270 results in Wits University Press
Frontmatter
- 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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- Visualising China in Southern Africa
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Contributors
- 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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- 01 April 2023, pp 351-354
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9 - Tech Transfer: Marcus Neustetter’s China in Africa Corpus
- 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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Summary
In a wide-ranging, two-hour conversation, South African artist Marcus Neustetter and Zimbabwean art historian Gemma Rodrigues discuss Neustetter's ongoing engagement with his experiences of China's presence in South Africa. The conversation took place on 3 May 2018, over Skype. Their dialogue is followed by a short, interpretative essay by Rodrigues, which distils and theorises the main themes of their conversation and offers an art historian's perspective on Neustetter's work.
At the time of their conversation, Neustetter was in Dakar, Senegal, preparing to mount a new installation for a project with the independent art and multimedia centre Kër Thiossane. Rodrigues was in Funchal, Portugal, where she worked as an independent curator and served as a research fellow at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute. Neustetter is a post-medium artist, who frequently deploys new technologies and innovative forms of community partnership in his practice. Rodrigues's interest is in cross-cultural interactions in art and in history, and the interfaces between art, technology and politics in Africa and beyond.
A transcript of the conversation, which has been shortened and edited for clarity, offers readers an opportunity to consider Neustetter's oeuvre largely from the point of view of its creator – a valuable counterpoint to more typical forms of art-writing, which approach artworks from the perspective of the viewer. As such, the conversation presents a set of ideas, coming directly from the artist, about his creative process, technical choices, sources of imagery, goals and motivations. More specifically, Neustetter's commentary offers fresh insight into techne, that is, the particular details of an artist's practical methods or know-how, which reflect the kinds of knowledge based in making and doing that usually remain unspoken (Whitehead 2012, 48–51). By making ordinarily tacit, procedural knowledge available for scrutiny and interpretation, our hope is that the dialogue proves a valuable resource for scholars, students and artists alike. Focused solely on work that explores China's deepening presence in South Africa, the dialogue also offers insight into the particular artistic and technical strategies Neustetter has developed to broach questions of difference in the context of an African continent that is increasingly ‘looking East’. The circulation of stereotyped representations of otherness, the experiential dynamics of cross-cultural encounters, and newly hybrid visions of materiality and socio-economic power are all key themes in Neustetter's China in Africa corpus.
2 - Circulation
- 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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- 01 April 2023, pp 121-121
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Introduction: Geopolitics by Other Means: Navigating the Chinese Presence in Southern Africa through Art
- 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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Summary
In the past few decades, the growing Chinese presence in Africa, along with many other regions of the Global South, has given rise to a significant body of research, much of it focused on politics, economics and various policy-related themes. However, as fields such as postcolonialism have demonstrated, any burgeoning transregional interaction gives rise not only to new configurations of money and power, but also to new cultural forms, including the visual and performing arts, literature, popular culture, social space, and everyday narratives and counter-narratives. Artistic creation engaging with African and Chinese intersections has grown markedly in the past decade or so. However, in-depth scholarly analysis of Chinese presence in Africa and the visual arts remains limited to a small number of scholars, and to date no scholarly text has consolidated this research. Thus, a key motivation of this volume is to draw together, for the first time, the work of some of these authors in a single scholarly book that addresses, with depth and nuanced contextual analysis, Chinese and African encounters, through the lens of visual art and material culture.
The authors examine an array of artistic media and cultural material objects, including photography, painting, etching, sculpture, film, performance, installation, postcards, stamps, political posters, cartoons and city space. They bring together rigorous visual analysis typical of art history and the broader ‘material turn’ in social science and the humanities, where objects, far from being inanimate and detached, are an inextricable connecting force in the construction of identity, society and thought itself (Latour 2005; Miller 2005; Bennett 2010). Materiality is thus enmeshed in all aspects of life, playing critical roles in the ways humans navigate their personal, communal, political, economic and spiritual experiences in the world. Given the inter-regional focus of this volume, objecthood here is inextricably bound to an ‘elsewhere’ in that many of the materials discussed originate from afar, but also in the sense that they generate novel forms of imagination of this elsewhere within their new contexts.
