tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/under-the-influence-31577/articlesUnder the influence – The Conversation2016-09-22T17:10:29Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/658272016-09-22T17:10:29Z2016-09-22T17:10:29ZUnder the influence of … working class rocker Bruce Springsteen<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138828/original/image-20160922-22521-1110qpm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bruce Springsteen is not just a musician with an extraordinary body of work. He's also a born performer.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sony Music</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our regular series, “Under the influence”, we ask experts to share what they believe are the most influential works of art or artists in their field. Bruce Springsteen will soon release his <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/books/review/bruce-springsteen-born-to-run-richard-ford.html?_r=0">long-awaited autobiography</a>. Here, academic Richard Pithouse, who has also worked as a music critic, explains why he finds Springsteen, the progressive musician known to his fans as The Boss, a hugely influential figure in rock music.</em></p>
<p>Bruce Springsteen was <a href="http://ultimateclassicrock.com/bruce-springsteen-auditioned-for-columbia-records-40-years-ago-this-month/">signed</a> by Columbia Records at the age of 24. He was <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/artists/bruce-springsteen/biography">born</a> into a Catholic working class New Jersey family living in the shadow of a depressive and violent <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/born-to-run-bruce-springsteens-long-awaited-memoir/2016/09/20/b1f0a52a-7e7c-11e6-8d13-d7c704ef9fd9_story.html">father</a>.</p>
<p>As a boy it was television that offered a window into a wider world. In 1956, at the age of nine, seeing <a href="http://www.cmt.ca/artist/bruce-springsteen">Elvis Presley</a> perform for the first time, on The Ed Sullivan Show, sent a jolt of electric excitement into his body. The following year his mother took a loan to buy him his first guitar. A few years later watching John Ford’s film version of John Steinbeck’s novel <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-grapes-of-wrath-1940">“Grapes of Wrath”</a> opened him to the political possibilities of art, and began a life long connection to the history of popular American radicalism. </p>
<p>By the time Springsteen was signed to Columbia he was a veteran of the music scene in the bars along the Jersey Shore. Since he was in high school he had worked on his craft with extraordinary dedication. At 24 he could weave blues, rock, soul, pop and R'n'B together in a way that commanded critical and popular attention.</p>
<p>His first two albums – “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/greetings-from-asbury-park-nj-mw0000195808">Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.</a>” (1973) and “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/the-wild-the-innocent-the-e-street-shuffle-mw0000195809">The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle</a>” (1973) – both with a folk feel with shades of <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/bob-dylan-mn0000066915">Bob Dylan</a> and <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/van-morrison-mn0000307461">Van Morrison</a>, won critical respect but didn’t attain commercial success. Springsteen and his band spent more than a year in the studio working on the third album. It was an exhausting struggle to try and translate the sounds that he could hear in his head onto the record. It was a make or break situation.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IxuThNgl3YA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Springsteen performing ‘Born to run’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Why was Springsteen influential?</h2>
<p>When “<a href="http://ultimateclassicrock.com/bruce-springsteen-born-to-run/">Born to Run</a>” was released in 1975 it was immediately recognised as a major event in the history of rock. It’s rushing wall of sound, and lyrics that presented everyday working class life in dramatic terms, were explosive. This time extraordinary critical acclaim was matched with real commercial success. In the coming years Springsteen released three more albums that each took an instant and enduring place in the rock pantheon – <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/darkness-on-the-edge-of-town-mw0000191913">“Darkness on the Edge of Town”</a> (1978), “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/the-river-mw0000191949">The River</a>” (1980) and “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/nebraska-mw0000650804">Nebraska</a>” (1982).</p>
<p>In 1984 “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/born-in-the-usa-mw0000191830">Born in the USA</a>”, his most accessible record so far, became a massive commercial success. It was the second or third <a href="http://rateyourmusic.com/list/abyss89/the_100_biggest_selling_albums_of_the_80s__usa_/">best selling album</a> (depending on who you ask) of the ‘80s after Michael Jackson’s “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/thriller-mw0000056882">Thriller</a>”.</p>
<p>After the extraordinary success of “Born in the USA”, the last of a set of albums often featuring songs about young men out on the street or on the road – and in flight from teachers, fathers, bosses and judges – Springsteen released three albums - “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/tunnel-of-love-mw0000193300">Tunnel of Love</a>” (1987), “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/human-touch-mw0000265071">Human Touch</a>” (1992) and “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/lucky-town-mw0000275900">Lucky Town</a>” (1992) – that often featured songs scripted around older characters, husbands and fathers. </p>
<p>At the time this work wasn’t always as well received as the previous four or five albums that had come to be considered as his major contribution to rock. But many of these songs have endured and, over the years, critical assessment has steadily become more generous.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5ayi81QMuak?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer of John Ford’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1995 he recorded a stark and critically celebrated solo acoustic album, “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/the-ghost-of-tom-joad-mw0000181768">The Ghost of Tom Joad</a>”, that reprised the themes in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/15/robert-mcrum-100-best-novels-observer-steinbeck-grapes-wrath">“The Grapes of Wrath”</a>, the Steinbeck novel that Springsteen had first encountered via John Ford’s cinematic adaption. It’s an undeniably great record that began a period of more explicit political commitment in Springsteen’s work in the set of albums to come. </p>
<p>This political commitment was most directly tied to the tradition of popular American radicalism in 2006 in “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/we-shall-overcome-the-seeger-sessions-mw0000722023">We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions</a>”, a collection of popular radical songs played with loose-limbed joy. The set of more explicitly political albums was interrupted with a couple of more lighthearted offerings but, in 2012 in “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/wrecking-ball-mw0002302848">Wrecking Ball</a>”, a well honed response to the financial crisis, Springsteen offered his most <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/dailynews/opinion/bruce-springsteens-call-to-battle-1254472">direct political statement</a> ever. It’s a damn fine record.</p>
<h2>Why is he still influential?</h2>
<p>Springsteen is not just a musician with an extraordinary body of work – including an abundance of individual songs recorded for soundtracks and other projects, as well as large and growing body of outtakes and live recordings. He is also a remarkably generous performer – playing for up to four hours and often happy to take <a href="http://www.thinkdigital.net/blog/td-blog/the-5-marketing-lessons-i-learned-from-bruce-springsteen">requests from the audience</a>. He usually plays a song, generally with a <a href="http://hollowverse.com/bruce-springsteen/">political bent</a>, from or <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/q-a-bruce-springsteen-on-touring-europe-the-e-street-band-and-a-half-century-of-rock-20130620">relating to the country</a> where he is performing. There is a sense of an artist that has a genuine respect for his audience.</p>
<h2>Why is Springsteen still relevant?</h2>
<p>Since at least 1984, when he made a large anonymous <a href="http://www.uncut.co.uk/news/bruce-springsteen-lifted-the-striking-miners-spirits-21844">donation</a> to striking miners in England and Wales, Springsteen has also offered consistent support to poor and working class people taking direct action to challenge the systems that sustain oppressive social relations. In recent years he has begun to speak about his longstanding battles with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/sep/07/bruce-springsteen-depression-crushed-born-to-run">depression</a>.</p>
<p>The really great figures in popular music have often burnt bright and died young. When musicians who found themselves in the pantheon of the great at a young age have continued composing and performing into middle age and beyond they have often seemed to become caricatures of themselves. But Springsteen has been able to sing about the school, the factory, the court, racing in the street, friendship, marriage, fatherhood and politics with a consistent integrity.</p>
<h2>Me and Bruce</h2>
<p>Like millions of others I first heard Springsteen in 1984. I was 13 when “Born in the USA” became a global sensation and I heard “Dancing in the Dark”, the first of seven singles off the album. From there I worked backwards, starting with “Born to Run”. I have listened to every new album since. I remember with the bright clarity that comes with the experience of art as event the thrilling commitment to life that rushed off the record the first time I dropped the needle on “Born to Run”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/129kuDCQtHs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">One of Springsteen’s greatest hits, ‘Dancing in the dark’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Today my wife is most likely to ask me to put on Springsteen – perhaps something like his 1990’s Christic Institute <a href="http://brucespringsteen.net/news/2016/the-christic-shows">shows</a>, which were one-off acoustic sets in <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22055-the-christic-shows-november-16-17-1990/">support </a> of a public interest law firm – while she’s cooking, I’m being her sous chef and our son is telling us about his day. My boy is now quite partial to Irish punk-rockers <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-pogues-mn0000489876">The Pogues</a> but the first song he ever liked was “High Hopes”, off Springsteen’s 2014 <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/high-hopes-mw0002603277">album</a> with the same name. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rOPDhoZH91g?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Springsteen’s title track from ‘High Hopes’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When we’re driving from the university town of Grahamstown to Durban on South Africa’s east coast where our families live, we generally leave early, around three in the morning. I might listen to something like <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/nina-simone-mn0000411761">Nina Simone</a>, <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/philip-tabane-mn0001419119">Philip Tabane</a>, <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/lee-scratch-perry-mn0000785380/">Lee Perry</a> or <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2016-09-16-00-new-documentary-out-on-iconic-springs-band-the-radio-rats">The Radio Rats</a> when my wife and son are asleep. But as they start to wake up it’s just a matter of time before we turn to Springsteen to get us through the ten or eleven hours on the road. </p>
<p>My phone has space for just over 3 000 songs. Each one is very carefully chosen. With just over 300 songs by Springsteen he clocks in at around 10% of the mobile music collection that’s always with me in the banality of airports, doctors’ waiting rooms and supermarkets. It’s been more than 30 years and Springsteen is still a part of everyday life, still bringing meaning and passion into the now.</p>
<p>Springsteen played tremendously successful, and typically generous, shows in <a href="http://www.theconmag.co.za/2014/01/31/1988-bruce-springsteen-in-harare/">Harare</a> in 1988, and Cape Town and <a href="http://www.theconmag.co.za/2014/02/11/bruce-springsteen-rocks-johannesburg/">Johannesburg</a> in 2014. His <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/books/review/bruce-springsteen-born-to-run-richard-ford.html">autobiography</a>, “Born to Run”, will be a significant publishing event in this part of the world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65827/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Pithouse does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It is more than just his music that has made Bruce Springsteen one of the world’s most influential rock stars. His progressive politics has made him the voice for many people around the world.Richard Pithouse, Associate Professor in Politics, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/650112016-09-07T19:20:07Z2016-09-07T19:20:07ZUnder the influence of … Dumile Feni’s ‘African Guernica’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136886/original/image-20160907-16611-16gemxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dumile Feni's 'African Guernica' - charcoal on paper.</span> </figcaption></figure><p><em>In our regular series, “Under the influence”, we ask experts to share what they believe are the most influential works of art in their field. Here, artist/academic Sharlene Khan explains why she finds South African artist Dumile Feni’s “African Guernica” (ca 1967) hugely influential.</em></p>
