Papers by Nashilongweshipwe JJS
Journal of Namibian Studies : History Politics Culture, Dec 31, 2020
This article reflects on a practice-led and Katutura-based intervention Operation Odalate Naiteke... more This article reflects on a practice-led and Katutura-based intervention Operation Odalate Naiteke to explore how notions of performing and curating can be employed in mobilizing public art and trans-historic work. I relied on Oudano and other African concepts of performance such as Dala, to argue for an expansive and care-driven approach to curating and organizing radical education in the public sphere. Specific projects such as What is the Sound of Katutura in 1971? and Okapana Mobile Concert demonstrate the intersecting trans-historic and care work in the public sphere. The artistic work by Ouma Paulina Hangara, Lamek Ndjaba, Lovisa the Superstar, Maspara Pantsula, Ten Ten, and Trianus Nakale is discussed to make these connections between performance, publicness and the curative. Operation Odalate Naiteke as a radical education programme that facilitates site-related, trans-historic and trans-generational dialogic action through alternative publics situated on the margins of dominant and centralized public culture
Social Dynamics-a Journal of The Centre for African Studies University of Cape Town, Jan 2, 2021
ABSTRACT In thinking of alternative and undisciplined cinematic forms, I look at the margins and ... more ABSTRACT In thinking of alternative and undisciplined cinematic forms, I look at the margins and cracks of Windhoek’s cinematic landscape to map and read content that shows critical thought and radical politics. I reference video documentation work by artists and activists Tuli Mekondjo, JuliArt, Neige Moongo, Tangeni Kauzuu and the Decolonising Space Group, most of which is available online. I read their works as acts and embodiments of love because of how they are politically situated. I refer to bell hooks’s idea of the margin as a site of resistance to explain how these works are not only situated on the peripheries of Windhoek’s public imagination but also have the power to mobilise radical politics and critical engagement in and about the city. The article responds to the backdrop of a dominant mainstream film industry which is restricting in terms of form and structure. It also highlights the dangers of heteronormative and nationalist thinking which dominates local film content, misrepresenting bodies on the margins of the city.
This book chapter presented in critical and performative styles speak about the struggle for coll... more This book chapter presented in critical and performative styles speak about the struggle for collaboration, access, visibility, voice, place and critical engagement in Namibian contemporary artsand its applications to educational, community, therapeutic, organisational and other social contexts. This chapter is a story about several creative research projects focused on the radical transformation in my arts praxis and the inadequacies of these experiences. I also cite my own theatre making, performance and writing experience of working in other SADC countries such as Zimbabwe, Botswana,South Africa and Mozambique. It suggests a decolonization of arts practices and their pedagogies.
Journal of Namibian Studies : History Politics Culture
This article studies Nanghili Nashima’s Oudano practices and public life. We discuss how her auto... more This article studies Nanghili Nashima’s Oudano practices and public life. We discuss how her autobiographical public performance practices during apartheid and independent Namibia constitute feminism. The study mainly focused on the sound and video recordings currently archived at the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation's Music Library and on YouTube. This work offers critical engagement on themes of migration, sexuality and labour, challenging colonial, Christian, patriarchal and heteronormative norms, and systems in Ovawambo and African societies at large. We unpack her mobile work and public life as defiant and subversive, therefore, speaking truth to multiple forms of power. By listening collectively and closely to her performance work, the study argues that Nanghili Nashima emerged as a trans-local figure who relied on transgression through her Oudano praxis to embody agency and radical imagination as practices of freedom. It is on this basis that her intellectual tradition i...
African Diaspora
There are far too few studies on Namibian art and artists in the diaspora. In response to this, I... more There are far too few studies on Namibian art and artists in the diaspora. In response to this, I look at the work of Herman Mbamba, Jackson Wahengo and Shishani Vranckx. Mbamba is a visual artist based in Haugesund, Norway while musicians Wahengo and Vranckx are based in Copenhagen, Denmark and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, respectively. I offer an aesthetic reading, unpacking their work as counter-hegemonic maps, that signal the places of imagining otherwise. Wahengo and Vranckx’s songs lean towards national cultural memory while Mbamba’s abstract and figurative paintings conceal everyday realities. The concept of speculative cartography is applied, to read how these artists as African Diasporic subjects, speak to historic displacements and scatterings, while orientating themselves within national cultural memory that goes beyond ‘Namibianess’ or the African Diaspora. I argue that the speculative cartographies generate Thirdspaces that collapse binaries between settled and unsettled...
