Rabia’s MA Research Report completed while I was at Wits.

On 27 December 1794, the São José Paquete d’Africa wrecked just off the shores of Cape Town. Battling the rough winds, high swells and stuck between two reefs, the crew set about to rescue the 512 enslaved people held in the ship’s hold. Despite this 212 enslaved people succumbed as the ship broke into pieces. This paper looks at the ghostly echoes of the concreted shackles found on the São José wreck site. It uses the stone-like concretions of the shackles to explore how we can begin to consider human and more than human assemblages that lie below the waterline and how we can use these to think about their hard and violent histories and the legacies, and objects, that remain with us.

Former ConCourt Judge and anti-apartheid activist lawyer, Justice Albie Sachs also joined us for this event. What was special about a visit from Justice Sachs this time around is the fact that the São José slave ship was discovered in front of his home in the oceans of Clifton/Camps Bay Beach. In 2015, Justice Sachs also hosted a special event at his home to commemorate the enslaved people that died in the shipwreck.

Zintombizethu (zethu) Matebeni is a sociologist, activist and writer whose research focuses on the development of African Queer Studies. She has worked at different universities in South Africa and the United States of America and has been part of decolonizing interventions, including #RhodesMustFall and the Black Academic Caucus at the University of Cape Town. zethu has edited and co-edited various volumes on African LGBTQI life, including Reclaiming African: queer perspectives on sexual and gender identities (Modjaji, 2014); Queer in Africa: LGBTQI Identities, Citizenship and Activism (Routledge, 2018); and Beyond the Mountain: queer life in 'Africa's gay capital' (UNISA Press, 2021). zethu holds the National Research Foundation South Africa Research Chair in Sexualities, Genders and Queer Studies at the University of Fort Hare.

Click below for full profile:

https://www.ufh.ac.za/news/News/NRFAWARDSSOUTHAFRICA

Rabia Abba Omar is a researcher and curator working towards a MA in Visual Studies from Stellenbosch University’s Visual Arts Department. She likes to think with/of the ocean, memory, archives, and is currently exploring the body as an archive of violence. She is a MA Fellow of Imagining Futures of Un/Archived Pasts project (Exeter University) and based at AVReQ. She holds a MA in Heritage Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand, where she was part of the Oceanic Humanities of the Global South and is an alumni of the UnSchool of Disruptive Design’s Emerging Leaders Fellowship.

https://avreq.sun.ac.za/people/ms-rabia-abba-omar/

Andrea Gullotta is lecturer in Russian at the University of Palermo. He has also worked for the University of Glasgow, the Ca' Foscari University of Venice and the University of Padua, where he obtained his PhD. He is co-editor of the journal AvtobiografiЯ, which deals with life-writing and the representation of the self in Russian culture. His main research area is Gulag literature. He has authored dozen of works on Gulag literature, Gulag poetry and Gulag culture.

Professor Siona O’Connell (PhD) is an African Studies scholar/practitioner in the School of the Arts at the University of Pretoria. Her research focus falls within three areas, that of Memory Studies, Creative Studies and Restorative Justice in postcolonial and post-apartheid South Africa. She is widely respected for her work on the effects of race-based land dispossession. Her co-edited book, ‘Hanging on a Wire’ won the 2018 National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) Humanities and Social award for the best non-fiction edited volume and her monograph on forced removals in Cape Town, “An Impossible Return: Cape Town’s Forced Removals” continues to garner broad recommendations.

Watch the Ballie Boys short film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhlThBeCMG0&t=610s

Professor Heidi Grunebaum is a writer and academic, and Director of the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Her work focusses on the afterlives of genocide, war and forced displacement, and on the relationship between art and politics. She is author of Memorialising the Past: Everyday Life in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2011), co-editor of Uncontained: Opening the Community Art Project Archive (2012) and Athone in Mind (2017) amongst other writings. With Mark J. Kaplan, she made the documentary film, The Village Under the Forest (2013) on the Palestinian Nakba. She is currently making a second documentary film with Kaplan set in Germany on weaponization of Jewish memory politics.