This study explores the triple imbrications of race, power and gender in the selected novels of Bessie Head. A critical analysis of Maru (1971) and A Question of' Power (1974) is undertaken with a view to identifying the subordinating and the marginalising tropes that result in silencing of female subjectivities in Head's protagonists. Linked to a critical reading of the novels, this study examines the role of cultural and psychological forces in maintaining patriarchal hegemony, which is based upon hierarchy and domination of women rather than equality. Furthennore, this dissertation suggests that Head's depiction of narrow ethnic and racial bigotry serves a broader etiological purpose of accounting for "the state of thingsff within the South African context. Thus this study oscillates between the abstract constructs and the concrete social experiences within which Bessie Head's literary imagination subsists. In this study, particular attention is paid, in addition to critiques of individual texts, to some of Head's biographical elements with a view on the one hand, to highlighting the moments, events and issues which are reflected as " contexts of her-story" and on the other, to amplifying how Head's formative experiences contribute to her critique of the exploitative racially structured narratives. By using Foucault's theories within the social constructionist model, this dissertation aims to demonstrate the insidious intersections between racism and sexism and how these constructs are implicated in the conception and construction of power. Specifically, this study argues that due to their arbitrary applications, racial and sexual difference be viewed as dynamic and contested, rather than fixed. A synthesis is reached which accords literarure a role within the framework of socio-cultural practice in general. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY: PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR AT indisunflower@yahoo.com OR CONSULT THE LIBRARY FOR THE FULL TEXT OF THIS THESIS.... This thesis investigates the trajectory traced from Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman exploited in Europe during the nineteenth century, to a contemporary writing workshop with circumcised, immigrant West African women in Harlem New York by way of a selection of African women's memoirs. The selected African women's texts used in this work create a new testimony of speech, fragmenting a historically dominant Euro-American gaze on African women's bodies. The excerpts form a discursive space for reclaiming self and as well as a defiant challenge to Western porno-erotic voyeurism. The central premise of this thesis is that while investigating Eurocentric (a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist and sexist development of European language employed not solely with Baartman, but contemporaneously upon the bodies of Black women of Africa and its Diaspora, focusing predominantly on the "anomaly of their hypersexual" genitals. This particular language applied to the bodies of Black women extends into the discourse of Western feminist movements against African female circumcision in the 21st century. Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian writer and activist and Aman, a Somali exile, write autobiographical texts which implode a western "silent/uninformed circumcised African woman" stereotype. It is through their documented life stories that these African women claim their bodies and articulate nationalist and cultural solidarity. This work shows that Western perceptions of Female Circumcision and African women will be juxtaposed with African women's perceptions of themselves. Ultimately, with the Nitiandika Writers Workshop in Harlem New York, the politicized outcome of the women who not only write their memoirs but claim a vibrant sexual (not mutilated or deficient) identity in partnership with their husbands, ask why Westerners are more interested in their genitals than how they are able to provide food, shelter and education for the their families, as immigrants to New York. The works of Saadawi, Aman and the Nitandika writers disrupt and ultimately destroy this trajectory of dehumanization through a direct movement from an assumed silence (about their bodies, their circumcisions and their status as women in Africa) to a directed, historically and culturally grounded "alter" speech of celebration and liberation. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil.(English)

English Studies / M.A. (English)

