Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-260).

The divisive city planning and urban fabric of apartheid in Cape Town, South Africa has prevented social and economic growth for much of the population. The types of places invented by human cultures have the potential to be altered by sociopolitical events throughout history, yet little in Cape Town has been accomplished thus far in regards to breaking the patterns of segregation in the built environment. Worldwide, cities dictated by walls have been met with issues of mobility and social integration, raising the question of how design may aid in the transcendence of borders. Efforts towards redevelopment within Cape Town are often misplaced and have the tendency to strengthen the notion of "apartness" as they are not truly connecting people, places and goods to one another. By focusing on connecting disparate communities across boundaries, new development can construct a mobilized future. In order to integrate community and environment, siting at the seam between the mobile and the immobile is required for future growth. In Cape Town the highway is a conduit of freedom and access but exists simultaneously as a physical boundary between poor areas lacking the very access the highway provides. It is along this edge that this thesis will focus on, as it pertains so closely to what needs to be addressed for the growth and development of Cape Town- issues of location, containment and condition, and shifting building goals from that of immobilization, security and control to that of mobilization and new networks; allowing for an increase in physical movement, social progress, and economic growth. / 0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

No description available.

J.M. Coetzee’s novels are suffused with a pervasive, though often oblique, Holocaust awareness. Direct references to the event and to the historical era to which it belongs, subtle stylistic and thematic echoes of Holocaust writing, and the recurrent mobilization of Holocaust imagery in Coetzee’s novels all contribute to suggest the significance of the event to the author’s work and thought. Providing Coetzee with a lens through which to view the contemporary situation, both local and global, the Holocaust offers Coetzee a means by which difficult and complex questions of ethics and historiographical truth may be approached. Above all, the Holocaust and its representation contribute to Coetzee’s exploration of the dilemmas of translating the traumatic lived experience of atrocity – including, but not limited to, life in apartheid South Africa – into narrative form. Taken as a whole, Coetzee’s oeuvre initially anticipates and later responds to, in characteristically oblique fashion, the narrative project(s) facing post-apartheid South Africa as the newly-democratic nation sought to make sense of its past through a variety of means, the most important of which was the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Implicitly challenging the TRC’s findings as well as its narrative assumptions, the Coetzean oeuvre accordingly invites being read as offering a continuous and evolving counter-narrative to the TRC and its construction of a narrative of the apartheid past for the post-apartheid nation. In utilizing the Holocaust, its representations, and the reception thereof to frame his response to apartheid, Coetzee implicates both in a critique of the Western model of modernity, suggesting, in the process, the importance of reconfiguring modernity in a more ethical shape. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-29 12:15:58.377

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Thesis (PhD (Music)) -- Stellenbosch University, 2010. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: During the past few decades fascinating opera productions have been staged by South African opera companies, using strong local casts and strikingly indigenous interpretations of standard works from the canon. It appears that opera in South Africa has survived the tumultuous recent history of this country and is invigorated by the creative possibilities unleashed by its contexts. This dissertation explores whether and how opera production in the Western Cape has reacted to societal influences specific to South Africa. It launches an exploration of if and how the genre has ‘indigenized’ to become what it is today. The following themes present themselves during the course of this dissertation: the process through which opera has rooted itself in the country historically, the forms in and through which opera manifested itself in the Western Cape, how the art form has developed, to what extent local culture has influenced the art form and if, how and why opera production in the Western Cape has diverged from original Western operatic ideals. This dissertation is comprised of two sections representing, broadly, the past and the present. Chapters 1 and 2 are historical studies, whilst Chapters 3 and 4 discuss contemporary perspectives. Chapter 1 is an attempt to construct a history of opera in South Africa and serves as a background or frame for the ensuing chapters. This chapter will show that indigenization in its most subtle form can be traced in local opera productions long before the issue of the reflection of indigenous cultures in opera became relevant. Chapter 2 is a first attempt to account for the history of the Eoan Group, a so-called Coloured opera company who performed during South Africa’s Apartheid years. It investigates the far-reaching implications of the drive to ‘Europeanize’ indigenous culture, as exemplified in the opera productions of this group. Chapter 3 discusses a new opera composition, Hans Huyssen’s Masque (composed in 2005), focusing on the use of voice as it engages with the indigenization of the aesthetic model of voice production. Chapter 4 is an investigation into the functioning of Cape Town Opera. It investigates how a local opera company – an institution promoting opera as a Western form of art – negotiates its way through the tumultuous changes of post-Apartheid South Africa. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Operageselskappe in Suid-Afrika het gedurende die afgelope dekades verskeie fassinerende produksies op die planke gebring, produksies wat aansienlik deur inheemse interpretasies beïnvloed is en dikwels van inheemse sangers gebruik maak. Dit wil voorkom of opera in Suid-Afrika nie slegs die politieke omwentelinge van die onlangse verlede te bowe gekom het nie, maar ook produktief put uit impulse wat uit plaaslike omstandighede voortvloei. Die gedagte wat in hierdie proefskrif ondersoek word, is of en hoe opera produksie in die Weskaap op spesifiek Suid-Afrikaanse omstandighede gereageer het. Die bestudering van opera in die Weskaap deur die lens van verinheemsing fokus op die manier waarop opera in die land wortel geskiet het, die wyses waarop dit in die verlede en in die hede tot uiting gekom het, hoe produksie van die genre ontwikkel het, tot watter mate inheemse kulture operaproduksie en komposisie beïnvloed het en hoe en waarom operaproduksie in die Weskaap afgewyk het van oorspronklike Westerse ideale. Hierdie proefskrif bestaan uit twee dele wat die verlede en die hede verteenwoordig. Hoofstukke 1 en 2 behandel historiese gevallestudies en Hoofstukke 3 en 4 kontemporêre operapraktyke. Hoofstuk 1 onderneem om ’n geskiedenis van opera in Suid-Afrika te skets en dien as ’n vertrekpunt of konteks vir die daaropvolgende hoofstukke. Die hoofstuk dui aan dat verinheemsing reeds in subtiele vorm plaasgevind het in operaproduksie lank voor die vraagstuk oor die weerspieëling van inheemse kulture in opera relevant geword het. Hoofstuk 2 is ’n eerste poging om die geskiedenis van die Eoan Groep, ’n sogenaamde Kleurling operageselskap wat gedurende die Apartheidsjare in Suid-Afrika opera geproduseer het, neer te pen. Die hoofstuk ondersoek die verreikende implikasies van die veldtog om inheemse kulture in Suid-Afrika te verwesters. Hoofstuk 3 bespreek ’n nuwe operakomposisie, Hans Huyssen se Masque (gekomponeer in 2005) en fokus op die gebruik van stem en die kwessie van die verinheemsing van die estetiese model van stemproduksie. Hoofstuk 4 het as onderwerp die plaaslike operageselskap, Kaapstad Opera, en ondersoek hoe hierdie organisasie wat opera as ’n Westerste kunsvorm beoefen en bevorder, sy weg vind deur die ingrypende veranderinge wat post-Apartheid Suid- Afrika kenmerk.