<h2>My relationship with the work</h2>
<p>Standing in front of South African visual artist <a href="http://www.revisions.co.za/biographies/dumile-feni/#.V8_3Qfl97IU">Dumile Feni</a>’s “<a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/dumile-feni-biography-sophia-reuss">African Guernica</a>” when I was 19 years old at the University of Fort Hare Gallery in 1996 felt like something between hero-worship and a pilgrimage. At high school, Feni was one of my “favourite” artists, in the way one speaks of favourites in one’s youth. </p>
<p>I loved seemingly tortured “expressionistic” artists like <a href="http://www.artble.com/artists/honore_daumier">Honoré Daumier</a>, <a href="http://www.artble.com/artists/vincent_van_gogh">Vincent Van Gogh</a>, <a href="http://www.franciscogoya.com/">Francisco Goya</a>, <a href="http://honolulumuseum.org/art/exhibitions/15899-k_kollwitz/">Käthe Kollwitz</a>, <a href="http://www.revisions.co.za/biographies/cyprian-shilakoe/#.V8_7sPl97IU">Cyprien Shilakoe</a> and Feni. They seemed to understand the depth of human suffering. Their commentary undercut politics to question the very soul of human beings. </p>
<p>“African Guernica” – often spoken in relation to Spaniard Pablo Picasso’s equally haunting work <a href="http://www.pablopicasso.org/guernica.jsp">commentary</a> on the plight of war in his country – surpassed this for me.</p>
<h2>Why it is/was influential</h2>
<p>In recent years, the <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern">Tate Modern Gallery</a> in London has a room with the two massive pieces of Leon Golub’s <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/golub-vietnam-ii-t13702">“Vietnam II”</a> (1973) and Dia al-Azzawi’s <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/al-azzawi-sabra-and-shatila-massacre-t14116">“Sabra and Shatila Massacre”</a> (1983). Both pieces, like Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937), deal with the trauma and devastation of conflict and war in very different contexts. Golub’s concerns the American invasion of Vietnam and Azzawi’s the murder of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in Lebanon. </p>
<p>Looking at these works, I often thought about how Feni’s work was part of the dialogue of political unrest and human suffering on display. But while Golub, Azzawi and Picasso’s works all communicate feelings of chaos, conflict and trauma, Feni’s work has always stood out for the feeling of insanity that he visualises metaphorically.</p>
<p>In Feni’s painting we see a scene dominated by various animal and pseudo-human figures. A double-headed cow turns its back on us while it suckles a child at its teats. A grotesque naked squealing human figure, head a-kilter, seems to be splitting from itself with a third leg. Two groping figures seem to see each other and are alarmed. Another strange-armed figure is seated at a table as if awaiting a meal, while he seems to be begging at the same time. Yet another of these figures seems to be the harbinger of doom – perhaps one of the four biblical horsemen except his steed seems to be more of a comical cow. </p>
<p>Other animals (cows, ducks, cat, fowl) roam the landscape. These figures are stark white against a darkened background which contains repetitions of this maddened scene (as well as wandering figures). It is a visualisation perhaps of the seven deadly biblical sins, except there is no god to judge or save. Can this abyss be likened to our unconscious, the residual in which we seem to be a chaotic folk, a scene in which rational actions are furthered into the insane? </p>
<p>Human beings make art. We reason. We have evolved beyond the basic needs of survival. But in Feni’s “African Guernica” we see exactly the tensions of an artist commenting on the insanity of reason which results in the oppression of one human being by another. </p>
<p>It was done in 1967 when the world was contesting race, gender, sexuality and neo-colonialisms. One assumes that Feni is commenting on colonial racism that by this time has become institutionalised as <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/apartheid-and-reactions-it">apartheid</a> in South Africa. European colonial-modernist racist propaganda functioned on the rationalisation that certain groups of human beings were lower down the evolutionary chain. It operated on the “fact” of these groups’ proximity to animals, that could therefore be regarded as animals, as devoid of human thinking and feeling. </p>
<h2>Almost-but-not-right</h2>
<p>Primitives were almost-but-not quite, almost-but-not-white, almost-but-not-right. Postcolonial theorist <a href="https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/mimicry.html">Homi K Bhabha</a> reminds us that the slippage of this “almost-but-not-quiteness” was not merely justification that allowed the denigration and economic exploitation of certain bodies. But that it was a desire, an imagination that allowed a distinction between a higher order and the lower order, gave a group of people’s its idea of itself through a “not-quiteness” of the Other. </p>
<p>This was a cultural supremacy that could enslave men and women and treat them as animals. It could create complex systems of colonial order across the globe in order to claim and access natural resources, including bodies. This supremacy could systematically control, segregate and annihilate millions of people. </p>
<p>It is not just the heinousness of the act of war and the resultant trauma that is atrocious for Feni living in a legislated system of human degradation. It is also the very mindsets and societal values that lead to a warped society where we no longer can separate human from animals. A society where animals may seem more humane than the folks they are meant to serve.</p>
<p>The stark whitened figures which are visually disjunctive with their background should read as “positive” images – white against black. And yet one wonders if they are rather voids, an outline of a thing that has become distorted in its “thing-ness”? </p>
<p>And what to say of the darkened figures in the abyss? Are they the colonised man that repeats at a distance actions which are not his own as psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon eulogises in “<a href="http://abahlali.org/files/__Black_Skin__White_Masks__Pluto_Classics_.pdf">Black Skin, White Masks</a>”?</p>
<h2>Why it is still relevant</h2>
<p>In a darkened Rhodes University Theatre in July 2016 a <a href="https://www.nationalartsfestival.co.za/events/animal-farm/">new staging</a> of “<a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100011h.html">Animal Farm</a>” directed by Neil Coppen, features a cast of six young black South African women (Mpume Mthombeni, Tshego Khutoane, MoMo Matsunyane, Mandisa Nduana, Khutjo Bakunzi-Green and Zesuliwe Hadebe). <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/orwell_george.shtml">George Orwell</a>’s 1945 story has become a classic, prophetic of the manner in which communist ideals devolve into capitalistic nightmares. The cast is utterly brilliant in their multiple roles – in the manner in which their bodies enact the animal characters and slide into present day critiques of democratic capitalistic governing models, in particular but certainly not limited to South Africa. </p>
<p>Several times during the play Feni’s “African Guernica” comes to mind as exploitation and human abasement, first as tragedy, then, in its repetition, turns to farce. Great for comedy, for theatre, for visual art metaphors, much less funny in reality.</p>
<p>The power of Feni’s “African Guernica” is not simply that he blatantly recognised the insanity of white colonial racist rule. Nor is it that he recognised how everyone in a warped system loses their “humanity”. It is also not only that he visualised local conditions of human oppression, nor that, even like Orwell’s text, it seems prophetic of days to come.</p>
<p>But rather, it is like the Goyas, Daumiers, Orwells and many other insightful creative intellectuals throughout time and in various societies, sensing the power and chaos that lurks in all of us to rationalise our ways as the next oppressors, the next supremacists, harbingers of truths, civilisation and order, even when madness unfolds before our very eyes.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65011/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sharlene Khan receives funding from National Research Foundation, National Arts Council. </span></em></p>‘African Guernica’ is an incredibly powerful work of art in many ways, importantly filling that space between the visible and the visible.Sharlene Khan, Senior Lecturer of Art History and Visual Culture, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/640312016-08-17T19:00:42Z2016-08-17T19:00:42ZUnder the Influence of … Paul Stopforth’s Biko painting called ‘Elegy’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/134410/original/image-20160817-3597-1t5w78l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Paul Stopforth (b. 1946) 'Elegy' (1980). Graphite and wax on paper on board: 149 x 240 cm
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy Durban Art Gallery</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our weekly series, “Under the influence”, we ask experts to share what they believe are the most influential works of art in their field. Here, artist/academic/forensic practitioner Kathryn Smith explains why she believes Paul Stopforth’s “Elegy” (1980) is hugely influential.</em></p>
<p>“Elegy” is a postmortem portrait of South African Black Consciousness activist <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/stephen-bantu-biko">Stephen Bantu Biko</a> (1946-1977) by <a href="http://paulstopforth.com/">Paul Stopforth</a> (b. Johannesburg, 1945). It is executed in graphite powder painstakingly polished into layers of Cobra floor wax from which countless hair-fine excisions then excavate the figure from its ground.</p>
<p>Measuring 149 x 240 cm – near life-size – it hovers between drawing, photography, sculpture and painting, demonstrating kinship with all these media and yet claiming a singular materiality. </p>
<h2>My relationship with the work</h2>
<p>The work was completed in 1980, three years after Biko’s violent death in police custody. It was purchased by the <a href="http://www.durban.gov.za/city_services/parksrecreation/durban_art_gallery/Pages/default.aspx">Durban Art Gallery</a> in 1981, where I first encountered it as a young child.</p>
<p>I have a distinct recollection of being drawn towards the surface of this phantom image. Of it filling my child-self’s visual field from above as I tried to make sense not of what, but how it was: it was obvious to me that whoever this man was, he was not asleep. And why did the light in the picture seem so off, seeping out from this body’s darkest parts like a photograph gone wrong?</p>
<p>As with the series of smaller, more fugitive drawings of Biko’s hands and feet that preceded this monumental study, “Elegy” was made with direct reference to the forensic photographs of his postmortem examination, given to Stopforth by the Biko family’s lawyer. There can be no doubt that it borrows from religious iconography, presenting Biko as a secular martyr (the clue is in the title). </p>
<h2>Why it is/was influential</h2>
<p>Art historian Shannen Hill suggested in her 2005 article “Iconic autopsy: postmortem portraits of Bantu Stephen Biko” (published in a special edition of the journal <a href="http://www.international.ucla.edu/africa/africanarts/">African Arts</a>) that Stopforth’s graphic techniques “disrupt detached viewing”. Our experience is a kind of looking that is tactile, penetrative, what I would call a forensic gaze.</p>
<p>Forensic photographs embody a beguiling paradox: they perform as evidence, yet they are not self-evident. We demand that they act as arbiters of empirical data, while knowing they are technological constructions that require expert interlocution to reveal their truths.</p>
<p>“Elegy’s” impact on my childhood idea of what art could be – do even – was utterly formative, not least because it was through an embodied connection with an image that I later learned of the existence and significance of its subject. </p>
<p>“Elegy” could be said to represent the critical coordinates of my creative and intellectual life, which has been consistently involved with ideas of the body as image and as experience, evidence and affect, absence and presence. </p>
<p>My praxis is now bifurcated between my experimental (and perhaps even impolitic) interests as an artist, and my professional responsibilities as a forensic practitioner. It requires of me, among other things, to recreate convincing facial images for deceased or disappeared individuals who cannot be otherwise legally identified, in the hope that they might be.</p>
<p>This work feeds the tensions I perceive between conceptions of identity and technologies of identification, the revelatory and obfuscatory powers of archives, and the capacity of objects to be simultaneously loquacious and mute. So it is productive to think through “Elegy” as a sort of conceptual and ethical compass. </p>
<p>Did this image subconsciously navigate my earliest tussles with school teachers who insisted that my mutual inclination towards both visual art and forensic pathology was at worst impossible and at best, deeply conflicted? Did it silently guide me, many years later, from Durban to Johannesburg, and to the <a href="http://wsoa.wits.ac.za/fine-arts/">Wits Fine Arts</a> department, where I would encounter an influential tutor who insisted the opposite, and who showed me how it could be so?</p>
