Doctoral Degrees (Visual Arts)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Visual Arts) by Author "Sidogi, Pfunzo"

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    Unsettling segregation: the representation of urbanisation in black artists’ work from the 1920s to the 1990s
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-12) Sidogi, Pfunzo; Van Robbroeck, Lize; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this study I explore artistic representations of urbanisation produced by black South African artists throughout the twentieth century. Successive colonial and apartheid governments denied black people full rights to the city through, amongst other strategies, the systematic creation of black urbanisms or ‘black cities’. Commonly known as townships, ‘black cities’ were built to house reservoirs of black labour beyond the major cities and industrial hubs. This forced separation resulted in selective and ambiguous integration for the urbanised black populace. The influx of black people into the peri-urban sphere led to an unprecedented proliferation of artists recording the black experience of living and working in segregated urbanisms. Regrettably, much of the discourses on urbanisation produced by white scholars constructed black urbanisation specifically as a ‘problem’,and the diverse artistic annals showcasing urban black life were classified as ‘Township Art’, a category that could not fully capture the multi-dimensional, complex,and layered experiences of the urban black. A Social-Darwinist teleology that rural-based African traditions necessarily had to make way for urban-based western modernity informed the way black artists’ works were interpreted. Contesting these discoures,I use Afropolitanism, and the associated notions of multi-locality and New Africanism, to reframe depictions of twentieth-century urbanisation by black artists in order to redress the sweeping and essentialising binaries that characterised white writing on the phenomenon. Through a thick description of the major forces that shaped urban black life, I use the redeeming qualities of Afropolitanism to arrive at alternate interpretations of the artistic representations of black urbanisation created by black artists, which ultimately unsettle the rural-urban and tradition-modernity dichotomies.