This volume contains contributions that consider new approaches to three areas: the documentation of rock art; its interpretation using indigenous knowledge; and the presentation of rock art. Working with Rock Art is the first edited volume to consider each of these areas in a theoretical rather than a technical fashion, and it therefore makes a significant contribution to the discipline. The volume aims to promote the sharing of new experiences between leading researchers in the field. While the geographic focus is truly global, there is a dominant north-south axis with strong representation from researchers in southern Africa and northern Europe, two leading centres for new approaches in rock art research. Working with Rock Art opens up a long overdue dialogue about shared experiences between these two centres, and a number of the chapters are the first published results of new collaborative research. Since this volume covers the recording, interpretation and presentation of rock art, it will attract a wide audience of researchers, heritage managers and students, as well as anyone interested in the field of rock art studies.

In this wonderfully original and intensely personal--yet deeply analytical--work, Dr. Carli Coetzee argues in favor of difference and disagreement as legitimate forms of activism to bring about social change both inside and outside the teaching environment. She begins by defining "accentedness" as the process of actively working towards the ending of apartheid by being aware of the legacies of the past, without attempting to gloss over the conflicts and violence that may exist under the surface. Having established this, she examines the concept of "accent" in a broad educational context, analyzing it, not only as an accent of speech, but also an attitude, a stance against being understood--yet a way of teaching that requires teacher and pupil to understand each other's contexts. The book draws on seminal recent South African literature to illustrate a new way of reading and to theorize this teacher-student relationship. The ideas presented about the relationships created by the use of language to convey knowledge, particularly in translation, are evocative, thought-provoking, and even challenging at times. "Accented Futures" marks a significant and important contribution to research on identity in post-apartheid South Africa, as well as to the fields of education and translation studies.

The 'Cradle of Humankind' (COH), bordering Gauteng and the North-West Province, was declared a World Heritage Site for the wealth of the human and animal fossils found there. Research based on fossils found in the area as well as signs of early human habitation have shed new light on the evolution of humankind and on the significant role that southern Africa played in the development of modern humans.;"A Search for Origins" aims to provide an overview of the history of the COH, and of the important discoveries that have been made there, for a non-specialist audience. A number of general accounts have been written which have concentrated on the palaeontological discoveries made there. No systematic account written by specialists in their disciplines has, however, been published about the wider history of the COH and surrounding areas. In particular, no overview spanning the evolution of early plant and animal life, human development, and recent and colonial history as reflected in discoveries linked to the COH, has been attempted. In this sense alone the book will fill a niche.;This edited volume frames the scientific advances that have been made in the COH against the intellectual and political background out of which they emerged. It places the COH within a recognisable South African context, which renders it a great deal more meaningful for both South African visitors and international tourists. The multi-disciplinary approach - from a wide range of specialists - is innovative and ground-breaking.

Since South Africa's transition to democracy, many universities have acquired new works of art that convey messages about the advantages of cultural diversity, and engage critically with histories of racial intolerance and conflict. Given concerns about the influence of British imperialism or Afrikaner nationalism on aspects of their inherited visual culture, most tertiary institutions are also seeking new ways to manage their existing art collections, and to introduce memorials, insignia or regalia, which reflect the universities' newfound values and aspirations. In Picturing Change, Brenda Schmahmann explores the implications of deploying the visual domain in the service of transformative agendas and unpacks the complexities, contradictions and slippages involved in this process. She shows that although most new commissions have been innovative, some universities have acquired works with potentially traditionalist - even backward-looking - implications. While the motives behind removing inherited imagery may be underpinned by a desire to unsettle white privilege, in some cases such actions can also serve to maintain the status quo. This book is unique in exploring the transformative ethos evident in the curation of visual culture at South African universities. It will be invaluable to readers interested in public art, the politics of curating and collecting, as well as to those involved in transforming tertiary and other public institutions into spaces that welcome diversity.

Combative, volatile, constantly on the verge of exploding, Dwayne and Shanell Combrink are two halves of a white South African working-class couple, living an uneasy truce as they struggle with the day-to-day trials of scraping together a living and dreaming competing dreams. But beneath Dwayne's angry, violent exterior lies the heartbreak that governs his attitude to life. Dwayne is a man in mourning. Shanell believes his current level of despair was sparked by the death of his childhood friend and recent work partner, Jonas, but the source of his mourning and anger lies much further back. When the elegant and self-contained Namhla Gumede, born on 16 June 1976, arrives on their doorstep seeking answers to questions that have remained buried for 40 years, Dwayne and Shanell finally find out the truth. What starts as a smouldering dark comedy suddenly turns into a roller-coaster ride of startling revelations, rage and recrimination ... before the storm finally breaks.

