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Today we live in a society scarred by history, crippled by a lack of transformation, subjugated by the spectacle of global capitalism, marked by inequality and alienation. “The question for me as a writer, is can we find a way to write that is equal to this moment” Stacy Hardy asks. “A writing that captures and confronts the present, with its new urgencies and particular forms of violence, including violence done to the body and to language?”
Why do some men hurt the women they claim to love? Professor Kopano Ratele’s lecture explores this question. Written in part as a response to a character in Pumeza Rashe-Matoti’s play, Unbroken Silence – which will be staged during the lecture – Ratele also considers why some women love the men who hurt them. “My interest,” Ratele says,“is in a certain play of affects connected to the desire to hurt others, to being hurt, to forgiving, to both affection and hatred, so as not to offer explanations that easily snap into place.”
Award-winning novelist Claire Robertson offers a short history of imagining and mis-imagining ourselves, and thoughts on using the tools and gifts of fiction to choose and understand the framework of those “things that are no longer and things that are not yet.”
‘I’m a little concerned about the kind of masculinity we teach our sons,’ says poet and musician Itai Hakim. This concern is at the centre of Fuccboi, a collaborative and interactive lecture-performance presented by Hakim and Siyabonga Mthembu (The Brother Moves On). Fuccboi is a sonic exploration of masculinities and ways of being in the world that men inherit. At once a private/public reckoning with the past and present, Fuccboi is also an attempt at dreaming different futures.