The Great Texts/Big Questions lecture series, launched in 2010, aims to engender an exchange of ideas and opinion structured around a specific text or piece of work that is of interest or importance to the public. The ICA has invited a wide range of prominent academics, artists and writers to present at the Great Texts lecture series over the years – William Kentridge, Gayatri Spivak, Sisonke Msimang and Achille Mbembe are just a few.
Read more about individual lectures in the drop down menus below.
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2023
The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) is proud to announce the launch of the 2023 Great Texts/Big Questions Lecture Series on Tuesday 16 May at 5.30 pm at the Little Theatre on Hiddingh Campus.
In late 2022, The Institute for Humanities in Africa at UCT (HUMA) convened researchers and thinkers around the theme of ‘epistemic disobedience’ or disobedient ways of knowing, aimed at grounding critical thinking and engagement with the sociology of ideas, philosophy and historical development of human, Southern, marginalised and African/Africa centred epistemologies.
Through the Great Texts/Big Questions Public Lecture Series, the ICA wishes to extend the thinking around the theme of disobedience. Drawing on work by writers of novels, plays, performances, memoirs and academic texts who theorise and practice various modes of disobedience and resistance, the public lecture series explores the grammar and texture of disobedience. Disobedience is reflected on as a refusal to engage conventional systems, epistemologies and practices of being — that which scholar Saidiya Hartman contemplates as waywardness; “related to the family of words: errant, fugitive, recalcitrant, anarchic, wilful, reckless, troublesome, riotous, tumultuous, rebellious and wild.” In this sense, disobedience reflects an ability to inhabit the world in ways inimical to those deemed proper and respectable.
Through the work of award-winning scholars, historians, poets, academics and artists, the 2023 Great Texts/Big Questions will tease out different ways of thinking "disobedience". The roster features artists Chuma Sopotela and Qondiswa James in conversation with director of the ICA Jay Pather, interdisciplinary theatre practitioner Tamara Guhrs, writer and editor Stacy Hardy, authors Zikhona Valela and Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, historians Dr Joel Cabrita and Dr Kwasi Konadu and writer and critic Dr Wamuwi Mbao.
Programme: Hiddingh, Hiddingh Campus at 17h30.
Tue 16th May, Jay Pather, Chuma Sopotela and Qondiswa James.
The Little Theatre, Hiddingh Campus at 17h30.
Thurs 18th May, Tamara Guhrs and Stacy Hardy.
Tues 23rd May, Zikhona Valela.
Tue 30th May, Dr Wamuwi Mbao.
16th till 19th May, Installation at The Little Theatre Foyer, “The Disobedient Eye”.
Online, Zoom at 17h30.>
Tues 6th June, Dr Joel Cabrita.
Thurs 8th June, Dr Kwasi Konadu.
Tues 13th June, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah.
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2019
Imagining Futures
The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) launches its 2019 Great Texts/Big Questions lecture series in February, with a line-up that features acclaimed and award-winning writers, artists, academics and filmmakers. The theme underpinning the upcoming series is drawn in part from Kodwo Eshun’s essay, ‘Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,’ in which he writes that ‘it is clear that power now operates predictively as much as retrospectively.’ The present, Eshun argues, is saturated with articulations of the future commissioned by various powerful actors, ‘that are primarily concerned with making futures safe for the market.’
Departing from this standpoint, the intention for the upcoming Great Texts series is to offer talks that intervene in the production and distribution of these futures. The work of imagining futures, Eshun says, ‘constitutes a chronopolitical act’ – a radical attempt to re-engineer the present.
26 February: Nelson Maldonado-Torres
28 February: Masande Ntshanga, Mohale Mashigo & Lauren Beukes
7 March: Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi & Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum
14 March:Dr Ebrahim Harvey
20 March: Nadine Cloete
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2018
APRIL-MAY | Things Unfinished
The theme underpinning this Great Texts series is drawn from Achille Mbembe’s foreword to Fiona Forde’s An Inconvenient Youth: Julius Malema & the ‘New’ ANC in which he writes: ‘[South Africa] is still caught … between things that are no longer and things that are not yet.’ The talks comprising the series will explore South Africa’s state of in-betweenness, as evoked in Mbembe’s words, from the vantage point of things unfinished, things unwritten – an exploration of mutability as opposed to certainty from academic, historical, poetic, musical, artistic and literary points of view. The series, then, is also an investigation of becoming – what and where we are as a country, and how we might become differently.