<p>That tutor was <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2013-01-18-obituary-colin-richards-1954-2012/">Colin Richards</a> (1954-2012). I would later discover that he’d had his own powerful encounters with images of Biko’s body, twice. The first was while working as a medical illustrator at Wits in the late 1970s. The second was as a deliberate confrontation with his perceived complicity in the administration of Biko’s death. The outcome he presented as the multi-part work, “Veils” (1996).</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/134412/original/image-20160817-3583-i26tse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/134412/original/image-20160817-3583-i26tse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134412/original/image-20160817-3583-i26tse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134412/original/image-20160817-3583-i26tse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134412/original/image-20160817-3583-i26tse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134412/original/image-20160817-3583-i26tse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134412/original/image-20160817-3583-i26tse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Colin Richards (1954-2012) - ‘Veils’ (1996). Mixed media.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the author</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Here Richards employs a representation of the Biblical “<a href="http://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/mysterious-veil-veronica-masterpiece-or-miracle-004917">veil of Veronica</a>”, a piece of cloth onto which the face of a suffering Christ was reportedly imprinted. As an analogue “print” made directly from a source, it is considered to be the first photograph. On his recrafted veils, Richards instead imprinted facsimiles of images of the cell in which Biko was tortured, and two macroscopic pathology photographs which do not identifiably belong to a specific body (yet they are Biko). </p>
<p>In an interview with Richards in 2004, he suggested to me that “Illustration is a hinge between the linguistic and the visual, and it can turn many ways”. This is particularly true of forensic images. Their simultaneous ability to be authoritative and obtuse is the source of their potency and fallibility. </p>
<p>Public memorialisation of the dead pivots on a core ethical decision: whether to respect personal privacy through maintaining anonymity, or to name. The dead cannot give informed consent. Publishing images of corpses is regarded as something which requires very careful management, lest such dissemination is seen to either objectify or profit from the deceased. Like public shaming, such exposure can turn many ways. And that line is thin indeed.</p>
<p>The figure in “Elegy” is not visually identifiable as Stephen Bantu Biko. This has two possible effects, neither of which are easy: sublimating his identity counts as yet another violation of the historical specificity of Biko as an individual. Protecting his identity could be considered a sensitive choice – a tactical dehumanisation, if you will.</p>
<h2>Why it is still relevant</h2>
<p>In many ways, “Elegy” tests the very limits of representational politics. After all, it’s yet another instance of a violated black man represented by his social and political opposite, an artist who embodies Apartheid’s privileged classes, specifically the white, patriarchal subject position it worked to strengthen and maintain.</p>
<p>Should this difficulty make us avert our gaze or even more seriously, reject the image? I cannot, because its effect on me now is as potent as it was three decades ago: the sharp, sour shock of touching your tongue on a battery.</p>
<p>Significant events are unlikely to rise to public consciousness without a visual record, and recent events in South Africa - such as the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/marikana-massacre-16-august-2012">Marikana massacre</a> where police killed 34 striking mineworkers - have demonstrated the extraordinary productive and destructive power of images. A direct response to the atrocities of its moment, “Elegy” reflects on political oppression, those tasked with propagating the abuse of state power and those set up to bear such abuse. It represents processes of concealment and revelation with very real social and political consequences.</p>
<p>Yet images like this are not stable; their significance is neither continuous nor equivalent. They are ciphers for what it means to be human and vulnerable within a social and political regime in which not all bodies are considered equal, and where a state under threat resorts to covert and fatal tactics.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64031/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kathryn Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Works like “Elegy” are ciphers for what it means to be human and vulnerable within a social and political regime in which not all bodies are considered equalKathryn Smith, Visual/forensic artist, PhD researcher, Liverpool John Moores UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/637782016-08-10T15:46:22Z2016-08-10T15:46:22ZUnder the influence of … Spike Lee’s film ‘Do The Right Thing’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133660/original/image-20160810-20932-1zjptc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The poster for 'Do The Right Thing'</span> </figcaption></figure><p><em>In our new weekly series, “Under the influence”, we ask experts to share what they believe are the most influential works of art or artists in their field. Here, University of the Witwatersrand film studies lecturer and filmmaker Dylan Valley explains why Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing” is one of the director’s most influential films.</em></p>
<p>For a black film and media student at the University of Cape Town, Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing” (1989) was a revelation. I watched it on a DVD one afternoon with my friend Frank in one of the damp tutorial rooms in the Arts Block on Upper Campus, only a few steps away from where Cecil John Rhodes’ statue stood. </p>
<p>Our film history curriculum at that point had been mostly European and American cinema. While still American, this was something completely different. It had been nearly 20 years since the film’s inception and it took place on a completely different continent, and yet it was so relatable.</p>
<p>More than just that, it was a visceral film experience, a wake-up call, but also an affirmation. Watching it in 2016 it’s eerie (and tragic) how relevant its central theme of racial tension and structural violence still is, both in America and South Africa.</p>
<p>“Do The Right Thing” takes place over the course of the hottest day on a block in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Spike Lee plays Mookie, a 25-year-old who seems to be meandering through life, but is on a mission to get paid. He works at the local Italian pizzeria, Sal’s, where most of the neighbourhood eats and hangs out.</p>
<p>The simmering heat of the day (visualised by deep reds and yellows on screen) reflects the tensions between the Italian pizzeria owner, Sal (Danny Aiello) and Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), the self-appointed neighbourhood spokesperson. Buggin’ Out questions the lack of representation of black people on the walls of the pizzeria, which services a mostly black clientele: “Sal, how come you ain’t got no brothers on the wall?”</p>
<p>Sal’s hostile response to Buggin’ Out’s provocation leads to a protest that ends in police brutality and the loss of black life, and marks the demise of the pizzeria.</p>
<h2>Why is/was it influential?</h2>
<p>Despite its explosive dénouement, one of the main strengths of the film is the complexity of its characters and the representations of blackness on screen. Lee moved beyond stereotypes of African Americans in cinema and created characters reflected in the everyday. In “Do The Right Thing”, black people are not presented in the traditional binary of subservient and smiling, or violent and dangerous, but rather are able to exist as more rounded expressions of themselves. </p>
<p>While Buggin’ Out is concerned with black nationalist politics and representation, he also bugs out when a white gentrifier on the block accidentally scuffs his brand new US$100 Jordan sneakers. Even though this infliction is frivolous, it leads to a cathartic (prophetic?) outburst: “Man motherfuck gentrification!”</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jc6_XgtOQgI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A clip from ‘Do The Right Thing’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>No one in “Do The Right Thing” is necessarily “heroic”. Even Radio Raheem, the likeable, stylish giant who blasts the film’s opening theme and leitmotif, hip-hop group <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/public-enemy-mn0000856785/biography">Public Enemy</a>’s <em>Fight The Power</em>, from a large boombox, imposes his music on others. He is mostly an irritant in the neighbourhood. Radio Raheem is unnecessarily confrontational with the Korean shopkeepers who have recently moved onto the block. It’s reflected in the scene where he goes to them to buy batteries, “I said 20 ‘D’ batteries, motherfucker! Learn how to speak English first, alright?”</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cMNvYJ6O_Ks?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The ‘20 D’ clip from ‘Do The Right Thing’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although in the same scene, he smiles and tells shopkeeper Sonny (Steve Park), “You’re alright, man”, diffusing any threat of real conflict. </p>
<p>Mookie isn’t necessarily noble or likeable, however his actions towards the end of the film disrupt this reading of him and show significant character development. Ironically, there is not that much black and white in this film; the characters live in a world of greys. </p>
<p>While the film has no typical heroes, it is more clear about its villains, particularly the police. Also there is pizzeria owner Sal’s son Pino (John Turturro) who is openly racist and tells Sal, “I’m sick of niggers.” Sal is more complicated, as he sees himself as a good guy who takes pride in feeding the neighbourhood. </p>
<p>Sal later tells Mookie he sees him as “son”. Despite this, during the film’s climax and in the verbal screaming match between him and Buggin’ Out, he flips and uses racial epithets, telling Radio Raheem to turn off that “jungle music” and hurls profanities like “nigger mutherfucker”.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133664/original/image-20160810-9203-74xg7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133664/original/image-20160810-9203-74xg7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133664/original/image-20160810-9203-74xg7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133664/original/image-20160810-9203-74xg7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133664/original/image-20160810-9203-74xg7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133664/original/image-20160810-9203-74xg7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133664/original/image-20160810-9203-74xg7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cover of ‘BFI Modern Classics: Do The Right Thing’.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In his book, “<a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=lnVZAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y&hl=en">BFI Modern Classics: Do The Right Thing</a>”, Ed Guerrero points out that it is Sal who destroys Raheem’s boombox with a bat: “A line is crossed here, from words to physical action.” When that violence escalates and turns fatal, the victim doesn’t need to be an angel for us to have tears in our eyes. He was real, we knew him.</p>
<p>“Do The Right Thing” was partly inspired by the <a href="http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/a-racial-attack-that-years-later-is-still-being-felt/?_r=0">1986 Howard Beach incident</a> in which a black man, Michael Griffiths, was killed while escaping an angry white mob with baseball bats after exiting the New Park pizzeria. The mob had earlier tried to chase him and his friends out of their neighbourhood for being black. Unsurprisingly, this was only one of the stories that Lee drew from to write “Do The Right Thing”. This story is sadly familiar nearly 30 years later.</p>
<h2>Why is it still relevant today?</h2>
<p>In 2016, amidst the #BlackLivesMatter <a href="http://blacklivesmatter.com/">movement</a>, and a never-ending list of unarmed African Americans being <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-people-killed-by-police-america_us_577da633e4b0c590f7e7fb17">killed by police</a>, the film is even more relevant. In 2015, young black men were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/31/the-counted-police-killings-2015-young-black-men">nine times</a> more likely to be killed at the hands of police than other Americans, and 2016 looks to be on par. In a South Africa where the police killed 34 miners in <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/marikana-massacre-16-august-2012">Marikana</a> for striking for a better life, and where the politics of representation and ownership are still unresolved, the tragic trajectory of “Do The Right Thing” will send chills down your spine. </p>
