Ataya: HUMA Interdisciplinary Seminar Series
Speaker: Lebogang Mokwena, UWC, Centre for Humanities Research
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Bio: Lebogang Mokwena is a NIHSS postdoctoral fellow at UWC’s Centre for Humanities Research. Her work intersects cultural and historical sociology with a special focus on material culture and visual studies. She is currently working on her first book, provisionally titled “Fabricating Africanity: Unravelling Isishweshwe’s Visualities after Apartheid,” which presents a social history of the isishweshwe textile. She holds degrees from The New School, the University of Sussex, and the Wits University.
Topic: Notwithstanding the “material turn” as an attempt to foreground objects in everyday life, sociology is either ambivalent to or neglects objects in social theory. This article sets up a theoretical discussion to address three provocations from Les Back and Nirmal Puwar’s live methods manifesto. The first regards a multi-sensorial attentiveness, which, I argue, any consideration of textiles, their histories, and uses necessitate. I illustrate this with a discussion of the African print textiles scholarship. The second, exceeding textiles’ materiality, attends to the ideological, normative-political and, therefore, ethical concerns that research into African print textiles surfaces. Finally, woven into and as an important segment of the engagement with textiles’ methodological aliveness are the temporalities that textile research activates and through which researchers can, to use Puwar and Back’s formulation, “avoid the trap of the now”. The guiding question around which I thread this article’s argument is how we use and what we discern (and can therefore seek to explain) about the social world through object-centred inquiry. Accordingly, and as one engagement with Back and Puwar’s provocations, this article offers the notion of topographic hermeneutics to demonstrate the vibrance and analytical breadth of material cultural objects. This topographic hermeneutics attends to surfaces (including cloths themselves) and the structural conditions of textiles’ production, circulation, and uses. Topographic hermeneutics captures objects’ methodological aliveness in social scientific inquiry, enabling us to unlock textiles as forces, sites, and portals in social inquiry to grasp, with analytical dynamism, complex social relations across time and place.
How Ataya works: One presenter and their work – in exchange with the audience. Each Ataya session engages with selected work by the presenter (a text, artwork, performance, even food). The presenter introduces their work and grounds the subsequent discussion with the participants. For best engagement, we recommend participants to view the work (made available in advance on our website) before the session. More on the Ataya Series
Convenor: Dominique Somda
Lunch will be served at 12:30 SAST (GMT+2).
Register to attend: send us an email at huma@uct.ac.za
Attending online? Register to join via Zoom:
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