Humanities 1:Layout 2 - University of Cape Town

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10 In Psychological Research: *Katie Rachael Bromley Sarah May Cotton *(With distinction) Christa Gelderblom In Religious Studies: *Marie Bastienne Klein In Theatre and Performance: *(With distinction) Darron Araujo *Vaneshran Arumugam (With distinction) Alude Sinayo Mahali *(With distinction) Jacqueline Rita Singer DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In African Language & Literature: Michael Oyoo Weche Thesis Title: Bantu and Nilotic children’s singing games: a comparative study of their value communication Michael Oyoo Weche has a BA (Literature) and MA (Literature) from Kenyatta University, Kenya. He is currently a lecturer at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Nairobi, Kenya. He has been studying at UCT, in the department of African Languages and Literatures, since 2007. Michael Weche’s thesis examines the aesthetic form and value communication in selected Bantu and Nilotic children’s singing games, with particular reference to the Luhya and Luo communities of Kenya. Based on the premise that Luyha and Luo children’s singing games are creative outputs that reflect the macro cultures of the two communities, he uses ethnopoetic and ethnomethodological approaches to reveal the subtle communication in the singing games. The comparative analysis reveals that children’s creative outputs are repertoires of the aesthetics, aspirations and norms of their macro cultures. Through the performance of the singing games children socialize and assimilate the superstructure of their communities’ aesthetics and norms. The performance of the singing games is also significant in the social and moral development of the child. The singing games therefore become significant in the child’s socialization and can also be used in an educational setting. Supervisor: Dr Abner Nyamende (School of Languages and Literatures) In Afrikaans and Netherlandic Studies: Shathley Qadir Abrahams Thesis Title: Older than language: comics as heuristic for the philosophical canon SQ Abrahams has a BA and MA both from UCT, where he began his academic career in the mid-1990s. In 2001, he became the first African comics-scholar invited to present a paper at the Congress of the Americas, hosted that year in Puebla, Mexico. His professional interests in popular culture allowed him establish links with both the field of Religious Studies and study emerging from Information and Communications Technologies and their prospective roles in education. His thesis examines the role of medium with respect to perennial questions recurring in the history of philosophy. Specifically, his thesis contends that the apperception of such questions, and their resulting resolutions, would be dramatically altered when articulated in sequential art, rather than in simple prose. To support this statement he explores a range of aesthetic mechanics of the comics medium, and various semioideological connotative structures that reflect on questions essential to the bodies of work of philosophers ranging historically from Giambattista Vico (c. 1725) to Michel Foucault (c. 1979). To underline an axiom central to his thesis, Older Than Language closes out with a brief exercise in speculative fiction. Imagining certain twists in history (the failure of Gutenberg’s printing press to popularize learning and overturn artistic patronage, for example), “Life In Print” is a posthumous tribute to writer who redefined the role of popular culture and literacy. Supervisor: Professor J Hambidge (School of Languages and Literature) In English Language and Literature: Fatima Fiona Moolla Thesis Title: Individualism in the novels of Nuruddin Farah Fiona Moolla obtained her Undergraduate, Honours and Masters degrees from UCT. She previously served as a part-time lecturer in the English Department and is currently a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape. Fiona Moolla’s thesis performs a close reading of individualism in the novels of the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah. It argues that a specific, individualist conception of the self is central to the genre of the novel as a cultural form that emerged with modernity. This individualist conception locates the sources of the self within an internal moral horizon rather than in a realm external to the subject. Against this background, the thesis explores the constitution of the self in Farah’s novels, approaching them through the alternative insights of a moral philosophy which suggests that one’s idea of oneself is formed only in orientation to an external, social idea of virtue. [The Southern African ideal of ubuntu is one example of such an orientation]. The thesis therefore draws attention to the tension often generated between the social commitment Farah expresses as a writer and the constraints of the form of the novel he employs. It is the first critical work on Farah’s novels that explores the ways in which the ideology of form may work against the