"Why bother to rob a bank, when you can own a bank?" asked Bertold Brecht. The question is reiterated in the very Brechtian "Love, Crime and Johannesburg," the story of Jimmy 'Long Legs' Mangane, a people's poet involved in the struggle, who is accused of robbing a bank. He passionately asserts his innocence, claiming to work for the "secret secret service." Lewis, his old friend and comrade from the struggle, now owns a bank. How did this happen? The man of the struggle is now a man of accounts. A man of the nineties. Part of the cellphone generation. Added to the mix is an old-style gangster, two girlfriends, a Jewish father and a very unusual Chief of Police. Described as one of the first genuine post-apartheid plays, "Love, Crime and Johannesburg" is a witty, lighthearted account of life in the City of Gold at the turn of the millennium. A must for all students of South African theatre. Winner of the 2000 Vita Award for best script of a new South African Play.

An illustrated collection that takes stock of current knowledge and proposes a new way of reading indigenous art.

For thousands of years, nomadic hunter-gatherers assigned a fundamental role to the visualization of the animals who shared their lives. Some, such as the Cape eland, the largest of antelopes, were the object of a fascinated gaze, as though the graceful markings and shapes of their bodies were the key to secret knowledge safeguarded by the animals’ unsettling silence.

Renaud Ego posits that the artists sought to steal the animals’ secret through an act of rendering visible a vitality that remained hidden beneath appearances. In this process, the San themselves became the visionary animal who, possessing the gift of making pictures, would acquire far-seeing powers. Thanks to the singular effectiveness of their visual art, they could make intellectual contact with the world in order better to think and,ultimately, to act. They gained access to the full dimension of their human condition through painting scenes that functioned like visual contracts with spiritual and ancestral powers.

Their art is an act that seeks to preserve the wholeness of existence through a respect for the relationships linking all beings, both real and imaginary,who partake of it. The fundamentally ecological dimension of this message confers on San art its universality and contemporary relevance.Visionary Animal is a translation of L’Animal voyant, published in France in 2015. This rich collection of essays is beautifully illustrated with the author’s photographs of rock art from across southern Africa.

On 11 May 2008, residents of Alexandra Township turned violently on their neighbours, launching a string of attacks that, two weeks later, left 60 dead, dozens raped and over a hundred thousand displaced. Most of those killed were from beyond South Africa's borders, but at least a third were citizens who, for reasons of ethnicity or political affiliation, failed to protect their space in the country's urban core. Although not the most severe political violence in South Africa's turbulent past, the 2008 attacks reflect an important moment in the country's post-apartheid, post-authoritarian existence: a moment when the government's legitimacy and the post-apartheid order were called into question. This xenophobic violence made evident cracks in the cohesion of law and society while helping to redefine both. It is these events and subsequent consequences for the ordering of power, population and place that this book explores. Exorcising the demons within makes sense of recent anti-outsider violence by situating it within an extended history of South African statecraft that both produced the conditions for the attacks and has been reshaped by it. Drawing on an interdisciplinary team of expert scholars and on new research, this is the first academic text to fully theorise the events that made global headlines in 2008. Through its subtle, empirical and theoretically informed analysis, the book reshapes discussion of xenophobia and violence in South Africa while injecting local debates into global considerations of the meaning of citizenship and the post-colonial state.

Life of Bone brings into sharp relief, and interrogates, the abutting practices of the scientific and the artistic, practices which have co-existed since the beginning of our species. It's based on an exhibition, scheduled to open in May 2011 at the Origins Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand. This exhibition will display the original fossil skull of the Taung child hominid alongside artworks by Joni Brenner, Gerhard Marx and Karel Nel made specifically in response to these evolutionarily significant remains. This unique combination of paleoanthropological finds and art prompts a range of enquiries on the nature of both artistic and scientific disciplines, and encourages a dialogue between the very distant historic and the contemporary.

