Global Blackness Summer School ‘23 / For Wholeness. Black being well

“Ceremony”, Film screening & installation with Milisuthando Bongela

The Nest Space, 23 7th Ave, Parktown North

This year’s Global Blackness Summer school featured artist is Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, whose painting ‘Ceremony’ has graced our home page and Summer School graphics. For this session, she joins RGC curator Dani Bowler in conversation at the Nest, an inclusive, Black-owned, femme-centric wellness centre.

RSVP here to join.

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Join us in ‘Ceremony’ as we gather with our featured artist for this year’s Summer School, painter and multi-media artist Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi. At The Nest, we will create a space to experience, feel, ground, think and share around Thenjiwe’s work – considering the ideas and practices that sustain her life-giving artistry, which ‘investigates the lived consequences of imperial histories and the personal dimensions of political identities, collectivity, and futurity, among other concepts’.

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Click here for session details and presenter bios! | Click here for the GBSS ‘23 programme

Global Blackness Summer School ‘23 / For Wholeness. Black being well

“Milisuthando”, Film screening & installation with Milisuthando Bongela

Market Photo Workshop, 138 Lilian Ngoyi St, Newtown

Join us a for a ritual gathering and special screening of award-winning film Milisuthando, with an alter installation by Director Milisuthando Bongela.

RSVP is essential - book your (free) ticket here

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Set in past and present South Africa, Milisuthando is a poetic coming-of-age personal essay documentary on love and what it means to become human in the context of race, explored through the memories of Milisuthando – who grew up during apartheid but didn't know it was happening until it was over.

8 years in the making, Milisuthando is a portrait of me and South Africa growing up together in the aftermath of apartheid. Driven by my narrative voice and a compelling cast of my family, friends, foes and some historical figures, the story braids together the three different worlds of my childhood — The now defunct Republic of Transkei, East London in the 1990s new South Africa and my adult life in Johannesburg. Spanning 30 years in a non-linear manner, the film is a  meditation on difficult questions about power, fear, intimacy and love as it relates to race. Through a roving feminine lens, we find ourselves in happened-upon environments that take the viewer into the interiors of the new South Africa and its relationship with its past.

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Click here for session details and presenter bios! | Click here for the GBSS ‘23 programme

Global Blackness Summer School ‘23 / For Wholeness. Black being well

“Relational Repair - Black life beyond injury” (hybrid)

Gather with us for a hybrid gathering with Jovan Scott Lewis, author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020) and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (2022). Venue: LAPA, 29 Chiswick St, Brixton (opp Breezeblock Cafe).

Click here to watch the video!

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Join us as we gather at LAPA to think relational repair together. In our political present, shaped by the insurgent recognition of the consequences of antiblackness following the murder of George Floyd, but whose influence is quickly expiring, Jovan Scott Lewis examines the possibilities for Black reparations. Thinking from what he identifies as our reparative conjuncture, Jovan's new research addresses the societal and ethical limitations of what kind of reparations this moment can produce. Recognizing that the harms against Black people are generally harms to their relations, he suggests a relational framework of reparation. In doing so, Jovan encourages resisting Blackness’ principal formulation through (studying) antiblack violence and its related practices of resistance and offers a formula for repair beyond the terms of Black injury.

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Click here for session details and presenter bios! | Click here for the GBSS ‘23 programme

Global Blackness Summer School ‘23 / For Wholeness. Black being well

“I want to be sound” A listening session with Black Intellectual Praxes & Nombuso Mathibela

Flame Studios, Constitution Hill (next to Food I Love You) / Numbers are limited, please RSVP here to join the session.

Bring a pillow, blanket, yoga mat or cushion and gather with us in the Blue Room at Flame Studios for an immersive listening session with Nombuso Mathibela and collective Black Intellectual Praxes. Brunch snacks will be served by Lady Day.

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Anchoring these sessions is the idea of ‘soundness’ and by soundness we are thinking through methods of articulating what is to be human through sound – as a sonic, embodied, performative and queer take on being human that recognises the human as a mutable category and invention explored from the genre perspectives of the Black radical tradition. When we say ‘I want to be sound’ the invitation is to think about song as a medicinal practice of how to stay in the presence of wholeness. We want to tend to historical ailments, wounds of the present and emphatically cultivate old and new methods of being that centre our continual re-enchantment of the world as a definitional process. In these sessions, together, we will read through narratives in the form of short stories, poems and other forms of literature, and listen to archival audio film footage, voice notes, speeches and music on vinyl.

