Browsing by Author "Mashange, Bongani Tendai Percy"

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    An Afropolitan Quest: A Contemporary Jeweller’s Inquiry into Identity and Identification in Post-Colonial Africa
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-12) Mashange, Bongani Tendai Percy; Van Robbroeck, Lize; Terreblanche, Carine; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
    In this project, I engage my personal experiences as a cosmopolitan African subject belonging to multiple worlds. My body of work is in celebration of my cultural identity as complex and multifarious. I utilise a visual semiotics that contests fixed notions of cultural identity, that offer a means of expressing a need for recognition, and negotiate the parameters of the intersectionality of cultural and political citizenship. I use my art jewellery as a tool to question the concept of belonging in contemporary Africa. To examine my political subjectivity, I investigate contemporary writings on national and cultural identity politics. This research project not only adds to what is known and understood about identity and identification in postcolonial Africa, but it offers individuals who have struggled with racism, xenophobia, tribalism or any form of alienation, due to complex or hybrid identities, a different way of understanding and engaging their own identity as positive, thereby offering strategies to escape essentialist perceptions of identity and culture.