3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Representation of Coloured identity in selected visual texts about Westbury, Johannesburg(2008-11-11T13:22:29Z) Dannhauser, Phyllis D.In post-apartheid South Africa, Coloured communities are engaged in reconstructing identities and social histories. This study examines the representation of community, identity, culture and historic memory in two films about Westbury, Johannesburg, South Africa. The films are Westbury, Plek van Hoop, a documentary, and Waiting for Valdez, a short fiction piece. The ambiguous nature of Coloured identity, coupled with the absence of recorded histories and unambiguous identification with collective cultural codes, results in the representation of identity becoming contested and marginal. Through constructing narratives of lived experience, hybrid communities can challenge dominant stereotypes and subvert discourses of otherness and difference. Analysis of the films reveals that the Coloured community have reverted to stereotypical documentary forms in representing their communal history. Although the documentary genre lays claim to the representation of reality and authentic experience, documentary is not always an effective vehicle for the representation of lived experience and remembered history. Fiction can reinterpret memory by accessing the emotional textures of past experiences in a more direct way.Item The Incredible Journey of Freddy Reddy(2006-11-16T07:53:47Z) Lauf, Kyle RadfordThis is an historical documentary about an individual’s remarkable journey, one which starts in Durban in 1957 and ends with the protagonist’s arrival in London later the same year before he would subsequently move to Oslo in 1961. The documentary is intended primarily for a South African television audience. As such, it is a history to be apprehended visually rather than in writing, and to a large and heterogeneous, though primarily South African audience. The documentary is actually about two journeys: the physical overland African passage to Europe with its various episodes, and the journey of an ambitious young adult from a humble and disadvantaged background with only a primary school education. It culminates with him gaining acceptance for study of medicine at a Norwegian university, where he would eventually qualify as a doctor and later as a psychiatrist. Though set against the backdrop of the emerging political opposition to apartheid, the documentary is a somewhat depoliticised personal history – the biographical narrative of an old man who accomplished something in his youth which altered his whole life. It is not primarily a political history, nor is it a narrative about the experience of exile. The documentary attempts to locate a historical and spatial context from where the protagonist emerged, but does not attempt to portray the history of South African Indians as a racial or cultural group, per se.Item Role of documentaries in the construction of national identity: Project 10 documentary series, South Africa(2006-10-26T12:40:01Z) Ambala, Anthony TThis study analyses the role of the media generally, and the documentary mode specifically, in the construction of national identity. It focuses on the Project 10 documentary series in South Africa. Chapter one, lays the foundation for the study by discussing the concepts, theories and debates on the notion of ‘the nation’, ‘national identity’, ‘nation building’ and the documentary mode. Chapter two argues that nations are in a constant state of (re)birth, (re)definition and (re)invention and interrogates how the documentary mode attempts to sustain what Benedict Anderson (1991) calls a sense of ‘imagined community’. Chapter three focuses on the role and position of an individual citizen vis-à-vis ‘nation’ and ‘nation building’, and how the documentaries in the Project 10 series explore this concern. Chapter four examines the effects and manifestations of previous leadership regimes in the present-day South Africa and how this affects the process of building contemporary South Africa.