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Click here for session details and presenter bios! | Click here for the GBSS ‘23 programme

Global Blackness Summer School ‘23 / For Wholeness. Black being well

“Emergent Transformations - who shapes the world?”, with Cathy-Mae Karelse & Dee Marco (online)

Join us for an interactive online session with deep systems change specialist Cathy-Mae Karelse, facilitated by Dee Marco of Mother.Lab. Cathy-Mae Karelse is the author of Disrupting White Mindfulness - Race and Racism in the Wellbeing Industry (Manchester University Press, 2023)

Click here to download a pdf Playbook prepared with care by Carthy-Mae & Dee

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Decolonising  and emerging – together…

In White Mindfulness:Race and Racism in the Wellbeing Industry (2023), Cathy-Mae Karelse outlines and critiques why the now trillion dollar wellness industry is as problematic as it is in our global, contemporary imaginaries.Alongside this, Karelse explores the relationship between wellness and whiteness by naming how whiteness, with its harsh hyper-individualised borders, has come to and continues to shape so much of our thinking around wellness, serving as the quintessential marker of being whole and well.

What is this thing that shapes our ideas and aspirations which are being sold at such an unreachable price?

Cathy-Mae and Dee Marco welcome you into a conversation and practice that centralises thinking and living from a place of nourishment, kindness and collective care, outside of the hyper-capitalist and colonial ways of behaving we have come to know.The session intends to weave narrative, symbols and breath to explore questions of radical peace, radical joy, radical freedom - keeping in mind the deeply disruptive and destroying context of war, climate crises and violence.They invite us to think about and explore how we can radically transform violent constructs that impose structures and frameworks upon us.

Cathy-Mae and Dee will be bringing some of the following questions to the session:

Is wellbeing a destination? In our fast-changing, demanding world, what does being well mean and/or look like? Is it in your body or somewhere else? Do we experience joy and ease in our bodies and when or where does this happen? Are there other words and definitions for being well that we could use instead? Do these give greater or more accurate expression to compassion and love? If we were to shine a light on our moments of peace, what might we see?

Please join us in our play box… an intimate, virtual enclave of light that we hope to create with you to chat, laugh, dismantle and recreate the confines of the conventional trappings and impositions of the wellness world. Please bring your paper and pens, cushions and blankets to this online session, as we together uncover the unexplored crannies of our longings for ease and tell stories of our communal joy-making.

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Click here for session details and presenter bios! | Click here for the GBSS ‘23 programme

Global Blackness Summer School ‘23 / For Wholeness. Black being well

“Beloved”, with Gabrielle Goliath & Maneo Mohale

Join us for a Saturday morning of poetry readings, mimosas, conversation and Black feminist invocation with Gabrielle Goliath and Maneo Mohale, in response to Beloved, Goliath’s current exhibition of drawings and prints at the Goodman Gallery.

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Beloved. Or as Christina Sharpe phrases it (with characteristic poise), be loved.

In this ongoing and very personal series of drawings and prints, Gabrielle Goliath summons and celebrates a chorus of both radical and quotidian femme presences: poets, priestesses, activists, artists, parents and prodigies. Beloved is an ode, a work of the heart – a labour of recognition, thanks and love.

In this select showing, Goliath pays homage with tender and sensuous lines to figures such as Gabeba Baderoon, Caster Semenya, Sylvia Wynter, Yoko Ono, Sade and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Portraits of Alek Wek and Desire Marea are touched with iridescent pigment dust, affirming an erotics of black femme beauty and possibility, whilst the solemn repose of Berenice and Melwyn Britz – mother and father to Camron Britz (d. 2017) – invokes a life-work of mourning.

Accompanying the drawings are two recent print series, published by Johannesburg-based print studio Edition Verso. Opening new expressive channels, each of these editioned works feature unique

Click here to view the exhibition | Click here to read the Bubblegumclub review of the conversation.

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Reflecting on the exhibition and their ongoing, collaborative relationship, poet and RGC Research Associate Maneo Mohale will present a series of readings, including poems by Gabeba Baderoon and queer Palestinian poet George Abraham.

