African Feminisms (Afems) 2023

Our Sisters Killjoy

Hosted by Rhodes University Department of Literary Studies in English and the Wits University Department of Fine Arts

Date: 6-8 July 2023

Venue: Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa

 

In 1977, Ghanaian novelist Ama Ata Aidoo published her book Our Sister Killjoy: Or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint. In it Sissie arrives on a fellowship in Germany. Her observations of white colonial culture, of relations between black and white subjects and historical collisions and disjunctures, even relationships between African men and women come under her incisive interrogation and tongue. Both in form and in content, Sissie heralds a break with convention,  demonstrating that African subjects have always been speaking and not always in the politeness that some would prefer. Jean Paul Sartre (1948) in Orphée Noir said, “What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?” Angry black women, sassy black women, too loud, too vocal abound as stereotypes in culture – women who do not know their place. bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Stella Nyanzi, Peace Kiguwa all talk about how the angry black women stereotype is used to silence subjects and, yet, as Lorde tells us, anger is a reasonable response to injustice. In a world coping with the stark inequalities that COVID-19 has thrown into view, our sisters across the continent and world have every reason to be angry, and they are more vocal than ever. In this fifth anniversary edition of the African Feminisms (Afems) Conference, which will be hosted by the Rhodes University Department of Literary Studies in English and the Wits University Department of Fine Arts, Afems 2023 will return to its birth at Rhodes University and celebrate Our Sisters Killjoy – feminist killjoys, black feminist killjoys, queer killjoys, differently-abled killjoys, eco killjoys, creative killjoys, anti-capitalist killjoys, speaking-truth-to-power killjoys, everyday killjoys, chick-lit killjoys, comedic killjoys and more …

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Conference presentations can include the following thematic areas:

• On being angry black women

• Back talk: Speech acts, speaking truths to power and ‘the mute always speak’

• Nervous Conditions: Radical negativities and radical refusals

• Testimony as witnessing – or ‘theorising from the epicentres of our agency’

• Willful Subjects

• Creativities as sites of de-authorisation, as de-archiving, of de-inscription and decolonisation

• I Write What I Like

• Onwards: Moving forward with ‘six mountains on her back’

• Butterflies Burning

• Madams and Mistresses

• Intersecting intersectionalities or refusing either/or positionalities

• So Long a Letter: on love and sister-killjoys

• David’s Story: or actually a story about a history of women

• So you think you’re funny, eh?

• Murder She Wrote: Women in Crime/ Women and Crime

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We will also be celebrating the lives of feminist killjoys bell hooks and Ama Ata Aidoo.

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The keynotes for this special edition of Afems are:

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Prof Pumla Gqola

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Pumla Dineo Gqola is Research Professor at the Centre for Women and Gender Studies at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, and SA National Research Foundation (NRF) SARChI Chair in African Feminist Imagination. She has been Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Classical Culture at the University of the Free State (UFS), Professor in the School of Literatures, Languages and Media at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), and Chief Research Specialist in Cultures, Society and Identities at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). She holds two Master’s degrees from the Universities of Cape Town (UCT), and Warwick (UK, cum laude), and a PhD in Postcolonial Studies (magna cum laude) from the University of Munich (LMU) in Germany. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, her seven books include the pioneering study What is slavery to me? Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-apartheid South Africa, published by Wits Press in 2010, the 2016 Alan Paton Award winner, Rape: A South African Nightmare and the 2022 Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Best Non-Fiction Book, Female Fear Factory.  

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Prof Dina Ligaga

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Dina Ligaga is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. She has published in the areas of gender, digital media and popular culture in Kenya. She is author of Women, visibility and morality in Kenyan popular media (2020) and co-editor of SI ‘Gender and popular imaginaries in Africa’ published by Agenda (2018). She is also the co-editor of Radio in Africa: Publics, Cultures, Communities (Wits Press, 2011) and Rethinking Eastern African Literary and Intellectual Landscapes (Africa World Press, 2012).

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Ms Philiswa Lila

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Philiswa Lila (b. 1988) is a visual artist and researcher. Her work is concerned with memory, histories and theories of personal experiences, identities and subjectivities. She is the 2018 recipient of the prestigious Gerald Sekoto Award, which included a residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris. She was featured in the eminent list of Mail and Guardian 200 Young South Africans (2022). Lila is currently an artist-in-residency at the GendV Project: Urban Transformation and Gendered Violence in India and South Africa hosted by the University of Johannesburg and the University of Cambridge. In this work, she focuses on issues of gender violence and inequality by engaging on themes of shared pain and healing – paths of pain, resilience and vulnerability. Lila has also participated in other artist-in-residency programs at the Bag Factory Studios in Johannesburg (2013) and Greatmore Studios in Cape Town (2014). Lila has presented her research in conferences such as African Feminisms (Afems), 14th National Conference of the South African Journal of Arts History (SAJAH), 34th Annual South Africa Visual Arts Historians (SAVAH) and Narrative Enquiry For Social Transformation (NEST) Colloquium & Summer School. Her most recent written work is an essay published in Creative Knowledge Resources’ bopa writers’ forum.

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Art on our Mind Public Creative Dialogue: Mary Sibande

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Mary Sibande engages counter-historical narratives and the language of dress to animate the stories of South African women and critique western imperialist depictions of their lives. Her artistic practice takes heavy influences from processes involved in fashion design as she tailors elements of the narrative directly onto the characters through their clothes, playing with colour, meaning and coded motifs. Sibande works with large-scale installations and photography to further enhance the worlds she creates and the characters within them. Viewers are introduced to her alter ego, Sophie, whose many incarnations speak to the experiences and livelihoods of Sibande’s mother and grandmother under apartheid. While Sophie’s blue dress and white doek [headscarf] signify her status as a domestic worker, the artist adorns her outfits and gestures with alternate meanings, transforming her context from an ongoing history of servitude and labour to a grander, reimagined reality within a prefigurative, dreamlike space. Her solo exhibitions include The Wake, Kunstpalais, Germany (2022); The Red Ventrioquist, Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon (2022); A Red Flight of Fancy, SMAC Gallery, Cape Town (2022); Past Is Present,
Herron Galleries, Indiana University(2022); Let me tell you about Red…, Durban Art Gallery, South Africa (2022); Unhand me Demon!, Kavi Gupta, Chicago (2021); Blue Red Purple, The Frist Art Museum, Nashville (2021) I Came Apart at the Seams, Somerset House, London (2019) and A Crescendo of Ecstasy, The Mixed Reality Workshop, Johannesburg (2018). Sibande has also exhibited in many group shows, including the 2023 Sharjah Biennial 15; Garmenting, Museum of Arts & Design, New York (2022); TEXTURES, Kent State University, Ohio (2021); Like Life, Th MET Breuer, New York (2018); All Things Being Equal, Zeitz MOCCA, Cape Town (2018); South Africa: the Art of a Nation, British Museum, London(2017); and Ideal Narratives in Contemporary South African Art, South African Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale (2011). She is the recipient of the Helgaard Steyn Award (2021) and Smithsonian National Museum of African Art Award (2017). Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, USA; and the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, France, among others. Sibande received a Diploma in Fine Arts from Witwatersrand Technical College, Johannesburg (2004) and a Degree in Fine Arts from the University of Johannesburg (2007). Born in 1982 in Barberton, South Africa; Sibande currently lives and works in Johannesburg.

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CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

 

 

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For any queries, please contact us on:afrifems17@gmail.com

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