Journal of Namibian Studies : History Politics Culture, Dec 31, 2020
This article reflects on a practice-led and Katutura-based intervention Operation Odalate Naiteke... more This article reflects on a practice-led and Katutura-based intervention Operation Odalate Naiteke to explore how notions of performing and curating can be employed in mobilizing public art and trans-historic work. I relied on Oudano and other African concepts of performance such as Dala, to argue for an expansive and care-driven approach to curating and organizing radical education in the public sphere. Specific projects such as What is the Sound of Katutura in 1971? and Okapana Mobile Concert demonstrate the intersecting trans-historic and care work in the public sphere. The artistic work by Ouma Paulina Hangara, Lamek Ndjaba, Lovisa the Superstar, Maspara Pantsula, Ten Ten, and Trianus Nakale is discussed to make these connections between performance, publicness and the curative. Operation Odalate Naiteke as a radical education programme that facilitates site-related, trans-historic and trans-generational dialogic action through alternative publics situated on the margins of dominant and centralized public culture
Journal of Namibian Studies, 2023
This article studies Nanghili Nashima’s Oudano practices and public life. We discuss how her auto... more This article studies Nanghili Nashima’s Oudano practices and public life. We discuss how her autobiographical public performance practices during apartheid and independent Namibia constitute feminism. The study mainly focused on the sound and video recordings currently archived at the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation's Music Library and on YouTube. This work offers critical engagement on themes of migration, sexuality and labour, challenging colonial, Christian, patriarchal and heteronormative norms, and systems in Ovawambo and African societies at large. We unpack her mobile work and public life as defiant and subversive, therefore, speaking truth to multiple forms of power. By listening collectively and closely to her performance work, the study argues that Nanghili Nashima emerged as a trans-local figure who relied on transgression through her Oudano praxis to embody agency and radical imagination as practices of freedom. It is on this basis that her intellectual tradition is situated in what Pumla Gqola has theorised as African feminist imagination.
Namibian Journal of Social Justice, 2022
This article is a critical response to World Athletics (formerly the International Association of... more This article is a critical response to World Athletics (formerly the International Association of Athletics Federations) and the western ethos of athletics for their sustained systemic exclusion of women, particularly black women. We make a case in defence of two Namibian athletes, Christine and Beatrice Masilingi, who were removed from the 400-meter race in the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, Japan due to the World Athletics testosterone rule. The rule appears to be primarily applied to female athletes from the Global South. This article argues that the testing regulation is demeaning, and is based on questionable science, and targets women based on racial and gender stereotypes. We posit the testing regulation to be problematic and demeaning to all women, as it implies that women having high testosterone levels places them at a competitive level similar to that of men, and that testosterone is the sole key to their athletic success. This strategy, which we see as a form of institutional racism and sexism, has been widely criticised in international scholarship, media and other public spheres. Mboma and Masilingi are amongst the black women who have recently been excluded from elite sports and subjected to this kind of scientific racism and gender essentialism.
Other athletes include South Africa’s Caster Semenya, Burundi’s Francine
Niyonsaba and Kenya’s Margaret Wambui. Caster Semenya, an Olympic
athlete, “was subjected to genetic, gynaecological, psychological, and
endocrine gender verification” (Swarr et al., 2009). The article will unpack how black gender-non-conforming bodies pose an administrative challenge for institutions such as World Athletics, and how as a result they are othered through overt human rights violations. Our critique of gender essentialism is also extended to racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic people in the Namibian context who seemed to be offended by witnessing this systemic violence in their performativity of nationalism.
Namibian Journal of Social Justice, 2021
This incomplete and process-based photo essay is an exhibition of selected photographs representi... more This incomplete and process-based photo essay is an exhibition of selected photographs representing recent protest performances in Windhoek and Luderitz. I make use of Performative Writing as a method of embodying the work that these protests do, which is to mobilise dialogic action and movement formation. The performativity of these
photographs points towards alternative notions of Publicness, critical visualities and spatial processes, particularly in Namibian urban centres. This essay posits that this protest action and their photographic remnants mobilise Praxis that is required for decolonial
futures.
Social Dynamics, 2021
In thinking of alternative and undisciplined cinematic forms, I look at the margins and cracks of... more In thinking of alternative and undisciplined cinematic forms, I look at the margins and cracks of Windhoek’s cinematic landscape to map and read content that shows critical thought and radical politics. I reference video documentation work by artists and activists Tuli Mekondjo, JuliArt, Neige Moongo, Tangeni Kauzuu and the Decolonising Space Group, most of which is available online. I read their works as acts and embodiments of love because of how they are politically situated. I refer to bell hooks’s idea of the margin as a site of resistance to explain how these works are not only situated on the peripheries of Windhoek’s public imagination but also have the power to mobilise radical politics and critical engagement in and about the city. The article responds to the backdrop of a dominant mainstream film industry which is restricting in terms of form and structure. It also highlights the dangers of heteronormative and nationalist thinking which dominates local film content, misrepresenting bodies on the margins of the city.