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Click here for session details and bios | click here for the GBSS ‘23 programme

Global Blackness Summer School ‘23 / For Wholeness. Black being well

“Ordinary Notes”, with Christina Sharpe, J Wortham, Maneo Mohale & Dani Bowler (online)

For Wholeness. Black being well. What could be more fitting for the 1st session of this year’s Global Blackness Summer School than an intimate gathering with Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes (2023) and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)?

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These notes might just reach you across distance, time, and space and with them you may be “held and held”

Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

Join us as we gather around a selection of notes from Christina Sharpe’s tender, beautiful and luminous new book Ordinary Notes – a work that unfolds as creatively as it does intellectually, as it considers the work of the memorial in tandem with intimate recollections that weave personal memory into its critical considerations. Writer J Wortham, poet Maneo Mohale, and curator and writer Dani Bowler will offer poetic and creative responses to Christina’s offering – as we gather across distances to reflect, connect, imagine, dream and hold these ideas, together.

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Click here for session details and presenter bios! | Click here for the GBSS ‘23 programme

“A diasporic perspective towards education and south-south cooperation”

A public lecture with Her Excellency, Anielle Francisco da Silva

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Venue: Ubuntu Chambers, Madibeng Building, UJ Kingsway Campus / watch the video here

The Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg, Professor Letlhokwa Mpedi takes pleasure in inviting you to a Public lecture delivered by Her Excellency, Anielle Francisco da Silva, Minister for Racial Equality, Brazil.

Respondent: Prof Victoria Collis-Buthelezi (RGC Director)

Anielle Francisco da Silva is the current Brazilian Minister of Racial Equality. Her sister Marielle Franco, was also a politician who was assassinated in 2018. After her death, the family established the Marielle Franco Institute with the aim to seek justice and continue her work. Anielle was the director of the institute, that works mainly with political violence and the participation of black women in politics. She is a journalist, educator, master in ethnic-racial relations (CEFET/RJ), and a doctoral candidate in applied linguistics (UFRJ). Previously, she was a volleyball player.

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This event is collaboratively hosted by the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), Faculty of Humanities, Division for Internationalisation, and the Transformation Division at the University of Johannesburg.

Click here to view the video

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For Marielle: on hearing the news of Anielle Francisco da Silva’s forthcoming address in Johannesburg, our dear friend Prof Geri Augusto shared this beautiful reflective piece, penned in recognition of the life, activism and intellectual contribution of Marielle Franco: For Marielle: Mulhere(s) da Maré—Danger, Seeds and Tides (click here to read).

Joburg Launch: Cyberfeminism Index

With Mindy Seu & Natalie Paneng

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Venue: LAPA, Brixton (Breezeblock Cafe) / Watch the video here

Join us at pan-african project space LAPA for the Joburg launch of the Cyberfeminism Index, with a performative reading by Mindy Seu, as well as a special installation and performative presentation by multidisciplinary artist Natalie Paneng.

In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol. But the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers, it is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use. 

Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.  Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Index—an anti-canon, of sorts—celebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminism’s long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy. 

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Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and close collaborations. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), academic institutions (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Pornhub, SSENSE, Google), among many others. Mindy holds an M.Des. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art.

Natalie Paneng received her BA in Dramatic Arts from the University of Witwatersrand in 2018 and was awarded the Leon Gluckman Prize for the best piece of creative work. She lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. Natalie makes use of both her self-taught digital skills and theatre background to create multidisciplinary digital art/new media. Paneng’s work has been exhibited with TMRW Gallery, The National Arts Festival, Blank Projects, Michaelis School of Fine Art, BKHz Gallery, Javett Art UP and Galerie Eigen Art Leipzig and Mutek Festival. She has also published creative research through Ellipses Journal and Artist Research Africa and was a 2020 Fellow with the Institute of Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town. Paneng describes herself as a world-builder and sees her growing practice as a way to navigate, share and archive imagined and alternative realities brought to life through digital artistic process.

“An inter-generational struggle for gender equality”

With UJ Chancellor Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

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Venue: Ubuntu Chambers, Madibeng Building, UJ Kingsway Campus / Watch the video here

Join us for the 17th annual Helen Joseph Memorial lecture, with UJ Chancellor and former United Nations (UN) Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women, Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka!

