Conference “The Body is Present: Rethinking the Afterlives of Violence and Legacies of Oppression” – 23-25 April 2025
23-25 April 2025
Humanities Graduate Centre, University of the Witwatersrand
RSVP here
Enquiries: towardsapartheidstudies@gmail.com
Samukelo Ndlovu, Qhawekazi Mahlalela and Rheyna Pattni – the Critical Apartheid Studies Group of the University of the Witwatersrand – are pleased to invite you to the conference “The Body is Present: Rethinking the Afterlives of Violence and Legacies of Oppression”, in partnership with IFAS-Research, the Innovation Foundation for Democracy and the Wits Humanities Graduate Centre.
The aim of this conference is to stage a multidisciplinary conceptual conversation to critically examine the afterlives of colonial-apartheid violence and the enduring legacies of systemic oppression in South Africa. Although these legacies often manifest through violent protests and demonstrations, as seen in #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall, and Marikana—events that have shaped South Africa’s recent histories. In truth, etched into the bodies of black South Africans, are century old stories of oppression and resistance.
Further, our bodies mark the trajectory of our movements through time and space, whilst simultaneously marking that time and space with our presence. This interplay of hypervisibility and invisibility results in our current context wherein the violation of the black body remains the bedrock on which our conceptions of value, and power and legitimacy are rooted. Whether through ridicule, stereotypes, tropes, violations or brute force.
This conference wants to want to consider what conceptions of freedom and corrective justice are adequate to address the embodied experience of black South Africans. What does it mean to centre bodily health and integrity in our conceptions of freedom and justice? In this conference, we are interested in not only the body – as it is present – but also in its shadows, silhouettes and shapeshifting. We seek to peek behind the veil of knowing, certainty and transparency. We encourage an attentiveness to embodied language: a slant, a shiver, silence. This move to expand the notions of legible narration of black lives opens the possibility for languaging new possibilities in the afterlife of immense trauma and violation. And in many ways, moves us closer to what we might in the future call ‘Critical Apartheid Studies’.