Gaze Regimes is a bricolage of essays and interviews showcasing the experiences of women working in film, either directly as practitioners or in other areas as curators, festival programme directors or fundraisers. It does not shy away from questioning the relations of power in the practice of filmmaking and the power invested in the gaze itself. Who is looking and who is being looked at, who is telling women's stories in Africa and what governs the mechanics of making those films on the continent? The interviews with film practitioners such as Tsitsi Dangarembga, Taghreed Elsanhouri, Jihan El-Tahri, Anita Khanna, Isabel Noronhe, Arya Lalloo and Shannon Walsh demonstrate the contradictory points of departure of women in film - from their understanding of feminisms in relation to lived-experiences and the realpolitik of women working as cultural practitioners. The disciplines of gender studies, postcolonial theory, and film theory provide the framework for the book's essays. Jyoti Mistry, Antje Schuhmann, Nobunye Levin, Dorothee Wenner and Christina von Braun are some of the contributors who provide valuable context, analysis and insight into, among other things, the politics of representation, the role of film festivals and the collective and individual experiences of trauma and marginality which contribute to the layered and complex filmic responses of Africa's film practitioners.

Against the lethargy and despair of the contemporary Anglophone Caribbean experience, Aaron Kamugisha gives a powerful argument for advancing Caribbean radical thought as an answer to the conundrums of the present.

Beyond Coloniality is an extended meditation on Caribbean thought and freedom at the beginning of the twenty-first century and a profound rejection of the post-independence social and political organization of the Anglophone Caribbean and its contentment with neocolonial arrangements of power. Kamugisha provides a dazzling reading of two towering figures of the Caribbean intellectual tradition, C.L.R. James and Sylvia Wynter, and their quest for human freedom beyond coloniality.

Ultimately, he urges the Caribbean to recall and reconsider the radicalism of its most distinguished twentieth-century thinkers in order to imagine a future beyond neocolonialism.

This is an abbreviated version of Tracks in a Mountain Range, and is published in dual format in English and isiZulu. The uKhahlamba mountains have been the home of many different groups of people for a very long time. Small groups of hunter-gatherers began living in rock shelters there at least 27 000 years ago. Their descendants were San people who still lived there as recently as a hundred years ago. About 600 years ago, groups of African farmers began building their villages near the foothills, and grazing their cattle into the mountains. From the 1840s, European settlers in the colony of Natal began laying out farms for sheep and cattle in the foothills of the mountains. They drove out the San, and brought the African farmers under their domination. In the twentieth century the settlers and their descendants began to use the land for purposes besides farming, especially for developing tourism and leisure activities, and supplying water for industry. Africans became labourers on the farms and in South Africa's towns and cities. Exploring the History of the uKhahlamba Mountains tells about the coming of these different peoples to the mountains, and describes the different ways of life that they established, sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently. It is copiously illustrated with photographs in full colour.

Craig Higginson's first three plays for adult audiences - collected here in one volume - represent one of the strongest debuts in contemporary South African theatre. Although each can be seen as a variation on the theme of the post-apartheid state of the nation play, they are also engaged with realities in Zimbabwe, the Congo and contemporary Europe. Higginson's experience of growing up in wartorn Zimbabwe and apartheid South Africa have given him a deeprooted and potent angle from which to dramatize a dialogue between Europe and Africa. As British director Jeremy Herrin has noted in his Foreword: `The pairing of delicate psychology and considered plot allow the plays to move beyond the realism of their settings into a bespoke theatrical landscape, a place where the contradictions and messiness of contemporary life hold themselves up for inspection.'

Evil stalks the township of KwaMashu, near Durban. It comes in the form of whoonga (known as nyaope elsewhere), a toxic mix of B-grade heroin, rat poison and other chemical components that almost immediately sucks its users into a vortex of addiction and the crime, deception and personal tragedy that goes with it. Caught up in the web, the ulwembu of the title (spider’s web in isiZulu), presided over by the dealer, Bongani Mseleku, are Lieutenant Portia Mthembu, a police officer in the frontline of the fight against the scourge; her son Sipho; his friend, Andile Nxumalo, and Emmanuel Abreu, a Mozambique-born spaza shopkeeper. As it traces Sipho’s descent from talented scholar and aspirant poet and songwriter to suicidal addict, Ulwembu explores the effects of addiction not only on those who suffer from it but on communities, families and the police, both those who try to control the murderous trade and those who benefit from it. Using a process they have dubbed Empatheatre, The Big Brotherhood, Neil Coppen, Dylan McGarry and Mpume Mtombeni, aim to share `people’s real-life stories, with the intention to inspire and develop a greater empathy and kindness in spaces where there is conflict or injustice’. Ulwembu is the dramatic result of their efforts.