Magister Artium - MA / Bab’aba - Ugly Short Stories is a collection of vignettes whose function is to colour and
collage three portraits of Black women characters; namely, a rural woman (Nozikhali), a
township teenager (Zola), and a child/baby (Loli). Each of these stories serve as details in
each other’s portraits whilst remaining stories on their own. My intention with this collection
was to restore some form of abstract equality and right to mystery by functioning within a
lexicon of opacity. In the scholarship of decoloniality this is my argument for the legitimacy
of vernacular/customised definitions for problems that preoccupy communities/individuals
rather than having to always pin ourselves to already existing theory in order to be legible. In
the scholarship of opacity, this is a contribution to the argument against the necessity for
legibility/transparency (in the first place) in exchange for dignity. I chose ugliness as my
thematic district of departure because of its connoted potential to provide richer explorations
into notions of marginality and an emancipatory praxis that cannot afford to have in its
makeup the potential to seek to eliminate. And though such a liberatory ambition is hard to
fantasize about against the backdrop of popular chauvinism in the contemporary landscape of
- particularly - South Africa, and the visceral effects thereof and the swift justice needed to
attend thereto, I do think that there is merit in hallucinating some sort of doctrine of humanity
that ends in dignity for all.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uwc/oai:etd.uwc.ac.za:11394/6669 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Nxadi, Julie Ruth Sikelwa |
| Contributors | Moolman, Kobus |
| Publisher | University of the Western Cape |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | University of the Western Cape |
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