Black Music and the Aesthetics of Protest

Co-presented with the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music Department of Musicology

Neo Muyanga’s opera The Struggle serves as a departure point for a panel discussion exploring the role of Black opera and other genres of Black music in achieving racial justice and social change, the persistent exclusionary politics of musical genres, and the future revolutionary potential of historically defined Black genres.

Neo Muyanga, WiSER's composer-in-residence, reflects on work done during April and May 2015.

WiSER is proud to announce the publication of Sarah Emily Duff's monograph Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860-1895. The first full-length study of the history of childhood in South Africa, it has been published in Palgrave Macmillan's new Studies in the History of Childhood series.

The Wits Vuvuzela on Hlonipha Mokoena's move to WiSER later this year.

Sarah Emily Duff writes about sex education in South Africa during the 1920s and 1930s for The Conversation.

The Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand, Professor Adam Habib, has released a statement on accelerating transformation at Wits.

Doppiozero has reprinted the text of Achille Mbembe's essay on xenophobia, in both English and Italian. Photographs are by Kudzanai Chiurai.

Faculty of Humanities

School of Literature, Language and Media

LECTURER IN MEDIA STUDIES

An edited version of the new preface, 'The Value of Africa's Aesthetics,' to the Africa edition of Achille Mbembe's On the Postcolony, published in May 2015 by Wits University Press.

Achille Mbembe's recent essay 'Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive' has been published as an ebook by the blog Africa is a Country.