Social scientists who have written about the dynamics of festival rituals have analysed such practices variously as celebrations of commonality, as the enhancement of social cohesion, or as expressions of nostalgia. Festivals ...

In the last 19 years of post-apartheid South African democracy, race remains an enduring and familiar trope, a point of certainty amid the messy ambiguities of transformation. In the present article, we explore the ...

This special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies grew out of a panel we organized at the European Conference on African Studies in Lisbon in June 2013. Our starting point was the observation of a massive ...

The staging of complicity has developed into one of the most prevalent trends in recent South Africa theatre. The audience may become aware of their own complicity in injustice, or complicity may feature as a subject to ...

As in Pidjiguiti in Guiné-Bissau or Baixa de Cassanje in Angola, the massacre that occurred in the northern Mozambican town of Mueda on 16 June 1960 has been inscribed in the nationalist narrative as the breaking point ...

I offer a retrospective on the field of orality and performance studies in South Africa from the perspective of 2016, assessing what has been achieved, what may have happened inadvertently or worryingly, what some of the ...

This paper looks into the aesthetics and politics of the ‘hip-hopera’ Afrikaaps. Afrikaaps was produced in 2010 by a group of musicians and spoken-word artists from Cape Town and the rural Western Cape Province of South ...

In focus in this paper is the genre of drag, and the uses to which it is put by its proponents in subverting conventional and repressive (Western) models of gender, sexuality and race. We raise the question of to what ...

The paper explores the benefits of performative ethnography as a methodological intervention. The intervention discussed in this paper utilizes the persuasive power of aesthetics and performance to attain participation ...

The push to sustain online learning platforms that have been established in the wake of Covid-19 at South African universities raises a number of concerns. Apart from highlighting the stark and ongoing social inequities ...