Such engagements are not only aesthetic in nature. They are underpinned by tectonic shifts in politics and economics, which not only give rise to new material realties, but also create new openings through which to critique these realities. In the post-Cold War era the market economy, in one variety or another, has now permeated nearly every country on the planet, bar a few enclaves.
8 - Shifting Urbanity and Global China in Conversation: Views from Johannesburg and Lusaka
- 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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Summary
In major cities, the perpetual quest for money and profit tends to translate not only in to accelerated circulation of commodities, a sustained individual hustle, but also in a continuous production and alteration of the built environment. In Johannesburg and in Lusaka, similar observations can be made when focusing on the spatial materialisation of a multifaceted and layered Chinese presence. Largely driven by an economic impetus, these different forms of global China have left a more or less tangible imprint on the urban fabric, with direct connections to specific sectors and phenomena in each of these two cities.
Through a combination of photographs and text, this chapter offers a multi-sited and flexible reading of some of these Chinese features, both in relation to places and lived experiences. In parallel, it reflects on the spatial and social ‘thickness’, derived from Clifford Geertz's (1973) interpretation, in these two urban environments. The essay draws on a larger and collaborative research project centred around the reciprocity and dynamic tension between forms of Chinese involvement and urban shifts in Johannesburg and in Lusaka. With Chinese spaces in urban Africa often framed as exotic, different, and operating in parallel to the host society, the project's underlying aim has been to disrupt and (re)imagine how this interplay is currently conceived, studied and conceptualised. As such, it explores the differentiated ways in which these spaces have come into existence, how they are shaped by contextual realities, and are largely entangled in complex city-making processes.
In early March 2020, Erwin Pon, the chairman of The Chinese Association (TCA) in South Africa, appeared on a few locally televised news reports to comment on fears related to what was, at the time, the still-limited spread of the coronavirus. One of these interviews took place in Derrick Avenue in Cyrildene, Johannesburg's main Chinatown. Even before the pandemic reached South Africa, its reputed genesis in the Chinese city of Wuhan triggered a direct association with, and prejudice against, Chinese people and spaces, irrespective of their location. On several occasions Mr Pon, a South African-born Chinese citizen, spoke out against the propagation of xenophobic remarks, anti-Chinese discrimination, stereotyping and broad generalisations.
Acknowledgements
- 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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13 - Wolf Warrior II: Chinese Film, African Settings and Western Narrative Convergence
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- By Ross Anthony
- 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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Summary
If popular culture and its projections are bound to the economic and political conditions under which they are produced (Eagleton 1991; Jameson 1992; Williams 1975), then the 2017 Chinese box office hit Wolf Warrior II offers insights into the People's Republic of China today. In this chapter, I discuss how the film, a Rambo-style action film set largely in an unnamed African country, reflects the growing material, commercial and military presence of China within the Global South.
Despite Soweto, South Africa, serving as a filming location, the movie setting is a generic sub-Saharan African country without a name. Nevertheless, the themes it raises in terms of China's growing political and economic power are as applicable to southern Africa, as they are to many other parts of the Global South. Within the past few years, an aggressive discursive turn in the tone of Chinese diplomacy has led the media to dub this style ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy. One of its earliest proponents, the ‘brash’ former ambassador to South Africa, Lin Songtian, has typified this approach (Du Plessis 2020). For instance, in response to the continued diplomatic ties of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) to Taiwan, Lin issued a threatening missive accusing Eswatini of being ‘immoral’ and shutting ‘all the Chinese Embassies and Consulate-Generals’ to their citizens, bar the embassy in Pretoria, so as to ‘cripple their business and the country's economy [sic] development’ (Mamba 2020).