<p>When the film was released, journalists feared it would <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/08/when-spike-lee-became-scary/261434/">spark race riots</a> and hate crimes. There were even warnings issued to white people to avoid seeing the film. Instead, it caused a nation to reflect, and affirmed the black experience around the world. Despite critical and fan acclaim, the film was mostly snubbed by the Academy Awards in 1990, receiving <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097216/awards">two nominations</a> for Best Writing and Best Supporting Actor (Danny Aiello). </p>
<p>Tellingly, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097239/awards">Best Picture</a> went to “Driving Miss Daisy”, which Ed Guerrero calls </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the paternalist problem picture with its long-suffering black servant … The contrasts between Morgan Freeman’s rendering of an elderly, humble and enduring Negro servant in “Driving Miss Daisy” and Spike Lee’s portrayal of the feckless, urban youth Mookie could not have been greater in the 1989 Oscar year.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133663/original/image-20160810-28149-upq3yx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133663/original/image-20160810-28149-upq3yx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133663/original/image-20160810-28149-upq3yx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133663/original/image-20160810-28149-upq3yx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133663/original/image-20160810-28149-upq3yx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133663/original/image-20160810-28149-upq3yx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133663/original/image-20160810-28149-upq3yx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Spike Lee accepting an honorary award at the Oscars in 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mario Anzuoni/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Last year Lee finally won his Oscar at the Academy’s annual <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2015/11/spike-lee-finally-gets-his-oscar.html">Governor’s Awards</a>, an honorary nod for his contribution to cinema.</p>
<p>Filmically, there is so much more to be said of “Do The Right Thing”: its beautiful cinematography, it’s on-point casting (Rosie Perez’s debut as Tina, and Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee as an elderly couple) and its belligerent dialogue (“I’m just a struggling black man trying to keep his dick hard in a cruel and harsh world!”).</p>
<p>The film often breaks the “<a href="https://alwaysactingup.wordpress.com/what-is-the-4th-wall/">fourth wall</a>” – the imaginary “wall” that exists between actors and the audience – making us aware of its construction, like in Raheem’s dreamlike love/hate soliloquy and the racial hatred montage. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pa-oUPTr9LI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The ‘Love/Hate’ clip from ‘Do The Right Thing’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Watching it all these years later, perhaps what’s most impressive is how fresh the film still feels, even down to the classic hip-hop and “Afro-centric” clothes and haircuts (there are many Buggin’ Outs walking the streets of my home city of Johannesburg as we speak). </p>
<p>“Do The Right Thing” was a challenge to Hollywood’s cultural hegemony. Lee fought to get the story told on his terms, exchanging larger financial support for his artistic vision.</p>
<p>Most importantly, the film doesn’t offer neat answers, but rather important questions, which haven’t lost any of their urgency today. As a filmmaker, one can only hope to create work with such long-lasting affect.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63778/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dylan Valley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>With #BlackLivesMatter and a never-ending list of African Americans being killed by police, the film ‘Do The Right Thing’ is even more relevant now than when it was released 27 years ago.Dylan Valley, Lecturer of Film & Media Studies, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/633472016-08-03T17:29:15Z2016-08-03T17:29:15ZUnder the influence of … Bob Marley, the timeless music man<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132752/original/image-20160802-17169-106om32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bob Marley's album 'Legend' is still an international bestseller</span> </figcaption></figure><p><em>In our new weekly series, “Under the influence”, we ask experts to share what they believe are the most influential works of art or artists in their field. Here, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University’s Stewart Maganga explains why reggae megastar Bob Marley remains relevant, 35 years after his death in 1981.</em></p>
<p>It would be easy to dismiss <a href="http://www.bobmarley.com/">Bob Marley</a> (1945-1981) as someone who is and should remain a figure of the 20th century. However, this does not help to explain why even after his death from cancer three and a half decades ago, he continues to be revered by millions of people around the world. Marley’s images can be found almost everywhere, ranging from T-shirts and hats, to bags and even coffee mugs. His greatest hits compilation, “<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/bob-marley-and-the-wailers-legend-20120524">Legend</a>”, has sold an estimated <a href="http://tsort.info/music/faq_album_sales.htm">27.9 million copies</a> since it was released in 1984. It still sells <a href="http://www.mixedracestudies.org/?p=20696">250,000 copies</a> a year.</p>
<p>If there is anything that is to be associated with <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/genre/reggae-ma0000002820">reggae</a> music, the Afrocentric religion of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/rastafari/ataglance/glance.shtml">Rastafari</a>, or the Caribbean island of <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-18784061">Jamaica</a>, the first name that comes to mind is Bob Marley. Despite this, the reality that the world often tends to associate Marley with is far different from the one he grew up in more than 70 years ago.</p>
<p>Marley lived in a Jamaica that had experienced more than <a href="http://jis.gov.jm/information/jamaican-history/">200 years</a> of slavery and colonialism. This would have a great impact on him, considering that he was born from a <a href="https://debate.uvm.edu/dreadlibrary/gurtman02.htm">white father</a> and <a href="http://caribbean-beat.com/issue-93/mother-legend#axzz4G5zFwK1a">a black mother</a>. The key to understanding Marley was not merely the music but the life experiences that played a part in shaping the individual and, ultimately, the music that the world would come to know. </p>
<p>If there are three areas that played a part in shaping Marley the musician, it would have to be his experience of racism as a mixed-race person, his life in the slums of Kingston’s Trenchtown and his Rastafari beliefs. All three factors have combined to make Marley the so-called superstar that he is still known as today.</p>
<h2>Why Bob Marley remains an influential figure</h2>
<p>Marley’s influence was not limited to simply making music for the sake of entertainment. He was most noted for using his music to spread the message of Rastafari. Rastafari is a phenomenon that began in the 1930s in response to a message given by Jamaican nationalist <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/garvey_marcus.shtml">Marcus Garvey</a>, who proclaimed that African people in the diaspora should look to Africa, where a black king would be crowned. It was here that they would find their redemption.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132759/original/image-20160802-17177-1t9h7m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132759/original/image-20160802-17177-1t9h7m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=818&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132759/original/image-20160802-17177-1t9h7m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=818&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132759/original/image-20160802-17177-1t9h7m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=818&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132759/original/image-20160802-17177-1t9h7m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1029&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132759/original/image-20160802-17177-1t9h7m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1029&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132759/original/image-20160802-17177-1t9h7m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1029&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An Ethiopian stamp of Haile Selassie.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It so happened that on November 2 1930, <a href="http://www.thewhitereview.org/features/in-the-light-of-ras-tafari/">Tafari Makonnen</a> was crowned emperor of Ethiopia under his baptismal name, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zqqx6sg">Haile Selassie</a>. Rastafari was <a href="http://jamaicans.com/orgins/">derived</a> from Haile Selassie’s name – it is a conflation of Ras, the title given to Amharic royalty in Ethiopia, and Tafari, his pre-coronation name.</p>
<p>What Marley brought to the world stage was something that was perhaps unique for its time. His tireless dedication and hard work to ensuring that the world came to learn and hear of Rastafari is in itself a major contributor to what made it into a global phenomenon.</p>
<p>Through Marley’s music, people in all corners of the world came to embrace Rastafari. This has helped shape the Rasta philosophy to the extent that it can no longer be attuned solely to the needs of believers in Jamaica. </p>
<p>It is found that everywhere it has been adapted to suit the needs and concerns of the society in which it has been embraced. This has further led Rasta scholars such as Richard Salter to <a href="http://www.ideaz-institute.com/Ideaz%20J%20Volumes/IDEAZ%20VOL7%202008.pdf">argue</a> that there is no one thing as Rastafari but rather only “Rastafaris”. What Salter means by this is that as a phenomenon Rastafari is understood in the societies where it is found. This further demonstrates how far and wide the phenomenon has spread globally. There are currently an estimated <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/rastafari/ataglance/glance.shtml">one million followers</a> around the world.</p>
<p>Marley’s message of Rastafari would further be extended to scholars who would play their part in educating the public about the nature of Rastafari. They would include, among others, <a href="http://www.oberlin.edu/archive/holdings/finding/RG30/SG64/biography.html">George Eaton Simpson</a>, <a href="http://www.cifas.us/sites/g/files/g536796/f/1960e_RasTafariMov_B.pdf">Rex Nettleford</a>, <a href="http://www.rootsreggaeclub.com/culture_reggae_afro/the_rastafarians/the_rastafarians_main.htm">Leonard E Barrett</a>, <a href="http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20101106/lead/lead2.html">Barry Chevannes</a>, <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272338580_Towards_a_New_Map_of_Africa_through_Rastafari_'Works'">Jahlani Niaah</a>, <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41125667_'Cleave_to_the_Black'_expressions_of_Ethiopianism_in_Jamaica">Charles R Price</a>, <a href="http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20120425/ent/ent2.html">Michael Barnett</a> and many others. Without Marley, scholarship on this phenomenon would not exist in such magnitude as is the case today.</p>
<h2>Why Bob Marley’s music is still relevant</h2>
<p>Although Marley may have lived in a world that is different to the one we find ourselves in today, the reality is that the human problems he encountered were no different from the ones we experience in the 21st century. </p>
<p>What is perhaps most significant about Marley’s music is that his message has transcended both time and space. We now find ourselves living in a post-9/11 world where mistrust and intolerance continue to remain dominant, as much as they were back then. It comes as no surprise because Marley spoke of the human condition.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gAFbYTvXXyY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Bob Marley’s ‘So Much Trouble in the World’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There are very few musicians in this present day that may claim to use their music to fight for causes that Marley may have fought for. Marley did not only speak about love and unity among all mankind as seen in his 1977 song <a href="http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=3909"><em>One Love</em></a>. He also spoke about the sufferings of the world in his songs. These include <a href="http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobmarley/somuchtroubleintheworld.html"><em>So Much Trouble in the World</em></a>, <a href="http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobmarley/burninandlootin.html"><em>Burnin’ and Lootin’</em></a>, <a href="http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobmarley/johnnywas.html"><em>Johnny Was</em></a> and <a href="http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=13282"><em>War</em></a>. This is what has made Marley not just relevant to his time but to ours as well.</p>
<h2>My relationship with the music of Bob Marley</h2>
<p>My relationship with Bob Marley’s music began when I was living in England in the 1980s. There was a BBC television programme that my parents used to watch every Thursday night called “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/totp/history/">Top of the Pops</a>”. One of the songs that introduced me to Marley’s music <em>One Love</em>. Little would I know that, over the years, I would become a fan of Bob Marley’s music and eventually become a scholar of the Rastafari phenomenon.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XbFbkY1tPTI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Bob Marley on ‘Top of the Pops’ in 1984.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Birds of a feather</h2>
