Books by Pedzisai Maedza
Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa, 2015
This book chapter explores how the city of Cape Town is captured and imagined in cultural product... more This book chapter explores how the city of Cape Town is captured and imagined in cultural productions. It examines the representation of the city in the documentary play Burn Mukwerekwere Burn, written in 2010 by Blessing Hungwe and Rumbidzai Karize. It frames the city as an assemblage of various economic, social and linguistic nationality networks and relations. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ideas on the representation of space (1986), it examines what the city is made to symbolise and mean for Zimbabwean audiences of the play, in the aftermath of the 2008 attacks on foreign nationals. Reading Cape Town through a cultural production entails a departure from engaging with the city as a three-dimensional entity. Instead the city is engaged with as a constructed and imagined space. The chapter looks at how the foreign body is imagined and is located in relation to the host community. The play is significant in that it links the embodied experience of a migrant (who by definition is mobile) and the meanings this mobility accrues in the city (where the movement marks the mover as an ‘undesirable’ foreigner). The representations in the play give the act of movement meaning at the same time as the Cape is constructed as a place and locale for the play’s audiences in Zimbabwe.
Performing Asylum: Theatre of Testimony in South Africa. , 2017
The use of testimonies in performance is enjoying increased artistic and critical popularity and... more The use of testimonies in performance is enjoying increased artistic and critical popularity and has a long and rich tradition on South African stages. Both internationally and locally, emerging and established playwrights working on migration and refugee issues are seeking to incorporate the testimony of asylum seekers into their work. This necessitates a critical reflection of the influences that shape and structure the staging of these testimonies. This study argues that increased migration and the growing number of asylum seekers arriving on South African shores, has motivated at times violent interaction between host communities and the newcomers. These incidents have inspired a distinct trend of testimonial performances around the concept of asylum. This study uses narrative analysis to read examples of contemporary theatre of testimony plays that examine this phenomenon. It examines how playwright positioning informs the structuring of asylum testimonies on stage, in addition to contextualizing the ethical and moral complexities the playwright’s positionality places on their practice. Through three case studies, the study interrogates how playwright positioning informs notions of authorship, authenticity, truth, theatricality and ethics. Furthermore, it investigates the challenges that speaking for ‘self’ and speaking for the ‘other’ place on testimonial playwrights.
http://www.ascleiden.nl/news/performing-asylum-theatre-testimony-south-africa
Papers by Pedzisai Maedza
This chapter reflects on how indigeneity is constructed, promoted and embodied in the performing ... more This chapter reflects on how indigeneity is constructed, promoted and embodied in the performing arts at a postcolonial university. The chapter investigates the packaging of indigenous performing arts using Foucault’s concept of panopticon and Blanchard’s work on the human zoo. It uses Great Zimbabwe University (GZU) Venda and Shangaan dance troupe as a case study to interrogate the use of indigeneity as a framing device and performance structure for African indigenous dance(r)s. The chapter can be understood as an imperfect response to three rhetorical questions that an institution mandated with cultural heritage reclamation grapples with. Who creates culture? Who decides what this culture comprises of? How is culture represented? It problematizes the exclusive conflation of indigeneity with the pre-contact experience.
South African Theatre Journal
On 16 June 1976 an estimated 20,000 black students took to the streets of Soweto, South Africa in... more On 16 June 1976 an estimated 20,000 black students took to the streets of Soweto, South Africa in protest against the mandatory use of Afrikaans in all segregated schools. Apartheid police responded to the protest march with unrestrained brutal violence, firing live rounds of ammunition at the unarmed school children. This police intervention left thousands injured and 176 people dead. Using Mbongeni Ngema’s Sarafina!: The Sounds of Liberation (1987), this account problematizes the often romanticized post-apartheid portrayal of the usage of art as a tool to fight apartheid. It investigates two interrelated themes. First, it interrogates how the memory of the 1976 student protest was shaped, preserved, remembered and transmitted over space and time through performance as the show toured from apartheid South Africa to the US. Second, through a close reading of the musical this article investigates how Sarafina!’s global circulation and reception negotiated the United Nations sanctioned academic, cultural and sporting boycott imposed on South Africa in 1968, which called for a total ban on all such activities. This close reading of the tour offers a nuanced understanding of the complicated and sometimes contradictory dynamics of the total anti-apartheid cultural boycott movement and the use of art as a weapon for the struggle.
South African Theatre Journal
TDR/The Drama Review, 2019
Themba Mbuli's SOLD! integrates differently abled dancers in a performance that remembers the 190... more Themba Mbuli's SOLD! integrates differently abled dancers in a performance that remembers the 1904–08 Namibian genocide. SOLD! pays homage to four unnamed women and a young boy whose mortal remains were among the first skulls repatriated from Berlin to Windhoek in 2011, as it animates the excesses of colonial officials who obtained body parts for use in eugenics, phrenology, and other racial-hygiene sciences.
