Refusing Racialised Structures of Aesthetic or Identity Theories

This conversation will discuss some of the imperatives and challenges in the name ‘African art’ and the epistemic and ontological issues it raises, asking what it means to speak, think, theorise and make in the name of an African aesthetics or art (especially from the location of South Africa with its settler colonial legacy). It will also propose that African psychologists and psychology students can best learn from the freedom that the African artist has sought to inhabit, even though we must never be trapped in static meaning of Africa and its arts.

Kopano Ratele

Kopano Ratele is professor of psychology at the University of Stellenbosch and head of the Stellenbosch Centre for Critical and Creative Thought. He is the former director of the SAMRC-Unisa’s Masculinity and Health Research Unit and former research professor at the Unisa where he ran the Transdisciplinary African Psychologies Programme. Ratele was a member of the second Ministerial Committee on Transformation of South African Universities, former chairperson of Sonke Gender Justice, and past president of the Psychological Society of South Africa. He is on the national advisory board for the Future Professors Programme. Ratele has published extensively and his latest books are Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity (2022) and The World Looks Like This From Here: Thoughts on African Psychology (2019).

Sophia O Sanan

Dr Sophia Olivia Sanan (nee Rosochacki) holds a master’s degree in Sociology (from the Universities of Freiburg, Germany; Jawaharlal Nehru University, India and the University of Cape Town, 2014) and a PhD in Sociology through the University of Cape Town (2024). Her doctoral dissertation investigated politics of identity, loss and heritage through a study of the African art collection at the Iziko South African National Gallery. She has a professional background in African cultural policy development, education and art related research and has taught university students in South Africa, as well as travelling academic programs in Uganda, the USA, Brazil and India. Since late 2020, she has worked with 12 museums in Africa, South America and South Asia, exploring ideas and practices of museology from Southern perspectives. She publishes on themes related to museology in the Global South; race and arts education; race, inequality and visual culture.

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