Sarah Nuttall

• University of the Witwatersrand

Penny Siopis is internationally acclaimed for her pathbreaking paintings and installations. Your History with Me is a comprehensive study of her short films, which have put her at the front ranks of contemporary artist-filmmakers. Siopis uses found footage to create short video essays that function as densely encrypted accounts of historical time a...

Penny Siopis is internationally acclaimed for her pathbreaking paintings and installations. Your History with Me is a comprehensive study of her short films, which have put her at the front ranks of contemporary artist-filmmakers. Siopis uses found footage to create short video essays that function as densely encrypted accounts of historical time a...

Review of: Louise Green, Fragments from the History of Loss: The Nature Industry and the Postcolony. AnthropoScene: The SLSA Book Series. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. 7 b&w illus. x + 193 pp. $29.95 (pb).

Conditions of pluviality and dryness are crucial to registers of extraction, abandonment, and care in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K . The analysis reads for these conditions across the looped hinterlands from the port city of Cape Town into the uplands of the Karoo. Water, specifically rain or the lack of it, shapes K’s capacity to (e...

This introduction first considers the history of the hinterland as not just any spatial distribution but one driven by and instrumental to the workings of the capitalist-colonialist-climatic assemblage. Subsequently, it contends that an interdisciplinary conceptual approach to hinterlands that straddles the humanities and social sciences allows for...

This concept note was produced for a symposium held under the banner of Critical University Studies – South Africa (CUS-SA) at the University of Johannesburg in August 2022. The opening plenary session was addressed by Profs. Premesh Lalu, Sarah Mosoetsa and Sarah Nuttall. A summary of a paper prepared for this symposium by Michael Peters on the un...

This introduction provides a wide-ranging framing for a set of essays that explores the topic “Reading for Water” in southern African literature. The introduction begins by demonstrating this method through snapshots of three seminal South African novels: Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006), A. C. Jordan’s The Wrath of the Ancestors (1980) and J. M....

Pluviality, a term I have developed in relation to heavy rainfall and flooding – its timescapes and material and textual conditions – is the focus of this analysis of Namwali Serpell’s magisterial 2019 novel, The Old Drift. Located largely in Zambia, it is nevertheless a novel of the Zambezi watershed, and of hydrocolonial and southern African regi...

World Literature is a vital part of twentieth-first century critical and comparative literary studies. As a field that engages seriously with function of literary studies in our global era, the study of World literature requires new approaches. The Cambridge History of World Literature is founded on the assumption that World Literature is not all l...

In conversation with Sarah Nuttall's earlier essay ‘Pluvial Time/Wet Form’ and drawing on Isabel Hofmeyr's concept of hydrocolonialism and the works of, among others, Julia Kristeva and Robert Macfarlane, this essay juxtaposes readings of J G Ballard's 1962 novel The Drowned World and Pitchaya Sudbanthad's 2019 novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain to offer...

At the University of Cape Town in 2016, student protesters burned works of art, torn down from their long-established positions on University walls. A large bonfire was made in front of the empty plinth that had held, until he was forcibly removed, the statue of Cecil John Rhodes. Amongst the paintings burned were portraits of patrons of the Univer...

In this article I draw together the meteorological term denoting intense rainfall – pluviality – as a conceptual category and explore its specifically literary dimensions. I draw it together with the sea as a material domain and think through rain and sea as vectors of the oceanic and of the literary ecologies that this issue seeks to explore. I co...

In this paper, we reflect on the many deaths as well as the new lives of secrecy in our political and cultural age. We consider through five rubrics (statehood, security, finance, urbanity, and selfhood) the complicated and constantly shifting scales of relation between secrecy, transparency, conspiracy, and intimacy. We explore the paradox of publ...

In drawing together aspects of South African autobiographical and fictional works with images by contemporary artists, this essay pursues the question of how the notion of surface and depth—and the visible and the hidden—is explored and experimented with. Literature's investment in symptomatic readings is placed in conversation with strategies used...

Nelson Mandela was one of the most revered figures of our time. He committed himself to a compelling political cause, suffered a long prison sentence, and led his violent and divided country to a peaceful democratic transition. His legacy, however, is not uncontested: his decision to embark on an armed struggle in the 1960s, his solitary talks with...

The essay draws on four recent artworks which have been highly controversial or visible in South Africa since 2010, in order to explore concepts of wounding and political autopsy on the one hand, and of skin surface on the other. The discussion aims to elaborate on and render increasingly complex both the wounds that won't heal, and which erupt int...

