The WiSER Podcast | Bessie Head's Absorbent Literature by Anneke Rautenbach
In this week’s episode, Anneke Rautenbach discusses how, when the writer Bessie Head escaped apartheid South Africa and settled in the rural village of Serowe, Botswana, she remained haunted by the violence of her past. In her work on experimental development farms, alongside locals and foreign volunteers, she discovered not only a source of healing, but a subterranean moral philosophy.
Anneke Rautenbach spent time in residence at WiSER in 2022, participated in The WiSER Podcast group and travelled from there to Botswana to conduct archival research at the Bessie Head Papers in Serowe. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University, where she is completing a dissertation on the role of the public intellectual in southern Africa. The PhD focuses on flashpoint moments in recent history when language played a particularly dynamic role -- from anticolonial prophecy to nationalist sloganeering to the metaphors of the HIV/AIDS crisis.
The WiSER Podcast Team this year is convened by Sarah Nuttall, sound editing by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh and designs by Bronwyn Kotzen.
Podcasts
Today we release Season Two of The WISER Podcast Series. The series launched in April of this year, partly in response to lockdown conditions and with the intention to profile the work that WISER researchers do, individually and in conversation with each other and with the global academic community.
We have produced 21 podcasts in total, profiling the work of 30 WISER researchers. Across the series, we have reached nearly 10 000 listeners from the African continent and around the world.
In 2021, we will develop new formats and a wider range of interventions. We will release written versions of the podcasts in the form of e-books and offline publications, as public archives of the audio-work done and for ease of reference and citation.
We are proud of the range of interdisciplinary and intergenerational work that we do at WISER and we warmly invite you to listen with us and offer us feedback, as we draw the work of the seminar room into the public domain.
The members of the Podcast Group at WISER are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Isabel Hofmeyr, Bronwyn Kotzen, Mpho Matsipa, Achille Mbembe and Tinashe Mushakavanhu.
In Episode 8 of Season 2 of The WISER Podcast, Charne Lavery discusses how theory from the south can be taken further south, towards the currents and creatures of the Southern Ocean.
The WISER Podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Charne Lavery is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria and a Research Fellow in the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project (www.oceanichumanities.com) based at WISER. Her work explores literary and cultural representations of the deep ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Southern Ocean and Antarctic seas, researching oceanic underworlds of the global South in a time of climate change.
In Episode 7 of Season 2 of The WISER Podcast, Keith Breckenridge discusses Biometric Capitalism and African economics in the 21st Century.
The WISER Podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Keith Breckenridge is a Professor of History, and Deputy Director of WISER.
In Episode 6 of Season 2 of The WISER Podcast, Sarah Nuttall discusses her thoughts on the “redistributed university”. Using Covid-19 as a point of departure, she considers new and older challenges that have contributed to redefining institutions of higher learning. As the university constantly reconfigures itself in response to multiple pressures and struggles, including economic pressures, struggles for social justice and rapid technological change, she asks - concretely and speculatively - how we might approach the institution in its present and historical formation.
The WISER Podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and the Director of WISER. Her research focuses on literary and visual cultures, city lives and forms and critical cultural theory. She has authored or edited many influential books, published more than 60 articles and book chapters and her work is widely cited across disciplines. For eight years she has directed WISER, one of the largest and most established Humanities Institutes across the global South.
Photo of Sisonke by Iain and Erick Regnard
In Episode 4 of Season 2 of The WISER Podcast, Shireen Hassim and Sisonke Msimang discuss the life, politics and legacy of Winnie Mandela.
The WISER Podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Shireen Hassim is Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics and Visiting Professor at WiSER. She has published three articles on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela: “A Life of Refusal: Winnie Madikizela Mandela and violence in South Africa (Storia della Donne); “Not Just Nelson’s Wife: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Violence and Radicalism in South Africa”, and “The Impossible Contract: The Political and Private Marriage of Nelson and Winnie Mandela” (both in the Journal of Southern African Studies).
Sisonke Msimang is the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018) and is a Writing Fellow at WISER.
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In Episode 3 of Season 2 of The WISER Podcast, Sakiru Adebayo discusses what it means to be melancholic, especially in the time of a pandemic. He suggests that Covid-19 melancholy can be thought of in part as a condition yet to come, as we postpone aspects of our reckoning with loss to the post-Covid period. He reads the temper of the social and political present as a melancholic one.
The WISER Podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Sakiru Adebayo has a PhD in African Literature. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at WISER. He is interested in questions of memory, mourning and melancholy in African literary works and cultural practices.
In Episode 2 of Season 2 of The WISER Podcast, Terry Kurgan discusses two photographs, each found in her father’s possession, and both taken on the edge of graves, one in Ein al-Beida, Palestine and the other in a forest just outside the town of Panevėžys in Lithuania. She considers the two photographs as entry points to a new book she has just begun that will traverse perhaps the darkest period of mid-twentieth century European and Middle Eastern History.
The WISER Podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Terry Kurgan is a visual artist and writer based in Johannesburg. Her recent publication, Everyone is Present, written while she was a Writing Fellow and Artist in Residence at WiSER, won South Africa’s premier literary prize, the 2019 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. It was also shortlisted for the 2019 Photo Arles Book Prize, and selected as a Finalist for the 2019 New York based National Jewish Book Awards. Terry is currently a Research Associate at WISER, working on a new book project, and co-director of the independent publishing project, Fourthwall Books. www.terrykurgan.com
In the first episode of Season 2 of The WISER Podcast, Johannes Machinya discusses the everyday experience of living with potential or imminent arrest and deportation for undocumented migrants in South Africa.
The WISER Podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Johannes Machinya is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow co-hosted by WISER and the African Studies Center (ASC) at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on migration, labour and politics, migration control and the temporalities associated with waiting and the anticipation of deportation.
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