scholarly journals Art and visual culture in Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Poyner
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
South African ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
African History ◽  
Photographic Image ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mary Louise Pratt ◽  
Apartheid Regime ◽  
The City

This article argues that South African author Ivan Vladislavić’s fictionalized memoir, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006), through its portrayal of visual culture and an enabling process of what the narrator, Vlad, calls “seeing and then seeing again” (2006: 89), “rehabilitates” (Coombes, 2003: 23) Johannesburg’s potentially alienating post-apartheid urban environment depicted in Portrait as having been indelibly inscribed by the apartheid state. Through the idea of “seeing and then seeing again”, I argue, the author stages an act of cultural rehabilitation, one that constitutes both artistic and ideological revision. Extending Walter Benjamin’s notion that the photographic image uniquely constellates the past and the present — of which “seeing and then seeing again” is therefore a form — I show that through his depiction of visual culture, Vladislavić engages critically with South African history in the present, and, consequently, his own historical position as white and thus always already a beneficiary of the apartheid regime. From this, I go on to argue that the method of “seeing and then seeing again” inverts the genre of Euroimperial travel writing theorized by Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes to lay bare questions of scopic power, including Vlad’s own.

Learning Zulu

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
South African ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
African History ◽  
African Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Correct Form ◽  
Linguistic Purism

When this book's author began studying Zulu, he was often questioned why he was learning it. This book places the author's endeavors within a wider context to uncover how, in the past 150 years of South African history, Zulu became a battleground for issues of property, possession, and deprivation. The book combines elements of analysis and memoir to explore a complex cultural history. Perceiving that colonial learners of Zulu saw themselves as repairing harm done to Africans by Europeans, the book reveals deeper motives at work in the development of Zulu-language learning—from the emergence of the pidgin Fanagalo among missionaries and traders in the nineteenth century to widespread efforts, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to teach a correct form of Zulu. The book looks at the white appropriation of Zulu language, music, and dance in South African culture, and at the association of Zulu with a martial masculinity. In exploring how Zulu has come to represent what is most properly and powerfully African, the book examines differences in English- and Zulu-language press coverage of an important trial, as well as the role of linguistic purism in xenophobic violence in South Africa. Through one person's efforts to learn the Zulu language, the book explores how a language's history and politics influence all individuals in a multilingual society.

Исследование психологических особенностей восприятия города Бишкек городскими и сельскими студентами

2019 ◽  
pp. 98-100
Author(s):  
Д. М. Кудайбердиева
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Space Perception ◽  
Language Barrier ◽  
Rural Students ◽  
Adaptation Period ◽  
Educational Work ◽  
The Past ◽  
Spatial Environment ◽  
The City

