Apartheid—The Global Itinerary

by Karin Berkman -- It is difficult to condense my understanding of the contribution of the ERC project, “Apartheid— the Global Itinerary: South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation,” both to my personal development as a researcher, and I hope to the field of South African studies. While the focus of my research has been South African exilic literature, the structuring of the project has meant that my area of study was integrated into an ever-ramifying historical scrutiny of apartheid South Africa in its global context. My attempts to trace the singularity of literary production outside of South Africa within the framework of exile have unfolded alongside and under the impact of the work of other researchers. working in different disciplines. The model of dissemination and diffusion that the principal investigator, Louise Bethlehem, has proposed for the object of study – South African expressive culture in transnational circulation—can in effect be applied to the st...

by Karin Berkman --   In 1929, at the tenth annual exhibition of the South African Academy held in Johannesburg, eight works by Moses Tladi (1903-1959) were displayed. Two years later, in 1931, two of his landscape paintings were included in the exhibition that formally opened the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. In both instances Tladi was the first black painter to have his work publicly exhibited in these venues. Tladi, the “native artist” was a curiosity, arousing wide interest. Benny Lewis, the art critic of The Star , reviewed the two National Gallery paintings: “I must refer to two landscapes . . . by Moses Tladi, a Basuto houseboy in Johannesburg, who is quite untaught. They are something of a portent. In a naive technique all his own, Tladi tells the stark truth in a poetic way. The atmosphere of the Witwatersrand is in these pictures unmistakable to all who know the Transvaal” (Cape, December 11, 193, quoted in Read Lloyd, 2013, 11). The pointed del...