Journal of Namibian Studies, 2020
This article reflects on a practice-led and Katutura-based intervention Operation Odalate Naiteke... more This article reflects on a practice-led and Katutura-based intervention Operation Odalate Naiteke to explore how notions of performing and curating can be employed in mobilizing public art and trans-historic work. I relied on Oudano and other African concepts of performance such as Dala, to argue for an expansive and care-driven approach to curating and organizing radical education in the public sphere. Specific projects such as What is the Sound of Katutura in 1971? and Okapana Mobile Concert demonstrate the intersecting trans-historic and care work in the public sphere. The artistic work by Ouma Paulina Hangara, Lamek Ndjaba, Lovisa the Superstar, Maspara Pantsula, Ten Ten, and Trianus Nakale is discussed to make these connections between performance, publicness and the curative. Operation Odalate Naiteke as a radical education programme that facilitates site-related, trans-historic and trans-generational dialogic action through alternative publics situated on the margins of dominant and centralized public culture.
Books by Nashilongweshipwe JJS
Changes in Direction: A Journal edited by Heidi Brunnschweiler, Laura Horelli, 2021
This book chapter is a decolonial look at international solidarity as a necessary yet contested n... more This book chapter is a decolonial look at international solidarity as a necessary yet contested notion practiced between Africa and Europe. It poses love as central to any notion of solidarity. I look at examples from Namibia's liberation struggle, such as the SWAPO newsletter Namibia Today as unpacked in Laura Horelli's research and artistic work. I also look at the lifework of activists and intellectuals Ottilie and Kenneth Abrahams. I also trace international solidarity in the early 20th century as embodied by theatre artist Rosa Clay whose Namibian-Finnish-American migrations are evidence of internationalism. The chapter also unpacks recent efforts by contemporary artists and social movements aimed at international solidarity and the limits of these practices.
Writing Namibia (Unam Press), 2018
This book chapter presented in critical and performative styles speak about the struggle for coll... more This book chapter presented in critical and performative styles speak about the struggle for collaboration, access, visibility, voice, place and critical engagement in Namibian contemporary artsand its applications to educational, community, therapeutic, organisational and other social contexts. This chapter is a story about several creative research projects focused on the radical transformation in my arts praxis and the inadequacies of these experiences. I also cite my own theatre making, performance and writing experience of working in other SADC countries such as Zimbabwe, Botswana,South Africa and Mozambique. It suggests a decolonization of arts practices and their pedagogies.
Book Reviews by Nashilongweshipwe JJS
Journal of Namibian Studies History Politics Culture, 2022
"Boulton’s book focuses on the political economy of intimacy and relatedness as embodied, pr... more "Boulton’s book focuses on the political economy of intimacy and relatedness as embodied, produced and otherwise ‘per-formed’ by Black middle- and working-class men in the strange town of Swakop-mund. It references places, material objects, and concepts to explain how men build and negotiate their intimate relation-ships with each other, work, friends, lovers and families in a town that largely depends on the uranium industry."
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Papers by Nashilongweshipwe JJS
Other athletes include South Africa’s Caster Semenya, Burundi’s Francine
Niyonsaba and Kenya’s Margaret Wambui. Caster Semenya, an Olympic
athlete, “was subjected to genetic, gynaecological, psychological, and
endocrine gender verification” (Swarr et al., 2009). The article will unpack how black gender-non-conforming bodies pose an administrative challenge for institutions such as World Athletics, and how as a result they are othered through overt human rights violations. Our critique of gender essentialism is also extended to racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic people in the Namibian context who seemed to be offended by witnessing this systemic violence in their performativity of nationalism.
photographs points towards alternative notions of Publicness, critical visualities and spatial processes, particularly in Namibian urban centres. This essay posits that this protest action and their photographic remnants mobilise Praxis that is required for decolonial
futures.
Books by Nashilongweshipwe JJS
Book Reviews by Nashilongweshipwe JJS
Other athletes include South Africa’s Caster Semenya, Burundi’s Francine
Niyonsaba and Kenya’s Margaret Wambui. Caster Semenya, an Olympic
athlete, “was subjected to genetic, gynaecological, psychological, and
endocrine gender verification” (Swarr et al., 2009). The article will unpack how black gender-non-conforming bodies pose an administrative challenge for institutions such as World Athletics, and how as a result they are othered through overt human rights violations. Our critique of gender essentialism is also extended to racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic people in the Namibian context who seemed to be offended by witnessing this systemic violence in their performativity of nationalism.
photographs points towards alternative notions of Publicness, critical visualities and spatial processes, particularly in Namibian urban centres. This essay posits that this protest action and their photographic remnants mobilise Praxis that is required for decolonial
futures.