grain of an author’s social commitments. Supervisor: Professor H Garuba (Centre for African Studies) Sarah Rowan Thesis Title: ‘The Efficacy of Song Itself’: Seamus Heaney’s “Defence of Poetry” Sarah Rowan has a BA (Honours) in English and Linguistics and an MA in Creative Writing (with distinction) from UCT. Her thesis focuses upon Seamus Heaney’s prose writing, particularly those essays of his in which he defines the function and purpose of poetry. Taken together, Rowan argues, these essays amount to the most concerted and far-reaching of the defences of poetry that are available to us in this historical moment. She underlines this point by placing Heaney in a long line of ‘defenders’ of English poetry, beginning with Sidney and including Shelley and later poets like T.S. Eliot. She further highlights the special value of Heaney’s defence by contrasting his arguments with those of other famous contemporary poets, including Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky. Although the thesis points out that Heaney’s arguments for the importance of poetry are not unique in the originality of their ideas—many of these derive from the work of his predecessors—the Irish poet’s powers of synthesis as well as his stylistic gifts make the presentation of these arguments more persuasive and less an instance of special pleading than any to be found in his contemporaries. His prose style, as well as the consistent grounding of his argument in examples provided by individual poems, constitutes a witness to the pleasure and the potency of the art form which is itself both uniquely pleasurable and potent. The originality of Sarah Rowan’s own thesis lies in the fact that, while Heaney’s distinction as a poet has attracted a huge critical literature, there has been no thesis to date which looks at his distinction as a prose writer. Nor is there any which recognises the extent to which his prose amounts to one of the most coherent statements available as to why poetry matters. ‘The Efficacy of Song Itself’ is a remarkable demonstration of just this. Supervisor: Professor Stephen Watson (English Language and Literature)
In Film Studies: *Kristin Diane Pichaske Thesis Title: Colour adjustment: race and representation in Post-Apartheid South African documentary Kristin Pichaske holds a Masters Degree in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University. Before relocating to South Africa on a Fullbright Fellowship in 2004, Kristin produced documentaries for Lucasfilm/Paramount Pictures. Her work has been honoured by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the National Federation of Press Women and numerous film festivals. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the television department of Columbia College, Chicago. The goal of this dissertation was to examine the process of racial transformation within South Africa’s documentary film industry and to assess how the nation’s shifting identity is both influenced by and reflected in documentary film. Drawing examples from a diverse collection of local and international films, Kristin examined changes in who is making documentaries in South Africa and how, as well as the representations of race that result. In particular, she focused on how the balance of insider vs. outsider storytelling may be shifting and to what effect. At the same time, Kristin qualitatively examined the representations produced by black/insider filmmakers as compared to those of white/outsider filmmakers in order to assess the impact of the filmmaker’s racial status on outcomes. Finally, she investigated ways in which the tradition of white-on-black storytelling must change in order to satisfy the political shift that has taken place in South Africa and the cultural sensitivities that have resulted. This study draws multiple conclusions: Thanks largely to the legacies of apartheid, the already high barriers to entry into the documentary field are considerably higher for people of colour in South Africa. For this and other reasons, black South Africans remain more often the subjects of documentaries than their makers. Overcoming this barrier must be a long-term priority, as it is the only means by which an equitable plurality of voices may reach South African audiences. While racial parity must remain the industry’s ultimate goal, the intent, integrity, and approach of the filmmaker is ultimately a more significant determinant of representational accuracy than the colour of his or her skin. Supervisor: A/Professor Martin Botha (Centre for Film and Media Studies) In Historical Studies: Laurence Neill Nathan Thesis Title: The failure of the SADC Organ: Regional security arrangements in Southern Africa, 1992-2003 Laurie Nathan (BBusSci/LLB, UCT; MPhil, Bradford) is a Research Associate at UCT and a Visiting Fellow with the Crisis States Research Centre at the London School of Economics. Since 2005, he has been a member of the Centre’s Management Committee and co-ordinator of its research programme on regional and global axes of conflict. He