WiSER invites you to

Living together/living apart – the complexity of home

A collaboration between Neo Muyanga and Khadija Patel.

Wednesday, 8 October 2014
13:00

WiSER Seminar Room,
6th Floor, Richard Ward Building,
East Campus, Wits University

As Neo and Khadija leave for Duke University, they present some of the work produced during their time as Writing Fellows at WiSER.
 
Neo: As a composer preoccupied with both western classical and African folk musics, I am curious about how ‘opera’ – an art form supported by the landed gentry and the royal courts of eighteenth-century Europe – found a home in the hearts and minds of the poor in the townships and rural farms of South Africa. While some critics are quick to dismiss opera as simply an outdated, Eurocentric preoccupation of the rich elite of the global north, many local and international fans have celebrated the emergence of a crop of young black opera singers who are currently the ‘new hope’ at Covent Garden in London, at Milan’s La Scala and at the Met in New York. 

But what is the deeper meaning behind such a collision in cultural practices and taste? Is it an indication of how the arts in South African culture are assimilating global culture in the twenty-first century, or merely an illustration of how far the south is willing to bend over to accommodate the practices of the north?
 
Khadija: For those of us weaving our ways through a maze of contradictions and open manholes, Mayfair, in all its obscurity, is just home. Yet here that sense of home is often constructed by barricading the streets, insulating ourselves behind the safety of multiple locks, boom gates and sleepy security guards. It’s not just our safety that we are obsessing over, but we also seem to be cloistering ourselves from the reality of the space we inhabit. And within our homes, the metal gates and wooden doors are also emblematic of how we come to relate to the space we inhabit, how we manufacture a present for this space and remember its past. Beyond home, a whole ‘Somaliland’ has arisen, Tanzanian fruit sellers have moved from a roadside stall to a Bird Street store, while the ‘homeless’ clutching fiercely onto cartons of Joburg Beer. There is a disjointedness in the act of living in Mayfair, we are a community of communities, islands of being, living together but, also, apart. 
 
This project is the result of a collaborative initiative between WiSER, the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Forum for Public Scholars at Duke  University.
 
RSVP: Najibha.Deshmukh@wits.ac.za