2023 marks the 17th annual Helen Joseph Memorial lecture. Since 2022, the Helen Joseph Memorial lecture has been hosted by the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class (RGC), and speaks to its emphasis on the relationship between Black feminist intellectual and creative praxis and activism. We are thrilled to announce UJ Chancellor and former United Nations (UN) Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women, Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, as our keynote speaker for this year’s lecture!

Click here to learn more about Dr. Mlambo-Ngcuka’s story.

The Helen Joseph Memorial Lecture has sat in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg since 2005. Named for the British-born anti-apartheid activist, the Helen Joseph Memorial lecture was spearheaded by the Centre for Social Development in Africa and Professor Leila Patel and intended to speak to Joseph’s legacy and that of the wider terrain of women’s movements in South Africa. The lecture is often held in August in commemoration of the 1956 August 9th Women’s March to the Union Buildings against pass laws that Joseph led, along with other leaders of the Federation of South African Women like Lilian Ngoyi. Tried for treason and held under house arrest for over two decades, Joseph was a strident critic of apartheid and a champion of the rights of women, children and families.

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Dr. Mlambo-Ngcuka will be joined in conversation by Professor Victoria Collis-Buthelezi. Introductions by UJ Vice-Chancellor Prof Letlhokwa Mpedi. Note of thanks by Prof Kammila Naidoo (UJ Dean of Humanities).

“Working from Overwhelmed” 

A warm-up discussion

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Join us at the UJ Art Gallery (map) for Working from Overwhelmed, a warm-up discussion taking place inside the exhibition Overwhelmed. This Saturday at 2pm, SCCIP (Scholarship with Community Care is Possible) is having an informal discussion around the guiding concept of working from overburdened states. The plan is to inhabit the exhibition as a shared thinking space. In the current academic and artistic climate, there is continual pressure to take on overflowing amounts of intellectual, emotional and interpersonal labour. Led by artists Ruth Sacks and Shonisani Netshia, this conversation proposes ways of inhabiting systems in a constant state of imminent collapse, through sharing experiences of the research and pedagogic projects the group is currently involved with. We are hoping to move gently into a more formal academic forum later in the year, with a special edition interdisciplinary journal publication in mind. 

SCCIP is a postgraduate care community hosted by RGC with the support of friends from across disciplines in UJ Humanities and the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture. 

For more information on Overwhelmed, click here. 

A Discussion on JUNX with author Tshidiso Moletsane 

With Marzia Milazzo and Shameema Sarang

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Join us on the 24th for an intimate discussion with Tshidiso Moletsane, author of the award-winning novel Junx (Penguin, 2021). Moletsane will be in conversation about his book with Marzia Milazzo and Shameema Sarang. All are welcome. Catering will be served. Please RSVP to: csrgc@racegenderclass.org

Junx is the winner of the 2022 Sunday Times Fiction Award and finalist for the 2022 UJ Literature Prize. Click here to read more about the book.

"Set between Soweto and the Joburg CBD, Moletsane’s explosive novel serves shots of sex, drugs and anxiety while tearing into life, death, race and politics." 

This event is co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) & the UJ Department of English.

“CULT” A Lunchtime Reading

With New York Times bestseller author Michael Datcher

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Join us at queer women-led community space Toasted (map) for an intimate reading session with author and NYU scholar Dr. Michael Datcher. Michael will be reading from his forthcoming novel, CULT, with contributions from local poets and writers.

Important note: spaces are extremely limited for this informal reading and meet-and-greet session (max 20). RSVP is essential.

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CULT - about the novel

Jameela Easter wants to start a cult. CULT is the compelling origin story that chronicles the early stage of her creation—and answers the intriguing question: How do cults get started? As a charismatic and brilliant Black theology graduate student at Berkeley who’s researching People’s Temple cult leader Jim Jones, Jameela wonders why so few Black women have been cult leaders—and wonders how she could benefit her South Berkeley Black community by using cultish power. She tells herself that cult of personality-power can be used for good. Jameela makes a decision to drop out of graduate school to start the House of Magdalene, a “positive womanist cult” disguised as a radical womanist church, where the Black Divine Feminine will be worshipped, Black women will be centered and Jameela Easter will be the powerfully charismatic center of the center. But first she has to deeply disappoint the two people who’ve been heavily invested in her graduate school success by telling them that she’s quitting: her Dissertation Advisor and her father.