African Identities, 2019
Between 1982 and 1987 the Zimbabwean government deployed a North Korean trained military unit, th... more Between 1982 and 1987 the Zimbabwean government deployed a North Korean trained military unit, the Fifth Brigade into the Midlands and South Western regions of the country in an operation code-named Gukurahundi (the first flash floods that cleanse the riverbeds of all debris and chaff before the spring rains). By the time the unit’s operations were halted, an estimated 20,000 mostly ethnic Ndebele and Kalanga speaking civilians were dead, with many more displaced, mutilated and traumatised. This paper investigates how the memory of this operation is publicly remembered, commemorated, contested and transmitted through performance. It uses the annual public holiday ‘Unity Day’ observed on 22 December and a 2010 artistic exhibition ‘Sibathontisele’ (Lets Drip on them) by Owen Maseko as case studies to examine the contrasting and conflicting ways in which the Gukurahundi is memorialised. This account interrogates the ways in which national holidays are used by the state to shape public memory in postcolonial Zimbabwe as a cultural phenomenon and as a contemporary elegy and memorial. This is contrasted with the state’s response to counter-memory performances that contest its hegemony over public remembrance.
Popular Music and Society, 2019
In 2010 South African band Freshlyground produced a satirical music video critical of Zimbabwean ... more In 2010 South African band Freshlyground produced a satirical music video critical of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s 30-year long tyrannical rule titled “Chicken to Change.” For eight years after the song’s release, the band was barred from Zimbabwe. Using Ngugi wa Thiongo’s “enactments of power” concept and Michel Foucault’s insights on censorship, this account investigates the cross–border and esthetic censorship dynamics that prevented the band from landing and performing in Zimbabwe. The paper argues that the Zimbabwean state used its national borders and ports of entry as a music censorship mechanism and provides a nuanced appreciation of performance censorship in contemporary postcolonial Zimbabwe.
South African Theatre Journal (SATJ), 2019
On 16 June 1976 an estimated 20,000 black students took to the streets of Soweto, South Africa in... more On 16 June 1976 an estimated 20,000 black students took to the streets of Soweto, South Africa in protest against the mandatory use of Afrikaans in all segregated schools. Apartheid police responded to the protest march with unrestrained brutal violence, firing live rounds of ammunition at the unarmed school children. This police intervention left thousands injured and 176 people dead. Using Mbongeni Ngema’s Sarafina!: The Sounds of Liberation (1987), this account problematizes the often romanticized post-apartheid portrayal of the usage of art as a tool to fight apartheid. It investigates two interrelated themes. First, it interrogates how the memory of the 1976 student protest was shaped, preserved, remembered and transmitted over space and time through performance as the show toured from apartheid South Africa to the US. Second, through a close reading of the musical this article investigates how Sarafina!’s global circulation and reception negotiated the United Nations sanctioned academic, cultural and sporting boycott imposed on South Africa in 1968, which called for a total ban on all such activities. This close reading of the tour offers a nuanced understanding of the complicated and sometimes contradictory dynamics of the total anti-apartheid cultural boycott movement and the use of art as a weapon for the struggle.
African Studies Centre, University of Leiden, 2015
South African Theatre Journal (SATJ), 2018
This article analyses Gina Shmukler’s verbatim play The Line (2012) and argues for another look a... more This article analyses Gina Shmukler’s verbatim play The Line (2012) and argues for another look at the testimonies captured from witnesses, survivors and perpetrators
of the violence targeting foreign and perceived as foreign persons in South Africa that escalated in 2008 and in 2015. It is a narrative analysis of the play that uses Gregory H. Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide model and the United Nations Convention on Genocide to investigate the theatrical representation of the violence. This account argues that the events that are captured in the play and
that inspired it should be reconsidered as acts of genocide. In the absence of an official acknowledgement of the events as genocide, performances like The Line and other ‘xenophobia’ plays entomb what Winston Churchill called ‘a crime without a name’ (1965). The article argues that performance stands as the public yet ephemeral and embodied commemoration of the trauma of genocide
violence, filling the void of the absent murals and museums that are often a built-in commemoration of past and contemporary trauma.
PhiN-Beiheft, 2017
This paper investigates the memory of colonial mass violence and atrocities as articulated, prese... more This paper investigates the memory of colonial mass violence and atrocities as articulated, preserved and transmitted through the performance Exhibit B by Brett Bailey. Particular focus is placed on the collusion of racism and colonial sciences towards African women's bodies. It traces the systematic use of sexual violence and the institutionalisation of rape during and in the aftermath of the 1904 to 1908 German aggression in present day Namibia. This sexual aggression on prisoners of war and colonial subjects in and outside of concentration camps found expression and was echoed in racist sciences such as eugenics and racial hygiene. People like Eugen Fischer gained recognition and fame for notorious studies on 'racial hygiene', through forced sterilisation experiments on racially mixed people in Namibia and Germany, the majority of whom were born as a result of these institutional rapes. Exhibit B is a performance exhibition that deploys performance to animate genocide memory and photographs from the colonial ethnographic archive. I use Exhibit B as a case study to investigate how performance enacts this memory to transmit knowledge about the past in response to the 'social amnesia' accompanying unacknowledged gen-ocides. I examine the deployment of performance in animating archival texts to create ephemeral images. In doing so, I explore how the images tell (hi)stories through performance as well as the contemporary political usage and reception of images. I make the case that performance envelops time and creates an alternate historiographic repository for gendered genocide memory. I propose that performance preserves time and history. Through its performativity, performance serves as an event preservative and embalms memory.
