Suchergebnisse

In this chapter Rosemarie Buikema elaborates on how decolonial feminist artists and scholars are engaged in knowledge production by means of deploying a poetics of recycling as a way to re-orientate themselves towards the relation between the subject and the object of knowledge, matter and form, signifier and signifed. Buikema analyses the work of El Anatsui and Nandipha Mntambo to illustrate the power of this poetics of recycling and gives the example of an exhibition in which the Museum of Equality and Difference (MOED) re-curated the cultural heritage of abolitionism, giving centre stage to the black, previously enslaved woman Sojourner Truth, rather than the white Dutchman Nicolaas Beets. She concludes that the collective fijield of decolonial feminism envelops engaged scholars and artists like a sensitive skin that continuously responds to the context in which it fnds itself.

Centered around the relationship between art and political transformation. From Charlotte Bronte and Virginia Woolf, to Marlene van Niekerk and William Kentridge, artists and intellectuals have tried to address the question: How to deal with the legacy of exclusion and oppression? Via substantive works of art, this book examines some of the answers that have emerged to this question, to show how art can put into motion something new and how it can transform social and cultural relations in a sustainable way. In this way, art can function as an effective form of cultural critique. 0In the course of this book, a range of artworks are examined, through a postcolonial and feminist lens, in which revolt-both as a theme and as a medium-specific technique or/as critique -is made visible. Time and time again, revolt takes the form of a slow and thorough working through of the position of the individual in relation to her history and her contemporary geopolitical circumstances. It thus becomes evident that renewal and transformation in art and society are most successful when they proceed according to the method of self-reflexive cultural critique; when they do not present themselves as revolution, radical breaks with the past, but rather as processes of revolt in which knowledge of the past is investigated, complemented, corrected, and bent to a new collective will.

In this article Rosemarie Buikema demonstrates how feminist scholarship has contributed from a variety of perspectives to the study of the dynamics between the subject and the object of knowledge. She in particular shows how she as a Genderstudies scholar has produced new knowledge and insights by means of paying attention to the processes of in- and exclusion, and the accompanying workings of erasure and neglect. She gives the example of an exhibition in which the Museum of Equality and Difference (MOED) re-curated the cultural heritage of abolitionism, giving centre stage to the black, previously enslaved woman Sojourner Truth rather than the white Dutchman Nicolaas Beets.

First- and second-wave Western European feminists struggled to realize full access to civil rights for women and the creation of a participatory democracy that ensured social solidarity. They consequently stressed the fact that in addition to the struggle for civil rights, women needed to contest the dominant images of womanhood. However, the initial deeply political commitment to participatory democracy and social justice included goals which, with hindsight, simultaneously served the neoliberal vocabulary of autonomy, choice, and meritocratic advancement. The ethical–political second-wave nuance, one geared toward justice for all rather than merely toward equality and emancipation, needs to be reactivated in the context of twenty-first-century feminist activism. The challenge for twenty-first-century third-wave feminists, therefore, is to develop and practice an activism that continues truly to connect the local and the global, the private and the public, the personal and the political, the empirical and the symbolical.

In this pictorial essay, Buikema investigates the image that won the World Press Photo award in 2012. This photograph of a veiled woman cradling the body of a fallen revolutionary in a mosque in Yemen evokes in western audiences the image of the pieta. Buikema argues that the image pictorially stages a confrontation between east and west, and owes its affective power to the similarities with and difference from christian depictions of the virgin mother.

This text seeks to rethink the relationship between literature and the gendered construction of national boundaries. It does so by proposing a reconsideration of the terms singularity, difference and literariness while analysing two talked-about and best-selling postcolonial novels, Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee and Agaat (2004) by Marlene van Niekerk.

This text seeks to rethink the relationship between literature and the gendered construction of national boundaries. It does so by proposing a reconsideration of the terms singularity, difference and literariness while analysing two talked-about and best-selling postcolonial novels, Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee and Agaat (2004) by Marlene van Niekerk.