Footnotes is a bi-monthly interdisciplinary program on changemaking voices in artwork, books, films and other media. We’ll be talking about black feminism, queerness, violence, mermaids, struggle, post memory, heritage, myth busting, empowerment, and image making. In Footnotes we’ll connect countries and cultures, makers and theorists from interdisciplinary perspectives. 

About the series: Intersectionality has, in recent years, rapidly grown into a buzzword in cultural, academic and political debates across the world due to the ongoing need to foreground a much wider array of voices than was formerly the case. Voices that can speak to the often troubling ways in which the various intersections of race, gender, sexual or cultural inequalities in people’s lives wreak havoc for some, but not for others. As Desiree Lewis and Gabeda Baderoon argue in their introduction to Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa, mapping these interconnected power relations, so that they can be made visible and addressed, is no easy task. Especially not in an “age of advanced capitalized globalization”(Bogic qtd in Lewis and Baderoon), where some of the power structures in place have become so large and overbearing (like the imbrications of race and gender with market mechanisms), that situated perspectives tend to be drowned out by the boom of so called progress. 

It all started with And Wrote My Story Anyway : Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism, Barbara Boswell’s book that Wits University Press published in 2020. The topics discussed in this book deserve more than a book review. Black feminism, and many other subjects on the broad grid of intersectionality deserve their own airing time. It was not hard to find inspired editors to join the bandwagon. We’re looking forward to create fascinating episodes together with (South) African makers and theorists. Follow our website and YouTube channel, to stay updated on the coming topics and guests in our new series!

Footnotes – Intersectional Strategies in (South) Africa, is a bi-monthly online program. To make the conversations accessible to people from multiple lingual backgrounds, these series will be produced in English.