As a trade-off for continuing her graduate school program, Jameela’s Advisor and father both agree to help her develop the House of Magdalene’s womanist social services, which will include a women’s clinic, a girl’s mentoring program and a microloan bank. However, good intentions can’t stop a cult from doing what cults do: bad things. And Jameela Easter is at the center of the center of these bad things.

In intersecting narratives, CULT also tells the origin story of the real-life Berkeley Church of Christ cult that emerges on Berkeley’s campus in 1986 as Jameela is starting the House of Magdalene. These narratives intersect with Jim Jones’ audio recorded messages (via Jameela’s cult research), making Jim Jones a character who engages fellow characters from the grave.

Jameela is CULT’s primary messenger in this novel about the early stages of cults of personality: their seductions, dangers and complicated benefits. Also, the cult of personality around former President Donald Trump haunts this story. Subtly spliced, interspersed and interwoven into the narrative fabric, President Trump’s own words blend with the words of the novel’s cult leaders so seamlessly that their difficult-to-differentiate melding creates a powerful undercurrent that is deeply fascinating and deeply disturbing.

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Michael Datcher is the author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times Bestseller RAISING FENCES—a TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB Book of the Month pick. The film rights were optioned by actor Will Smith’s Overbrook Productions. Datcher is also the author the Ferguson-area historical novel AMERICUS and the Pulitzer Prize-nominated ANIMATING BLACK AND BROWN LIBERATION. He has made many media appearances including OPRAH and TODAY SHOW. Datcher is co-host of the weekly public affairs radio news magazine BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE on 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles.

In dialogue: Prof Marzia Milazzo & Prof Victoria Collis-Buthelezi

“Colourblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power”

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Venue: Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies (JIAS) / map

Please RSVP for this in-person event / those unable to join in person can do so online. Click here for Zoom registration.

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Marzia Milazzo, in conversation with Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, discusses her new book Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power (Northwestern University Press, 2022). Examining texts on race from Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, the USA, and South Africa from the inception of the colonial era to the present, Colorblind Tools shows how white people disavow racism on a global scale to maintain power, and how anti-Black and colonial logics can be reproduced even in some decolonial literatures. 

Click here for Prof Milazzo’s bio

Meet-and-greet Session

sccip: an RGC postgraduate community care group event

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Venue: Toasted, Rosebank / map

Join us for an informal meet-and greet session at Toasted this Friday. sccip convenors Dani Bowler, James Macdonald, Ruth Sacks and Tuliza Sindi will briefly introduce the group, and its ethos of community care. Those gathered will then have a chance to share their research ideas and speak through some of the challenges postgraduate students at UJ face. If you would like to join, please contact: csrgc@racegenderclass.org

Scholarship with community care is possible. This is the grounding value of sccip, a postgraduate care community hosted by Race:Gender:Class (RGC), with the support of friends across disciplines in UJ Humanities and the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture. Recognising the often lonely, solo experience of post-graduate scholarship, sccip aims to foster a collaborative space in which to think, share, facilitate, dream and imagine theses in radically supportive, uplifting, curious and enabling ways.

Think from Black: a Lexicon

Public programme / JAG (Occupation)

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Saturday 28th Jan ‘23 / 10:00-14:00 (SAST), JAG (map)

Join us in-person at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) on Saturday the 28th January (10:00-14:00) for Think from Black: a Lexicon - a programme of art activations and poetry readings, featuring Nelisiwe Xaba, Christina Sharpe, Danai Mupotsa, Canisia Lubrin and Gabrielle Goliath (click here for artist bios).

This curated offering of sonic, performative and poetic responses is presented by the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), University of Johannesburg, and the Practicing Refusal Collective (PRC), in collaboration with JAG and Occupation (@occupation.jag), and with the generous support of the Princeton Collaboratorium and the Columbia University Institute for Research on Women and Gender Studies. This unique event forms part of the Johannesburg convening of Think from Black: a Lexicon - click here for more details.

‘Think from Black: A Lexicon’ is imagined as a collective effort to create a more expansive conceptual vocabulary that takes Black life - in all of its diversity and multiplicity - as its point of departure.

