Papers by Louise green
Town hes been given the right to reproduce this thesis in whole or In part. Copyright Is held by ... more Town hes been given the right to reproduce this thesis in whole or In part. Copyright Is held by the author.
Social Dynamics-a Journal of The Centre for African Studies University of Cape Town - SOC DYNAMICS, 2012
Current Writing, 2006
The language of dogs: intermediate forms in global culture.
The language of dogs: intermediate forms in global culture.
Social Dynamics, 2014
This piece argues for the importance of critical engagements with photographs in order to explore... more This piece argues for the importance of critical engagements with photographs in order to explore and rethink the past, to reflect on the present and to imagine the future. It provides a brief overview of the articles that constitute the first part of the Social Dynamics special issue on photography in Africa, a collection that contributes to the growing body of scholarship that deepens our understandings of the significance of photography on the continent.
Introduction to an edited special section "The Ruins of Apartheid and the future of research in S... more Introduction to an edited special section "The Ruins of Apartheid and the future of research in South Africa" published in Social Dynamics A journal of African studies, 2012
This paper explores the particular complexity of thinking about nature and animals in post-libera... more This paper explores the particular complexity of thinking about nature and animals in post-liberation South Africa through focusing on one group of animals, the wolves housed in the Tsitsikamma Wolf Sanctuary. Wolves are not indigenous to South Africa and the presence of the sanctuary raises questions about the place of alien species in the symbolic configuration of the emerging South African nation. Although the Wolf Sanctuary is anomalous in the wider discourse of environmental management in South Africa, the wolves provide an interesting focus for thinking about the production of nature both within the South African nation and within contemporary global culture. These South African wolves are very clearly products of history, imported from North America to satisfy a particular political purpose – the breeding of wolf-dogs for use by the South African military and police during the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on Truth and Reconciliation Commissions transcripts of Hearings on Chemical and Biological Warfare, two self-published border war memoirs, and newspaper reports, this paper investigates how wildness was configured under apartheid particularly in the crucible of the border war. Finally, the paper discusses how as material animals the wolves leave their own traces on the actual and conceptual landscape surrounding wild predators and their place in South Africa.
Social Dynamics, 2013
This special section was convened at a time when there are numerous initiatives and activities to... more This special section was convened at a time when there are numerous initiatives and activities to mark the centenary of the passing of the Natives Land Act in South Africa. The centenary is the moment for reflection on the hardships that the majority of South Africans suffered and how land reform in post-apartheid South Africa has unfolded. Such a reflection is more urgent because the direction that the country has taken with regard to land reform is yet to satisfactorily respond to conditions of landlessness and poverty in South Africa. Recent farm workers’ strikes, the anger expressed in the acts of burning vineyards, and the ongoing conflict over the proper amount for a minimum wage, serve to foreground the increasing urgency of the question of land reform. The papers in this section present different perspectives on the Natives Land Act, and are all concerned with the futures that hinge on the resolution of the land question.
Social Dynamics, 2012
This paper explores the place of kramats the graves of Muslim saints or Auliyah – in the landscap... more This paper explores the place of kramats the graves of Muslim saints or Auliyah – in the landscape of contemporary Cape Town. The kramat sites have been proclaimed as heritage sites because of their importance as tangible signs of Islam at the Cape. At the same time, the process of the kramats becoming heritage sites has contained moments of intense, often sensational, public con- testation. Offering a reading of the discourses surrounding two contested kra- mats in Cape Town, this paper explores the way kramats mark out a miraculous space in the prosaic modern city and introduce into the post-apartheid evaluation of heritage, alternative conceptions of space and notions of temporality. They are sites of impossibility where, it is claimed, the laws of nature themselves are interrupted to mark the intangible particularities of the site. This paper explores what happens when this miraculous space is subject to the demands of private property and municipal law and the conflicts that arise from this collision of dif- ferent conceptual and experiential modalities. It considers the effects of the entanglement of legend and history that result from the production of these sites as heritage in a market-driven economy.
The Johannesburg Salon, 2012
This essay focuses on a single aphorism from Minima Moralia which addresses, in a very particular... more This essay focuses on a single aphorism from Minima Moralia which addresses, in a very particular way, the question of nature. The aphorism, Mammoth, takes as it starting point a newspaper article announcing the discovery of a ‘well-preserved dinosaur in Utah’, and places this archaeological find in relation to a constellation of cultural forms, King Kong, the Loch Ness monster, tigers, zoos, and Karl Hagenbeck, the animal dealer who designed one of the first ‘open zoos’ in Hamburg in 1907. This aphorism offers a creative way of considering how it might be possible to talk about nature at the current historical moment, a moment in which anxiety about the environment is everywhere and environmental crisis often seems to supercede, even obliterate, other forms of crisis.
