Faculty of Humanities (ETDs)

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Aesthetics

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    The aesthetic politics of skin tone and hair texture amongst black women in Diepkloof, Johannesburg
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Kwinika, Makhawukana Akani; Katsaura, Obvious
    Beautification practices for Black women in South Africa reveal a complex interplay of cultural influences and individual affirmative choices. This research explores the societal factors that inspire Black women to beautify the surface-body, focusing on hair and skin, both locally and from an intra-racial perspective. The theories that the research borrows from are the Self- objectification theory, which explains the issues associated with bodily modifications and insecurities, and African Feminism, which examines the intersectionality of race, gender, and beauty standards, emphasizing the importance of examining the history of African women. Employing a qualitative methodology, data were collected through questionnaires and in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted in Diepkloof Zone 2, a Township situated in Soweto, Johannesburg, with a sample size of seven women. Thematic analysis was utilized for data analysis. The findings demonstrate that Black women’s beautification practices remain politicized globally, yet the Black beauty experience is multifaceted, ranging from personal to trivial. The study highlights the agency of Black women in redefining beauty standards globally and within the African continent, rather than merely adhering to Western norms. Recommendations include further exploration of Black women’s hair aesthetics to accommodate bald-headedness or short hair as a preference. Furthermore, to explore skin bleaching practices among Black women and understand the psychological implications of colourism and the yellow bone phenomenon beyond the internalization of whiteness.
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    In Search of Utopia: Sylvia Pankhurst, Ethel Mannin, Nancy Cunard, and International Socialist Woman Authors in Interwar Britain
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Timlin, Carrie; Kostelac, Sofia; Gordon, Colette
    A revival of anti-communist discourse in scholarship and politics has reignited decades-long debates between those who associate communism with the atrocities of totalitarian systems, and those who seek to emphasise the work of Socialists who genuinely sought to create a world free from gender, class and racial discrimination. In literary studies this has manifested as renewed interested in the lives and work of utopian Socialist authors like Nancy Cunard, Ethel Mannin and Sylvia Pankhurst, which suggests a shift in scholarship towards those outside the literary canon. Pankhurst and Mannin drew on literary forms that spoke to the culture, history, and experiences of their readers: women and the working classes. An exploration of the complexity of Cunard’s journey from attempts to infiltrate elitist literary circles, to a poet whose work captured the hardships of racial inequality and war, challenges ideas about the politics of modernist experimentation, and the value placed on high art. Taken together, their fiction and non-fiction unsettles the boundaries between art and activism, high, middle and lowbrow art, and preconceived ideas about the canon in the study of literature. Bringing their fiction and non-fiction into conversation with their socio-political contexts, readerships, and the philosophies and utopian socialist doctrine that shaped them as author-activists opens new avenues of exploration into the interplay of politics and aesthetics. Blurring the line between public politics, fiction and non-fiction, Pankhurst, Mannin, and Cunard’s work was a crucial and effective part of their internationalism, socialist activism, and resistance to totalitarianism. In the tradition of the utopianism of the late 19th Century they adapted literary forms as vehicles for socialist philosophy and doctrine. In addition to their creative work, they used literary techniques to shape non-fiction like newspaper articles, pamphlets and other political texts. The diversity of experience that Pankhurst, Mannin and Cunard recorded in their fiction and non-fiction amounts to an archive of work that complicates reductionist post-Cold War debates about the theory and practice of communism.