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Programme / 10:00 - 14:00 @ JAG*

• Catering will be served

• Poetry readings by Danai Mupotsa & Canisia Lubrin (JAG Courtyard)

• Performance: Nelisiwe Xaba, Fremde Tänze, 30mins (JAG / Occupation “Ghost Room”)

• Screening: Gabrielle Goliath, Elegy - Eunice Ntombifuthi Dube, 60mins (JAG / Occupation “Blaxis Screen”)

• In closing: a Reading by Christina Sharpe

*Access to JAG may take longer on Saturdays, due to traffic and taxis. Uber rides may not be easily available, due to the inner-city location.

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Nelisiwe Xaba, Fremde Tänze

In the spring of 2014, Nelisiwe Xaba, was invited to the Julius-Hans-Spiegel-Zentrum at the Freiburg Theater, amidst the Black Forest in Southern Germany. During her residency, Nelisiwe Xaba created a dance evening based on the programs of female dancers such as Mary Wigman and Sent M’Ahesa. These pioneers of Modern Dance in the 1910s and 1920s often presented a series of short pieces accompanied by music. In one evening, they journeyed between distant places and times, or rather their imagination of them: a “Temple Dance” was followed by an “Indian Dance”, an “Arabesque” or a “Siamese Dance”. In her evening of ‘foreign dances’, Xaba rotates the perspective and exoticizes the Black Forest.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelisiwe_Xaba

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Gabrielle Goliath, Elegy - Lerato ‘Tambai’ Moloi

Elegy is a long-term commemorative performance initiated by Gabrielle Goliath in 2015. Staged in various locations, each performance calls together a group of female vocal performers who collectively enact a ritual of mourning, sustaining a single haunting tone over the course of an hour.

Responding to the physical, ontological and structural outworking(s) of rape-culture in South Africa, Elegy performances invoke the absent presence of individuals whose subjectivities have been fundamentally violated, and who are as such all too easily consigned to a generic, all-encompassing victimhood. Each performance commemorates a named, loved and missed woman or LGBTIQ+ individual subjected to fatal acts of gendered and sexualised violence. Significant to the work is how loss becomes a site for community, and for empathic encounters with and across difference. Refusing the symbolic violence through which traumatised black, brown, femme and queer bodies are routinely objectified, Elegy performances open an alternative, relational space, wherein mourning is presented as a social and politically productive work, not in the sense of healing or closure but as a necessary and sustained irresolution.

For this programme, a 1hr performance screening will be held in commemoration of Lerato ‘Tambai’ Moloi.

gabriellegoliath.com/elegy

Global Blackness Summer School ‘22 / Black Geographies, of Care

#5 “Brokenness, Black Temporalities & Waiting as Rehearsal” /Seminar with Mpho Matsipa (in-person)

GSA Zone A, 1st Floor JBS Building, 69 Kingsway Ave, Auckland Park / Google map

This in-person seminar is limited to 20 participants, RSVP is essential.

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Hosted by Dr Mpho Matsipa, this seminar will explore how fractured Black geographies prefigure urban imaginaries and creative networks within and across sites of urban decay and abandonment.

Looking at both Johannesburg and Lubumbashi, the seminar will explore “the city” as a site of both extraction and cultural production, at different temporal scales.

Click here for Mpho Matsipa’s bio

Global Blackness Summer School ‘22 / Black Geographies, of Care

#1 “Surrender/Suture” / In conversation, Deborah A. Thomas & K’eguro Macharia (online)

Zoom Registration

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In this intimate, speculative conversation, scholars and writers Deborah A. Thomas and K’eguro Macharia reflect on Black women’s creative practices as the creative, quotidian, tenuous but transformative enactment of repair. From their respective locations - Deborah in Jamaica, K’eguro in Kenya, each offers a word, an opening statement, a conceptual space of thought and work ‘in progress’ for us to inhabit, share and explore.

“Surrender”

Deborah: “I have been thinking about the reorientation of sovereignty claims that are not hinged to Western juridical norms and that do not address the state. I'm interested in other terms that might be useful in describing these modes of address, modes that are performative, processual, and affective. I've been playing with "possession" as one such term; one that invokes a condition of being that is not only material and juridical but also spiritual and erotic. Here, possession is meant to index an altered state of consciousness, time, and space caused by the inhabitation of humans by gods, ancestors, and other spirits, both eventfully and in the every day. In this way, I think, possession can undo the certainties of liberal possessive individualism, and lead us to the non-linear and non-extractive ways relation circulates and is transmitted. Another such term is "surrender," which I'm thinking of in relation to the giving over of oneself - to a movement, a person, a spirit or ancestor - as a practice of relinquishment that could lay out a different set of social and political possibilities. I'm thinking these terms through a number of different sites and communties, including the Charles Town Maroon community (and in particular, a recent apology offered by Chieftainness Gloria Simms for maroon complicity with British rule and plantation logics); practitioners of Kumina; women in central Jamaica who have been protesting the new highway being built by a Chinese company; and residents of Tivoli Gardens, still reeling from the 2010 incursion. The question I've been interested in is "how did you learn to surrender?"  