<p>To understand Bob Marley the man, it is imperative not to solely listen to his music but also read biographies and watch documentaries that offer different perspectives of the man. Although there are a number of them, I would strongly recommend the following:</p>
<p>Biographies:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>“<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7353179-bob-marley">Bob Marley: The Untold Story</a>” – Chris Salewicz (2009); and</p></li>
<li><p>“<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44968.Catch_a_Fire">Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley</a>” – Timothy White (1983).</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Documentaries:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>“<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1183919/">Marley</a>” – directed by Kevin McDonald (2012); and</p></li>
<li><p>“<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1297801/">Bob Marley: Freedom Road</a>” – directed by Sonia Anderson (2007).</p></li>
</ul><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63347/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stewart Maganga does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Bob Marley is one of those rare artists who continues to touch the hearts of millions of people across the world, even though he died more than three decades ago.Stewart Maganga, Doctoral Candidate, Nelson Mandela UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/628742016-07-27T18:39:00Z2016-07-27T18:39:00ZUnder the influence of … the cult film ‘Blade Runner’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132196/original/image-20160727-21584-1sdw2xw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Blade Runner' poster</span> </figcaption></figure><p><em>This is the fifth in a weekly series called “Under the influence”, in which we ask experts to share what they believe are the most influential works of art in their field. Here, the University of Johannesburg’s James Sey introduces Ridley Scott’s cult film, “Bladerunner”, released in 1982.</em></p>
<p>OK. Confession time. I’ve seen <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000631/">Ridley Scott</a>’s “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Blade Runner</a>” at least 50 times. I know the entire screenplay of the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blade-Runner-Directors-Harrison-Ford/dp/0790729628">director’s cut</a> off by heart. I have owned three different VHS versions, three different DVD versions (including a very collectable 12" laser disc) and have downloaded the ever-expanding online FAQ. Sad, isn’t it?</p>
<p>My only excuse is that this version of acid-head science-fiction pulp genius Philip K Dick’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/29/do-androids-dream-electric-dick-review">novel</a>, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, is a movie of almost total prescient brilliance. </p>
<p>Cyberpunk guru <a href="http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/">William Gibson</a> went to see it when he was just beginning to write his seminal debut novel, “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/28/william-gibson-neuromancer-cyberpunk-books">Neuromancer</a>”. Legend has it that he walked out halfway through, saying later that the movie was too much like the inside of his head. </p>
<p>“Blade Runner” is one of those films that seemed predestined for underground immortality. Generally consigned to the “flawed but fairly interesting” category by most movie critics on its release, it was famously withdrawn from release to be re-cut. It was also given a laughable voice-over narrative to explain it better to the popcorn brigade.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132002/original/image-20160726-7033-1qxnzdo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132002/original/image-20160726-7033-1qxnzdo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132002/original/image-20160726-7033-1qxnzdo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132002/original/image-20160726-7033-1qxnzdo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132002/original/image-20160726-7033-1qxnzdo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132002/original/image-20160726-7033-1qxnzdo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132002/original/image-20160726-7033-1qxnzdo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Blade Runner’ director Ridley Scott.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrew Kelly/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Since then the film has, like “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Casablanca</a>”, transcended its formula trappings as a sci-fi cum hardboiled noir detective thriller to spawn a dedicated cult following and fill a special niche in pop culture. One of the touchstones for its cult value over the years has been its singularity – it has never spawned any overt remakes or sequels, despite being hugely influential. Until now, that is. The news that Scott himself is involved in bringing a <a href="http://collider.com/blade-runner-2-director-denis-villeneuve-talks-sci-fi-sequel-harrison-ford/">sequel</a> to the screen, scheduled for release in late 2017, is making fans edgy and ambivalent.</p>
<h2>Why is/was it influential?</h2>
<p>“Blade Runner’s” storyline and theme is on one level a well-worn one. It is the Frankenstein theme – science creating life, or technogenesis. But it’s the way in which the film broaches that theme that has remained prescient and influential. It was released long before the advent of the commercial internet, and long before the headline experiments in stem cell research, genetic modification and human genome sequencing. </p>
<p>The film posits that commercially viable superhumans – known as replicants – have been created by science, and now pose a threat to their human creators as a rogue band of them return to earth to seek answers to the mystery of their lives. Police agents, known as blade runners, hunt them down and terminate (or “retire”) them.</p>
<p>The genre combination of savvy sci-fi with hardboiled noir thriller was unique at the time, and has since spawned many cinema imitators – “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Minority Report</a>”, “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212720/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">AI</a>”, “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">I, Robot</a>” – but the film’s most marked influence has been visual. Its celebrated “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1213042?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">retrofitted</a>” production design – of a 21st-century Los Angeles megacity gradually imploding, overpopulated, largely Asian, and constantly raining from self-created weather conditions – has inspired numerous copycats, especially in advertising.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132003/original/image-20160726-7045-150td0p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132003/original/image-20160726-7045-150td0p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132003/original/image-20160726-7045-150td0p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132003/original/image-20160726-7045-150td0p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132003/original/image-20160726-7045-150td0p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132003/original/image-20160726-7045-150td0p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132003/original/image-20160726-7045-150td0p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Actor Harrison Ford.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Fred Prouser/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The term “retrofitted” was coined to describe the film’s clever design, with its postmodern flourishes and visual in-jokes. One of the best of these is a decrepit building in the city in which the final showdown between blade runner Deckard (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000148/">Harrison Ford</a>) and lead replicant Batty (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000442/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1">Rutger Hauer</a>) takes place. </p>
<p>An existing architectural landmark in Los Angeles, it’s called the <a href="https://www.laconservancy.org/locations/bradbury-building">Bradbury</a>, a nod to Golden Age sci-fi author <a href="http://www.raybradbury.com/">Ray Bradbury</a>. Another building is called the <a href="http://nofearofthefuture.blogspot.co.za/2007/11/blade-runner-borges-cut.html">Hundertwasser</a>, a nod to the famously quirky Austrian architect. </p>
<p>The film’s main theme is brilliantly realised, even with, and perhaps because of, the lack of sophisticated computer-generated imagery. Drawing on its own visual template – Fritz Lang’s sci-fi cinema classic “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/oct/21/metropolis-lang-science-fiction">Metropolis</a>” (1927) – for the vision of a technology-saturated early 21st century, it achieves the same level of visual artistry about a city of the future as Stanley Kubrick’s “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/30/2001-a-space-odyssey-kubrick-sci-fi-epic-back-big-screen">2001: A Space Odyssey</a>” did about outer space. </p>
<p>It also gave two relatively unknown actors major cachet, which they used in different ways. Harrison Ford, who plays world-weary, compassionate, perhaps even a replicant, blade runner Deckard, went on to A-list Hollywood stardom. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132005/original/image-20160726-7051-1kil393.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132005/original/image-20160726-7051-1kil393.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132005/original/image-20160726-7051-1kil393.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132005/original/image-20160726-7051-1kil393.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132005/original/image-20160726-7051-1kil393.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132005/original/image-20160726-7051-1kil393.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132005/original/image-20160726-7051-1kil393.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Actor Rutger Hauer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Denis Makarenko/Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rutger Hauer, the prodigal son and leader of the rogue replicants, turned in the performance of his life as Batty (cult trainspotters can quote the entire “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe … attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion” etc speech), and then descended into the cult movie underworld, reprising the outlaw cyborg figure in a stream of dire B-movies (the brilliant “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091209/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2">The Hitcher</a>” perhaps the only notable exception).</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NoAzpa1x7jU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A well-loved scene from ‘Blade Runner’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Why is it still relevant?</h2>
<p>Perhaps the true index of the movie’s cult status is the vociferous debates about its different versions. One of the first contemporary films to have a collectable director’s cut version, which is radically different in feel to the commercial, noir voiceover release (as well as suggesting that the hero is a replicant), it also has the aforementioned laser disc version that, for initiates, contains subtle differences in soundtrack and visual editing. </p>
<p>Its astounding look has not dated at all, testimony to its intelligence and style. It has given the contemporary lexicon at least two new words – replicant and retrofitted – and its compelling urban future vision has been widely imitated. </p>
<p>In the final analysis its influence and relevance, as well as its continuing hold on me as a writer and film fan, are also tied into the age-old theme of <a href="https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/how-we-think-digital-media-and-contemporary-technogenesis/">technogenesis</a>. In an effort to control the replicants better, the genetic engineers install implanted memories and a four-year lifespan.</p>
<p>The replicants constantly refer to their self-knowledge (Batty memorably says to the genetic engineer who makes eyes for the replicant series, “if only you could see what I have seen with your eyes”), and develop their own emotions as time passes. This astonishingly stylish realising of a complicated philosophical theme is the real triumph of the film.</p>
<p>The central concern is an ontological one: what are the psychological consequences for technologically created subjects who cannot reconcile their human-like consciousness to their status as made, not born? </p>
<p>Finally, the tragic fallen angel replicants of the film are denied “truly” human status by their relation to their own deaths. That is, they can have no productive conflict between life-instincts and death-instincts if they are always already aware of the hour of their deaths. It remains one of the most poignant aesthetic representations of the issue. </p>
