Grasping the regimes of language, space and identity in the visual of post-apartheid higher education in South Africa

Abstract

In 2014, through the University of the Free State's (UFS) Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice (IRSJ), three South African universities partnered to collaborate on the pilot phase of a research project focused on understanding whether the Arts could enable social cohesion, as the 2012 National Development Plan (2030) had promoted. The project, which had been conceptualised by one of the authors of this article in early 2014,1 followed both experience and observation of the challenges with regards this concept in the Arts, Culture and Heritage sectors of South Africa. Subsequent reflection and questioning of some of the related challenges, problematised the role that higher education had in societal transformation, and accordingly, in the conceptual development of social cohesion: Were universities creating appropriate conceptual frameworks and praxes required for the post-apartheid South African context? The disruption created by the 2008 'Reitz Video' and the UFS's subsequent decision to critically explore the meanings and trajectories thereof as part of the university's transformation process, opened an important space also for the interrogation of concepts like that of 'Arts' and 'Social Cohesion' in South Africa. The 'Reitz Video' when read as a 'Visual', signaled the need to not only understand and address racism more substantively, but also the need to understand the power of the visual in the disruption of outdated social imaginaries and, in the production of what the new social imaginaries could also be.