This introductory essay considers how we might forge a critical language to discuss an emerging constellation of cultural production in South Africa: that which focuses on the work of 'intimate exposure' in order to shape a public-private sphere, which in turn forges forms of citizenship unavailable, or submerged by, a history of segregation. We as...

Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid and coeditor, most recently, of Johannesburg—The Elusive Metropolis. First published in Penny Siopis: Paintings,...

On saturdays we sometimes drive across the city to buy fish. We stand at the counter and try to choose fresh fish in a land-locked city—pink salmon, gray sole, yellow kabeljou, silver red roman. Delicious fish, at least six hours from the nearest coast. After that, we're back in the car, on the road. If we take the highway around the city, we see t...

This essay attempts to track the changing shape of cultural studies in South Africa, drawing on both local and global reference points. In the first part of the essay, I account for the preoccupations of South African cultural studies from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. In the second part, I reflect on further shifts since 2000. Here I argue for...

Free Style: Youth Cultures of Consumption in Johannesburg Johannesburg is the epitome of the African metropolis. Akey aspect of the city in the post-apartheid era is “Y”, an advertisement, fashion and music-driven youth culture. “Y” appeals to the young across confines of class, education and race, breaking with the past in the adoption of an elabo...

This article considers ways of theorising the now, or the contemporary, in South Africa. It seeks a method of reading that offers unexpected and defamiliarising routes through the cultural archive. The article discusses notions of race, class and space both in a general and historical sense and, in the second part, as they relate to new literatures...

Public Culture 16.3 (2004) 430-452 Global cities, like New York, San Salvador, or Shanghai, have served as critical sites for the remixing and reassembling of racial identities. This has taken specific and concrete form in Johannesburg, where, particularly after 1994, the city has become a site for new media cultures as a wide range of radio statio...

Public Culture 16.3 (2004) 507-519 Between the University of the Witwatersrand and the inner-city neighborhood of Hillbrow (the densest square kilometer of urban space in Africa) is a giant building that emerges from rubble and ruins. To watch it rise is to see a city and a democracy heaving itself from the debris, carrying with it the physical mar...

Public Culture 16.3 (2004) 347-372 This special issue of Public Culture is, and is not, about Africa. It is, and is not, about Johannesburg. It is an exercise in writing the worldliness—or the being-in-the-world—of contemporary African life forms. To write, said Maurice Blanchot, is the same thing as to form. To a large extent, to write is to bring...

In this chapter I track the story of a literary text, the first novel written by a black woman in South Africa. This novel by Miriam Tlali was published in 1975 under the title Muriel at Metropolitan.1 Written by Tlali on a typewriter and now lodged in the archive of the National English Literary Museum (NELM) collection in Grahamstown, South Afric...

In this essay I discuss representations of reading in African literature and in particular the relationship between reading and recognition in these texts. Reading may often be about recognizing the self as known, identifiable or acknowledged by a text, as if for the first time. Certainly, recognition, or the lack of it, has dominated and generated...

This article focuses on constructions of whiteness in South African autobiographies and other narratives of the self. It attempts to understand how the category of whiteness—racial, social, political, and economic—is given meaning in this context. The essay departs from US- and British-based studies of whiteness, as well as from African studies of...

This article discusses the uses of history as a dominant structuring metaphor or interpretative frame in two Australian autobiographies by women. In both Drusilla Modjeska'sPoppy, which forms the main focus of the argument, and in Sally Morgan's earlierMy Place, this imperative can be related to women's stories having been hidden from history. But...

This article discusses the uses of history as a dominant structuring metaphor or interpretative frame in two Australian autobiographies by women. In both Drusilla Modjeska'sPoppy, which forms the main focus of the argument, and in Sally Morgan's earlierMy Place, this imperative can be related to women's stories having been hidden from history. But...

Acknowledgements. Biographical notes. Introduction. Part O ne: Defining the South 1. Paul Carter Turning the Tables - or, Grounding Post-colonialism 2. David Bunn Comparative Barbarism: Game Reserves, Sugar Plantations, and the Modernization of South African Landscape 3. Kerryn Goldsworthy The Voyage South: Writing Immigration 4. Gillian Whitlock A...

Black South African women writers in South Africa have generally written for foreign audiences and this raises interesting questions about black South African women readers, who are unlikely to be reading many of these texts. Taking this as a starting point, this article discusses interviews the author has done with black South African women reader...

David Attwell, J.M Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (University of California Press, Berkeley; David Philip, Cape Town), 1993.