<p>If ever a film was worthy of its underground reputation and cult influence, “Blade Runner” is it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62874/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Sey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’ has transcended its sci-fi/hardboiled noir detective thriller formula to spawn a dedicated cult following.James Sey, Research Associate, Research Centre, Faculty of Fine Art, Design and Architecture, University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/620102016-07-20T18:30:10Z2016-07-20T18:30:10ZUnder the influence of … novelist Ishtiyaq Shukri’s debut, ‘The Silent Minaret’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131380/original/image-20160721-32623-1cw8pf0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Cover of The Silent Minaret.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jacana</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is the fourth in a weekly series called “Under the influence”, in which we ask experts to share what they believe are the most influential works of art in their field. Here, Neelika Jayawardane introduces Ishtiyaq Shukri’s first novel, “The Silent Minaret”, published in 2006 by Jacana.</em></p>
<p>“The Silent Minaret” is <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2005-02-04-written-in-secret">Ishtiyaq Shukri</a>’s first novel. It centres around the unexplained disappearance of a young South African-born student, Issa Shamsuddin, in London. We never learn of the reasons behind the disappearance.</p>
<p>Through the use of a variety of narrative techniques, Shukri links colonial-era tactics used to subdue people and control their resources with similar strategies employed in both apartheid-era South Africa and the post 9/11 world. </p>
<p>After reading “The Silent Minaret”, there’s no mistaking that the tactics used by 16th- and 17th-century empires – including the abduction, transport and imprisonment of dissenters in distant island-gulags – are parallel to those that have been used by the empire-builders of the 21st century. </p>
<p>We realise, as we follow Issa’s intellectual trajectory, that during the so-called global “<a href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4679.htm">war on terror</a>”, the US and its powerful allies have similarly confiscated vast swathes of land, displaced millions of people and forcibly taken over access to this century’s most valued resource – petroleum. </p>
<h2>Why is/was it influential?</h2>
<p>This novel resonated with me in a way few books have. I would even venture to say that my scholarship is based on the initial research I did for my scholarly writing about Shukri’s first novel.</p>
<p>Issa Shamsuddin, Shukri’s protagonist, begins his political journey in South Africa as social, intellectual and political outsider, as an in-between <em>Other</em> who identifies with no ethnic or national group. His position as an <em>Other</em> allows him to question easy nationalism, revealing the ways in which the privilege of belonging is made possible, most often, using violence and exclusion.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129462/original/image-20160705-820-1agmyh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129462/original/image-20160705-820-1agmyh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129462/original/image-20160705-820-1agmyh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129462/original/image-20160705-820-1agmyh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129462/original/image-20160705-820-1agmyh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=678&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129462/original/image-20160705-820-1agmyh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=678&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129462/original/image-20160705-820-1agmyh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=678&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">South African-born author Ishtiyaq Shukri.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jacana Media</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Shukri <a href="http://www.litnet.co.za/interview-i-see-you-by-ishtiyaq-shukri/">has said</a> in a Litnet interview that he is, in some ways, “homed” in many places, be it Palestine, Oman, London or South Africa. He declares, very clearly, “I don’t believe in the nation state.”</p>
<p>He details why a passport does not make a person, nor give a person an identity or sense of belonging. That’s especially something that becomes apparent when you realise that your passport “belongs to the South African government, and […] can be withdrawn at any time”, he said in the LitNet interview. His novel is a challenge to such easy, go-to sorts of identity locators.</p>
<h2>My relationship with the book</h2>
<p>These are the issues I’ve dealt with as a person who was born in one country (Sri Lanka), raised in another (Zambia), educated in yet another (the US), and lived somewhat itinerantly in about five countries (a list that includes South Africa). That’s without having any sense of national pride in any one of them.</p>
<p>I have a visceral reaction to being asked “Where are you from?” That question usually comes from those who wish to circumscribe you through the category of nation – and then, by the mythologies of race, gender and the like that the questioner associates with the location you are supposedly “from”. </p>
<p>The question assumes, with the 20th century’s false elevation of nation above all else, that one’s nation will determine one’s loyalties and cultural and psychic belonging, as well as what one will be like, in general. Shukri gets us to question that powerful political-cultural myth of being tied to nation – it’s a remarkable achievement in fiction.</p>
<h2>Why is it still relevant today?</h2>
<p>“The Silent Minaret” follows the ways in which empire reproduces itself in different locations, with different actors. For instance, there is a section where we learn about how Israel is systematically eradicating entire Palestinian villages by diverting flowing bodies of water into Jewish settlers’ farms. This, while building a vast, snaking concrete <a href="http://www.stopthewall.org/the-wall">wall</a> across lands that once belonged to Palestinians.</p>
<p>Shukri shifts the reader’s line of thought from one war and contested location to another, creating layers that reveal the ways in which imperialism, conquest and erasure work, rather than creating easy parallels.</p>
<h2>Birds of a feather</h2>
<p>Similar books incude:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Shukri’s second novel, “<a href="http://www.jacana.co.za/component/virtuemart/i-see-you-detail?Itemid=0">I See You</a>” (Jacana, 2014), published eight years later;</p></li>
<li><p>“<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/23/fugitive-pieces-anne-michaels">Fugitive Pieces</a>” by Anne Michaels (Vintage, 1998); and </p></li>
<li><p>“<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/09/biography.nicholaslezard">Out of Place</a>” by Edward Said (Vintage, 2000).</p></li>
</ul><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62010/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Neelika Jayawardane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The protagonist in the novel ‘The Silent Minaret’ gets us to question that powerful political-cultural myth of being tied to nation. That is a remarkable achievement in fiction.Neelika Jayawardane, Associate Professor of English, State University of New York OswegoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/623742016-07-13T20:57:01Z2016-07-13T20:57:01ZUnder the influence of … the Black Consciousness novel ‘Amandla’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130440/original/image-20160713-12389-e1910l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Portrait of Miriam Tlali as part of Adrian Steirn's 21 Icons South Africa project. Date: 15.10.2014
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.21icons.com">Adrian Steirn/Courtesy of 21 Icons South Africa</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>South African novelist <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/miriam-tlali">Miriam Tlali</a>’s “Amandla” is one of a handful of Black Consciousness novels that renders in fiction the June 1976 <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">Soweto uprising</a>.</p>
<p>Published in 1980 by <a href="http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3781">Ravan Press</a>, it was only the second novel authored in English by a black woman to be published within the borders of apartheid South Africa (her 1975 debut, “<a href="http://www.postcolonialweb.org/sa/tlali/mukhuba3.html">Muriel at Metropolitan</a>” was the first). Predictably, “Amandla” was <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/miriam-tlali">banned</a> upon publication.</p>
<p>“Amandla” offers a richly detailed fictional account of the 1976 Soweto uprising, when the township’s youth rose up against the decision to make Afrikaans compulsory as a medium of instruction in black schools. “Amandla” is written from the perspective of a number of young revolutionaries of the time. </p>
<p>Based on Tlali’s experience as a Soweto resident in 1976, the novel depicts the uprising and its aftermath. It vividly sketches the mechanics of the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/introduction-black-consciousness-movement">Black Consciousness</a> ideology in the service of anti-apartheid activism. “Amandla” does so while teasing apart gender relations between men and women activists, and within the larger community.</p>
<p>It is one of four novels considered “Soweto novels”, works of fiction depicting the June 1976 uprising. The others are Mongane Serote’s “<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02564710308530320">To Every Birth its Blood</a>” (1981), Sipho Sepamla’s “<a href="https://africainwords.com/2014/02/18/teaching-africa-sipho-sepamla-literary-realism-and-a-ride-on-the-whirlwind/">A Ride on the Whirlwind</a>” (1981) and Mbulelo Mzamane’s “<a href="http://www.mml.co.za/children-of-soweto-review-bookchat">The Children of Soweto</a>” (1982).</p>
<p>These novels are heavily influenced by Black Consciousness ideology. They are also shaped by <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/stephen-bantu-biko">Steve Biko</a>’s writings on a unified black populace that would decolonise itself from racist indoctrination.</p>
<p>However, “Amandla” departs from these novels in an unprecedented attentiveness to the <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10130950.2013.778620">gender politics</a> of the day. It engages in the mimetic work of reflecting black gender relations in Soweto. The novel also constructs a new vision of black masculinity.</p>
<h2>Why is/was it influential?</h2>
<p>Tlali uses Black Consciousness discourse as a launching point for this vision of masculinity. The novel tracks the life of the student leader, Pholoso, and a range of minor characters.</p>
<p>The reader follows Pholoso as he becomes a leader of the youth. In this role he has conscientising sessions in the cellar of a church with young people active in the struggle. Here Tlali allows him long streams of dialogue. He outlines several position statements from the underground resistance movement on how society should be organised.</p>
<p>Relationships between black men and women is one area where he “instructs” the youth on ethical behaviour. In one scene, Pholoso addresses a room of 22 activists as “Ma-Gents”, making it clear that the room is filled with young men. Within this masculinised space, Pholoso articulates, among other things, a strong position on gender equality and relationships with women.</p>
<p>First, he addresses the absence of women from the “innermost core” of the underground movement this gathering represents. He attributes women’s absence to the high levels of sexual harassment to which women are subject whenever they move around Soweto.</p>
<p>Pholoso names this scourge of molestation as an impediment to women’s participation in political activity. He believes it should be countered through educating the public at large.</p>
<p>Critics such as <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/463784?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Cecily Lockett</a> and <a href="http://www.english.uct.ac.za/professor-kelwyn-sole">Kelwyn Sole</a> have critiqued Pholoso’s centrality as a student leader. They have also scrutinised the masculine space wherein he operates as reifying women’s subservient positions within the anti-apartheid struggle. <a href="https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-34153224/forms-of-resistance-south-african-women-s-writing">Margaret Miller</a> makes the case that Pholoso’s utterances confirm the marginal role women seemingly played in the 1976 uprising in his “patronising and contradictory” speech. </p>
<p>What critiques such as Miller’s ignore are the reasons Tlali may have for recruiting a black man in the role of gender conscientising. He is equated with Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, to disseminate a message of gender parity through the community.</p>
<p>In addressing the “Ma-Gents” on the sexual harassment, treatment and education of women, Pholoso advocates an oppositional black masculinity to counter dominant iterations of masculinity in Soweto. He exhorts the men to “go out and educate the people”. Pholoso is reliant on a ripple effect his message will have as it spreads out in concentric circles among the township’s men.</p>
<p>It is important to note that he is not addressing white men or women and their treatment of black women, but black men specifically. A black man himself, he holds black men as a group accountable for the safety, education and equitable treatment of women. He is gesturing to a time as yet unknown, in the future, when black subjects will be free of the oppression of apartheid.</p>
<p>Pholoso infers that women will not only be instrumental in fighting for this new, racially equitable social order. Black men also need to prepare for this time of freedom by ensuring that women and men are fully prepared and able to partake in its fruits.</p>