Social Dynamics , 2017
This account departs from the focus and consensus on the centrality of song in pungwes for mass m... more This account departs from the focus and consensus on the centrality of song in pungwes for mass mobilisation during Zimbabwe’s war for independence. It traces the less commented upon dystopian continuities between the usage of pungwe during the liberation war and the gukurahundi (1982–1987). It suggests that music is a
mnemonic device through which experience is narrated, facilitating the storage, transfer and remembering of memory. It uses the song “Mai VaDhikondo” to position gukurahundi pungwes as sites of state-sanctioned mass violence against ethnic minorities. The song’s reception and symbolism has morphed from the 1980s when
it was composed for and sang by the Fifth Brigade and introduced to gukurahundi victims, to being recorded for public broadcast and becoming a hit with people who were oblivious and or indifferent to its gukurahundi usage in the mid-1990s, to the spirited 2012 campaign that stopped its remixing and rebroadcasting. The 2012 uproar lifted the veil of silence that shrouded public discussion about the Fifth Brigade’s gukurahundi conduct. The history and reception of the song curates the memory of the gukurahundi. As a song that remains from the killing fields, “Mai VaDhikondo” embalms time and history as an
unintended and undesignated requiem.
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Books by Pedzisai Maedza
http://www.ascleiden.nl/news/performing-asylum-theatre-testimony-south-africa
Papers by Pedzisai Maedza
of the violence targeting foreign and perceived as foreign persons in South Africa that escalated in 2008 and in 2015. It is a narrative analysis of the play that uses Gregory H. Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide model and the United Nations Convention on Genocide to investigate the theatrical representation of the violence. This account argues that the events that are captured in the play and
that inspired it should be reconsidered as acts of genocide. In the absence of an official acknowledgement of the events as genocide, performances like The Line and other ‘xenophobia’ plays entomb what Winston Churchill called ‘a crime without a name’ (1965). The article argues that performance stands as the public yet ephemeral and embodied commemoration of the trauma of genocide
violence, filling the void of the absent murals and museums that are often a built-in commemoration of past and contemporary trauma.
mnemonic device through which experience is narrated, facilitating the storage, transfer and remembering of memory. It uses the song “Mai VaDhikondo” to position gukurahundi pungwes as sites of state-sanctioned mass violence against ethnic minorities. The song’s reception and symbolism has morphed from the 1980s when
it was composed for and sang by the Fifth Brigade and introduced to gukurahundi victims, to being recorded for public broadcast and becoming a hit with people who were oblivious and or indifferent to its gukurahundi usage in the mid-1990s, to the spirited 2012 campaign that stopped its remixing and rebroadcasting. The 2012 uproar lifted the veil of silence that shrouded public discussion about the Fifth Brigade’s gukurahundi conduct. The history and reception of the song curates the memory of the gukurahundi. As a song that remains from the killing fields, “Mai VaDhikondo” embalms time and history as an
unintended and undesignated requiem.
http://www.ascleiden.nl/news/performing-asylum-theatre-testimony-south-africa
of the violence targeting foreign and perceived as foreign persons in South Africa that escalated in 2008 and in 2015. It is a narrative analysis of the play that uses Gregory H. Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide model and the United Nations Convention on Genocide to investigate the theatrical representation of the violence. This account argues that the events that are captured in the play and
that inspired it should be reconsidered as acts of genocide. In the absence of an official acknowledgement of the events as genocide, performances like The Line and other ‘xenophobia’ plays entomb what Winston Churchill called ‘a crime without a name’ (1965). The article argues that performance stands as the public yet ephemeral and embodied commemoration of the trauma of genocide
violence, filling the void of the absent murals and museums that are often a built-in commemoration of past and contemporary trauma.
mnemonic device through which experience is narrated, facilitating the storage, transfer and remembering of memory. It uses the song “Mai VaDhikondo” to position gukurahundi pungwes as sites of state-sanctioned mass violence against ethnic minorities. The song’s reception and symbolism has morphed from the 1980s when
it was composed for and sang by the Fifth Brigade and introduced to gukurahundi victims, to being recorded for public broadcast and becoming a hit with people who were oblivious and or indifferent to its gukurahundi usage in the mid-1990s, to the spirited 2012 campaign that stopped its remixing and rebroadcasting. The 2012 uproar lifted the veil of silence that shrouded public discussion about the Fifth Brigade’s gukurahundi conduct. The history and reception of the song curates the memory of the gukurahundi. As a song that remains from the killing fields, “Mai VaDhikondo” embalms time and history as an
unintended and undesignated requiem.