The fantasy dimension of Wolf Warrior II, namely the lone Chinese warrior rescuing African and Chinese citizens from a rebel army and its multicultural cohort of mercenaries, is indicative of a growing desire within China to project power abroad, one that is, however, simultaneously curtailed by a self-proclaimed foreign policy of non-interference. In order to resolve this contradiction, the narrative is structured by what has been referred to as the ‘state of exception’ (Schmitt 2006 [1922], 5) – a legal grey zone in which the hero of the film operates, outside the structures of domestic and international law, while simultaneously receiving tacit government approval and support for these transgressions.
The fact that this structure mimics so many Hollywood action films is not so much a reflection of cultural appropriation per se, as it is a reflection of China's growing role as a powerful actor in global affairs.
4 - Abapakati: Chinese Intermediaries and Artisanal Mining on the Zambian Copperbelt
- 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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Summary
Stary Mwaba and Ruth Simbao first met in Zambia in the early 2000s, and then reconnected a decade later through their mutual research interest in the Chinese presence in Zambia and the visual arts. Mwaba had just completed a residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, and was working as an artist in Lusaka, while Simbao was lecturing Art History and Visual Culture in South Africa. Joining Simbao's postgraduate research programme, Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa as a Master of Fine Art (MFA) candidate, Mwaba created the exhibition Black Mountain in February 2019.
In December 2019, Mwaba and Simbao drove together from Lusaka to the Copperbelt to photograph the Black Mountain mining slags in Kitwe and Chingola. This trip along a road that is in many places corrugated from the weight of trucks bearing copper and other goods, formed the basis of this collaborative photographic essay. Abapakati – ‘those in the middle’ – considers the impact of Chinese intermediaries outside of multinational mining companies who have created a new small-scale market for artisanal mining at old mineral dumpsites on the Copperbelt.
Conversations over the years about Mwaba's personal experiences of growing up on the Copperbelt, and his cousin's work as an artisanal miner, create (auto)biographical lenses through which the Chinese presence in Zambia is viewed. This approach emphasises the need to look beyond sweeping stories, preconceived ideas and social media rumours that often fail to consider on-theground experiences. Small stories that are connected to individuals’ daily lives are filled with specificities, exceptions and ambiguities.
In this photo essay, the Chinese intermediaries – men and women who negotiate to buy minerals from small-scale Zambian miners – are not explicitly represented, but the impact of their presence is subtly felt in local engagements with the natural and urban landscapes of the Copperbelt. Importantly, the influence of abapakati is positioned within a broader context of colonial history and local politics, all of which shape the stories of the Black Mountain slags and the experiences of artisanal miners.
Stary Mwaba was born in 1976 in Chingola, a mining town on the Zambian Copperbelt, and spent his formative years in Chingola, Kitwe and Mufulira. He lived with his grandparents, who had migrated to the Copperbelt in the late 1950s, while his parents lived in nearby Kitwe. His father and some of his other relatives were miners and worked for Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM).
3 - Transgression
- 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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- 01 April 2023, pp 229-229
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3 - The Chinese Camera Club of South Africa: Landscape and Belonging
- 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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Summary
A DIFFERENT LENS
Formed in Johannesburg in 1952, the Chinese Camera Club of South Africa gained recognition among its peers for a distinctive approach to landscape photography. Its members – some of whom were born in southern China and emigrated to South Africa during their teenage years, and some of whom were second- or third-generation immigrants born in South Africa – were classified as ‘coloured’ under the Population Registration Act of 1950 and experienced structural discrimination, exclusion and racism throughout the period marked by South Africa's formation in 1910 to the demise of apartheid in 1994. They drew on conventions associated with classical Chinese painting and appropriated twentieth-century trajectories of photographic practice from China and East Asia and deployed them within the spatial coordinates of apartheid South Africa. Such patterns of photographic mediation were facilitated by institutional links that were established and maintained between the Chinese Camera Club and photographers and camera clubs in East Asia. In producing such photographs, they established and publicised a proprietorial relationship with Chinese art-making practices. This cemented a sense of their ongoing and privileged connection to Chinese culture and civilisation, which acted as a source of pride and allowed them to deflect the indignities of apartheid.
