Author: Sophia Olivia Sanan Post-Doctoral Fellow at AVReQ

In mid-February 2025 AVReQ hosted renowned scholar Professor Jacqueline Rose, author of numerous seminal texts on feminism, sexuality, psychoanalysis and violence, for a public conversation with AVReQ director Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. I share here some of my notes and reflections from this rich dialogue.

This seminar formed part of a larger theme with which AVReQ is engaging over the next 18 months around the concept of ‘bearing witness’. The concept of ‘bearing witness’ raises a number of poignant questions about how we engage in the contemporary moment, both as individuals and collectively, with the knowledge of perpetration of real-time violence and injustice on catastrophic scales. Here we think of the genocide in Gaza, and also the mass killings, atrocities and violence against targeted groups of people in Sudan, India, Ukraine and many more places in the world.

‘Witnessing’, as Professor Jaco Barnard Naude observed during the public conversation, from a legal perspective at least, entails a concomitant responsibility to testify. Are we living in an era in which powerful interest groups seek to separate witnessing from testifying? Can we claim to be witnesses rather than spectators when our seeing is not followed by action? What are the ethical implications of accepting the spectacularisation of violence (mostly consumed on our devices and screens) as the dominant mode of breaching existing (international) social contracts? And, what happens to the ethical weight of the claim to witness rather than spectate? I think here of Leonard Cohen’s observation that, “there is no decent place to stand in a massacre”.

Rose, a strident critic of Zionism, made it clear there is no automatic ethical higher ground that can be claimed by scholars or so called ‘witnesses’ who observe destruction and ethnic cleansing from a safe distance. We are all implicated in what unfolds in the world around us, and our actions, and convictions, matter and should be articulated in this high stakes context.

With reference to Israel’s actions in Palestine and Gaza, Rose emphasised that the danger posed by allowing victimhood to fully take over an individual and group identity, is a complete detethering from ethical responsibility and action. She reminded us of the chilling quote by Golda Meir (Israeli politician who served as the fourth prime minister of Israel): “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons” (1973). Drawing from her theorisation on feminism, Rose argued that it is crucial to recognise rather than disavow the contradictory state of being both a victim of oppression, and at the same time holding within the self a potential for violence and (sometimes in invisible ways) complicity in other forms of oppression. For Rose, this is critical to intervene in what psychoanalysis helps us to see as repetition, or compulsion in history – a theme that Professor Gobodo-Madikizela has taken up in her own work. Rose outlined how Gobodo-Madikizela’s preoccupation with questions about the (im)possibilities of forgiveness and repair, the ambiguity of temporality vis a vis trauma and the aesthetics of memory have influenced her own trajectory as a scholar.

On that Wednesday afternoon, Rose’s invocation to conceive of how to break out of cyclical violence resonated in a very intimate and uncanny way. As the discussion progressed, the audience listened to the roars outside the seminar room from ongoing student protests. These protests related to compounding fee and housing crises have come to mark an (anticipated) and almost inaugural moment at the start of the academic year on many South African university campuses for the last decade. These protests express the painful experience of being a young person in a gravely unequal society, in which social and economic exclusion and racial inequality remain intertwined. This too, on a campus whose most powerful executive body refuses to recognise the genocide in Gaza for fear of alienating its ideological and material allies in the Global North. In addition to this, as Professor Kopano Ratele observed, millions of people in Gaza, after more than 18 months of untold suffering, again exist in a state of absolute precarity. This precarity takes now place in a world in which Donald Trump is able to command a terrifying power of destruction (both material and symbolic) at whim.

Rose cautions against a reading of inevitability, despite all of this. She invoked Achille Mbembe. For whom the task of our time to create a planetary humanism at the same time that we destroy the planet. We must never accept violence as ineffable or as inevitable. To counter this it remains crucial to represent what we see and what we understand to be happening around us in the world, to articulate, to think together. These are strong and necessary charges in such turbulent times.

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, 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.