This thesis looks at the relationshp between water and social power. It attempts to answer two questions: who controls the distribution of water in the South African city of Durban? And how might this distribution be transformed in positive democratic ways? In attempting to answer these questions, the thesis provides insights into post-apartheid South African society and the possibilities for democratic social change. The framework of analysis builds upon work conducted in urban political ecology. In particular, I argue that urban environments, indeed all environments, should be understood as created ecosystems. Recognising this, I suggest that Durban's waterscape should be seen as produced through capitalist social relations. The waterscape thereby becomes a particular accumulation strategy through which profits may be generated. for Durban's communities, one of the most direct effects of this capitalist accumulation strategy is that access to water is dependent upon the exchange of money. Whilst this situation has been amerliorated somewhat through the development of a free basic water policy, the policy itself has necessitated a much tighter regulation of domestic supplies and, in effect, a more severe commodification of each household's water supply. In turn, this has resulted in water infrastructure acquiring power over the lives of most residents. This, I argue, is a result of the social relations that come to be invested within that infrastructure. The possibilities for change that are suggested lie within the struggle for feminist standpoint and the connection of these situated knowledges of the waterscpe with a broader historical and geographical understanding of the terrain of civil society. from such an understanding of civil society, a dialectical critique of hegemony is opened up. Overall, the thesis moves from an analysis of the power relations camprising the waterscape to the development of a critique from which, it is hoped, the possibilities for political change might emerge.

In 1926 the Kruger National Park in South Africa became the first national park in Africa to accept visitors. Since that date there has been a propaganda campaign to convince people outside of the administration of the importance of the national park project and the value of the wildlife inside the parks. As a large tract of land in a land-hungry region of the country, the Kruger Park required both political and public support to ensure its survival. This attempt to communicate with the public is the subject of my thesis. The idea of the national park, and the natural world that it contained, altered dramatically since 1926. At times the message was tightly managed, and at others that control was loosened. As various interests intervened and encroached, new discourses developed and struggled for influence. Contained within the messages around the park and its wildlife were ulterior strands and ideologies that impacted in various ways on the idea of the national park. Nationalism, race, gender, class and status all became constituent parts of a heterogeneous construction. My thesis interrogates those strands within the discourse on the Kruger National Park. In 1967 the Manyeleti game reserve, on the western borders of the Kruger Park, became the first segregated game reserve for the exclusive use of black South Africans. Through this parallel project African visitors, who had been generally ignored in the Kruger Park setting, became the focus of propaganda efforts intended for a black audience. Race, gender, and class merged with the environmental messages in this unique setting to create new directions in conservationist rhetoric. My thesis sets these diverse messages communicated at Manyeleti alongside those transmitted through and about the Kruger Park.

As South Africa’s struggle against apartheid entered its final, turbulent decade, African students and youth rose to the forefront of the liberation movement, engaging in non-violent protest and militant confrontation with the apartheid state. In the existing historiography, the “comrades” – as young activists were known – are predominantly depicted as male, with little attention paid to the experiences of politicised girls and young women. This thesis is the first extensive study of South Africa’s female comrades, focused on activists from the township of Soweto. In analysing the experiences of young female activists, it introduces their voices into male-dominated historical narratives, and complicates and challenges existing histories of gender, generation, identity, and political violence in late-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on oral history interviews with former comrades, the thesis provides new insight into why girls joined the struggle, what roles they played, how they were treated by their male comrades, and their experiences of political detention. It argues that the struggle, despite being a male-dominated arena, could provide girls with a sense of agency and empowerment at a time when girls’ lives were otherwise marked by their confinement to the private sphere, social subordination, and susceptibility to sexual violence. Thus, just as the struggle offered young men a means of asserting their masculinity, so too did it offer young women a means of challenging emphasised femininities and constructing oppositional gender identities that defied social expectations and limitations of traditional girlhood. Additionally, this thesis improves current understandings of girls’ experiences of conflict on a global scale by challenging widely held assumptions of girls’ predisposition to peaceful behaviour and lack of political agency. In so doing it places Soweto’s female comrades within broader narratives of liberation movements across Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. This thesis thus makes an important and original contribution not just to South African history, but also to histories of nationalism and liberation movements, feminist conflict studies, and girlhood studies.

Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.