Аннотация. В данной статье рассматривается проблема восприятия городской среды студентами из города и сельской местности. Обозначены определения терминов «среда», «пространственная среда», «городская среда». Проведено экспериментальное сравнительное исследование особенностей восприятия города Бишкек городскими и сельскими студентами в количестве 50 человек. Статья содержит результаты проведенного анализа исследования. Выявлены различия и сходства в восприятии города Бишкек у студентов двух групп. В контексте восприятия города изучена неудовлетворенность прошлым и настоящим временем, трудности языкового барьера у студентов из сельской местности. Также было выявлено, что актуальной для студентов обеих групп является потребность в социальных контактах, общении, включенности в социум. Полученные результаты будут иметь пользу в проведении воспитательной работы со студентами из сельской местности, в оказании поддержки им в период адаптации с учетом особенностей восприятия города студентами. Ключевые слова. среда, городская среда, восприятие пространства, городские студенты, сельские студенты, восприятие города Бишкек, неудовлетворенность прошлым и настоящим, языковой барьер, учеба в городе, сходства и различия в восприятии города. Аннотация. Бул макалада шаардык жана айылдан келген студенттердин шаардык чөйрөнү кабыл алуу көйгөйү каралган. «Чөйрө», «мейкиндик чөйрө», «шаардык чөйрө» терминдеринин түшүнүктөрү келтирилген. 50 адамдан турган шаардык жана айылдык студенттердин Бишкек шаарын кабыл алуу өзгөчөлүктөрүнө эксперименталдык салыштырма изилдөө жүргүзүлгөн. Макалада изилдөөнүн анализ жыйынтыктары камтылган. Эки студенттик топторунун Бишкек шаарын кабыл алуусунун айырмачылыктары жана окшоштуктары белгиленген. Шаарды кабыл алуу контекстинде өткөн жана учур чактарга канагаттанбоо, тил барьеринин кыйынчылыктары изилденди. Ошондой эле студенттердин эки тобуна актуалдуу болуп социалдык катнаштарга, баарлашууга, коомго кошулуу муктаждыгы белгиленүүдө. Алынган жыйынтыктар студенттердин шаарды кабыл алуу өзгөчөлүктөрүнө эске алып, айылдан келген студенттерге адаптация убагында колдоо көрсөтүү максатында тарбиялык иштерди жүргүзүүдө жардам берет. Түйүндүү сөздөр. Чөйрө, шаардык чөйрө, мейкиндикти кабыл алуу, шаардык студенттер, айылдык студенттер, Бишкек шаарын кабыл алуу, өткөн жана учур чакка канагаттанбоо, тил барьери, шаарда окуу, шаарды кабыл алуусунун айырмачылыктары жана окшоштуктары. Annotation. This article addresses the problem of perception of the urban environment by students from the city and countryside. The definitions of the terms “environment”, “spatial environment”, and “urban environment” are indicated. An experimental comparative study of the characteristics of the perception of the city of Bishkek by urban and rural students in the amount of 50 people was conducted. The article contains the results of the analysis of the study. The differences and similarities in the perception of the city of Bishkek among students of the two groups are revealed. In the context of the perception of the city, dissatisfaction with the past and the present has been studied, and the difficulties of the language barrier among students from rural areas. It was also revealed that the need for social contacts, communication, inclusion in society is relevant for students of both groups. The results will have the benefit of conducting educational work with students from rural areas, in providing support to them during the adaptation period, taking into account the peculiarities of the perception of the city by students. Кeywords. Environment, urban environment, space perception, urban students, rural students, perception of the city of Bishkek, dissatisfaction with the past and the present, language barrier, studying in the city, similarities and differences in the perception of the city.

Problems of Analysis of Design and Research Methods of Interaction with the Urban Environment

2020 ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
П. В. Капустин ◽  
А. И. Гаврилов
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Environmental Movement ◽  
The Past ◽  
Types Of Knowledge ◽  
Historical Dynamics ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City ◽  
Research And Design

Состояние проблемы. Проблематика городской среды заявила о себе в 1960-е годы как протест против модернистских методов урбанизма и других видов проектирования. Средовое движение не случайно тогда именовали «антипрофессиональным» - оно было направлено против устоявшихся и недейственных методов работы с городом - от исследования до управления. За прошедшие десятилетия в рамках самого средового движения и его идейных наследников наработано немало методов и приемов работы, однако они до сих не подвергались анализу как пребывающая в исторической динамике целостная совокупность инструментария, альтернативного традиционному градостроительству. Результаты. Рассмотрены особенности и проблемы анализа методологического «арсенала» средового движения и урбанистики. Методы работы с городской средой впервые структурированы по типам знания. Показана близость методов исследовательского и проектного подходов в отношении городской среды. Выводы. В ближайшее время можно ожидать появления новых синтетических знаний и частных методологий, связанных как с обострением средовой проблематики, с расширением круга средовых акторов, так и с процессом профессионализации урбанистики. Statement of the problem. The urban environment paradigm emerged in the 1960s as a protest against the modernist methods of urbanism and other types of design. It was no coincidence that the environmental movement was back then called "anti-professional" as it was directed against the established and ineffective methods of working with the city, i. e., from research to management. Over the past decades, within the framework of the environmental movement and its ideological heirs, a lot of methods and have been developed. However, they have not yet been analyzed as an integral set of tools in the historical dynamics which is an alternative to traditional urban planning. Results. The features and problems of the analysis of the methodological “arsenal” of environmental movement and urban studies are considered. The methods of working with the urban environment are first structured according to the types of knowledge. The proximity of research and design approaches in the case when the urban environment is dealt with is shown. Conclusions. In the nearest future, we can expect new synthetic knowledge and particular methodologies related to both the exacerbation of environmental problems to emerge as well as the expansion of the circle of environmental actors and the process of professionalization of urbanstics.