This chapter explores how their mediation of a so-called Chinese approach to photography was facilitated by personal and organisational links with East Asian nation states (most notably Taiwan) and discourses of Chinese nationalism. Although I concentrate here on landscape photographs that referenced notions of ‘China’ and Chinese visual culture, it is worth noting that club members produced landscape photographs in a range of genres in order to express configurations of identity that were simultaneously local and transnational.
EXCLUSIVE CLUBS: LINKS TO HONG KONG, TAIWAN AND MAINLAND CHINA
The Chinese Camera Club of South Africa was established in 1952 by Jack Ho, a photography enthusiast who was born in Johannesburg in 1931. Around 1948, Jack Ho's father sent him to Hong Kong for two years of schooling. This educational pattern reflected a widespread desire among Chinese South African parents for their children to retain Chinese linguistic and social competencies alongside proficiency in English and Afrikaans (Yap and Man 1996, 279). During this period in Hong Kong, camera clubs were experiencing a renaissance following a stagnation during the Japanese occupation (1941–1945).
16 - Boiling Frogs: Narratives of Coloniality in South African Art
- 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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- 01 April 2023, pp 322-345
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The reference to China in the work of many contemporary South African artists has its origin in the long-standing critical scrutiny of power, expressed in the arts. This emerged gradually in the early twentieth century, and extended to hegemonies that upheld the colonial endeavour and its later capitalist economic and segregationist policies, which were rooted in colonialism and had devolved into the apartheid system by mid-century. Dissident visual artists began cautiously to tread a subversive path that challenged the state in upholding freedoms often denied vocal or written expression in the public sphere. This visual dialogue was not confined to fine art or mainstream art, but instead occurred initially in cartoons, posters and politically inspired apparel. And while such work was often subject to a degree of censorship, it mostly escaped suppression. In the early twenty-first century, art in South Africa continues to function as a critical visual dialogue – marked by questioning, evaluating, sanctioning, parodying and resistance.
However, because of the racialised nature of South African politics, even a mildly critical rhetoric targeted at China by local artists sits uneasily in a South African context. Resulting in a certain reticence, or obliqueness, critique is more veiled, often submerged in an ongoing indictment of global capital and globalisation, ecological damage, the collusion of local elites, autocratic rule and human rights abuses, and an anthropocentric view of the natural world. In echoing past practice – of speaking from a position of privilege and power in scrutinising geopolitical racial, gendered and class-based hierarchies – South African artists (especially white artists) are well aware of the danger of replicating a criticality located in Western neoliberalism and its cynical gaze at another ‘Third World’ partner, China. Emerging South-South relations and discourse between formerly geographically and culturally marginalised peoples in the South, have resulted in a degree of mutual support that is often destabilised by supporters of neoliberal rhetoric.
Rather than expand on the many examples of qualms raised in South Africa about the impact of a Chinese economic vision and ambitions for Africa, it is perhaps more valuable to situate this discourse within a context from which many South Africans, artists in particular, draw their insights and critique. Artists are particularly sceptical of what is actually being mooted in current power discourse, by whom, and the ultimate impact of externally sourced power strategies in a rapidly shifting global order.
10 - Moffat Takadiwa: Reincarnating Chinese Commodity Waste in Zimbabwe
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- By Lifang Zhang
- 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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- 01 April 2023, pp 212-228
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In a conversation with two friends from Zimbabwe, I mentioned that there is a large Chinese community in Harare. I was about to ask my friends if they ever engage with Chinese people, but before I could pose my question, one of them responded, ‘Those guys. They sell things.’ ‘Things’ – imported Chinese products – have played a significant role in the increasing engagements between Chinese and Zimbabweans, as well as people in various other African countries. While China is accused of flooding African markets with cheap, low-quality goods and overwhelming the already fragile local industry (Mlambo, Kushamba and Simawu 2016, 258; Li 2017, 28), these products are still prevalent in local markets, and more and more Africans are involved in their importation (Park 2013).
