Hanneke Stuit

Agrilogistics, a frame of mind and a set of behaviours that consider the environment as existing outside of humans and as inherently pliable to utilitarian and economic purposes, has determined human engagement with the countryside for centuries without second guessing the logics of its approach. Why are such agrilogistics maintained despite proving toxic to humans and other lifeforms? This essay argues that the genre of the pastoral, although based on ambivalence towards the dispossession and exclusion that structures it, forms a linchpin in sustaining agrilogistics’ feedback loops between the imaginary, the material, and the social, thereby determining who does and does not gain access to the rural idyll’s promise of ‘the good life’. Such incorporated pastoral attitudes, I argue, are caught between idyllic habits of signification and the carceral effects and experiences that these idyllic habits effect on others. The essay offers the concept of pastoral entrapment to capture the ubiquity of carceral structures in the rural while indicating the persistence with which we remain tethered to idyllic renditions that actively cover such structures up. After bringing into view the historical imbrications between the countryside as we know it today and the confinement of people, livestock, and ecosystems in general, the essay proceeds to suggest that the rise of domestic colonisation in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century was heavily invested in rural idylls and could be approached as an agrilogistic enterprise that, despite its charitable overtones, encouraged harmful feedback loops between the exploitation of colonised populations (both impoverished and racialised), the depletion of the environment, and a drive for profit. Finally, such an agrilogistic mindset can only be undone by recognising how we remain tethered to pastoral models of thought and what such pastoral entrapment really means for those at the receiving end of it.

De roman Die troebel tyd van de Zuid-Afrikaanse schrijfster Ingrid Winterbach, zo betoogt Hanneke Stuit, neemt afstand van het idyllische genre van de plaasroman waarin de plaas of boerderij een Afrikaner nationalisme verankert in het land. Doordat Winterbachs roman zich afspeelt
op meerdere plekken – een wijndorp, een kustdorp en een provinciestadje – ondermijnt zij het idyllische idee dat het plattelandsleven aan een  geïsoleerde locatie gebonden is. Verder is de temporaliteit van het
platteland niet die van de impasse, maar wordt een complexe wisselwerking tot stand gebracht tussen de tijdslijn van het leven van de hoofdpersoon, een doctor in de zoölogie, en een geologische temporaliteit of deep history.

This review article explores how Ronelda S. Kamfer’s novel Kompoun (2021) deconstructs and diversifies the white patriarchal space of the plaas (farm) by reinscribing it with a highly situated ‘plaasfeminism’ emerging from the female characters in the novel. This critical reinscription through the lives of the McKinney women from the Overberg is necessary, but certainly not triumphant. For Nadia, the protagonist, the idyll of the plaas consists of her admiration of and longing for her maternal forebears and thus provides a source of strength and personhood, but the plaas is also quite literally the scene of a crime from which her family fails to protect her. Kompoun complicates mainstream notions of feminist resistance by charting the internal contradictions of female subjectivity and highlighting the vulnerable position of the McKinney children, who grow up in a community where both adult men and women pose a threat of emotional and physical abandonment and abuse. Yet, in times of need, Nadia manages to mobilise her personal image of the plaas’ beauty as motherly and the women who live there as tough as coping strategies that suspend her imprisonment in the harmful dynamics around her.

The symbolic importance of the image of the farm in South African cultural imaginaries can hardly be overestimated, even today. Historically placed at the nexus of the dualism between commercial agricultural areas and the communal areas of the Bantustans, farms are still deeply marked by the  processes of colonisation and dispossession that made them possible. The material and symbolic infrastructures associated with the farm continue to sort access to the rural as idyllic and turn the farm into what Stoler has termed “imperial debris.” In this article, I will analyse how Karin Brynard’s novel Homeland and Michael Matthews’ film Five Fingers for Marseilles stage images of ruined farms that nudge audiences away from the “love and ownership of the farm” as one of the privileged scenes of South African rurality. How do these two texts use the farm to draw attention to the disastrous tracks rural idylls, in their (neo)liberal, capitalistic and (neo)colonial guises, have left in the contemporary moment? What kind of rural futures, livelihoods and landscapes can be gauged from the farm in ruin?