<h2>Why is it still relevant today?</h2>
<p>Another vignette from the novel deals with the sexual abuse and rape of young women activists while in detention. Here Tlali chillingly notes that rape and sexual abuse in prison is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the price we have to pay for our liberation. We have to fight hard and free ourselves, otherwise these things will always happen to us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These words seem an uncanny foreshadowing of the high rape and sexual abuse rates women would experience after apartheid. It draws into question whether the revolution against apartheid has been fully completed through overcoming only racial oppression.</p>
<p>It also carries a deliberately ambiguous meaning – while the “we” having to fight hard to free “ourselves” signifies the struggle against apartheid, it additionally invokes black women’s gendered struggle against sexual violence. Here, women are being called to simultaneously fight racial oppression while fighting the sexist oppression that spawns rape and sexual abuse. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Oarkgx4ekb0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A short documentary on Miriam Tlali.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In “Amandla”, Tlali thus negotiates Black Consciousness ideology by producing a critique of apartheid rooted in Black Consciousness. Simultaneously she complicates the discourse by showing the gendered experiences of sexual harassment that are singular to black women during the 1976 uprising. </p>
<p>“Amandla” provides a rich historical rendering of one of the turning points in the anti-apartheid struggle. It also gives an insightful analysis of the gender politics of the time. Given this content and context, the novel has great potential to contribute to contemporary discussions of violence against women, especially within national student movements.</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africa-student-movement-splinters-as-patriarchy-muscles-out-diversity-57855">Disagreements</a> about the role of gender and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and questioning (LGBTIQ) students’ role within the most recent student protests seems to have split the movement. Tlali’s novel provides an instructive critique of the gender politics of Black Consciousness, an ideology that has been forcefully reasserted in these most recent protests.</p>
<p>With its strong position on gender relations within Black Consciousness organising, “Amandla” is worth revisiting by student activists seeking to negotiate an ethical path between economic, racial and gender equity demands. Its didactic aims, instead of being dismissed as aesthetically unappealing, could be well utilised in reframing, for young men in particular, the historical events of the 1976 uprising. It could also be a blueprint for avoiding a repeat of the mistakes then made regarding women’s participation in political movements.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62374/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barbara Boswell is a board member of the Triangle Project.</span></em></p>A South African novel, published in 1980 and dealing with the Soweto student uprising four years earlier, still provides lessons for students today.Barbara Boswell, Senior Lecturer, English, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/620842016-07-06T14:52:42Z2016-07-06T14:52:42ZUnder the influence of … Miles Davis’ electric masterpieces<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129547/original/image-20160706-12743-g57sc7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The cover art of 'Bitches Brew' by Mati Klarwein</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Artist's website</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is the second in a new weekly series called “Under the influence”, in which we ask experts to share what they believe are the most influential works of art in their field. Here, Zen Marie introduces two of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis’ albums, “Bitches Brew” (1970) and “Live-Evil” (1971).</em></p>
<p>Miles Davis’ “<a href="http://www.furious.com/perfect/miles.html">electric period</a>” was book-ended by his records “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/in-a-silent-way-mw0000188020">In a Silent Way</a>” (1969) and “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/agharta-mw0000187879">Agharta</a>” (1976). Dubbed “<a href="http://www.furious.com/perfect/miles.html">Electric Miles</a>”, it was unpredictable, challenging, groundbreaking – funk’s <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/james-brown-mn0000128099">James Brown</a> meeting art music’s <a href="http://www.karlheinzstockhausen.org/">Karlheinz Stockhausen</a>, with psychedelic rocker <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/jimi-hendrix-mn0000354105">Jimi Hendrix</a> gatecrashing. </p>
<p>Like the respectable free jazz, his music was experimental and out there during this phase, but unlike the former, it was “electric, beat-heavy, and marketed to kids”, as music doyen <a href="http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/rock/davis-97.php">Robert Christgau</a> put it. And it was not loved by all, especially jazz critics – “thus obviously worthy of suspicion if not contempt”. Another reason these jazz ideologues dismissed “70s Miles is that the bands aren’t stellar”, according to Christgau.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129561/original/image-20160706-12743-1i841d2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129561/original/image-20160706-12743-1i841d2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129561/original/image-20160706-12743-1i841d2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129561/original/image-20160706-12743-1i841d2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129561/original/image-20160706-12743-1i841d2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129561/original/image-20160706-12743-1i841d2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129561/original/image-20160706-12743-1i841d2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The inside sleeve of the ‘Bitches Brew’ gatefold album.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I beg to differ. </p>
<p>“Bitches Brew” and “Live-Evil”, released in sequential years and part of the “Electric Miles” period, saw Davis gather a truly legendary cast of musicians to produce two of the most challenging collections of music – ever. In fact, what they offer goes beyond music – the albums are challenges that go beyond the ordinary and are an invitation to enter the sublime.</p>
<p>First, it’s worth mentioning the musicians, some of whom are featured across both albums: <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/airto-moreira-mn0000609992">Airto Moreira</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/billy-cobham-mn0000767741">Billy Cobham</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/bennie-maupin-mn0000790496">Bennie Maupin</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/chick-corea-mn0000110541">Chick Corea</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/dave-holland-mn0000585092">Dave Holland</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/don-alias-mn0000794633">Don Alias</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/gary-bartz-mn0000737969">Gary Bartz</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/harvey-brooks-mn0000951651">Harvey Brooks</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/herbie-hancock-mn0000957296">Herbie Hancock</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/hermeto-pascoal-mn0000572263">Hermeto Pascoal </a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/jack-dejohnette-mn0000104388">Jack DeJohnette</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/joe-zawinul-mn0000176859">Joe Zawinul</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/john-mclaughlin-mn0000223701">John McLaughlin </a>; <a href="https://www.discogs.com/artist/297013-Jumma-Santos">Jumma Santos</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/keith-jarrett-mn0000066570">Keith Jarrett</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/larry-young-mn0000134393">Larry Young</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/lenny-white-mn0000246487">Lenny White</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/michael-henderson-mn0000887718">Michael Henderson</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/ron-carter-mn0000275832">Ron Carter</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/steve-grossman-mn0000044517">Steve Grossman</a>; and <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/wayne-shorter-mn0000250435">Wayne Shorter</a>.</p>
<p>For those not into jazz, this is like the <a href="http://www.realmadrid.com/en">Real Madrid</a> (or <a href="https://www.fcbarcelona.com/">Barcelona</a>) of line-ups. For those not into football, its like a <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/22937970">G8 summit</a>. For those not into politics, its like the <a href="http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Triwizard_Maze">Triwizard Cup</a>. For those not into “<a href="https://www.pottermore.com/explore-the-story/harry-potter">Harry Potter</a>” … well, I think you get the picture.</p>
<p>The talent, mastery and prowess of the personnel on these albums can’t be emphasised enough and it is a credit to Davis that he managed to pull such heavyweights together.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dc7qiosq4m4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The title track from ‘Bitches Brew’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Why is/was it influential?</h2>
<p>The stature and pedigree of the musicians is not why I chose these works for “Under the influence”. When I first heard the music on these albums, I had no idea who they were nor the significance of the gathering. For me the two albums were strange and alien oddities that made absolutely no sense. </p>
<p>They did not sound the way I thought music should, the tracks were too long, the melodies syncopated, discordant, ghostly, disconcerting and at times psychotic. As far from smooth jazz as you can get, the form of this offering was something more like a pack of wild animals hooting, barking, howling and screeching: baying for carnal, bloodthirsty desires to be satiated. This was not a classic <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/miles-davis-quintet-mn0000424302">Miles Davis Quintet</a> type of gig … the music was complex, nuanced, elaborate and ambitious. </p>
<p>Then there was the album art, which was like something out of a fever-inspired hallucination or the guilt-ridden wet dream of a lonely German man (the artist <a href="http://www.matiklarweinart.com/">Mati Klarwein</a> was, of course, born in Germany). The whole package was important to me as it produced a challenge to think beyond aesthetics and form as I knew it and in a way much more complex than the commercial, pop diet that I was accustomed to. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129548/original/image-20160706-12717-1o32bop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129548/original/image-20160706-12717-1o32bop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129548/original/image-20160706-12717-1o32bop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129548/original/image-20160706-12717-1o32bop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129548/original/image-20160706-12717-1o32bop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129548/original/image-20160706-12717-1o32bop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129548/original/image-20160706-12717-1o32bop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The artwork of the ‘Live’ side of the ‘Live-Evil’ double album.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>My relationship with the records</h2>
<p>A small disclaimer is in order: I was six years old when I first heard these albums. Besides hearing them being played, I often took liberties with my parent’s record collection and these were albums that I searched out as they fascinated me – because they confused me. Part of their collection included Alice Coltrane’s “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/journey-in-satchidananda-mw0000204160">Journey in Satchidananda</a>” (1971), an album off which I used a track for a primary school science project (it was something about the solar system – I think I got a B+).</p>
<p>My experience with music at this stage was otherwise restricted to <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/michael-jackson-mn0000467203">Michael Jackson</a>. It was 1986 and I had a (pirated) copy of “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/thriller-mw0000056882">Thriller</a>” on tape, a leather jacket, a hat and one white glove. So, yes, I thought myself an expert on all things Jackson.</p>
<p>The comparison between Jackson and Davis is an unfair one. It’s like comparing a languid beach with the open ocean. One is warm and relaxing, luxurious and lazy with moments of excitement, energy and even eroticism. The other is spectacular, challenging, awe inspiring but unapproachable, inhospitable, terrifying and potentially destructive.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129550/original/image-20160706-12750-1bsh6qc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129550/original/image-20160706-12750-1bsh6qc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129550/original/image-20160706-12750-1bsh6qc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129550/original/image-20160706-12750-1bsh6qc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129550/original/image-20160706-12750-1bsh6qc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129550/original/image-20160706-12750-1bsh6qc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129550/original/image-20160706-12750-1bsh6qc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The artwork of the ‘Evil’ side of the ‘Live-Evil’ double album.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>My terror as a six-year-old, in the face of Davis or Selim Sivad (as he incarnates back to front in “Live-Evil”) and his gang of conspirators was intense and insatiable … </p>