previously headed UCT’s Centre for Conflict Resolution (1992-2003); was a member of the African Union’s mediation team for Darfur (2005-6) and served on the Ministerial Review Commission on Intelligence in South Africa (2006-8). His most recent book is No Ownership, No Commitment: A Guide to Local Ownership of Security Sector Reform, University of Birmingham, 2007. This dissertation explores the establishment, evolution and effectiveness of the regional security arrangements of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) between 1992 and 2003. It seeks to answer the following questions: why did SADC fail to establish a viable security regime and engage in effective peacemaking? , is SADC an emerging security community? , and what is the relationship between domestic stability and security communities? The dissertation argues that SADC’s failure to create effective security arrangements was due to three major problems: an absence of common values among member states; the unwillingness of states to surrender a measure of sovereignty to the regional body; and the political, economic and administrative weakness of these states. None of these problems could be solved at the regional level because the capacity and orientation of a regional organisation derive from, and are constrained by, the capacity and orientation of its members. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in the International Relations literature, the thesis also contends that domestic stability, defined as the absence of large-scale violence in a country, is a necessary condition of a security community. Supervisor: Professor CC Saunders (Historical Studies) In Linguistics: Menan du Plessis Thesis Title: A unity hypothesis for the Southern African Khoesan languages Menan du Plessis was born in Cape Town, and obtained herBA degree from UCT. She has published novels and short stories, including State of Fear (David Philip, 1983). She has worked on African languages of different affiliations, especially on the Khoesan languages of southern Africa, which are among the most gravely neglected on the continent. Whereas current scholarship holds that the Khoesan languages fall into three distinct language groups, Menan du Plessis’ thesis argues strongly for the genetic unity of the KHOE, JU and !UI-TAA groups of southern African Khoesan (SAK), by means of the first full-scale application of a standard linguistic approach in the comparative study of these languages. It is shown in the first stage that there are repeated cross-SAK resemblances in the morphology of those verbs most frequently enlisted for grammatical purposes in the context of multi-verb constructions; and that these languages furthermore display multiple similarities ‘horizontally’ across their specifier systems, where the resemblances are often also visible ‘vertically’, i.e. down the lists of possible exponents. These structural affinities are sufficiently thoroughgoing to warrant a working surmise that the SAK languages might be genetically related. In the second stage, cross-SAK comparative material is presented in the form of arrays. As is most often the case in any comparative study the study provides a synthesis of a wide array of data collected by earlier scholars. The tabulated material reveals a range of regular phonetic alternations – the existence of which in principle confirms the working hypothesis of unity within all of southern Africa’s Khoesan languages. Supervisor: Professor R Mesthrie (English Language and Literature) In Religious Studies: Federico Guliano Settler Thesis Title: Religion in the work of Frantz Fanon Born in the Eastern Cape, Federico Settler was a community development worker in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, between 1989 and 1991, and in Newcastle, UK, between 1994 and 1997. He received the BA(Hons) in Theology and Ministry from the University of Durham in 1997. Returning to South Africa in 1998, he established an independent research consultancy while serving as researcher and occasional lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies of the University of Cape Town, where he earned the MA in Religious Studies in 2006. During his doctoral research, he was awarded an AW Mellon Doctoral Fellowship in Humanities, an NRF Equity/Prestige Doctoral Scholarship, and a Harvard South Africa Fellowship. Drawing together postcolonial theory and religious studies, Rico Settler’s thesis examines the significance of religion in the work of the psychiatrist and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon. As a cultural analyst and political activist who drew on humanist and Marxist theory, Fanon rejected religion, seeing it as an irrational force that anasthetised the oppresed and inhibited any recovery of the black self. Nevertheless, as this thesis demonstrates, religion persisted as a force that Fanon had to engage in his native 11
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Humanities 1:Layout 2 - University of Cape Town

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