Fall 2011 COSA Events

Tuesday, September 6, 2011
"Constitutionalism and Diversity: Sexual Orientation in South Africa"

Justice Edwin Cameron, South African Constitutional Court

During apartheid, Cameron was a leading human rights lawyer. He was appointed by President Mandela to the bench in 1994. A critic of President Thabo Mbeki's AIDS-denialist policies, he wrote a prize-winning memoir, Witness to AIDS. He was appointed to the Constitutional Court in 2009. For more info...

Tues., September 6
4.00-6.00 pm
FHI "Garage"
C105, Bay 4, 1st Floor
Smith Warehouse

Free and open to the public

Cosponsored by the program in sexuality studies, the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Life, and the Center for International & Comparative Law.

Justice Cameron will also appear at the following events:

Stigma and AIDS: The Personal and the Political
Wed., September 7
4.00 pm
240 John Hope Franklin Center

Constitutionalism, Rights, and International Law: The Glenister Decision
Thurs., September 8
12.30 pm
Duke Law School, Room 3041

Wednesday, September 14, 2011
"Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting: Reassessing Male Violence and Virtue in South Africa"

Benedict Carton, Associate Professor of History and Africa Coordinator, AAAS, George Mason University

Zulu soldiers decimated a British army at the 1879 battle of Isandlwana, sensationalizing the idea of Zulu men as natural-born killers. Reassessing this stereotype, Carton scrutinizes the apparent link between Shaka's version of martial culture and the formative experiences of Zulu men, such as boyhood stick fighting -- a rural sport associated with masculine aggression in South Africa.

Wed., September 14
Noon - 1.30pm
Friedl 225, East Campus
Duke University

Free and open to the public

Light lunch served. Please RSVP to nancy.robbins@duke.edu by 9/12/11.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011
"Surface, Edge, Underneath:
Deciphering South Africa's Cultural Contemporary"

Kerry Bystrom, University of Connecticut
Sarah Nuttall, University of the Witwatersrand
Ato Quayson, University of Toronto
commentators:
Anne-Maria Makhulu, Duke University
Aarthi Vadde, Duke University

In a context in which the language of difference and alterity seems increasingly exhausted, might it be in depthlessnessthat something of an opportunity lies for cultural critique and social and literary imagination? If reading for depth, for symptoms, and for wounds no longer gives us a full purchase on the time-space we inhabit, what might another kind of conversation look like? In contemporary South African cultural form, surface has become suggestive, as artists and writers look not only down to the underneath (the life of allegory, and wound) but across social and political time in order to invent new ways of seeing.  In these horizontal invocations, the surface is in the symptom, and the symptom in the surface.  Here, paradoxically might reside the fugitive meanings of the present as well as the resources for a future-oriented politics.

Tues., November 1
Noon - 1.30pm
Friedl 225, East Campus
Duke University

Free and open to the public

Light lunch served. Please RSVP to nancy.robbins@duke.edu

Tuesday, November 15, 2011
"The Politics of South African Protest"

Philip Bonner, University of the Witwatersrand
Tshepo Moloi, Wits University
Noor Nieftagodien, Deputy Chair of the Wits History Workshop

Philip Bonner, "The ANC: A History of Fragments, 1912-1960"

Phil Bonner is Professor of History at the University of the Witwatersrand and Chair of the History Workshop.  He has published extensively on urban, labor and public history, was the co-curator of the Apartheid Museum and supervised a project interviewing ex Robben Island prisoners.

Tshepo Moloi, “To negotiate or not to negotiate? The Pan Africanist Congress and the ‘Revolutionary Watchdogs,’ 1980s-1996”

Tshepo Moloi is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in History at Wits University and a member of Wits’ History Workshop.  He has written widely on student politics in South Africa.

Noor Nieftagodien, “Struggling for the rights to the city: popular movements in the 1940s"

Nieftagodien is the Deputy Chair of the Wits History Workshop. He has published broadly on South African popular movements, and more recently on the 2008 xenophobic attacks.

Tues., November 15
Noon - 1.30pm
Friedl 225, East Campus
Duke University

Free and open to the public

Light lunch served. Please RSVP to nancy.robbins@duke.edu