scholarly journals Photographs by Guilherme Glück: a methodology for analyzing the photographic image of the cultural landscape of Lapa, PR, Brazil

Terr Plural ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. e2116706
Author(s):  
Caroline Ganzert Afonso ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Electric Power ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Photographic Images ◽  
Photographic Image ◽  
Symbolic Forms ◽  
Piped Water ◽  
The City

To read photographic images through Iconography and Iconology can be an interesting way to help describe landscapes. Which is the intention that corroborates the sense of “landscape as a way of seeing” proposed by Denis Cosgrove. In proposing this research aims to understand how the urban and cultural landscape was portrayed in Glück´s photographs. This study object is delimited by Glück's records about 1940, in the urban environment of the city of Lapa. These spaces were registered through the eyes of an immigrant, presenting the temporal transformations, in the yearnings to change and update Lapa as a republican city and adapted to new urban infrastructures, such as piped water, paved streets, electric power, new means of transportation, and communication. Through the systematization of the photographic methodological analysis, from iconographic investigation proposed by Panofsky, observing Cassirer's symbolic forms, through which he presented the advances in Cosgrove's research, it is intended to analyze Glück's images in a context of a city eager to incorporate republican and “modernity” standards.

scholarly journals History, memory and reconciliation: Njabulo Ndebele’s The cry of Winnie Mandela and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s A human being died that night

Literator ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
R. Goodman
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Human Being ◽  
African History ◽  
African Society ◽  
South African Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
Ethical Complexity ◽  
Narrative Techniques

This article deals with two texts written during the process of transition in South Africa, using them to explore the cultural and ethical complexity of that process. Both Njabulo Ndebele’s “The cry of Winnie Mandela” and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s “A human being died that night” deal with controversial public figures, Winnie Mandela and Eugene de Kock respectively, whose role in South African history has made them part of the national iconography. Ndebele and Gobodo-Madikizela employ narrative techniques that expose and exploit faultlines in the popular representations of these figures. The two texts offer radical ways of understanding the communal and individual suffering caused by apartheid, challenging readers to respond to the past in ways that will promote healing rather than perpetuate a spirit of revenge. The part played by official histories is implicitly questioned and the role of individual stories is shown to be crucial. Forgiveness and reconciliation are seen as dependent on an awareness of the complex circumstances and the humanity of those who are labelled as offenders. This requirement applies especially to the case of “A human being died that night”, a text that insists that the overt acknowledgement of the humanity of people like Eugene de Kock is an important way of healing South African society.

The Reconstruction of Memory at Constitution Hill

2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHURCHILL MADIKIDA ◽  
LAUREN SEGAL ◽  
CLIVE VAN DEN BERG
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
African History ◽  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
South Africans ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
Former Prisoners ◽  
The Web

Abstract The Old Fort Prison was Johannesburg's main place of incarceration of prisoners for eight decades, including during the apartheid era. Virtually every important political leader in South African history, including Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela, and Fatima Meer, as well as scores of ordinary South Africans caught in the web of colonial and apartheid repression, were imprisoned there. Today, this prison complex is home to South Africa's Constitutional Court. Constitution Hill has brought former prisoners to “map” their memories of the site. They also host public dialogues on the injustices of the past, as typified by the prisons at Number Four, as well as people's understanding of their constitutional needs and rights, and their experiences of the country's young constitutional democracy.

Dystopias in the Kingdom of Israel: Prophetic Narratives of Destruction in Recent Hebrew Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-31
Author(s):  
Gil Hochberg
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Ethical Concerns ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
To Come ◽  
Apartheid Regime ◽  
Current Reality

