This paper engages with the concept of the migrant subject, as framed through contemporary literature on migrancy, and read through the Pauline Ingle photographic collection, located in the Eastern Cape. As against gendered historiographies of labour migrancy and the associated meanings attributed to the rural as a site of social reproduction, Ingle's photographs invite a series of atypical readings that unsettle these subjectivities. Rather, they suggest social and political acts that presage and constitute a migrant citizenship, one that undermines the (...) dichotomy of the rural and urban and projects the possibility of reading the history of the subject in the Eastern Cape differently. (shrink)

The project from which this special issue emerges began in 2019 in a workshop at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape, entitled, iMpuma-Koloni Bearings: An Other Cape? The call to this workshop brought together a group of scholars from various universities and locations in southern Africa who had a commitment to critical history, to reconsidering the implications of the discipline in the colonial and apartheid project, and to addressing a continued reluctance of the discipline to engage with the critique of (...) history. (shrink)

This paper is not about work or labour itself, and how it changes historically in South Africa, but about how the meaning of 'work' and 'labour' itself changes. What we want to suggest, is that an 'original' meaning of the tasks/duties associated with 'work' was 'woman': ukusebenza. What men did, does not constitute 'work' but something else entirely: raiding, moving, occasional, going etc.: ukuphangela. It is in the latter term, ukuphangela, that the term 'raid' emerges, and the argument draws on (...) this notion and meaning of raid to underscore the re-thinking of gender, the subject and her relation to work, and history. The paper operates in two registers, focusing on the historic meanings of work and labour in the Eastern Cape and tracing lateral translations of these meanings into East London in the 1950s. It argues that in re-thinking meanings of labour and work through multiple temporalities, and through the contested meanings of the isiXhosa terms ukusebenza and ukuphangela, these word fragments are read as 'entryways to a wordliness' that puts lateral universals and temporalities of work back into circulation. As such, we pose the question rather, following Anne Kelk Mager and Helen Bradford, of whether it is gender that is at the forefront not only of class and race struggles, but of what comes to constitute the meaning of 'work', a concept whose provenance and meaning changes, as we have noted, with the making of modernity, industrialisation/capitalism, and the 'Europeanisation' of the world. (shrink)