This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water.

This book examines the ways in which ubuntu is continuously shaped and reshaped in different media in contemporary South African culture, such as literature, photography, cartoon art, journalistic fiction, and commercial television. It also studies ubuntu’s recent global dissemination and commodification, and critically assesses various approaches to ubuntu from different disciplines. From these various uses, ubuntu emerges as a powerful tool for thinking through problems of social inclusion and exclusion, and provides a nuanced perspective on what it means to strive for social harmony and communal unity when relating to others. Ubuntu Strategies attends to the cultural production of ubuntu and argues that it is not just about being part of a common humanity, but also involves strategic decisions that balance self and other, particular and universal, local and global, difference and sameness, as well as violence and safety. The literary and cultural theoretical approach offered in Ubuntu Strategies thus provides a new perspective that addresses the role of representation in ubuntu, both supplementing and challenging legal and political inquiries of the concept.

Call for Papers for the interdisciplinary International Workshop "Carcerality in the Globalised Present: Prison Spaces, Forms and Imaginaries", to be held at the University of Amsterdam on 18-19 June 2020. Keynote lectures by professors Jennifer Turner (UK) and Máximo Sozzo (Argentina). Deadline for abstracts: 31 January 2020. More information in the call!

This is what it must feel like to drive a muscle car. It is full of racy one-liners and insightful observations about the importance of wearing the right sneakers on the right day. It tackles issues as large and ominous as violence against women and mental health issues with deceptive ease and humour. It is relentlessly honest. It has mermaids in it. A granny who blows up the Magistrate's Court to avoid prosecution. And a Tamagotchi. This is Mermaid Fillet.

In this talk I use three spatial points of entry – the road, the town and the mountain – in order to ask if and how the concept of the hinterland helps to see beyond the colonially inflected triad of the South African rural as sublime wilderness, a place of failed service delivery, or as an agricultural setting, in all of which racially sorted access to the rural as idyll has dominated for so long. The hinterland is not a neutral descriptor and refers to a situation that is itself always already skewed. It is not a rehabilitative or reparative term, but rather a concept that seeks to describe and sharpen for analysis situations of discursive, economic, material and political disavowal that are associated with a spatial remove or demarcation of specific places from what metaphorically counts as civilization or the good life. By offering readings of the pastoral in Henriette Rose-Innes short story “Poison” (2010), of death worlds in Michael Matthew’s film Five Fingers for Marseilles (2017), and of personhood in John Trengrove’s Inxeba (2017), I seek to explore how the hinterland can be thought and represented in South Africa and beyond, and what kind of extractions, genres and affects the concept makes visible, particularly in comparison to related terms like rural, countryside and periphery.

According to Younes Saramifar and Hanneke Stuit of Amsterdam Young Academy, it is important that we take care of science. They have four indictments of the way science is currently being discussed in the Netherlands. 'We insist on Caring for Science as a craft of knowing and expression of curiosity that undoes apathy, indifferences and growthoriented individualism.'

The symbolic importance of the image of the farm in South African cultural imaginaries can hardly be overestimated, even today. Historically placed at the nexus of the dualism between commercial agricultural areas and the communal areas of the Bantustans, farms are still deeply marked by the processes of colonisation and dispossession that made them possible. The material and symbolic infrastructures associated with the farm continue to sort access to the rural as idyllic and turn the farm into what Stoler has termed “imperial debris.” In this article, I will analyse how Karin Brynard’s novel Homeland and Michael Matthews’ film Five Fingers for Marseilles stage images of ruined farms that nudge audiences away from the “love and ownership of the farm” as one of the privileged scenes of South African rurality. How do these two texts use the farm to draw attention to the disastrous tracks rural idylls, in their (neo)liberal, capitalistic and (neo)colonial guises, have left in the conte...