<p>I needed more … and over the years I sought out these two albums time and time again, re-listening to them as I grew up. I even went through a phase in my first year of university where I would buy a copy of “Bitches Brew” whenever I found one in a record shop – and for some reason in the late 90s I often found one. At one point I had four copies. All were lost over the years through break-ins or moments when I gave a copy away after a conversation that began, “You’ve never heard ‘Bitches Brew’!?”</p>
<h2>Why is it still relevant today?</h2>
<p>“Bitches Brew” and “Live-Evil” are more than albums. They are works: products of a combination of genius, depravity and bravery. While they are important to jazz and for music in general, for me the importance goes further than this musicological significance. “Live-Evil” and “Bitches Brew” are about meaning, interpretation and narrative – and the rupture of all of these categories. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/coJtMqOOqds?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Live-Evil’ consists of live and studio recordings by Miles Davis.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>They are a challenge to perception and a critical examination of the soul. They ask existential, metaphysical and dangerous questions. They dare you to go beyond the prepackaged/drive-through mode of consumption. They are a call to arms for the imagination and the spirit. </p>
<h2>Birds of a feather</h2>
<p>If you wanted to compare them to something, then “Bitches Brew” and “Live-Evil” would be the bastard children conceived in an orgy between Picasso’s “<a href="http://www.pablopicasso.org/guernica.jsp">Guernica</a>”, James Joyce’s “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/04/100-best-novels-ulysses-james-joyce-robert-mccrum">Ulysses</a>” and Hunter S Thompson’s “<a href="http://www.openculture.com/2014/04/free-the-original-text-of-hunter-s-thompsons-fear-and-loathing-in-las-vegas.html">Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas</a>”, while <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/aldous-huxley-9348198">Aldous Huxley</a> watched on and took notes. But that’s if you really had to compare them to something. </p>
<p>For me, the grooved wax discs and gatefold artwork that are “Bitches Brew” and “Live-Evil” are incomparable, as they are deeply rooted in the recesses of my subconscious. As such they are tightly bound to most things I do. I still routinely go back to them, and always find new marvels and wonders in the profane back-to-front mastery of Selim Sivad Evil.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62084/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Zen Marie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>‘Bitches Brew’ and ‘Live-Evil’, two albums from Miles Davis’ electric period, have more than musicological significance. They challenge the listener to think beyond aesthetics and form.Zen Marie, Artist and Lecturer in Fine Arts, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/606662016-06-29T18:26:31Z2016-06-29T18:26:31ZUnder the influence of … Congolese virtuoso Ray Lema’s ‘Nangadeef’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127743/original/image-20160622-7185-qfk9d4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The cover of Ray Lema's album, ‘Nangadeef’.</span> </figcaption></figure><p><em>This is the first in a new series called “Under the Influence”, in which we ask experts to share what they believe are the most influential works of art in their field. Here, Afrofuturist <strong>Michael Shakib Bhatch</strong> introduces Ray Lema’s “Nangadeef”, a record that was released in 1989 on Mango Records.</em></p>
<p>“<a href="http://raylema.com/en/albums-2/nangadeef/">Nangadeef</a>” is a nine-track album by progressive Congolese cultural icon, ethnomusicologist and virtuoso musician <a href="http://raylema.com/en/biography/">Ray Lema</a>. It features classic Afrofuturistic artwork on the cover, designed by London-based photographer <a href="http://www.richardhaughton.com/">Richard Haughton</a>.</p>
<p>The album was released four years prior to the coining of the term “Afrofuturism” by cultural critic <a href="http://markdery.com/?page_id=129">Mark Dery</a>. This is significant to note, as academic investigation and discussion around this term only gained momentum in the late 1990s. The conversation around this album is precisely centred on the fact that the clearly Afrofuturistic musical work “Nangadeef” is generally overlooked in the academic discussions about Afrofuturism in Africa and in the diaspora.</p>
<p>The album features an impressive lineup of African, American and British musicians. They worked incredibly well together to mould Lema’s vision for the record. The <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/mahotella-queens-mn0000235213/biography">Mahotella Queens</a>, <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/jesse-johnson-mn0000338566/biography">Jesse Johnson</a>, <a href="http://www.courtneypine.co.uk/">Courtney Pine</a> and session musicians from across the continent create an amazing fusion of traditional African music and futuristic sounds.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GmwtwG5Ckv8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Ray Lema with the Mahotella Queens on ‘What we need’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The album’s soundscapes can be described as traditional African music fused with contemporary Western sounds. This fusion is set to a strong overarching backdrop of <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/subgenre/electronica-ma0000002574">electronica</a>, which gives it a distinct Afrofuturistic character. Whether intentional or not Lema has created a masterpiece that will, for years, be dissected by anyone interested in Afrofuturism and its almost independent development on the continent.</p>
<h2>Why it is and was influential</h2>
<p>The album offers the listener an opportunity to explore African musical fusion that is “future concious”. It does so by giving an aural insight into both electronic music and traditional African sounds simultaneously and with equal vigour. The album explores Afrofuturistic soundscapes within an African music context almost independently from the Afrofuturistic soundscapes explored by black artists in the diaspora.</p>
<p>It offers another dimension to how we view the development of Afrofuturism in Africa, and in other parts of the world. It also gives us insight into how African musicians were thinking about the future sound of African music in the late 1980s.</p>
<p>Musically, it offers us foresight into how musical styles on the continent might fuse, alter and develop as music technology and the African context changes.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rbq34stJ-pc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The track ‘Kamulang’ from ‘Nangadeef’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Why it’s still relevant</h2>
<p>Afrofuturism has been dissected and made sense of by scholars across the globe for the past 18 to 20 years. Currently there is a rather pressing need to understand how it developed on the African continent. Also, if its development in Africa is different to its development elsewhere. Increasingly we need to understand it within our own context. We therefore need to explore the works of our own artists to do so.</p>
<p>Up until recently discussions about Afrofuturism have almost always been centred on prominent Afrofuturists in the diaspora. Examples are <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/sun-ra-mn0000924232/biography">Sun Ra</a>, <a href="http://octaviabutler.org/">Octavia Butler</a>, <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/funkadelic-mn0000187581/biography">Funkadelic</a> and <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/lee-scratch-perry-mn0000785380">Lee “Scratch” Perry</a>. </p>
<p>There has been a general neglect of Afrofuturists on the African continent who have been instrumental contributors to the ever-evolving story of this phenomenon. Here artists like <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/francis-bebey-mn0000801280">Francis Bebey</a>, Ray Lema, <a href="http://afrosynth.blogspot.co.za/2011/12/om-alec-khaoli-sekuru-1987.html">Alec Khaoli</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/aug/15/spotlight-on-william-onyeabor-atomic-bomb-meltdown-david-byrne">William Onyeabor</a> spring to mind. “Nangadeef” is relevant today because it is a largely unexplored repository of Afrofuturistic data.</p>
<p>Also, pan-African collaboration and cultural fusion in Africa is extremely necessary for various socio-historic reasons. Africans have, for a long time, been subject to internal divisions imposed upon us by our colonial masters. These divisions have prevented us from understanding each other’s cultures, traditions and overwhelming similarities. These divisions have also fragmented and isolated the elements that constitute our collectively rich musical identity and heritage.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ny03rtP7SYg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The track ‘Pongi’ from ‘Nangadeef’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>An album like “Nangadeef” allows us to imagine our musical identity outside of our historic and present divisions. If anything, the album is futuristic in its ability to make the listener forget that Africa is indeed a troubled continent with a history of colonially imposed divisions that make the pan-African cultural ideal seem far fetched. It tells us that we have great music on the continent that is yet to be explored, fused, experimented with and listened to.</p>
<p>“Nangadeef” is still relevant today as the sounds on the record can be heard on later and contemporary recordings, both inside and outside of the continent. Think <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/18/mbongawana-star-breaking-out-of-kinshasa">Mbongwana Star</a> and <a href="http://rocketjuiceandthemoon.com/">Rocket Juice and the Moon</a>. Outside of being a possible relic of cultural history, the album still has musical appeal.</p>
<p>Sonically, it remains largely unexplored, despite its genius. It is easy to see how the album may have been misunderstood and even overlooked on release in 1989. Today it yields insight and intrigue for the cultural scholar, the discerning listener and the dancefloor “<a href="https://support.shazam.com/hc/en-us/articles/204438738-What-is-Shazam-">shazammer</a>” alike. I would go as far as saying that the album needs to be sampled by African electronic, neo-soul and hip-hop artists who are looking for Afrofuturistic sounds from the continent.</p>
<h2>My relationship with the album</h2>
<p>I bought the record about a year ago from a prolific African music collector and ex-record label, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2011/jan/27/behind-music-industry-a-r">A&R</a> <a href="http://loandbeholdmagazine.blogspot.co.za/2010/10/issue-two-extras-jumbo-mixtape.html">Jumbo van Reenen</a>. The first thing about the record that grabbed my attention was the cover. It seemed so tribal and futuristic, which is right up my alley. I then gave the album a listen only to discover that the music mirrored my perception of the cover art. Since then the album has been a favourite in my household.</p>
<p>“Nangadeef” intrigued me because I’m fascinated with Afrofuturism and how it manifests in music, and also because of its pan-African feel. I love how the record educated me and entertained me 27 years after it had been released. It feels so new to me, both sonically and conceptually. It also got me thinking about how the traditional and progressive can coexist in the present time, and do so quite well.</p>
<h2>Birds of a feather</h2>
<p>The album is by no means the only one that does what it does. However, it is a brilliant example of how African artists were pushing boundaries and being progressive. To further expand our understanding of the Afrofuturistic pan-African ideas and sounds featured on “Nangadeef” I would recommend the following albums:</p>
<ul>
<li>Ray Lema – “<a href="http://raylema.com/en/albums-2/medecine/">Medecine</a>” (1985)</li>
<li>The Chris Hinze Combination – “<a href="http://www.rekord.net/shop/jazz/c/1/27554/Chris_Hinze_Combination.html">Saliah</a>” (1984)</li>
<li>The Art of Noise – “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/below-the-waste-mw0000653996">Below The Waste</a>” (1989)</li>
<li>Mandingo featuring Foday Musa Suso – “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/watto-sitta-mw0000668092">Watto Sitta</a>” (1984)</li>
<li><a href="http://omaleckhaoli.blogspot.co.za/">“Om” Alec Khaoli</a> – “Say You Love Me” (EP) (1985)</li>
</ul><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/60666/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Shakib Bhatch works for the University of the Western Cape </span></em></p>The Congolese album ‘Nangadeef’ remains largely unexplored, despite its genius. As a rich repository of Afrofuturistic data, it deserves to be delved into by lovers of African art.Michael Shakib Bhatch, Lecturer of English, University of the Western CapeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.