This chapter focuses on the artist Moffat Takadiwa, who is based in Harare. These ‘things’ are also a visible reality in his everyday lived experiences, and he employs them in his artwork in order to address certain social issues. Working with the consumer waste of made-in-China products, his work is not only a visual commentary on the phenomenon of the flood of Chinese goods, but also an intervention into the material reality of China in Zimbabwe. In my analysis of his work, I shift from the typical art-historical concern of visuality to an emphasis on materiality and, in particular, the artist's process of grappling with this materiality. Through interviews, field research and visual analysis, I foreground the artist's perspective on the consumer culture and urban transition in Harare, which transformed from a ‘European settler-colonial “sunshine city” to a “zhing-zhong” African city’ (Mbiba 2017, 375). More importantly, this chapter employs the social life of objects as a method to unfold the way in which Takadiwa materialises people's lived experiences through the consumer waste of made-in-China commodities. In so doing, I demonstrate the value in approaching the broader discussion on Africa–China engagements in relation to contemporary art which, with its expressive capacity, embraces contradictions and complexities (Simbao 2012a).
‘THINGS’ AND THE ZIMBABWE–CHINA RELATIONSHIP
Zimbabwe's engagement with the People's Republic of China stretches back to China's assistance to the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) led by Robert Mugabe during the liberation struggle against white rule in the former Rhodesia. However, the economic engagements between these two countries were only intensified at the beginning of this century.
5 - Diary of a Diasporic Chinese Artist 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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- 01 April 2023, pp 104-120
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As part of a Chinese-born diasporic community living and working in South Africa, I function as an artist in both China and South Africa. Over the past 21 years working and exhibiting in South Africa, I have gradually become part of the contemporary art scene in both regions, with public exposure at both local and international levels. This dual exposure to two different geographic and cultural realms benefits my work in many ways. Over time, I have come to realise the extent to which I can create a greater awareness and connection between peoples of other cultures and places. The impact of South Africa and local art practice on my work has been extensive, and this, together with a personal autoethnographic narrative, permeates it.
Born and raised in mainland China, I have lived in South Africa since 1999. In 2001, I moved to Pietermaritzburg to study for a postgraduate diploma at the University of Natal (now known as the University of KwaZulu-Natal). It was there that I later did my Master's in Fine Art, and I am currently completing a practice-based PhD in Visual Arts at that university. My family background has always been associated with art. My maternal grandfather was a traditional Chinese literati painter and my father is an oil painter. Both were professionally trained: my grandfather studied at Jinghua Art School in Beijing, and my father graduated from Shandong University of Arts. My grandfather lived primarily during the turbulent Republic of China era (1912–1949), while my father lived through the Maoist era (1949–1976), including the Cultural Revolution.
I underwent rigorous training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and the skills I acquired there form the foundation of my work. My current inspiration is drawn from my life experiences and interests. When I arrived in South Africa, I was excited by the strange faces I saw around me and I created a number of large-scale charcoal drawings that included portraits and figure studies.
REPRESENTING DIFFERENCE
While I have been warmly embraced in South Africa, I have also been subject to a certain amount of critical scrutiny, given my cultural difference and my country of origin, especially due to prevailing perspectives on China's presence in South Africa. Being a Chinese woman, I am often subjected to questions that both alarm and bewilder me. Many arise from South African stereotypical views of Chinese culture and practice.
7 - Hidden Objects at the Johannesburg Art Gallery: Han Dynasty Míngqì
- 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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- 01 April 2023, pp 140-153
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One of the more unusual sculptures housed at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) is a 2 000-year-old Chinese burial ceramic stemming from the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). Known in Chinese as a míngqì, or funerary object, the sculpture portrays a ceramic model of a farmyard (JAGC34) (Figure 7.1). Given how it stands out in terms of the broader collection of largely European and African art in the museum collection, this chapter seeks to understand how the míngqì came into the gallery's possession but also how, as gallery contexts have changed through the years, the object itself has assumed different layers of meaning. Drawing on archival materials, I discuss the work's ‘biography’ (Kopytoff 1986), where looking ‘outwards’ from the object reveals socio-cultural values that have become entangled with it. This aims at a better understanding of ancient East Asian art in a South African context, and also how the trajectory of such ‘irritating’ objects illustrates socio-cultural changes within the museum and South Africa more broadly.
