Zandile Joy Dywati holds a Bachelor of Arts Honours graduate from the University of Cape Town (2022). She has submitted her master’s dissertation to the Faculty of Social Sciences in African Feminist Studies, specializing in Gender and Transformation. Her research engages with the life stories embedded in narratives of the experiences of black African immigrant men in South Africa. Zandile is also engaged in an intercontinental working grouping towards attempts to unpack the impacts of colonial histories and historiographies in the constructions and experiences of childhoods with the Global South and Africa. These inter-generational and continental conversations encapsulate the need for excavating African childhoods from the margins of Eurocentric and Western epistemologies in childhood studies.

Current Research Project

Zandile’s research project explores questions on racialized subjectivities, and townships as spatial fixtures of violence and reconstructions of masculine selves through narratives. She is interested in how the continuities of colonial discourses shape the present conceptions and live experiences of black Masculinities. In attempts to disrupt these constructions, her research interrogates the crisis within post-colonial South Africa and the impact of post-present Apartheid violences on prevailing woundedness within black communities. Her research aims to engage the spatial fixtures of violent black men/ violent black masculinities within townships as sites of disposability, and ungrievable men. She attempts to engage the intersecting tensions of vengeance, healing, and reparation towards ‘new’ constructions of black masculine subjectivities in Townships.

Supervisors: Prof. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Dr. Veeran Naicker

Email: 27386619@sun.ac.za