Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Editorial: Transnational Audio Storytelling: Writing The Common Language Of Sound, Laura Romero, Siobhan Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

Editorial on a special transnational issue of RadioDoc Review, curated by Dr Laura Romero and co-edited by A/Prof Siobhan McHugh. The issue features mainly sound-rich European works in languages other than English, critiqued by reviewers from four continents. It also showcases invited articles on mainstream podcasts, The Shadows (audio fiction) and Serial Season Three (crafted documentary) .

Failure As Liberation: A Critical Analysis Of Rilo Chmielorz’ Artistic Feature “Scheitern Ist. Eine Bestandsaufnahme” (Failure Is. An Inventory), Ania Mauruschat

RadioDoc Review

This essay is a critical analysis, interpretation and assessment of the feature “Scheitern ist. Eine Bestandsaufnahme”(2016), by the German artist Rilo Chmielorz,which explores failure as a taboo subject in neoliberal societies that worship the ideology of success and progress.

This study deconstructs this unique feature to its various parts and looks at the feature as a whole in terms of the concept of “polyphonic narration” that the Russian literature and art scholar and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) derived from the poetics of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). It shows how the level of content (life stories of failure, experts …

Pillow, Talk: Kaitlin Prest’S The Shadows And The Elements Of Modern Audio Fiction, Neil Verma

RadioDoc Review

This essay is a study of The Shadows (2018), a series produced by Kaitlin Prest and Phoebe Wang for CBC Podcasts. I situate the work in the framework of Prest’s career after her podcast The Heart, and argue that The Shadows crystallises a set of conventions about “audio fiction” that set it apart from “audio drama,” “radio features” and other similar forms, at least at this particular historical moment. These conventions include: the embrace of naive themes; a preference for retroversion or 'queer temporality'; a focus on body sound; multiplication in mixing and editing that comes across as a …

Prix Europa: The European Broadcasting Festival 2018 - Radio Documentary And Feature Trends, Forms And Topics., Natalia Kowalska

RadioDoc Review

This article surveys a range of European audio features and documentaries selected for the prestigious Prix Europa 2018. Works critiqued come from Italy, UK, France, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Czech Republic. the Netherlands and Belgium. The winner was The Upside Down, made by Gianluca Stazi and Giuseppe Casu and produced by Radio Televisione Italiana, RAI Radio 3 and Tratti Documentari. The jury described it as a “timeless story about the dignity and spirituality of work. Patiently, it leads us deep into the recesses of the natural world and the human soul. We heard a real musical experience composed of natural sounds …

Listening To Our Inner Breath: The Acoustic Architecture Of Avec Le Vent (With The Wind), Laura Romero

RadioDoc Review

Avec Le Vent (With the Wind) is a radio art composition directed, edited and mixed by Jeanne Debarsy, about the story of exile and memories of three Armenian people living in Brussels and Paris. This review is an attempt to describe how the author breaks with verbal discourse to create an experience of transportation for listeners, through the musical use of layers of breaths coming from the characters and the sound effects caused by instruments of wind, such as the duduk, a potent symbol of Armenia. It is a poetic approach to the experience of uprooting and …

Notes On Contributors

Kunapipi

Notes On Contributors

The Search For A Role For White Women In A Liberated South Africa: A Thematic Approach To The Novels Of Nadine Gordimer., Kirsten Holst Petersen

Kunapipi

The impetus for this paper, and also its centre of concern is the puzzlement, spilling over into plain irritation with which many critics received A Sport of Nature.1 The irritation centred around the portrayal of the main character, the young girl Hillela. She seems to drift aimlessly through the 396 pages, surviving mainly by attaching herself to a series of men, often, it seems, simply because they come in handy. Feminists were outraged. Critics were looking for a serious discussion about options in the deteriorating political climate in South Africa. (This is what one had come to expect from Gordimer …

Impressions And Thoughts On The Options Of South African Women, Lauretta Ngcobo

Kunapipi

Eighteen months after President De Klerk gave his historic speech of 2 February 1990, South Africans are beginning to show signs of believing that things are actually destined for change, and that change will be irreversible. This has brought on a frenzy of hope and doubt, of feverish excitement (as of people before a gathering storm), of joyous instability and aggressive possessiveness, as though they are afraid to lose what they've known all through the years of oppression. Visiting South Africa after many years, one soon finds oneself joining in the medley, and it is hard to pause and observe …

The Finishing Touch, Deena Padayachee

Kunapipi

The shebeen was full of raucous people having a great old time. But Satha noticed that his friend Muthu didn't look too happy. The old man had come into the shebeen a few minutes ago and simply plopped down in a chair. He had taken his first drink in one gulp and was now staring at his empty glass like a zombie. That wasn't like Muthu, ruminated Satha, not like Muthu at all. Satha's bleary eyes focussed glassily on his friend and he asked him why he was looking so depressed.

Poem, Deela Khan

Kunapipi

Poem

Scenes From Some South African Weddings, Gillian Cargill

Kunapipi

These photographs were part of a larger series exhibited at The Market Galleries in Johannesburg in 1990. This project deals with the changing and unchanging aspects of the nature of the wedding ritual as it is practiced in various South African communities.

Post-Colonial, Post-Apartheid, Postfeminist: Family And State In Prison Narratives By South African Wome, Cherry Clayton

Kunapipi

I want to use a group of prison narratives by South African women to contest some of the implications of the current terms 'post-colonial', 'post-apartheid' and 'post-feminist'. The 'post' prefix in all cases seems to suggest a movement beyond the struggles of the past, to describe an already existing or desired state beyond the dialectic of power struggles figured in the earlier terms 'colonialism', 'apartheid' and 'feminism', which connoted sites of struggle organised around nationality, race, and gender.