11 April: Toni Stuart | Listening for Krotoa-Eva: Re-imagining historical narratives as an act of healing
20 April: Siyabonga Mthembu & Itai Hakim | Fuccboi
25 April: Claire Robertson | For the Time, Being
2 May: Kopano Ratele | I Love You, I Wish To Hurt You
9 May: Stacy Hardy | My Body is Eating my Body
16 May: Mishka Hoosen | Eros and undoing: language, trauma, and love in transformation
23 May: Sisonke Msimang | ‘Expressing the fine line’: Reflections on Winnie Madikizela Mandela and her husband
AUGUST | Archives of Black Womxnhood
The second installment of the 2018 Great Texts/Big Questions lecture series looks at archives of black womxnhood as inspired by the life of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. In the wake of her recent death, and the readings, mis-readings and counter-readings that have been made about her life, this series is interested how the voices of womxn in history – particularly black womxn – might be uncovered and reclaimed in complex ways.
1 August: Rioters in Session
8 August: Milisuthando Bongela | Wakrazulwa: After Naming, What Follows?
15 August: Panashe Chigumadzi | 'Big' and 'Little' Women Transgressing History: Black Women and Biomythography
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2017
2 March: Ngugi wa Thiong'o
8 March: Andrew Hennlich | Touched by an Angel: The Camp, History and Messianic Time in Athi-Patra Ruga's ‘Future White Women of Azania’
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission series
The focus of this Great Texts/Big Questions series is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The ICA presents 5 lectures that reflect on South Africa’s TRC at the inception of our new democracy – its vision, successes, failures, public perception of the Commission then and now – as a foregrounding to a discussion around UCT’s own TRC process.
14 March: Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela | The Cry of Nomonde Calata: What is Missing in the Discourse of Reconciliation?
22 March: Pippa Green | History for the Future: The Resonance of the TRC Today
29 March: Lwandile Fikeni | Like a Pistol Shot in the Middle of the Concert
12 April: Monageng 'Vice' Motshabi | When Victim Plays Victim and the Perpetrator Goes for the Kill…
25 April: Nomfundo Walaza
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2016
15 March: Masande Ntshanga | Iron Galaxy
22 March: Mark Fleishman Jennie Reznek | I Turned Away And She Was Gone
24 March: Jonny Steinberg | Why is Murder not a Crime in South Africa? An answer to an uncomfortable question asked in Hargeisa, Somaliland
20 May: Zanele Muholi | Somnyama Ngonyama
9 June: Gerald Machona & Pak Ndjamena | Influx
22 July: Gayatri Spivak | Still hoping for a revolution
2 August: Sindiwe Magona | The Writer and Her Times
4 August: Robert Bernasconi | Why Do We Think About Racism As We Do?
11 August: Jyoti Mistry & Jacki McInnes | When Tomorrow Comes
16 August: Grace A. Musila | A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder
20 August: MAMAZA | Eifo Efi
22 August: Nelson Maldonado-Torres | Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality
23 August: Imraan Coovadia | Nelson Mandela and the Arts
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2015
29 April: Jyoti Mistry | Structural possibilities and Narrative forms
13 August: Andrew Hennlich | Negotiating the absurd: migration and citizenship in ‘The Nose’
1 October: Ruth Sack & Lisa Espi | Picture Perfect: A social history of hand-coloured photographic portraiture in 20th century South Africa
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2014
16 April: Nadia Davids | Writing and Performing Cape Town
30 April: Edgar Pieterse
19 May: Mark Gevisser | Lost and Found in Johannesburg
31 July: Clayton Campbell | Words We Have Learned Since 9/11
18 September: Fiona Leonard | The Chicken Thief
2 October: Rustom Bharucha| The Aftermath: Reflections on Terror and Performance
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2013
9 April: Peter D. McDonald | ‘The Space Between’: Ways of Looking at the Art of Xu Bing
16 April: Mike van Graan in conversation with Brent Meersman | What it means to be a playwright in South Africa in the 21st Century
23 April: Virginia MacKenny | Waymarker – A Painter’s Progress with reflections on A Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela (c1139)
9 May: Jane Taylor | After After Cardenio
16 May: Zen Marie & Andrew Lamprecht | What do they of cricket know, who only cricket know?
29 May: Nicholas Mirzoeff | Freedom and the Global South: The Legacy of ‘Black Reconstruction’
26 September: Dorothy Driver | From Man to Man
3 October: Michael Godby | Maesta: Mediaeval, Modern, Marvellous