Heated Conversations by Hugo ka Canham | 21 June | 6pm
You are warmly invited to the next session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Heated Conversations
Hugo ka Canham will speak on
Watchful Ocean and Observant Mountains EmaMpondweni
(click here for link)
This paper synthesises the watery terrain covered in chapter one of my book Riotous Deathscapes. By pausing on the ocean and rivers of EmaMpondweni on South Africa's Wild Coast, I sit with Bhekizizwe Peterson's provocation of how we might read black histories outside of colonial registers and archives. Expanding on his conception of the black public humanities, the ocean, rock face, and river are scripts off which I read our past as a vast deathscape and how we fashion death as a strategy for living. By conceiving the riotous Wild Coast ocean as an opening for both colonial conquest and identity making on the ocean shoals, I think with my own family lineage to figure the blackness and indigeneity of coastal communities. While the white castaways of shipwrecks on the Mpondo shores have received literary attention, their AmaMpondo hosts have tended to be evacuated from analytical interests. By reading the shipwrecks through ukwakumkanya, a method of Mpondo theory, I read the crash of the arrival of castaways from the perspective of those who watched the landing from the shore. I suggest that Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation provide a useful way of thinking of those castaways and their black prisoners who decided to stay in relation with their hosts by learning the isiMpondo language and making lives in relation. I ponder too on how we might read the operation of power and hospitality when white arrival is characterised by disorientation on the roiling waters and when black people are surefooted on ancestral land. The opening provided by the borderlands of the tumultuous ocean stages possibilities for newness and fresh ways of attending to old things. Beyond the oceanic aspects of worldmaking on the Wild Coast, the paper explores how, pushed eastward from the Southern Cape, the San and Khoekoe communities made home in the mountains of EmaMpondweni and through relation, expanded Mpondo personhood and cosmologies and refigured our conceptions of blackness and indigeneity. Through reading traces of these oceanic and mountainous histories, I point to the ecological urgency of decentering the human and whiteness to explicate how water masses enable black sociality.
Hugo ka Canham is a writer and professor at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa. His work is located along the fault lines of black studies, African feminism, African and queer theorisations. He studies the phenomenology of living at the margins of human value, suffering and death. His work is invested in detonating the binaries between the human and the natural, multispecies world. It may be understood within the transdisciplinary rubric of Black Planetary Studies. His latest book, Riotous Deathscapes is published by Duke University Press and copublished by Wits University Press.
Wednesday, 21st June 2023
6pm
Register here: https://wits-za.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUoceusqjoiHNUXSjIorXJBRnmS3K4...
Heated Conversations is a new seminar series convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall
As global warming produces rising seas, falling dam levels and excessive droughts, generating new levels of multi-crisis in the world-now, so too are our conversations and discourses heating up in multiple ways. This seminar series takes up these questions of anthropogenic escalation and pedagogical shifts of gear. It does so in a context in which strengthening Southern bodies of knowledge is ever more crucial to engaging collectively with and comprehending these complex new rubrics and material dimensions. A forum broadly dedicated to the literary and cultural humanities, the seminar is hospitably open to wide participation from as many parts of the world as possible and will invite speakers to offer generative interventions for discussion and debate.
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at Wits University; Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WiSER, Wits.