Abstract This article is about a recent wave of literary dystopias published in Israel, most of which center on the soon-to-come destruction of the Jewish state. Notable among these are The Third (Ha-shlishi) by Yishai Sarid (2015), Mud (Tit) by Dror Burstein (2016), and Nuntia (Kfor) by Shimon Adaf (2010). These texts draw on biblical or Rabbinic Hebrew, Jewish sources, and Jewish historical events (specifically the destruction of the First and Second Temples), making them just as much about a dystopian past as they are about a dystopian future. They are, in other words, dystopias of a circular temporality: emerging from and moving toward (Jewish) dystopia. This recent wave of Israeli dystopian narratives is primarily preoccupied with the past and future of Judaism, the Jewish people, and Israel as a secular-yet-Jewish state. Most interesting, perhaps, is the complete absence of Palestinians from these texts and from this dystopic imagination. Despite their obvious presence in Israel’s current reality, Palestinians have no role whatsoever in these texts. We are dealing therefore with exclusively Jewish dystopias. Read against some of the dystopian white South African writings under Apartheid, the complete absence of Palestinians in the recently published Israeli dystopias, appears particularly disheartening. Neither partner nor enemy, Palestinians do not even share in a future nightmare with Israeli Jews. We are left with the following questions: Does writing a Jewish Israeli dystopia require eliminating Palestinians from the narrative? Is it possible (how is it possible?) to think of a Jewish (Israeli) future, present, and past without thinking about a Palestinian past, present, and future? Following the example of South African dystopias, this article concludes that for such literary and ethical concerns to be critically explored, Israel must first be (officially) recognized as an apartheid regime.

scholarly journals The Contested Gallery: street art, ethnography and the search for urban understandings

AmeriQuests ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Cultural Characteristics ◽  
The Road ◽  
The City

This is a paper on street art and its role as a form of artistic insurrection that challenges popular understandings of public space and urban visual culture. I would like to think of it as a field guide to urban seeing, a means of revising the way in which we view the cityscape and its imagery. It is a way of imagining the city as a canvas onto which ideas may be inscribed and reinterpreted, where resistance percolates up to those who look for it. It is here, in what Kathleen Stewart has called a “place by the side of the road” that the work of the street artist exists, slowly gurgling up through the cracks in the sidewalk and briefly illuminated by the yellow-white glow of the street lights. Street art most often takes the form of adhesive stickers, spray-painted stencils, and wheat-pasted posters, and while it shares many similar aesthetic and cultural characteristics with graffiti, street art embodies a unique ideology. Graffiti represents a territorialization of space (‘tagging’, or reclaiming urban spaces through the use of pseudonyms as territorial markings); street art represents a reterritorialization of space. Rather than taking space, street art attempts to re-purpose the existing urban environment. This paper seeks to reflect the changing dynamic of urban space through an analysis of the practice of street art. By examining the roles that street artists play in disrupting the flow of visual noise in the city, I will illuminate the cultural value and significance of this form of urban artistic resistance.

scholarly journals Modern Landscape-Technical Structure of Vinnytsia City Territory

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Residential Buildings ◽  
Urban Systems ◽  
Empirical Relationships ◽  
Industrial Enterprises ◽  
The Past ◽  
Technical Structure ◽  
Anthropogenic Systems ◽  
Modern Landscape ◽  
The City

Purpose. To identify the peculiarities of the modern landscape-technical structure of the city of Vinnytsia in order to improve the urban environment. Methods: systematization of facts, finding of empirical relationships, analytical and cartographic analysis, cartographic, field researches. Results. Vinnytsia is represented by a residential landscape-technical polysystem. Two landscape-technical urban systems are distinguished within the territory of the city: the residential located on undulating loess heights with gullies and ravines covered by oak-hornbeam forests on gray and light gray soils in past; and the industrial-residential located on a flat-undulating loess plateau with gray forest soils and podzolized black soils covered by hornbeam-oak forests in the past. In the structure of these urban systems there are floodplain water-recreational, slope forestry, watershed-road and watershed-field landscape-anthropogenic mesosystems, watersheds of low-rise residential buildings, sloping of low-rise residential buildings, floodplain-terrace of low-rise residential buildings, floodplain-terrace of medium multi-storey residential buildings, floodplain-terrace of industrial-residential buildings, sloping industrial-warehouse buildings, watershed industrial-warehouse buildings landscape-technical mesosystems, watercourse-hydropower, floodplain-pond fishery and floodplain water-recreational landscape-engineering mesosystems. Conclusion. It was found that landscape-technical mesosystems are dominant in the structure of modern landscapes of Vinnytsia, the smallest areas are under landscape-engineering mesosystems. Landscape-technical mesosystems of low-rise residential buildings are dominant by areas. They predominate also in the structure of landscape-technical mesosystems of Vinnytsia. To improve the urban environment, it is necessary to increase the area with landscape-anthropogenic systems of greenery, especially around rivers, roads and industrial enterprises.

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