“Suture”

K’eguro: I’m interested in Black women’s aesthetic practices as forms of suture. Whether it is how Yvonne Owuor imagines relations across Swahili Seas by foregrounding African and Chinese historical interactions in the novel Dragonfly Sea; or how Pauline Hopkins moves through myth and fantasy to imagine African and Black Diasporic reconnection in Of One Blood; or how Koleka Putuma weaves Black women’s intellectual and aesthetic genealogies through praise song, invoking and reframing geohistory as intimate practice; or how Sokari Ekine curated a blog, Black Looks, that moves through African and Black Diasporic geohistories, naming the urgencies of our ongoing crises, and inviting us to imagine freedom, across difference. I want to think about suture in two main ways: as repair and as invention. Suture as invention includes attempting different strategies to close wounds. Suture as repair names the many strategies created to name harm and to attempt to repair relation. Sutures are experiments, not guarantees. One attempts to hold the edges of wounds together and hopes that repair will happen, and that infection will not set in. One attempts to unstitch harm and to create conditions where repair might be possible. I'm interested in how sutures work across different scales: to address historical and contemporary devastation and to repair the quotidian harm that comes with living in relation, across difference.

Deborah A. Thomas - bio | K’eguro Macharia - bio

Global Blackness Summer School ‘22 / Black Geographies, of Care

#3 “Frequencies of Care” / Tina Campt, with a sonic offering by Zara Julius (hybrid)

In-person gathering: GSA Zone A, 1st Floor JBS Building, 69 Kingsway Ave, Auckland Park

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What does care sound like?

What would it mean to use sound to map the caring relations of our communities?

What would it look and sound like to engage in a sonic practice of care for black communities?

And what would it mean to animate these sounds as a black geography of care?

Presented by Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, Tina Campt, this talk considers the multiple frequencies through which we care for Black bodies. It is an invitation to imagine how we might mobilize these frequencies in ways that make it possible for Black people to live boundlessly, in the fullness of our own idiom. Engaging the work of artists who activate sonic, spatial, and affective frequencies of care, it speculates on these four expansive questions as a way of making visible some of the sonic geographies of care that have allowed black communities to thrive against all odds.

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As part of an ongoing creative dialogue with Tina’s work, social practice artist, cultural researcher and vinyl selector Zara Julius will present a sonic offering/response, commissioned by RGC. We are also excited to announce Udzabukaphi, a multimedia intervention (and alternative cartography) in the space by GSA Masters student Simphiwe Mlambo.

Click here for Tina Campt’s bio / www.zarajulius.com

Global Blackness Summer School ‘22 / Black Geographies, of Care

#1 “Writing with Intention” / Small-group workshop with K’eguro Macharia (online)

This small-group session (limited to~15 participants) is now fully booked.

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In this session - facilitated by independent scholar and writer K’eguro Macharia - we will develop strategies to shape and direct our writing with intention. Through a series of guided writing exercises, we will imagine our reading audiences and craft work that gathers and addresses them. Together, we will develop ways to create work that speaks to our intellectual, political, and affective interests and goals.

Workshop participants are asked to list and share at least 3-5 academic interests prior to the workshop. K’eguro has also supplied a set reading - a “gorgeous meditation on style and care” by Jennifer Nash (supplied).

Click here for K’eguro Macharia’s bio

Global Blackness Summer School ‘22 / Black Geographies, of Care

#1 “Whisper Network, Intelsat 502” / Artist talk & screening: Thandi Loewenson & Danielle Bowler (online)

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This year’s Global Blackness Summer School commences with an online artist talk by Thandi Loewenson, RGC’s inaugural Black Digital South Artist-in-residence, facilitated by writer, musician and RGC PhD Fellow Danielle Bowler.