Le présent mémoire se veut être une étude critique portant sur un thème qui n’a pas été traité à ce jour : l’œuvre sculptural d’Irma Stern (1894-1966), artiste d’ascendance juive-allemande née en Afrique du Sud. Il s’agit de dégager des perspectives nouvelles sur l’art, la carrière et l’importance historique d’une personnalité qui est d’ordinaire acclamée pour sa contribution à l’essor de la peinture sud-africaine moderne. Notre visée est double. Nous proposons d’abord le premier catalogue exhaustif des sculptures d’Irma Stern : sont présentées environ trente à cinquante œuvres qui furent réalisées entre 1922 et 1955 dans divers média et dont le trait commun est de représenter des femmes africaines. Nous proposons en second lieu une analyse interprétative du corpus, dans son intégralité. Il s’agit de corréler l’œuvre sculptural d’Irma Stern aux méandres de sa vie et de son travail de peintre déterminée à représenter des sujets africains. Notre but est de parvenir à une compréhension fine des désirs, des préoccupations et des angoisses qui animèrent l’artiste dans sa confrontation, longue de trente années, avec des thèmes africains ainsi que des dynamiques de pouvoir qui se dégagent de son œuvre. En portant tour à tour notre attention aux sculptures en argile (1922), en ciment (1936-45) et enfin, en pierre à savon et en verdite (1936-45), et en empruntant aux cadres conceptuels fournis par les théories postcoloniale, phénoménologique et sculpturale, nous mettons en évidence les évolutions qu’a connues le rapport de l’artiste à son sujet et ce qu’elles nous disent sur la relation, mouvante, qu’elle entretenait avec ses modèles. Les analyses que nous proposons sont susceptibles d’ouvrir de nouvelles pistes et de modifier le regard porté à Irma Stern et à sa place dans l’histoire de l’art sud-africain. / This thesis proposes an unprecedented critical study of the sculptural production of the South African-born, German-Jewish artist Irma Stern (1894-1966). It seeks to open new perspectives on the art, the career, and the historical significance of a figure who is commonly celebrated for her pioneering contribution to the development of modern South African painting. This thesis’ contribution is twofold. Firstly, it offers the first comprehensive catalogue of Stern’s sculptural œuvre, bringing into focus a corpus of roughly thirty to fifty works, produced between the years 1922 and 1955 in a variety of different media, which display a consistent focus on the African female subject. Secondly, it analyzes and interprets Stern’s complete sculptural oeuvre. Mapping the narrative of Stern’s sculptural production onto the plot of her life and work as a painter of African subjects, it seeks to offer a richer understanding of the desires, anxieties, and concerns that underpinned Stern’s thirty-year-long engagement with African subject matter as well as an account of the racial power dynamics that are at play in her oeuvre. Through dedicated studies of Stern’s production in clay (1922), cement (1936-1945), and wonderstone and verdite (1936-1945), guided by concepts drawn from postcolonial, phenomenological, and sculptural theory, it tracks the changes in Stern’s sculptural approach to her subject matter and analyzes them in terms of Stern’s changing relationship with her African models. These analyses ultimately offer new directions for approaching Stern and framing her position in the history of South African art.

Le présent mémoire se veut être une étude critique portant sur un thème qui n’a pas été traité à ce jour : l’œuvre sculptural d’Irma Stern (1894-1966), artiste d’ascendance juive-allemande née en Afrique du Sud. Il s’agit de dégager des perspectives nouvelles sur l’art, la carrière et l’importance historique d’une personnalité qui est d’ordinaire acclamée pour sa contribution à l’essor de la peinture sud-africaine moderne. Notre visée est double. Nous proposons d’abord le premier catalogue exhaustif des sculptures d’Irma Stern : sont présentées environ trente à cinquante œuvres qui furent réalisées entre 1922 et 1955 dans divers média et dont le trait commun est de représenter des femmes africaines. Nous proposons en second lieu une analyse interprétative du corpus, dans son intégralité. Il s’agit de corréler l’œuvre sculptural d’Irma Stern aux méandres de sa vie et de son travail de peintre déterminée à représenter des sujets africains. Notre but est de parvenir à une compréhension fine des désirs, des préoccupations et des angoisses qui animèrent l’artiste dans sa confrontation, longue de trente années, avec des thèmes africains ainsi que des dynamiques de pouvoir qui se dégagent de son œuvre. En portant tour à tour notre attention aux sculptures en argile (1922), en ciment (1936-45) et enfin, en pierre à savon et en verdite (1936-45), et en empruntant aux cadres conceptuels fournis par les théories postcoloniale, phénoménologique et sculpturale, nous mettons en évidence les évolutions qu’a connues le rapport de l’artiste à son sujet et ce qu’elles nous disent sur la relation, mouvante, qu’elle entretenait avec ses modèles. Les analyses que nous proposons sont susceptibles d’ouvrir de nouvelles pistes et de modifier le regard porté à Irma Stern et à sa place dans l’histoire de l’art sud-africain. / This thesis proposes an unprecedented critical study of the sculptural production of the South African-born, German-Jewish artist Irma Stern (1894-1966). It seeks to open new perspectives on the art, the career, and the historical significance of a figure who is commonly celebrated for her pioneering contribution to the development of modern South African painting. This thesis’ contribution is twofold. Firstly, it offers the first comprehensive catalogue of Stern’s sculptural œuvre, bringing into focus a corpus of roughly thirty to fifty works, produced between the years 1922 and 1955 in a variety of different media, which display a consistent focus on the African female subject. Secondly, it analyzes and interprets Stern’s complete sculptural oeuvre. Mapping the narrative of Stern’s sculptural production onto the plot of her life and work as a painter of African subjects, it seeks to offer a richer understanding of the desires, anxieties, and concerns that underpinned Stern’s thirty-year-long engagement with African subject matter as well as an account of the racial power dynamics that are at play in her oeuvre. Through dedicated studies of Stern’s production in clay (1922), cement (1936-1945), and wonderstone and verdite (1936-1945), guided by concepts drawn from postcolonial, phenomenological, and sculptural theory, it tracks the changes in Stern’s sculptural approach to her subject matter and analyzes them in terms of Stern’s changing relationship with her African models. These analyses ultimately offer new directions for approaching Stern and framing her position in the history of South African art.

