Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (22 juin – 2 juillet)

The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism based at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) is pleased to announce its calendar of events for 2013.

The JWTC 2013 Session
Dates
The 2013 Session of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism will take place from June 22 to July 2, 2013.

The Life of Forms
Propelled in large part by the ongoing global amalgamation of cultures under the sign of the market, forms no longer constitute the “ideal fixed structure”, the rigid handicap, the limitations or the boundaries  Simmel not so long ago thought they were. Like life itself, they have become a restless flux – structures and events, processes and assemblages at the same time.

In such a context, what has happened to Simmel’s statement according to which “life is always more life than there is room for in the form allotted by and grown out of it”? To what extent do contemporary forms mirror the neuronal organization of the brain (decentralized, flexible, pliable, highly adaptable)? If form has become its matter, where does this leave the social, the political, the aesthetic, or the subject? What prospects and possibilities does it open for democracy, freedom, the human and the non-human in our times?

To read the rationale for The Life of Forms, please click here.
For the rationale of the annual JWTC session please click here.

Programme
The programme will span ten intensive days of lectures, seminars, round tables, panels, studio sessions, exhibitions and performances. It will also include explorations of Afropolitan Johannesburg.

The Life of Forms Project Space
Parallel to the workshops, there will be a program of exhibitions, stagings and interventions held at the Goethe on Main project space in the Maboneng district, which is located in the JHB CBD.
The Life of Forms Project Space aims to develop the relationship between theory and  arts based practice. Speakers in the workshop will be invited to extend their theoretical work in the project space. Here, the concept of form will be critically developed through visual, audial, performed and spatial dimensions. The project space becomes a platform for theoretical/aesthetic model building, a laboratory for practice-based theory or a stage for concepts to be performed.
The space will function as a fluid, modular or easily reconfigured set of devices that will allow an evolving confluence of images, texts and staging’s that draw on the workshop’s themes, energy and intellectual debates.

Speakers
Speakers include: Arjun Appadurai (New York University), Jane Guyer (Johns Hopkins University), Ato Quayson (University of Toronto), Teresa Caldeira (University of California at Berkeley), Bernd Scherer (House of the Cultures of the World), Joshua Comaroff
(Lekker Design, Singapore), Ong Ker Shing (Lekker Design, Singapore), William Kentridge (Johannesburg), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmith’s College), Achille Mbembe (University of the Witwatersrand), Sue van Zyl (University of the Witwatersrand), Ntone Edjabe (Chimurenga), Neo Muyanga (composer), Louise Meintjes (Duke University), Ackbar Abbas (University of California at Irvine) and many others.

Deadline for applications
The deadline for applications is April 1, 2013. Admissions to The Workshop are announced on April 4, 2013.

The JWTC 2014 Session
Re-imagining the Non-Racial Archive
The 2014 Session of the JWTC will be organized in partnership with the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI). The theme is: Re-imagining the Non-Racial Archive.

The problem of the twentieth-century, wrote W.E.B. Dubois more than one hundred years ago, is the problem of the color line. Dubois’ century of the color line has now passed. Yet, at the dawning of the twenty-first century, racial hierarchies are still with us. New ways of imagining bodies and populations and coding differences are already under way. Old and new racial regimes are being reconfigured around genomic and gene-centered determinism.  Under such circumstances, what would the project of liberation from race and desegregation of culture and politics possibly mean?

The 2014 Session will be a mobile session. Participants will not only engage with Afropolitan Johannesburg. The 10-day programme will also take them to a selected number of small towns across the country. They will travel on buses, trains and taxis in selected locations whose significance for the struggle for racial equality in South Africa has been manifest.

Two Summer Conversations will be held in the lead up to the 2014 Session. The first will take place in November 2013 either on Gorée Island (Sénégal) or in South Africa, in one of the small towns we plan to visit during the Workshop. The 2014 Summer Conversations will be held in Sao Paulo (Brazil).

Summer Conversations 2012
The 2013 JWTC Summer Conversations will take place from  March 21  to March 23  in Hong Kong. The theme is “The Social Life of Forms”.  It is organized in partnership with the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).

Preparatory readings include Katherine Hayles (How We Became Posthuman), Peter Sloterdijk (Rules for the Human Zoo), Franz Kafka (In the Cathedral), Gilles Deleuze (The Powers of the False), Rem Koolhaas (Junk Space), Gandalsonas (X-Urbanism), Charles Baudelaire
(Loss of a Halo), Michel Foucault (Fantasia of the Library), Paul Virilio (Pure War) and Jacques Rancière.

