Sanele Ntshingana

Lecturer

Lecturer

BA (Hons) MA Rhodes

Sanele KaNtshingana works as a lecturer in the School of Languages and Literatures (African languages section) at the University of Cape Town with over five years of experience within the Higher Education sector.

His current PhD research project is titled “The political thought and African intellectual history of political authority in the southeast african region (c1838- c1918)” and it maps out how amaXhosa political life and ideas of political authority in the ‘deep’ past were discursively maneuvered and shaped by amaThwasa ooNcwadi “African intellectuals” in the vernacular press and other Black registrars in the early nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Sanele is involved in research projects and is currently a co-investigator in a British Academy-funded research project titled “Imagining the Ordinary City: Arts, Placemaking and Everyday Urban Lives.” Amongst other things, this project brings attention to literary, visual, and performance pieces that have sought to explore the usually overlooked or ‘ordinary’ cities of South Africa (Pretoria/Tshwane and Makhanda) placing them in a dialogue from which we can compare their representational strategies including how they seek to engage local, national, and foreign audiences.

Outside of ivory towers, Sanele is engaged in various kollectives which are dreaming and building a (Black)conscious, confident, bold, self-assertive, and deep-thinking generation of young people. In Makhanda, Sanele leads Makhanda Black Kollective. Among many programs that MBK runs is to re- educate young people of long traditions of African intellectual thought and activism through creative forms that center the agency and the voice of the youth. Sanele considers himself an ‘undisciplined’ young scholar who straddles History, Language, and Education, inside and outside the university. 

Selected Publications

Ntshingana, S. (forthcoming). Theorizing of ubulungisa and umthetho at the precipices of crisis and change: A thickly layered reading of justice and law in iTyala Lamawele. South African Journal on Human Rights.

Masola, A. and kaNtshingana, S. (2024). Exploring paratextual framings of the isiXhosa volumes in the African Treasury Series. In: S. Nuttall and I. Hofmeyr (eds.), Publishing from the South: A Century of Wits University Press. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

Thurman, C., Foot, L., Marx, G., Van Graan, M., Kessi, S. and kaNtshingana, S. (2024). Othello in Cape Town 2024. Journal of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, 37, pp.63–82.

Brydon, L., kaNtshingana, S. and Schupp, J. (2024). Introduction: Screen media and ‘middling cities’—questioning hierarchies, dominant narratives and negative associations. Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture, 9(3).

kaNtshingana, S. (2023). Changing theory is a necessary humanising act. Acta Academica, 55(1), pp.146–150. Book Review: Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South, edited by Dilip M. Menon.

kaNtshingana, S. (2022). S.E.K. Mqhayi: The destruction of the archive and restoration through digital affordances. Imbiza Journal for African Writing.

kaNtshingana, S. (2022). The potency of vernacular sources in illuminating the narrative of southern Africa’s deep past. In: The New History of South Africa. Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers.

Public Humanities

kaNtshingana, S. (2023). AC Jordan: A continental jewel whose legacy echoes across Africa and the diaspora. City Press. [Online]. Available at: https://www.news24.com/citypress/voices/sanele-kantshingana-ac-jordan-a-continental-jewel-whose-legacy-echoes-across-africa-and-the-diaspora-20231105

kaNtshingana, S. (2023). S.E.K. Mqhayi’s presentation. [Online]. Available at: http://emandulo.apc.uct.ac.za/cgi-bin/view/Presentations/sek-presentation-isixhosa.zip/studio-emandulo.uct.ac.za/sek-presentation-isixhosa/sek-presentation-english/index.html

kaNtshingana, S. (2021). Bheki Peterson: Pursuing radical epistemological thought with an understated erudition. Mail & Guardian. [Online]. Available at: https://mg.co.za/friday/2021-06-25-bheki-peterson-pursuing-radical-epistemological-thought-with-an-understated-erudition/