The Third Volume of The Johannesburg Salon is live!

Current Attractions

Volume Three features the following attractions:

Lousie Bethlehem and Ran Greenstein on Apartheid and the Israeli occupation in Palestine; Jean Comaroff on District 9; Kavita Phillip on Post-Colonial Technopolitics; Neelika Jayawardane on David Goldblatt’s photography; Christa Kuljian on Zimbabwean refugees at the Central Methodist Church;  Helen Douglas on Reading Levinas in Africa; James Sey on the Black Asylum; Tegan Bristow on Browsers’ Guideline to new Coal; Sarah Nuttall on Writing Entanglement; Achille Mbembe and Sarah Calburn on Design and the Post Apartheid City.

Download the entire Volume Three here

View The Salon Volume Two

View The Salon Volume One

A project of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC), The Salon is an intellectual, political and cultural digital magazine. It is open to scholars, writers, artists, designers, architects, activists and public intellectuals who want to shape conversation from the global South while testing their works and ideas against unanticipated modes of everyday life in an uncertain world.

The Salon blurs the lines that separate print from digital media. It combines maximum elegance and minimum ornamentation, transparency, minimalist aesthetics and ease of use.

Its platform has been designed by The Library, with funding from The Prince Claus Fund and support from the Faculty of the Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa).

The Salon’s editors are Lara Allen and Achille Mbembe.

Public Lectures in the next week

We are excited to remind you about the two upcoming public lectures, hosted by JWTC alongside our Summer Conversations programme.

Contaminated Diversity

Anna L. Tsing
Professor of Anthropology UC Santa Cruz, author of Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection

Thursday 3 February
18h00 - 20h00
WISER Seminar Room, 6th Floor
Richard Ward Building
East Campus, WITS

Transgressions, Circulations, and New Visibilities: Re-Configurations of the Public in São Paulo

Teresa Caldeira
Professor of Anthropology UC Berkeley, author of City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo

Monday 7 February
16h00 - 18h00
WISER Seminar Room, 6th Floor
Richard Ward Building
East Campus, WITS

Network - The Centre for Humanities Research of the University of the Western Cape

The Centre for Humanities Research of the University of the Western Cape, the District Six Museum, and the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust invite you to a public lecture -

The Architecture of Erasure in Jerusalem

Date 7 February 2011

District Six Museum

25A Buitenkant Street

18h00 - 20h00

Professor Saree Makdisi is a Professor of English Literature at the University of California in Los Angeles, UCLA and the author of several books on British romanticism, which is his area of expertise, and he writes on contemporary Arab politics and culture.

Widely published in his academic area, Makdisi has also written many commentaries on Palestine for publications such as the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, London Review of Books and San Francisco Chronicle. In 2008, Makdisi published his book Palestine Inside Out: Everyday Occupation. The book combines his personal experiences of daily life under occupation with an analysis of how the occupation functions as a whole. "What I discovered when I went there, for all that I knew, I still found myself shocked" he explained.

Network - AISCLI

Contemporary Sites of Chaos in the literatures and the arts of the postcolonial world

AISCLI Conference
Napoli
29-30 September 2011

Here in the ‘old world’ – in Europe, in Italy, in Naples – we seem to experience, more than at any other time in recent history, a renewed season of anomy. There is a sense of the apocalyptic in the air, a feeling of being on the brink of explosion. In other parts of the world – in still struggling post-colonies, in the borderscapes of migrant life, in the non-places of globalized economies, in proliferating war zones – chaos seems to be constitutive of existence itself.

The conference intends to explore a variety of chaotic experiences which have become the object of aesthetic intervention, not only in anglophone literatures, but also in cinema, photography, music, and the performative and visual arts of the postcolonial world.

The focus is on the contemporary: we ask how art registers, reacts to, responds, rebels against, endorses, elaborates, dissects, analyzes, understands, interprets, represents today’s sites of chaos.

A number of (not necessarily negative) declinations of the term ‘chaos’ are suggested:
Chaos as anarchic synchronicity of the contemporary
Chaos as confusion, formlessness, unpredictability
Chaos as anomy, normlessness, social and cultural alienation
Chaos as death (of the old / birth of the new?)
Chaos as emergency
Chaos as the emergent
Chaos as the post-colony / the postcolonial
Chaos as global cultural forms and modes of living
Chaos as conflict
Chaos as vulnerability
Chaos as contact zone
Chaos as liminality

Chaos as process (of artistic creation, of thinking, of change)
Chaos as revolution
Chaos as experimentation
Chaos as creation
Chaos as carnival (the carnivalesque, the subversive, the satiric)

We invite you to submit paper proposals (250-300 words) dealing with any of the above thematic inputs and from across the wide spectrum of postcolonial literatures and arts. A comparative, interdisciplinary approach is encouraged.

The deadline for submission is 30 April 2011.

Comitato scientifico:
Jane Wilkinson,
Marie-Hélène Laforest,
Silvana Carotenuto, Direttrice del Centro Studi Postcoloniali dell’Orientale di Napoli
Annalisa Oboe, Presidente AISCLI

Segreteria:
Manuela Coppola
Katherine Russo
Serena Guarracino