Thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Masters of Arts in Political Studies to the Faculty Humanities, School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2016 / Blackness has become a right to death that sees in death its almost essential property. The essence of blackness, its origin or its possibility, would be this right to death; but a death denuded of that ...sovereignty that gains from death its own sacrificial mastery ... and maintains itself in it. This is life as the work of death, a work born of fidelity to death, but death without transcendence (Marriot cited in Sexton 2015: 132). The advent of colonial modernity in South Africa marks the rupture of identity and being of Africans. That is, after the emergence of colonial modernity Africans cease to be Africans only but however they become black. Blackness becomes an object exclusion in the encounter with modernity. Blacks and by extension Africa is seen as being outside modern temporality inhabiting a zone of non-being and fungability. The encounter with modernity, without any doubt causes doubts in the Africans modes of existence or being and it is here that liberation and emancipatory movements/projects that have been initiated by blacks have sought to steer their lenses to try and liberate as well as understand how blacks can best live in modern conditions of racism or should there be any alternative to modern empty time. This study seeks to make an intervention, especially in South African Political studies, with concern to alternative political strategies that have not been take into consideration. [No abstract provided. Information taken from introduction]. / MT2017

Thesis (M.Fine Arts)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, School of Arts, 2016. / This paper will be an analysis of the covers and contents of the South African editions of Glamour magazine from September 2014 to August 2015 and True Love magazine from September 2014 to August 2015. The analysis will consider the effects of: globalisation; globalised culture and consumption; and perceptions of race and skin colour, (specifically the notion of colourism) in South Africa. Colourism is a prejudicial system that renders value and perpetuates social hierarchies along perceived tonal difference in skin colour. It has been asserted by writers like Deborah Gabriel and Nicole Fleetwood that this value system exists within communities of people of colour and is perpetuated by mainstream media, but maintains a somewhat obscure presence. I will consider the mechanisms that inform this colour system and will show how globalisation works to facilitate colourism. Finally, I aim to explain how skin colour extends beyond the body and define the effects of global cultural interaction, showing that colourism is not simply about skin colour and tone, but about economic, social, and political realities. / MT2017

No abstract available. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts by Research in Sociology, 2016 / "A reflective contemplation on the ordinary humanity of black South Africans under apartheid". [Quotation taken from p.4. No abstract provided] / GR2017

Thesis (M. A. (English Studies)) --University of Limpopo, 2018 / This study seeks to examine the concept of identity in the post-colonial South Africa. Like any other African state, South Africa was governed by a colonial strategy called apartheid which meted out harsh conditions on black people. However, the indomitable system of apartheid was subdued by the leadership of the people, which is democracy in 1994. Notwithstanding the dispensation of democracy, colonial legacies such as inequality, racial discrimination and poverty are still yet to be addressed. As mirrored in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift (2008) and Mother to Mother (1998) and Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut (2008) and Spilt Milk (2010), the colonial past perhaps paved a way for social issues to warm their way into the democratic South Africa. This study will use the aforementioned novels penned in the post-colonial period to present an evocation of identity-crisis in South Africa. It will then employ these methodological approaches; Afrocentricity, Feminism, Historical-biographical and Post-Colonial Theory to assert and re-assert the identity that South Africans have acquired subsequent to the political transition from apartheid to democracy. KEY WORDS: Apartheid, Colonialism, Democracy, Identity, Post-Colonialism

This study aims to understand emerging black identities in contemporary South Africa. The focus is on the impact the radical transformation of the political and social system in South Africa is having on black identity. This study emphasises two key ideas: possibilities for the construction of black identity and the significance of apartheid on black identity, and how these two factors have impacted on the construction of black identity. A reflection on the work of Biko (1978) is used as the key theoretical framework for this study to understand the construction of black identity in the process of encounter with whiteness and encounter with racism. In this thesis, black people‟s autobiographies have been studied as a site where shared images of the past are actively produced and circulated: a site where a collective engagement with the past is both reflected and constructed. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.

This report is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of masters by coursework and research report in the faculty of humanities in the university of Witwatersrand / This thesis explores the different ways that identities are negotiated and renegotiated in different spaces. It intends to unearth the contradictions, tensions and complexities that occur as a result of racialised subjectivities. This study unpacks the socially constructed term "Coconut" and challenges the existing dominant discourses that speak of "Coconuts" as inauthentic Black people who have lost touch with their heritage.What it means to be Black today in South Africa is being contested and there is resistance towards binary and rigid understandings and conceptualizations of blackness. In the intersection of race and class, class is often the silent signifier of distinction and difference post-apartheid but proves to be significant in understanding the different nuanced lived experiences of the Black subject. This thesis is specifically interested in how the inability to comprehend or communicate in an African language further complicates and adds another layer of complexity to not only the lived experiences of Black monolinguals proficient in English only, but also to their personal sense of self. Being a "Coconut" is experienced in conflicted and precarious ways. On the one hand it is experienced with alienation and rejection and in other contexts, it holds significant value and serves as social cultural capital necessary for maneuvering social, political and economic spaces. Key words: Identity, Coconut, Blackness, Class, Cultural capital, Monolinguals, Language, Accent, Racial subjectivity / GR2017

