3 results
12 - Seeing and Being Seen: Visualising China and the Chinese People in South Africa
- Edited by Juliette Leeb-du Toit, University of Johannesburg, Ruth Simbao, Rhodes University, South Africa, Ross Anthony, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
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- Book:
- Visualising China in Southern Africa
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 24 November 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 April 2023, pp 246-263
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Summary
The intense engagement between Africa and China has attracted considerable attention in popular and scholarly literature. One line of study explores textual representation of the Chinese presence in Africa, using media content analysis to support complex understandings of the differentiated, contested and fluid nature of the China–Africa relationship (Wasserman 2015; Wekesa 2013; Van Staden and Wu 2019). The focus on text does, however, leave open the question of how significant imagery is in framing or counterframing the representation of China and Chinese people in Africa. Our intention in this chapter is to explore the significance of images, but to do so in a way that avoids constructing the debate simply in terms of text or image. William Mitchell (1994, 4) bridges the conventional binary of the ‘text’ and the ‘image’ through the figure of the ‘image-text’. As Mitchell (2012, 5) explains, word and image ‘complement and supplement one another, simultaneously completing and extending … woven together to create a reality’.
Attention to visual imagery is not absent within the China–Africa literature. Tu Huynh (2008) offers a pioneering exploration of the imaging through postcards of indentured Chinese mineworkers on the goldfields of the Witwatersrand in the early twentieth century (see also chapter 11), while Ruth Simbao (2012) makes effective use of a photographic still of an African wearing an American suit and the mask of a Chinese president to discuss the ambivalence of imperialism in Africa. Malcolm Corrigall (2015) explores the Chinese Camera Club of South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, revealing a complex, intersectional sense of belonging and identity that was simultaneously local and Chinese (see also chapter 3 in this volume). Romain Dittgen and Ross Anthony (2018) have used cartoons in the African media in exploring how the persistent trope of the ‘Yellow Peril’ is embedded in contemporary South African consciousness. In taking this further, we track the evolving visual representations of China and the Chinese people in the specific setting of South Africa, with an emphasis on the ambivalence, ambiguities and contradictions in their representation.
Though fortunate that a considerable scholarship on the long history of the Chinese presence in South Africa now exists, providing contextual material to draw on, our main sources of original material were, however, South African newspapers, magazines and books, with the occasional film clip.
11 - Everyday Urbanisms of Fear in Johannesburg’s Periphery: The Case of Sol Plaatje Settlement
- Edited by Nicky Falkof, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Cobus van Staden, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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- Book:
- Anxious Joburg
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 16 June 2021
- Print publication:
- 01 January 2020, pp 226-240
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Summary
One night in 2017 I visited relatives in Bramfischerville, on the western edge of Sol Plaatje, an economically depressed quasi-formal settlement located between Roodepoort and Soweto on the outskirts of Johannesburg. I stayed until late at night and, on leaving, my cousin's instructions were as follows:
Here in Bramfischerville phase two, we do not have criminals anymore, it is safe, you can walk at night without any problems. The criminals that were troubling us were necklaced by the residents last year and since then we do not have issues of crime, the criminals are afraid. However, on your way, avoid Durban Deep [Sol Plaatje], it is not safe, that is where all the criminals are. They will hijack and rob you or, even worse, they may kill you. Rather, go through Bramfischerville phase one and drive straight to Main Reef Road and you‘ll be on your way to Johannesburg.
The instruction from my cousin is still vivid in my mind as I remember his demeanour and the concern in his eyes. It is a fear that the residents of Sol Plaatje live with. While my cousin and I live outside the area and can take steps to avoid passing through Sol Plaatje at night, those who live in the settlement do not have an alternative: this space is home to them and their children.
There have been numerous studies conducted in Sol Plaatje since its inception in the late 1990s. These have focused on a range of issues, including HIV prevalence, how people living with HIV cope with their everyday realities, and the treatment regimens that they adopt (see, for example, Decoteau 2008; Carrasco, Vearey, and Drimie 2011). Others have focused on the interlinked livelihood systems of internal migrants from rural parts of South Africa and how they remain connected with their areas of origin while setting roots in the urban environment (see, for instance, Carrasco, Vearey, and Drimie 2011; Vearey et al. 2010). In their work on urban health in Johannesburg, Joanna Vearey et al. (2010) use the example of Sol Plaatje to argue that place (physical location) is central to understanding intra-urban inequalities in the context of migration and HIV. They compare the living conditions of Sol Plaatje, which they describe as peripheral, and those of the inner city of Johannesburg, which they describe as centrally located in relation to service provision.
29 - Phantoms of the past, spectres of the present: Chinese space in Johannesburg
- from Section C - Spatial identities
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- By Philip Harrison, South African Research Chair in Development Planning and Modelling at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and a member of the National Planning Commission and other advisory structures to government, Khangelani Moyo, researcher in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and a GCSRI-Carnegie PhD fellow, Yan Yang, consultant for the South African Cities Network
- Edited by Philip Harrison, Graeme Götz, Alison Todes, Chris Wray
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- Book:
- Changing Space, Changing City
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 20 April 2018
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2014, pp 512-526
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Summary
Respect ghosts and gods but keep them at a distance.
– The Analects of Confucius, 6.20Phantoms lie about the past whilst spectres gesture towards a still unformulated future.
– Colin Davis, 2005Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe even the future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the living present: all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us.
– Frederic Jameson, 1999Phantom spaces
In the seventh lunar month of the Chinese calendar the gates of hell are opened and ghosts are released to roam the world. Those who died a wrongful death – Diao Sǐ Guǐ – or those who passed away far from home – Gū Hún Yě Guǐ – are oft en restless and vengeful, seeking recompense. It is a dangerous month to be out and about in Johannesburg for nearly 3 200 Chinese mine workers died on the Witwatersrand in the short period between 1904 and 1910. Faced with primitive conditions in the mines and prison-like conditions in the compounds in which they were housed, the lives of mine workers were ended by ‘execution, disease, opium overdoses, accidents, homicide and suicide’ (MacLellan 2008: 78). The dying suffered the terrible loneliness of being 7 000 miles away from home.
Around 63 000 Chinese were brought from the northern provinces of Henan and Shandong after the South African War to work on the gold mines as indentured labour. It was a move that restored production to the mines that had been closed during the war but provoked near hysteria among Johannesburg's white citizens and helped bring down Lord Arthur Balfour's government in the United Kingdom. By 1910 all the surviving Chinese workers had been repatriated except for the handful that had absconded and avoided capture (Kynoch 2005).
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