Research to date in South Africa has explored the coming out narratives of lesbian and gay people. Most of this research suggests these people experience their parents’ reactions as largely negative. This negativity is attributed to the patriarchal culture and religious beliefs which insist on compulsory heterosexuality that dominate African discourse in South Africa. However, thus far, little work has been done focusing specifically on the perceptions of the parents of lesbian, gay or bisexual offspring, and on the parents’ own coming out about their children’s alternative sexual orientation. In this qualitative study, I explored the lived experiences of black mothers of lesbian, gay or bisexual children from diverse backgrounds with the aim of capturing their own voices and gaining an understanding of their journeys, from the moment that each discovered that her child belongs to a sexual minority to her acceptance of the child’s alternative sexuality. I conducted semi-structured interviews with six black South African mothers of lesbian, gay or bisexual offspring in order to learn about these mothers’ experiences. I analysed the interview transcripts using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. I identified three main themes, namely the mothers’ journeys; responses to the study’s research questions, and other concerns the black mothers still have regarding their lesbian, gay or bisexual offspring. Each main theme was comprised of several sub-themes. In a nutshell, the study shows that in contrast to the assumption that South African black urban communities are hostile spaces with no visible familial support for lesbian, gay or bisexual youth, in reality, there are examples in urban African communities of parental support for members of sexual minorities. Although all the mothers in this study held Christian beliefs, none subscribed to a ‘same-sex attraction is a sin’ discourse. Instead, most of these mothers regarded their children as special gifts from God, and some saw their children’s alternative sexuality as God’s way of teaching them as mothers about unconditional love. / Psychology / M.A. (Psychology: Research Consultation)

This study explores the triple imbrications of race, power and gender in the selected novels of Bessie Head. A critical analysis of Maru (1971) and A Question of' Power (1974) is undertaken with a view to identifying the subordinating and the marginalising tropes that result in silencing of female subjectivities in Head's protagonists. Linked to a critical reading of the novels, this study examines the role of cultural and psychological forces in maintaining patriarchal hegemony, which is based upon hierarchy and domination of women rather than equality. Furthennore, this dissertation suggests that Head's depiction of narrow ethnic and racial bigotry serves a broader etiological purpose of accounting for "the state of thingsff within the South African context. Thus this study oscillates between the abstract constructs and the concrete social experiences within which Bessie Head's literary imagination subsists. In this study, particular attention is paid, in addition to critiques of individual texts, to some of Head's biographical elements with a view on the one hand, to highlighting the moments, events and issues which are reflected as " contexts of her-story" and on the other, to amplifying how Head's formative experiences contribute to her critique of the exploitative racially structured narratives. By using Foucault's theories within the social constructionist model, this dissertation aims to demonstrate the insidious intersections between racism and sexism and how these constructs are implicated in the conception and construction of power. Specifically, this study argues that due to their arbitrary applications, racial and sexual difference be viewed as dynamic and contested, rather than fixed. A synthesis is reached which accords literarure a role within the framework of socio-cultural practice in general. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY: PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR AT indisunflower@yahoo.com OR CONSULT THE LIBRARY FOR THE FULL TEXT OF THIS THESIS.... This thesis investigates the trajectory traced from Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman exploited in Europe during the nineteenth century, to a contemporary writing workshop with circumcised, immigrant West African women in Harlem New York by way of a selection of African women's memoirs. The selected African women's texts used in this work create a new testimony of speech, fragmenting a historically dominant Euro-American gaze on African women's bodies. The excerpts form a discursive space for reclaiming self and as well as a defiant challenge to Western porno-erotic voyeurism. The central premise of this thesis is that while investigating Eurocentric (a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist and sexist development of European language employed not solely with Baartman, but contemporaneously upon the bodies of Black women of Africa and its Diaspora, focusing predominantly on the "anomaly of their hypersexual" genitals. This particular language applied to the bodies of Black women extends into the discourse of Western feminist movements against African female circumcision in the 21st century. Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian writer and activist and Aman, a Somali exile, write autobiographical texts which implode a western "silent/uninformed circumcised African woman" stereotype. It is through their documented life stories that these African women claim their bodies and articulate nationalist and cultural solidarity. This work shows that Western perceptions of Female Circumcision and African women will be juxtaposed with African women's perceptions of themselves. Ultimately, with the Nitiandika Writers Workshop in Harlem New York, the politicized outcome of the women who not only write their memoirs but claim a vibrant sexual (not mutilated or deficient) identity in partnership with their husbands, ask why Westerners are more interested in their genitals than how they are able to provide food, shelter and education for the their families, as immigrants to New York. The works of Saadawi, Aman and the Nitandika writers disrupt and ultimately destroy this trajectory of dehumanization through a direct movement from an assumed silence (about their bodies, their circumcisions and their status as women in Africa) to a directed, historically and culturally grounded "alter" speech of celebration and liberation. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil.(English)

