Key words: carceral, rural, domestic colonisation, South Africa, The Netherlands, literature, affect & genre, metaphoricity & space.
I teach at the Literary and Cultural Analysis department at the University of Amsterdam and am affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA).
Currently, I’m working on my second monograph, provisionally entitled Reimaging the Rural: Pastoral Entrapment and Dis-Enclosure in South Africa (Bloomsbury Academic). The book examines South African literature and film to glean new registers for thinking the rural beyond the trap of dominant and idyllic imaginaries about the countryside that are rooted in devastating colonial habits of thought about enclosure, cultivation and extraction. This project came to fruition in the ERC project Rural Imaginations.
From February to June 2024, I will be stationed at NIAS, working on a new project entitled The Carceral Idyll: Imperial Legacies, Domestic Colonisation and the Will to Confine in the Netherlands. I aim to explore the development of the “carceral idyll” – the belief that confining people in the right way and in the right place will benefit society – as portrayed in literature, documentaries, and marketing materials related to three specific detention sites in the Netherlands: the Colonies of Benevolence, camp Westerbork, and the asylum center in Ter Apel. The project seeks to shed light on the often unacknowledged influence of Dutch colonialism on imprisonment, both at home and abroad.
"If Engels could once open an investigation of capitalism from the deck of the ship coming into harbor, this stunning collection makes clear that such an investigation today would have to begin from the hinterland. From swamps and drowned villages to windfarms and deindustrialized wastelands, these essays place the hinterland at the center of capitalism's new logistical form and chart a powerful global map for imaging, understanding, and resisting the subjection of hinterland networks to capitalism's multiple violences. No one will be able to ignore the political, historical, and planetary significance of the hinterland after reading this book."
--- Charmaine Chua, Department of Global Studies, University of California Santa Barbara
For a full description, please see here.
This special issue asks how the carceral, the rural and the colonial intersect in the Dutch Colonies of Benevolence. How do current uses obscure the Colonies’ uncomfortable connections to Dutch colonization in the East and West Indies? Which views of Veenhuizen are actively pursued and sanctioned, and which are disavowed? In order to explore these connections and questions, this cluster brings together close readings of contemporary elements of Veenhuizen, the historical context of the Colonies of Benevolence, and its resonance with other contexts that pertain to the colonial, the agricultural, and the carceral. As the joint contributions show, imaginations of the rural offer an idealized setting for lofty ideals and spectacularized consumption that render the rural invisible as a situated territory traversed by various structures of power and control.
This book examines the ways in which ubuntu is continuously shaped and reshaped in different media in contemporary South African culture, such as literature, photography, cartoon art, journalistic fiction, and commercial television. It also studies ubuntu’s recent global dissemination and commodification, and critically assesses various approaches to ubuntu from different disciplines. From these various uses, ubuntu emerges as a powerful tool for thinking through problems of social inclusion and exclusion, and provides a nuanced perspective on what it means to strive for social harmony and communal unity. Ubuntu Strategies attends to the cultural production of ubuntu and argues that it is not just about being part of a common humanity, but also involves strategic decisions that balance self and other, particular and universal, local and global, difference and sameness, as well as violence and safety. The literary and cultural theoretical approach offered in Ubuntu Strategies thus provides a new perspective that addresses the role of representation in ubuntu, both supplementing and challenging legal and political inquiries of the concept.
"Zones of Confinement: Carceral Imaginaries in Ian Gabriel's Four Corners (2013)." Faculty Lecture, University of Amsterdam. April 2017.
"Van achter het glas: Florence in J.M. Coetzee's Age of Iron." Afscheidssymposium Ena Jansen. Spui25. Amsterdam. Juni 2016.
“The Bastardisation of History: Mythology in Tertius Kapp’s Rooiland.” African Arts and Literatures Today. RCMC, ASC and Studium Generale, Leiden. May 2016.
“Waiting for the Barbarians.” Academische Boekenclub. University of Amsterdam. February 2016.
"One Art van Elizabeth Bishop." Poezie en waanzin. Spui 25, Amsterdam. March 2015.
"Mythologie in Tertius Kapp's Rooiland." Bredie van Stories. Herinnering en geschiedenis in recente Afrikaanse literatuur. University of Leiden, Leiden. September 2014.
"The Affective Mobility of Ubuntu, or How Concepts Travel.” Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship. University of Rostock, Germany. May 2013.
“The Ubuntu Strategy: Commodifications of Common Humanity in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Justus-Liebig Universität Giessen, Germany. December 2011.
“By the Look of It: Community in Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases.” University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa. August 2011.
"Prisons and Play: Heterotopia and Aesthetics in Prison Gaming." 2nd International Carceral Geography Conference, University of Birmingham, December 2017.
"Prisons and Parasites: Narrative Economies the South African Number Gangs." Narrative Conference, University of Amsterdam, June 2016.
Organiser OSL seminar "The Future Continent. Perspectives on Contemporary African Literature" March - June 2016.
Organiser Symposium "Human Nature? Memory, Ecology and Aesthetics in Contemporary Afrikaans Literature" Sept 2016
Co-organiser "African Arts and Literatures Today," April-June 2016.
Co-organiser (general co-ordination) of 2011 ASCA International Conference and Workshop Practising Theory: Imagining, Resisting, Remembering , March 2-4,2011.
In 2023-24 I teach the MA Comparative Literature core course "Texts in the 21st Century: Forms of Writing and Reading."
I encourage students to contact me if they want to organise tutorials that intersect with my research interests. I have no set office hours, so please make an appointment by email.
I was postdoctoral researcher in the ERC Rural Imaginations project and co-coordinate the Peripheries Project research group within ASCA, which focuses on spaces that have, at specific points in history, been constructed as peripheral and explores the social, political and cultural meanings and effects of this inherently perspectival positioning, as well as its dynamic relationship to what is seen as central.