Latin American Conversations with the JWTC
In collaboration with the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales sede Ecuador, the JWTC will hold a Symposium on Form and Informality, from 11 to 13 April in Quito, Ecuador. Funded by Mellon Foundation and initiated by Maria Cristina Cielo and Julia Hornberger, these conversations aim at further integrating Latin American and African perspectives into ongoing interdisciplinary conversations on informality and inequality in the global South.

Southern Theory | Global Humanities
Southern Theory | Global Humanities is a collaborative initiative between the JWTC and the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. The JWTC will launch an Advanced Study Group on this year’s topic in March 2013.
The Advanced Research Group will meet twice a month around the theme: The Syllabus.

Antipode and the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban South Africa
Antipode’s 4th Institute for the Geographies of Justice (IGJ) will take place in Durban, South Africa, May 27th – June 1st 2013. There will be a pre-Institute day in Johannesburg hosted by the Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism on 26 May 2013.
After Antipode’s first three successful Institutes held in Athens, Georgia (2007), Manchester, UK (2009), and again in Athens, Georgia (2011) we are delighted to announce that the 4th Institute will be held in Durban South Africa during the end of May/beginning of June 2013.  Antipode’s 4th Institute for the Geographies of Justice (IGJ) will provide an exciting opportunity to engage leading edge theoretical, methodological, and research-practice issues in the field of radical geography and social justice (both broadly defined), along with a range of associated professional and career development matters. This
international meeting will be specifically designed to meet the needs of new researchers, taking the form of an intensive, interactive workshop for 25 participants.

It will include facilitated discussion groups, debates and panels, training and skills development modules, and plenary sessions. Topics for the meeting will include: defining radical/critical geographies, models of engagement broadly/models of activist-scholarship specifically, interdisciplinary radical work, producing public geographies, locating the boundaries of « the geographies of justice, » the institutional cultures of radical geography, interdisciplinary dialogue and radical geography, how to teach radical geographies, publishing radical geographies and mapping the future of radical/critical geography.
Click here for more information.

The Johannesburg Salon
We are pleased to announce that Meghan Jones has now joined the Editorial Team of The Johannesburg Salon as a commissioning editor. Meghan holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).

Volume 6 of The Salon will go live in May 2013.
Click to read Volume 1; Volume 2;
Volume 3; Volume 4; and Volume 5

Network
WISER New Director
The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research has a new Director, Professor Sarah Nuttall. Sarah Nuttall is one of the leading cultural critics in South Africa. Her latest book is Entanglement.

William Kentridge in Conversation with Sarah Nuttall
“I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings. An art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay”, says William Kentridge in a recent interview. Kentridge’s output fluently shifts across such media as drawing, film, collage prints, sculpture, and stage sets and theatre. If his work resonates the South African experience and the city he lives in, Johannesburg, it also draws on a variety of European sources (literature, opera, early cinema). His most recent work  (The Nose, Vertical Thinking, The
Refusal of Time) is characterized by profound conceptual changes and novel ways of connecting the visual arts, cinema, the performing arts and music. In this conversation with cultural critic and Director of WISER, Sarah Nuttall, he will explore the politics of form and the forms of the political in his latest creations.

Thursday, February 21 6:00-7:30pm
WISER Seminar Room, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building,
East Campus, Wits University
Refreshments will be served

Please RSVP to Najibha.Deshmukh@wits.ac.za before noon on February 19.

Body Knowledge: Medicine and the Humanities in Conversation
WISER is launching a major program on medical humanities. A Conference to that effect will be held on 2-4 September 2013 in Johannesburg.
Abstracts of up to 500 words for papers are invited from scholars and practitioners in a variety of disciplines including the arts, literature, film, sociology, anthropology, history, medicine, philosophy, ethics, and psychology.
Papers might address, but are not limited to, the following themes; embodiment and the body as a site of knowledge; body parts in culture, history, art and literature (including organs, skin, skulls, bones, tissues and blood); metaphors and representations of health and illness; politics and power relations in medicine and health research; medical pluralism: the coexistence of indigenous pre-colonial systems of healing, their modern shifting forms, their conversations with biomedicine, and the links between these and religious practices of the body; medicine as an art: as a fusion of practical scientific knowledge,
tactics and performance; medical genres (case histories; medical memoir etc.); theoretical paradigms through which the humanities ‘reads’ biomedicine.
Deadline for the submission of abstracts is Friday, 1 March, 2013 – 13:00. Click here for further details
Queries may be directed to either Ashlee.Neser@wits.ac.za or cath@burns.org.za