As an architectural designer and researcher who thinks, dreams and imagines land and space otherwise, Thandi’s work deeply engages this year’s theme Black Geographies, of Care – which speaks to and engages “practises and processes of Black spacemaking” across place and space.

Describing her practise as one that “mobilises design, fiction and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds”, Thandi’s talk will include a special showing of her video work Whisper Network Intelsat 502, and map the ways she uses “fiction as a design tool and tactic” while working in “the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly and the airborne”. 

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Thandi’s video work Whisper Network Intelsat 502 (2022) is available to view via our online screening room over the course of this year’s Global Blackness Summer School (22 Nov - 17 Dec 2022). Thank you Thandi for making this limited-window screening possible!

Link to screening room

Click here for Thandi Loewenson’s bio

Viral Justice - How we Grow the World we Want

Book launch with Dr. Ruha Benjamin & Prof Victoria Collis-Buthelezi

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Join us at women-led community space Toasted for the South African book launch of Viral Justice - How we grow the world we want, with scholar, storyteller and social justice advocate Dr. Ruha Benjamin. In dialogue with RGC Director Prof Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, Dr. Benjamin will reflect on the book, its transnational resonances, and the transformative possibilities of ‘small changes’.

10 Nov 2022, 18:00, at Toasted, 138 Jan Smuts Ave, Rosebank - RSVP here / This Joburg gathering is presented in collaboration with Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity (AFRE).

About the book:

“A book as urgent as the moment that produced it” - Jelani Cobb, Columbia Journalism School

Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day.

Vividly recounting her personal experiences and those of her family, Benjamin shows how seemingly minor decisions and habits could spread virally and have exponentially positive effects. She recounts her father’s premature death, illuminating the devastating impact of the chronic stress of racism, but she also introduces us to community organizers who are fostering mutual aid and collective healing. Through her brother’s experience with the criminal justice system, we see the trauma caused by policing practices and mass imprisonment, but we also witness family members finding strength as they come together to demand justice for their loved ones. And while her own challenges as a young mother reveal the vast inequities of our healthcare system, Benjamin also describes how the support of doulas and midwives can keep Black mothers and babies alive and well.

Born of a stubborn hopefulness, Viral Justice offers a passionate, inspiring, and practical vision of how small changes can add up to large ones, transforming our relationships and communities and helping us build a more just and joyful world.

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Dr. Ruha Benjamin / An enthralling storyteller, brilliant scholar, and fierce advocate for all things just, Dr. Ruha Benjamin is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University where she studies the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, knowledge and power, race and citizenship, and health and justice. Read her full bio here

Scheherazade Tillet - “Black Girl Play: Re-visioning Freedom”

16th Helen Joseph Memorial Lecture (hybrid event)

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The 2022 Helen Joseph Memorial lecture is hosted by the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class and speaks to its emphasis on the relationship between Black feminist intellectual and creative praxis and activism. A photographer, art therapist and community organizer, our keynote speaker, Scheherazade Tillet engages us around practices of visibilizing Black girls and women’s experiences of community, gender and police violence at local and global levels. Co-founder and Executive Director of A Long Walk Home (ALWH), a Chicago-based national nonprofit, that uses art to empower young people and end violence against girls and women, Tillet uses site-specific work to explore the themes of gendered vulnerability, racial invisibility, pleasure, and play.  

Click here to read Scheherazade Tillet’s bio

The Helen Joseph Memorial Lecture has sat in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg since 2005. Named for the British-born anti-apartheid activist, the Helen Joseph Memorial lecture was spearheaded by the Centre for Social Development in Africa and Professor Leila Patel and intended to speak to Joseph’s legacy and that of the wider terrain of women’s movements in South Africa. The lecture is often held in August in commemoration of the 1956 August 9th Women’s March to the Union Buildings against pass laws that Joseph led, along with other leaders of the Federation of South African Women like Lilian Ngoyi. Tried for treason and held under house arrest for over two decades, Joseph was a strident critic of apartheid and a champion of the rights of women, children and families.

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Introductions by Prof Victoria Collis-Buthelezi (RGC Director), Prof Kammila Naidoo (Dean of Humanities) & Prof Tshilidzi Marwala, (UJ Vice-Chancellor), with a vote of thanks by Dr Danai Mupotsa (Department of African Literature, Wits). Hosted by the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg.

Watch the video