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of the Witwatersrand December 2016 / Within a narrative paradigm, this research project had two elements. Firstly, the project aimed to enable the researcher to gain an understanding of the construction of adolescent identity from the perspective of a cohort of first-generation, post-Apartheid adolescents as members of an NGO’s after-school support programme. Secondly, a participatory action element aimed to provide the participants with an opportunity to reflect upon their own lives in a positive, empowering way thereby providing an understanding of their past lives, strengthening a realistic power of agency for their future lives, balanced between self-identity and self transcendence in the present (Crites, 1986). Within this research, the self is theorised psychosocially, presented as both a narrated and narrating subject in which identity construction is consolidated through story-telling and the adaption of these stories to different audiences and cultural contexts. 12 volunteer participants were provided with disposable cameras and asked to take photographs of people and objects that were important to them. Using these photographs, the participants then constructed art timelines of their lives in the narrative format of ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’. Each participant was then narratively interviewed twice, four months apart. The two datasets (the art timelines and the interview transcripts) were subject to three levels of analysis. Firstly, the construction of each participant’s descriptive narrative portrait was analysed across the time zones of ‘past life’, ‘present life’, and ‘future life’; secondly, thematic analysis was horizontally conducted across the narrative portraits identifying the similarities and differences between the participants, extending the specific experiences discussed by the participants into generalised themes; and thirdly, the vertical analysis of portraiture was re-invoked in greater depth, examining how the different theoretical dimensions of narrative identity identified, coalesce in one case history. The first level of analysis focused specifically on the imagoes, or personified concepts of the self, identified within the narrative portraits of three participants. It was found that these imagoes had significant effects on the identity construction of these young people, specifically on those whose parents had died. In the second phase of analysis three different dimensions of, or ways of thinking about, narrative identity were distinguished: relationality and the sense of belonging or alienation experienced by the participants in their interaction with others; the consolidation of life stories at adolescence and the participants’ social positioning within the systems of structural identity markers of race, class, gender and sexuality; and lastly the participants’ hopes and dreams, their narrative imaginations and future-orientated lives. In the third level of analysis, one participant’s narrative was selected to illustrate the theoretical concepts that underpin the construction of narrative identity, particularly constructionist intersectionality (Prins, 2006) and cultural creolisation (Glissant, 1989). These young people’s narratives indicate a patent tension between their lives to date, the histories of their families marked by insecurity and feelings of being unsafe as the effects of racism, disease and poverty, and their future imagined lives characterised by the promise of freedom and agency, education, employment and health. Through listening to and analysing these young people’s past, present and future stories, this study gained an insight into the ambivalence that exists in their lives, the contradictions they face between their moments of belonging and their moments of alienation, and how all these experiences inform and contribute to their identity constructions. / MT2017

Steve Biko returns and continues to illuminate the postapartheid social order. His contestation by various claimants for different reasons shows his continuing and lasting legacy. However he finds a special niche among a disenfranchised and frustrated township youth who are trapped in township struggles where they attempt to derive a meaning. More important is why these youth who neither saw nor participated in the struggle against apartheid are turning to an age old idea like Black Consciousness in a context of the pervasive influence of non-racialism, rainbowism and triumphalism of neo-liberalism. The realisation is that a human-centred society with a human face which Black Consciousness practitioners advocated and strove for is yet to be realised. This shows the anomalies and maladies of a postcolonial dispensation where ideals, principles and teleology of the liberation struggle are yet to be consummated. Thus Black Consciousness as a node in a long thread of black political thought in the country; and as a spirit, will always be both an emotion, and a motion that finds a new meaning with each generation.

This research is concerned with the notion of being human. It acknowledges the dislocation of black people through themselves, a process which was exacerbated during, the colonial era and further through apartheid. The interest in this research is due to the historical dehumanisation of black people through dispossession and subjection to foreign rule and culture, by white people. The historical accounts of dehumanisation and disparity, through either pigmentation, poverty or an inferiority complex, led to black people viewing their humanity in terms of materialism and individualism in the present context. This research explores how materialism and individualism have affected black people's understanding of themselves and self-determinism. It is argued in the United States through Black Theology, the notion of the Black Church in the South African context and through Black Consciousness that the humanity of black people is affirmed historically and to date. / Philosophy & Systematic Theology / M.Th. (Systematic Theology)