English Studies / M.A. (English)

CAPES / Esta dissertação discute as articulações entre gênero, raça e cultura material na construção dos corpos de mulheres negras que passam pelo processo de transição capilar. A pesquisa está centrada no evento Afro Chic, que acontece em Curitiba e promove ações afirmativas relacionadas ao cabelo crespo e empoderamento de mulheres negras. Percebo esse evento como uma das estratégias da Geração Tombamento, movimento cultural que utiliza a moda e a estética como ferramentas políticas para desconstrução de estereótipos de raça e gênero. A partir de uma análise dos processos históricos ligados à ideologia de branqueamento no Brasil, busco compreender as rejeições e resistências a estética negra no país. Neste evento, me interessam principalmente as oficinas de tranças e turbantes, que ensinam essas técnicas e articulam seu uso à ligação com a cultura afro-brasileira, incentivando um olhar para a diversidade e para o corpo como um todo que é construído por diversos elementos, incluindo a cultura material. A pesquisa é de caráter qualitativo, tendo sido realizada observação participativa na segunda edição do evento, com registro em diário de campo e entrevistas com as facilitadoras das oficinas, com base no método de história oral e história de vida. A partir da teoria de cultura material e dos estudos de interseccionalidade, entendo tranças e turbantes como artefatos de moda e busco compreender como participam do processo de empoderamento de mulheres negras que passam pela transição capilar. Estes artefatos também constroem e desconstroem, marcam gênero e raça nos corpos e, deste modo, argumento que o uso de tranças e turbantes no processo de transição capilar é uma das propostas de “desbranqueamento” dos padrões estéticos no Brasil e estratégia de resistência ao racismo. / This dissertation discusses the articulations between gender, race and material culture in the black women’s bodies construction who undergo the process of hair transition. The research is centered on the Afro Chic event, which happens in Curitiba and promotes affirmative actions related to curly hair and black women’s empowerment. I perceive this event as one of the strategies of the Tombamento Generation, a cultural movement that uses fashion and aesthetics as political tools for the deconstruction of race and gender stereotypes. By an analysis of the historical processes related to the bleaching ideology in Brazil, I try to understand the rejections and resistances of the black aesthetics in the country. In this event, I am interested mainly in the braids and headwraps workshops, which teaches these techniques and articulate their use in connection with the Afro-Brazilian culture, encouraging a look at diversity and for the body as a whole constructed by different elements, including material culture. The research is qualitative, with participatory observation in the second edition of the event, with a field journal and interviews with the facilitators of the workshops, based on the method of oral history and life history. By the theory of material culture and intersectionality studies, I understand braids and turbans as fashionable artifacts and try to understand how they participate in the process of empowering black women who undergo the hair transition. This artifact also construct and deconstruct gender and race in the bodies and, therefore, I argue that the use of braids and turbans in the process of capillary transition is one of the proposals of "unbleaching" of Brazilian aesthetic standards and racism’s resistance strategy.