I draw on the use of ‘irritating’ here, from the work of Julia Kelly, who argues that some objects in collections are considered irritating because they are ‘unusual’ or have ‘not yet been the subject of research’ (2007, 2). While others have written on the history of objects in the JAG, these works primarily interrogate the tensions between the European and the African binary, as well as associated binaries: the modern and the ‘primitive’, fine art and the ethnographic, and how such tensions manifest themselves through the likes of exhibitions, acquisitions and policy formulation.1 None of these histories includes the Chinese ceramics collection in their exploration of the gallery's history, with the exception of one Ming dynasty roof tile image in the catalogue for the One Hundred Years of Collecting: The Johannesburg Art Gallery exhibition, juxtaposed with some Japanese prints (Carman 2010, 29). As if to highlight its liminality, the ‘Oriental ceramics collection’ is referred by Jillian Carman as ‘extraneous to JAG's core policy’, though it nevertheless comprises ‘superb assets which enhance JAG's collection and exhibition profile’ (2010, 23).
The Han dynasty objects have thus been largely overlooked in terms of critical engagement. This is due in no small part to the general lack of East Asian expertise in South Africa.
6 - Traces of Chinese Trade Ceramics in Southern 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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- 01 April 2023, pp 122-139
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CHINESE PORCELAIN TRADED TO AFRICA
Africa has a rich tradition of ceramic making and usage that spans thousands of years, yet the continent's ceramics signature also includes traces of those that originated elsewhere and reached Africa along various sea and land trade routes. Chinese porcelain featured prominently among imported oriental ceramics, which introduced high-fired glazed porcelain to Africa, in contrast to indigenous ceramics, which were usually made of low-fired earthenware (Gers 2012).
Composed of a mixture of crushed rock (porcelain stone) and clay (china clay, or kaolin), porcelain – a thin, white, translucent material – had been made in China since the ninth century (Clunas 1987, 34). From the twelfth century onwards, Jingdezhen, an inland town in southern central China, became synonymous with the manufacturing of blue-and-white, or underglaze blue, porcelain. Blue-and-white porcelain is typically painted with cobalt blue designs before the addition of a transparent surface glaze (Atterbury 1982, 56), cobalt being a metallic oxide that can withstand the high temperatures at which porcelain is fired (Atterbury 1982, 21). Jingdezhen's success was linked to the fact that it was situated close to large deposits of highquality raw materials needed for the making of porcelain, as well as a network of rivers and lakes, which facilitated transport to port towns for export purposes (Rinaldi 1989, 49).
This chapter analyses Chinese porcelain that arrived at ancient kingdom sites in southern Africa during precolonial times. It furthermore provides an overview of the kinds of trade ceramics that were in use at the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, specifically during the Dutch colonial period. It also engages with the trading practices of the time, the people who owned ceramics in colonial Cape Town, and the status associated with certain ceramic wares. In conclusion, the legacy of Chinese trade ceramics is considered in view of its continued influence on the work of a number of contemporary South African ceramic artists.
TRADE ROUTES
Trade between China and other parts of the world existed from early on. The famous Silk Road, a trans-Asian caravan trade route, flourished from the second to the thirteenth century, and stretched from China to Persia and Rome. Silk and other goods such as tea, ceramics and lacquered wares were transported overland along this route (Historical and Cultural Exhibitions 1991, 17).
15 - Understanding William Kentridge from China
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- By Ying Cheng, Shuo Wang
- 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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Summary
South African artist William Kentridge's Notes Towards a Model Opera (2015), displayed at the UCCA Centre for Contemporary Art, is the first major retrospective by an African artist held in mainland China. In this exhibition, the artist engages with the history of Afro-Asian interactions and ongoing Africa–China debates through extensive research on the intellectual, political, and social history of modern China. Through an analysis of Kentridge's engagement with Chinese culture and the reception of his work in China, this chapter examines how history has been explored as an essential trope in artistic interactions to trigger nuanced conversations about shared ideologies, temporalities and poetics within the context of the Global South.
