HUMA Doctoral Fellow, Tina-Louise Smith, presents at the July 2025 #IAmHistory Conference in Cape Town

To understand the silences and absences in the television shows I am studying, I have followed the path to the early days of the Cape Colony. The control of gender and sexual expression amongst coloured women, concealing violence in visual representations of the smiling oppressed and the yearning for recognition from the global north all have their roots deeply buried in the soil of the Cape Colony. Even when we ignore it, our stories are infused with history.

The historical nature of my research led to my attendance at the #IAmHistory Decentering Media Histories & Practices Conference, at the start of July 2025. It was the best conference I have attended as a postgraduate student and I think the organisers did an exceptional job. Everything edible was outstanding and I will be dreaming about the lamb curry for a while still. Scholars, filmmakers and archivists came from Africa, Australia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America and South America. One invariably misses many presentations, but those I attended were utterly fascinating.  

From Terri Ginsberg’s presentation, “Sudan: A Special Report: USIA Film Education and the Capitalocene”, I learnt that the US’s 1959 intervention in Sudan’s water crisis continues to destabilise the region and justify its unjustifiable support of Israel. Burçe Çelik told us about the15th century coffee houses of the Ottoman Empire and the ‘Circle of Justice’, a democratic practice that allowed peasants to hold sultans to account. In case I have misrepresented their work, do seek out their scholarship for more accurate and fascinating insights. 

Most exciting for me was my own session where I argued for an instance of history repeating itself in the television show Trackers (2019, Showmax). My contention is that Trackers represents the community’s use of space in Bo-Kaap in a way that mirrors the picturesque landscape paintings of visitors to the seventeenth and eighteenth century Cape Colony. Both representations silence the violence against marginalised people as Gabeba Baderoon, whom I draw from, details of the landscape paintings in her book Regarding Muslims (2014).

This was the first time I was amongst others comparing colonial landscape representations with contemporary screen versions. I was reassured that I was not the only researcher approaching screen representations in this way. Leen Engelen was the only presenter who used still photography, rather than the moving image in her study. The landscape painting of her research is a Belgian Congolese panorama, 115 m wide and ca. 30 m high. The team she worked with took 800 photographs of the painting, then stitched these together digitally to allow for a more practical examination of the text. The resulting file is 19 GB! Leen compared the panorama with the photographs the Belgian artists had taken of the scene and revealed that the artists had also silenced colonial violence in the painting.

I am encouraged that scholars around the world are excavating the violent silences in representations.

EXPLORE TINA-LOUISE’S PUBLICATIONS:

Peer Reviewed Journal Article: PEER REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLE

2023 Nommer 37 : Power and the gaze in South African cinema | Journal of African Cinemas. 15(1): 13-35.

COMMENTARY

2022 South African TV: Always Transnational? Critical Studies in Television Online. Available: https://cstonline.net/south-african-tv-always-transnational-by-tina-louise-smith/