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
In the latest episode of The WISER Podcast, Nolwazi Mkhwanazi speaks about Childbirth, Natality and 'Young’ Families.
The WISER Podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Nolwazi Mkhwanazi an Associate Professor in Medical Anthropology at WISER. She leads the Institute’s programme in Medical Humanities. She is the co-editor and co-author, amongst many other publications, of Young Families: Gender, Sexuality and Care and of Connected Lives: Families, Households, Health and Care in Contemporary South Africa.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu is currently a postdoctoral fellow at WiSER. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Kent. His forthcoming book is Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on a Speculative Archive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020).
In the latest two-part episode of The WISER Podcast, Professors Achille Mbembe and Dilip Menon explore the newly published book Capitalisms - A Global History, co-edited by Dilip Menon and Kaveh Yasdani and published by Oxford University Press.
The WISER Podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Professor Achille Mbembe is a world-renowned theorist, public intellectual and Professor of History and Politics at WISER. Professor Dilip Menon is Mellon Chair in Indian Studies and Director of CISA at Wits.
Dear friends of WISER,
In Episode 2 of The WISER Podcast, Dr Mpho Matsipa and Bronwyn Kotzen explore similarities in their work relating to space, race, and the politics of cement.
Listen on our website or subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Mpho Matsipa joined WiSER as a Research Fellow in April 2019. She completed her PhD in Environmental Design in Developing Countries at the University of California, Berkeley. Mpho is currently the curator of the African Mobilities Project. She divides her time between the Wits School of Architecture and Planning, where she holds a position as lecturer in design and urban research, and WISER.
Bronwyn Kotzen joined WISER as a Visiting Research Fellow in January 2020. Bronwyn is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Cape Town. Her doctoral research focuses on the political economy of materiality in urban Africa by tracing Pan-African cement flows and is supported by Emory University’s African Critical Enquiry Programme and the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust. Bronwyn’s broader research explores the interstices between materiality, politics and place in rapidly developing urban centres.
Welcome to The WISER Podcast! Published weekly, the podcast features conversations, talks and audio-essays from WISER.
You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. A complete list of all past episodes is at https://witswiser.podbean.com. For podcast transcripts, click here. For more WISER research, click here.
Public lectures from the 2015 Session of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, held at WiSER and the Adler Museum, Wits University, Johannesburg.
A podcast of our recent seminar on consent, rights, and the regulation of childhood and adolescent sexuality in South Africa.
(videos are listed in the order in which the panels took place)
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Introduction: Sarah Nuttall
Panel One: Africa in Diasporic and Continental Imagination
Xolela Mangcu, "The Idea of Africa in Black South African Political Thought"
Achille Mbembe, "Futures of Pan-Africanism"
Panel 2: Exile, Pan-African and Diasporic Solidarity
Nomboniso Gasa, Mandla Langa, Raimi Gbadamosi
Panel 3: Xenophobia and African Migrants' Experiences (Bureaucracy, Documents and the Police)
Ingrid Palmary, Shose Kessi
Panel Four: The Making of the 'Foreign National'
Niq Mhlongo, Tawana Kupe
Round Table: Redrawing Colonial Boundaries: Pan-Africanism, Nationalism, and Cosmopolitanism
Adam Habib, Gilbert Khadiagala (respondent), Eusebius McKaiser (moderator)
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Panel One: South Africa in the Geopolitics of the Continent
Adekeye Adebajo, Gilbert Khadiagala, Anthony Bizos
Panel Two: The Gateway to Africa? South African Capital in the Continent
Lucy Corkin
AND
Remarks by Moeletsi Mbeki
Panel Three: Africa in the South African Curriculum: Expanding the Boundaries of Knowledge
Michael Neocosmos
Suren Pillay
Concluding Session: The Africa We Want
Address by David Makhura, Premier of Gauteng
Achille Mbembe's public lecture 'Decolonizing the University: Five New Directions,' presented at WiSER on 22 April 2015.
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