List of Titles

Authors: de Jager, Maureen
Date: 2019
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147880 , vital:38681 , DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2019.1684966
Description: IN PARENTHESIS is a practice-based essay which takes shape, parasitically, amidst the “found text” of an existing book, British author Thomas Pakenham's The Boer War (1979, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball). The “author-reader” interjects into the found text of this authoritative history book, inserting her words amongst those of Pakenham's. What becomes apparent, however, is that the text into which she interjects is not The Boer War verbatim, but a dramatically abridged version. The book's primary content has been edited out. What remains is The Boer War whittled down to a litany of Pakenham's parentheses (the history book distilled into an essence of the seemingly non-essential). Into this stream of bracketed matter, the author-reader writes, ruminating on the parenthesis as ethos (as prison and portal, barricade and breach, enclave and embrace). In turn, her ruminations invite reflection on the conundrum of writing history, of writing this history (and, indeed, of writing per se).
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Date Issued: 2019

Authors: de Jager, Maureen
Date: 2017
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147380 , vital:38631 , https://0-hdl.handle.net.wam.seals.ac.za/10520/EJC-a867f5bb0
Description: In the greater landscape of South Africa’s traumatic past, the South African War of 1899-1902 is arguably “old history”, surpassed in time and importance by more pressing traumas. Moreover, because it was usurped by Afrikaner nationalism as a myth of national origin and used to justify claims of Afrikaner sovereignty, it is also often seen as “old Afrikaner history”: at best, an episode of limited relevance to the many South Africans effectively written out of this narrative; at worst, a platform for nostalgic hankering by a conservative few.
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Date Issued: 2017

Authors: de Jager, Maureen
Date: 2011
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147369 , vital:38630 , https://0-hdl.handle.net.wam.seals.ac.za/10520/EJC45815
Description: Taking as my starting point an artwork of "fillers" - a 2010 sound piece by Fine Art student Romie Sciscio foregrounding the disfluent speech of various visiting academics to the Department of Fine Art, Rhodes University - I propose that speech disfluencies such as "um", "kind of" and "I suppose" should not simply be derided as white noise or verbal graffiti. Rather, filled pauses - understood both literally and metaphorically - may be seen to function critically, precisely because they are located neither inside nor outside the "message" of speech. They hover between presence and absence, seemingly content-less and yet dimly portentous: they do and do not matter to meaning. As such, they require (or provoke and demand) a different kind of listening - the acoustic equivalent of reading between the lines.
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Date Issued: 2011

Authors: de Jager, Maureen
Date: 2009
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147402 , vital:38633 , https://0-hdl.handle.net.wam.seals.ac.za/10520/EJC38334
Description: Anton van Wouw : the smaller works is, as its title implies, concerned with the generally lesser-known smaller works of Dutch-born sculptor, Anton van Wouw. Using the measure of "half life-size and smaller" as a guideline, author Alexander Duffey provides a comprehensive and well-illustrated overview of the many full-length small sculptures, busts, relief panels and maquettes produced by Van Wouw between 1881 (nine years prior to his arrival in South Africa at the age of 28) and 1940. Naturalistically sculpted and generally cast in bronze, these smaller works are wide-ranging in their subject matter, depicting innocuous, commonplace scenes alongside aspects of Afrikaner history, representations of Boer and British leaders, and so-called "native studies" (p 11).
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Date Issued: 2009

Authors: de Jager, Maureen
Date: 2008
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147413 , vital:38634 , https://0-hdl.handle.net.wam.seals.ac.za/10520/EJC31057
Description: Kathryn Smith's Psychogeographies: The Washing Away of Wrongs is a series of twelve prints comprising photographs and handwritten text, wherein she records her 'pilgrimage' to the former homes of British serial killer Dennis Nilsen. As such, it utilises photographic and autographic traces to 'track' the elusive traces left by Nilsen. Given the lapse of two decades between Nilsen's arrest and Smith's visit, the traces of Nilsen's 'wrongs' seem all but erased by the banal façade of suburban living which has continued on, regardless. In taking this as a starting point, the following article considers the motif of absence that characterises Smith's work as intrinsic to traces per se.
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Date Issued: 2008

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