English Academy Review, 2012
Written in the 1870s, while Olive Schreiner was working as a governess on a farm in the Cradock d... more Written in the 1870s, while Olive Schreiner was working as a governess on a farm in the Cradock district, The Story of an African Farm represents the beginning of her lifelong engagement with the dominant imperialist discourse on human nature and social identity. In this quotation ...
Social Dynamics, 2010
This paper investigates the proliferation of high-end private game reserves in Africa as the mani... more This paper investigates the proliferation of high-end private game reserves in Africa as the manifestation of an emerging economic but also symbolic and emotional investment in the value of nature. Increasing concern for ‘the environment’ along with anxiety about the future of individual species has given the game reserve a special place in the contemporary global imagination. Through analysis of some of the ephemeral texts through which these fantasies and anxieties about nature are articulated - an advertisement, some publicity material and a design monograph- this paper explores a number of different objects which serve to mediate the relationship between the public and nature. Both the 4x4 whose increasing popularity seems to parallel that of the game reserve, and the carefully designed and decorated game lodges offer examples of the complex way in which the experience of nature needs to be mediated by objects in order to confirm nature as a site for the rediscovery of authenticity. Around the game lodge, I argue, there emerges a new discursive mode for articulating Africa, and South Africa’s relationship with the world, a novel aesthetic known as the ‘New Safari’. This design category goes beyond design to construct a moral and experiential fantasy in which conservation not as a practice but rather as an imagined value makes possible a disturbing reconceptualization of the relation between the national and the global.
Social Dynamics, 2008
Taking Arjun Appadurai’s suggestive argument about the ‘social lives’ of things as its starting p... more Taking Arjun Appadurai’s suggestive argument about the ‘social lives’ of things as its starting point, this paper traces the pathways of two commodities for sale in South Africa: a pottery bowl and a resin spoon. Both these objects acquire their value in part from the quality of being handmade. The aim of this paper is not to demystify the claim to value made by either the pottery bowl or the resin spoon, or to judge one or the other as the more ‘authentic’ expression of a resistance to the contemporary reifications of the everyday. Instead, it explores a family resemblance between these two objects and traces the way in which, within contemporary global ‘regimes of value’, what is handmade acquires value. If, as Jean and John Comaroff suggest, neoliberalism ideologically constructs a world of increasing abstraction, the trajectories of these two objects reveal how both locality and work return in an attenuated form as attributes of commodities.
Scrutiny2, 2007
ABSTRACT Current discussion of Science and the Humanities in the South African academy tends to p... more ABSTRACT Current discussion of Science and the Humanities in the South African academy tends to pose these two fields of study in oppositional and exclusionary terms: Science or the Humanities. In this paper we argue that the proper and necessary conjunction for ...
English Academy Review, 2003
Written in the 1870s, while Olive Schreiner was working as a governess on a farm in the Cradock d... more Written in the 1870s, while Olive Schreiner was working as a governess on a farm in the Cradock district, The Story of an African Farm represents the beginning of her lifelong engagement with the dominant imperialist discourse on human nature and social identity. In this quotation ...
Pretexts - studies in writing and culture , 1996
Journal Special Issues by Louise green
Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, 2014
In “A Critical Presence: Drum Magazine in Context” (1996) Okwui Enwezor writes of how the circula... more In “A Critical Presence: Drum Magazine in Context” (1996) Okwui Enwezor writes of how the circulation of photographs through Drum provided a rare conduit for ideas and experiences to travel both into and out of segregated South Africa. He writes: 'By casting a critical gaze at territories that existed beyond the margins, the work of the Drum photographers transcends the prosaic. Offhandedly charming or accusatively caustic, the photographs are more like sociological excavations than purely documen- tary artifacts. By defying the conventions of traditional documentary photography, these pictures ably penetrate the surface of appearances to probe the psychological states of their subjects as well as their environments' (185). These special issues on photographies in Africa invokes the spirit of the Drum photographers and brings a series of articles on South African photography into relation with essays on the work of photographers from across the continent. The special issue also positions readings of photographs taken under colonialism alongside analyses of contemporary photographers who are reworking and reimagining the limits of inherited visual forms.
Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, 2012
his special section brings together a group of papers that in very different ways approach the qu... more his special section brings together a group of papers that in very different ways approach the question of Islam and the everyday. The travels, lives, stories, political struggles, and physical structures described in these articles and essays are all in some ways touched, formed, enlivened, troubled or textured by Islam, though they are not all directly involved in the practice of the religion itself. In our conception of the pieces gathered together in this special issue, we wanted to attend to the complex and often untidy realm of the everyday – a space that destabilises the neat boundaries between politics, religion and culture. We chose to include, along with scholarly articles on a range of topics, creative essays that offer oblique entry points into the way Islam might be written and rewritten in South Africa today.
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Papers by Louise green
Journal Special Issues by Louise green