IN this chapter, the location of accented thinking is once again a university campus. This time the intellectual space is not provided by the tearoom or the staffroom, and the histories of these spaces’ referential frameworks and tastes. This chapter analyses two related scenes. The first is a large public artwork displayed on the outside wall of a student residence in Rondebosch, Cape Town. It is a work of art by artist, curator and academic Thembinkosi Goniwe, and it thematises the asymmetrically aligned viewpoints that are the focus of my own book. The artwork is untitled, but is closely associated with the larger public arts project called ‘Returning the Gaze’, and is sometimes referred to by that title. In its depiction of two faces (white/black) and two kinds of gaze (direct/ averted), it invites an oppositional reading, perhaps the reading of South African history: racialised opposites. The second scene I analyse is an academic seminar held at the same university where the artwork was made and exhibited, in a building called ‘The African Studies Gallery’, entitled ‘Insides and Outsides’, at which the artist (and subject) of the image, Goniwe, is a speaker.

I want in the discussion here to draw attention to an encounter, a disagreement, that highlights the ways in which ostensibly neutral assumptions and ideas function to keep some referents unreadable. The chapter develops the ideas around resistance and accent, and illustrates the argument through a discussion of staged and performed misunderstanding.

The inside/outside dichotomies have to do, in the first place, with historical inequalities, and with apartheid's ambitions to decree who is inside the learning environment, what knowledge is inside, how teachers and academic institutions regulate what is practised inside, and what is to remain outside (outside the canon, outside the debate, outside the footnotes and bibliographies). The inside/outside dichotomy features as the structuring idea in the account I give of a disagreement, a difference of opinion, between two colleagues at the seminar. In this expression of difference, what is at stake is precisely whose knowledge is ‘inside’, whose is ‘outside’. It is a disagreement that can be interpreted as a failed engagement (a lack of communication) that leads to silence.