Wits Interdisciplinary Seminar
Convened by Keith Breckenridge, the Faculty-wide Wits Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities takes place every Monday at 3pm. Forthcoming speakers include, among others, Deborah James (on regulating credit), Sarah Nuttall (on South African publics), Achille Mbembe (on democracy in the age of animism), Romain Bertrand (on how to write a non-Eurocentric history of Eurasian encounters),
Lucy Allais (on forgiveness and free will), Kea Gordon (on political consciousness in local idioms of power), Ashlee Neeser (on thinking through the throat), Alan Mabin (on Southern urban theory), Imran Coovadia (on Coetzee in and out of Cape Town), Ahmed Veriava (on containing the poor).

Pedagogy in the Humanities
The Wits School of Social Sciences and School of Education will host renowned  Humanities pedagogue James Arvanitakis from the University of Western Sydney. Arvanitakis will lead a series of critical discussions on the future of universities, teaching the Humanities, and large first year classrooms. All are invited to attend his discussions during 15-19 April 2012 at Wits.

Anthropology Seminars at Wits University
Curated by Hylton White, the Wits Anthropology Seminar Series runs weekly on Thursdays from 11.30am to 1pm. Forthcoming speakers include: Euclides Goncalves
(on the performance of territoriality in Mozambique); Sharad Chari (on work and class in South India); Anne-Marie Makhulu (on afterwork); Robert Thornton (on Southern African ritual lanscapes); Amy Niang (on state and migration in Moogo); Fiona Scorgie (on marriage, motherhood and respectability in Kwazulu Natal); Zaheera Jinnah (on migration and gender norms amongst Somali migrants in Johannesburg); Antonio Tomas (on the language of land in Angola).
For further information, please contact hylton.white@wits.ac.za

Goethe Institute and African Centre for Cities Public Symposium on New Imaginaries
The Goethe Institute, Johannesburg and the African Centre for Cities organize a public Symposium on New Imaginaries on February 21, 2013
at the Goethe Institute. The Symposium will explore the ways in which the power of the imagination can be harnessed in weaving a future urban fabric and how different registers of engagement across disciplines might work together in doing so.

For further information, please contact info@johannesburg.goethe.org

Exhibition: 57 Years to the Treason Trial
Point Blank Gallery presents 57 Years to the Treason Trial curated by Bettina Malcomess and Rangoato Hlasane from 16 February 2012 to 30 April 2013, at the
Drill Hall. Working with the photographic archive of the Treason Trial, courtesy of Museum Africa, the Exhibition captures the filmic nature of this event through its choice of images and layout. It includes texts from Drum Magazine. The Drill Hall is a mirror of contemporary Johannesburg: complex, contested, local, Afropolitan and global. Read more here.

Debating the Colonial Library
Organized by Point Sud (Bamako) and  the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), the Symposium on Debating the Colonial Library took place in Dakar (Senegal) from January 27 to February 2, 2013.

Africa, Reading, Humanities
A new platform, Africa, Reading, Humanities, is convened by the English Department at the University of Cape Town.
It aims to attend to concerns germane to the discipline of Literary Studies. More specifically, it intends to explore the question of what
it means to develop and perform disciplinary knowledge from an insular and inward-looking location, The Cape.
Debates include various topics such as: « Humanities here and now » (with John Higgins and Suren Pillay); « Teaching and Reading World Literature from the Cape » (with Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, Meg Samuelson, Hedley Twidle); « Beyond
Postcolonial/Post-apartheid » *(with Robert Muponde, Kelwyn Sole and Shaun Viljoen); « Africa Theorises » (with Achille Mbembe and Anthony Bogues); « The South African Book » (with Archie Dick, Peter McDonald and Sarah Nuttall), « Revising the Early Modern » (with Derrick Higginbotham, Daniel Roux and Sandra Young).

For details, please contact africareadinghumanities@gmail.com

The JWTC Team
The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) was founded in 2008 as an independent platform for inquiry into critical theory from the perspective of the South.  Support for its activities is provided by The Office of the Vice Chancellor, University of the Witwatersrand, the DVC for Academic Affairs, the DVC for Partnerships and Development, the Dean of the Faculty of the Humanities, the School of Social Sciences and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER).

The JWTC also works in partnership with the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University and the Goethe Institute in Johannesburg.