We are particularly interested in the essential concept of ‘peripheral thinking’, manifested in Kentridge's Beijing exhibition, as a way of looking at the marginal connections between Africa and China. In his lecture performance titled ‘Peripheral Thinking’ (authored in 2014, first delivered in Cape Town and later in Beijing in 2015), Kentridge (2015, 97) describes the periphery as follows: ‘Put a pin in a sheet of paper, pull on a string against the pin. The line that defines the outside edge of the blank circle is the periphery. Made as a pressure, a force against the centre …’
Dwelling on the concept of the periphery and its relationship with the centre, Kentridge asks what happens if we start to look at different points along the circle and the ‘unlikely connections’ at its edges. In his lecture performance, he juxtaposes the images of a ballerina in the Johannesburg suburbs and one on the stage of the Beijing revolutionary opera, The Red Detachment of Women (Hongseniangzijun), both of which are positioned ‘at the end of the long string stretching from the ballet centres of Paris and Moscow’ (Kentridge 2015, 113). This illustrates the beginning (as well as the naming) of Kentridge's China exhibition Notes Towards a Model Opera. This peripheral association is echoed in the project's beginnings, where Kentridge and South African dancer Dada Masilo engage in improvisation with the films of the eight model operas (yangbanxi). According to Kentridge (2015, 110–111), during his historical research on revolutionary China, he was particularly attracted to the seemingly marginal materials and images on the fringes of the political turmoil of the era, including the videos of model operas.
Contents
- 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 vii-x
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Dedication
- 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 v-vi
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11 - Postcard Representations of Indentured Chinese Labourers in South Africa’s Reconstruction, 1904–1910
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- By T Tu Huynh
- 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 230-245
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Summary
South Africa's history of importing indentured Chinese labourers to work in the gold mining industry in the Witwatersrand (Rand) region of the Transvaal Colony following the South African War (also known as the Anglo-Boer War) (1899–1902) is well documented in the country's national archives, libraries and museums. In the 1970s and 1980s, Marxist scholars of South African history also acknowledged these labourers’ contribution to the sector during the post-war reconstruction period (Callinicos 1980; Davies 1976; Richardson 1982; Van Onselen 1982a, 1982b). That the Chinese labourers could have had any sociocultural influence in the colony during this period was left unexamined, in spite of the wealth of materials in the above-mentioned repositories. Relying on those materials (for example, visual images, political pamphlets, newspaper articles, colonial correspondence, minutes of meetings and legislation), this chapter addresses that lacuna by showing how the recruitment and arrival of the indentured Chinese labourers contributed towards a ‘sharpen[ing] of racial sensibilities’ (Guterl 2003, 217), particularly what it meant to be white in the colony and to be a member of the British Empire. To demonstrate the developing racial sensibilities, this chapter analyses the iconography of indentured Chinese labour in Real Photo Postcards (RPPCs), which offer a glimpse into the ways in which local printing companies, photographers and consumers represented and viewed the debate focused on these labourers. It argues that the postcard representations of the Chinese labourers not only ostensibly normalised exploitative practices of the gold mining industry on the Rand, but also took the side of the British mining capitalists, colonial administrators and church ministers in the debate. While these parties asserted that importing labourers from China would uplift the Chinese race and benefit white labourers, their opponents who included abolitionists and members of mining unions, equated the indentured labour system with Chinese slavery.
SEEING AND CONNECTING THROUGH POSTCARDS
The companies that printed the postcards of the indentured Chinese labourers on the Rand were Braune & Levy and the South African Photo & Stereo Company (SAPSCo) in Johannesburg, Frank A Stauber in Jeppestown, Hallis & Co. in Port Elizabeth, and Sallo Epstein & Co. in Durban.