The Boy With An Extraordinary Mind, Enoch A. Monkwe

Kunapipi

It was six o'clock on Friday- a cool summer Friday morning. A tall and thin young man entered the kitchen in which he had had breakfast for twenty-one years. It was familiar. The room was small, the size of a store-room. A paraffin stove and a twenty litre gallon of water were the only outstanding features.

Emergency Series, Garth Erasmus

Kunapipi

Emergeny Series I-V

Confession, Interrogation And Self-Interrogation In The New South African Prison Writing, J U. Jacobs

Kunapipi

'At unlock' every morning (to use the prison parlance) there are approximately 120,000 people in prison in South Africa, with its population of 35 million. Britain, in comparison, has a daily prison population of 55,000 for a total population of 57 million - proportionally one-fourth of the South African figure. This depressing reality of an inordinate number of South Africans having become criminalized as the result of an unjust political system is further compounded by the detention of about 73,000 people under Emergency regulations since the first State of Emergency in 1960- 32,000 in the period between 12 June 1985 …

Poems, Peter Clarke

Kunapipi

Phulaphulani, Bloohounds

Poems, Mxolisi M. Nyezwa

Kunapipi

POEMS AND PAPERS, TRANSCENDENCE, A POEM

Poems, Sipho Sepamla

Kunapipi

ALL VOICES BECOME HOARSE, TOUCH ME NOW

Poems, Andries Walter Oliphant

Kunapipi

THE HUNGER STRIKER, AFTER LIFE

Forums And Forces: Recent Trends In South African Literary Journals, Andries Walter Oliphant

Kunapipi

Literary journals are important sites of cultural production. They perform a variety of roles which include providing forums for new developments in literature by publishing emergent voices. They help mediate and shape the direction in which a national literature develops by means of critical essays, reviews and debates. In most societies journals are often the barometers of the general literary life.

Long After The Night Watch, M Abner, B Nyamande

Kunapipi

Vukile was at last free from the maniacal pressure to go to school. He had at last passed his Senior Certificate. The aggregate wasn't anything exciting at all. It was the usual School Leaving certificate everyone was only too glad to receive. Vukile had always thought in terms of receiving his education rather than working it out himself. One always received information, received marks, received certificates; while, on the other hand one could also receive punishment or receive nothing at all, which was a clear indication of one's worthlessness. The school is well-known for its caprice and sinister nature. Anyhow, …

Like Shifting Sands, Santu Mofokeng

Kunapipi

These photographs are from Santu Mofokeng's exhibition Like Shifting Sands which focuses on the life and realities on the farms and in the rural towns in Transvaal. The exhibition, in the words of the photographer, attempts to depict 'ordinary Black South Africans going about the day-tcr day business of living'. In the process Mofokeng establishes his subjects as actors, neither as pseudcrheroic, nor as helpless victims. At the heart of this work is a sensitive and compassionate insight into the low-key but profound resistance inherent in the 'basic decency of marginalized and deprived people'.

Mzwakhe Mbuli: The People's Poet, Kirsten Holst Petersen

Kunapipi

Poems and Interview

'An Unfinished Mourning': Echo Poems From Pietermaritzburg, David Maughan Brown

Kunapipi

Between January 1987 and June 1989 some 1400 people were killed in incidents of politically-motivated violence in an area of 374 square kilometres around Pietermaritzburg in the Natal Midlands in South Africa1 • In the same area an estimated 1000 houses were destroyed, some 10,000 people moved house permanently, and another 10 to 15 thousand had to flee their homes for some part of the period in question. The South African State, represented by Cabinet Ministers and South African Police (SAP) spokesmen in particular, made consistent efforts to downplay the conflict until it suddenly became an excuse for not lifting …

Moving, Belonging, And Sorrow In ‘A Very Different Time’ By Phil Smith, Silvia Viñas

RadioDoc Review

Phil Smith’s A Very Different Time weaves poetry, music, ambience and snapshots of stories in an audio piece about movement, nostalgia, change and sorrow. It includes the voices of people he met while living in Berlin: a West African refugee; a musician and academic from the United States; a Syrian refugee escaping war; an academic of Italian/German citizenship; and a German musician who moved from a small town to the city. To this stream of voices, Smith adds layers of music, different beats, street sounds, distortion, the ambience that recall the words – valleys, mountains, water and islands –and a …

Kunapipi 23 (1) 2001, Contents, Editorial

Kunapipi

Contents, Editorial

Echo Poems

Kunapipi

JUST BEFORE EMBRACING DAWN, VIVA PEN OF CULTURE, DEATH ON MY DOORSTEPS, IT'S A WEEKEND AGAIN

The Law Of The Vultures: A Story For An Altered State?, Sally-Ann Murray

Kunapipi

State?* South Africa stands at a critical moment of her history. Despite the optimisms of recent times, it is not of course a moment that has arisen, as one of our leading sociologists has it, by an 'almost miraculous intervention'1 • Rather, it remains explicable as a point in a long, difficult process of opposition to the structural inequalities of South African society. From any vantage point of that story, we could identify continuities and discontinuities that predate even the institutionalization of apartheid in 1948.

Poems, Stephen Gray

Kunapipi

SEASON OF VIOLENCE, RETURNEES

An Author's Agenda: Re-Visioning Past And Present For A Future South Africa, Stephen Gray

Kunapipi

This paper takes as premise Stanley Frielick's generally accepted point that much publishing in South Africa today is 'part of the process of historical rediscovery and re-visioning that informs contemporary South African studies', so that 'through exploring the dynamic connections between past and present, we can gain a clearer picture of the forces that are shaping our future'.1 I would add to this one of the satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys's throwaway lines: The future is known in South Africa; only the past is unpredictable? The position of that elusive specimen - the South African writer- is perhaps best summarised in part …