THE COSMOPOLITAN KAROO RESEARCH FORUM (CKRF)

DST/NRF SOUTH AFRICAN RESEARCH CHAIRS INITIATIVE (SARChI)

EVENTS
EVENTS
EVENTS

Our forum returns this week (22 October) and we are delighted to welcome back Eve Wong!

Eve will be presenting “Give Us Back the Land”: Khoisan Revivalism, Rematriation, and Indigenous Land Ontologies in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Please find the abstract below.

We hope to see you there.

Abstract:

When asked what the government could do to address the marginalisation of Khoisan people in South Africa, one historian-activist answered without hesitation: “Land. They must give us back the land. That would be a start.” This talk begins with her answer and asks what kind of relationship to land it presupposes. Is “land” here property? Is it heritage? Is it a resource or resources? If it isn’t, or at least, those aren’t the completeness of the answer, then what else is it? What if it is something older and less legible to existing frameworks?

I have worked for over a decade with urban Khoisan-identifying and coloured communities in Cape Town and this talk is grounded in the ethnographic insights produced from that engagement and brings into it new dimensions based on more recent consideration through a rematriation and gendered revivalism perspective(s). I developed a triadic lens for considering identity in relation to embodied and lived responses in relation to political and social movements by non-activists to illuminate what is at stake in contemporary indigenous claims.

Central to the discussion for the forum is the concept of rematriation, which in this context I discuss as a return to relational, matricentric, and ecologically embedded ways of knowing and inhabitating space and place that transcends simple conversations about reclamations of land as a territory.

I argue that dominant “sustainable development” discourses impose demands on indigenous communities that function as its own sort of re(colonialism) through the proofs and contestations around proving “authenticity.” Meanwhile, the constellation of individuals at the heart of my research over the past decade have not reached for legibility through the archives or through “authenticity” but through “fabulation” or relational, performative, embodied acts of life that builds speculative futures outside of colonial categories.

Taking a more collaborative, co-creative format towards collective knowledge-making, this session is structured as a dialogue. After each thematic point, the floor opens for discussion. Participants are invited to ask whether (and how) these frameworks might enrich the conversations around land relations and community responses the Cosmopolitan Karoo research group encounters in its own field sites.