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The paper will specifically be considering the impact on young male identities resulting from these patterns of migration. This paper will discuss some findings from a SANPAD and South African National Research Foundation funded project on migration and language change. In the Western Cape, this has been characterised by migration from the old rural ‘homelands’ of the Eastern Cape to townships on the Cape Flats, a large, mainly residential area to the east of the city. 'Since the end of apartheid removed restrictions on the movement of people, there have been increased numbers of internal economic migrants flooding into South Africa’s urban centres. By way of stretching the discussion of artists who employ hybrid therianthropic strategies to a global context, I also discuss the performative artwork of the British contemporary artist Marcus Coates. The deterritorialising effect of “becomings”, where fixed subjectivity becomes dissoluble and mutable is highlighted, as well as the less colonising ends of such strategies in terms of the project of non-human agency. Through this off-set dialogue, I foreground the anthropocentric motives of symbolic representation, whilst also gesturing towards the agency enhancing properties of this trope in artworks wherein the artist courts disenfranchised human identity. The “academic” voice highlights symbolic meaning, while a voice speaking in “intuitive prose” draws attention to elements of the artworks that are aligned with the notion of a human/animal “becoming”. In analysing these artistic instances, I employ a dialectical approach that manifests in two textual voices.

In doing so, I look at Nandipha Mntambo’s performed animal transformations, in which she paradoxically critiques and embraces the figurative animality of the African body in colonial discourse. I thereafter discuss artworks in which the artist has created the sense that the human body is being performed in animal likeness and gesture. The chimerical sculptural work of Jane Alexander, where human form seamlessly meets animal façade, is referred to as an example of a representational mode of this therianthropic tendency. By way of situating these theoretical positions in the South African art and social context, I discuss specific works by two contemporary South African artists whose methodological approach invokes the hybrid animal/human body. The Derridian position that postulates human identity in a metaphoric relation to the animal (animetaphor), and Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of becoming animal, are instrumentally applied within the scope of this article. I also focus on the connections between photography, death and haunting which the Portfolio seems to invite, as well as on the larger dialogic potential contained within a visual narrative set in a small NYC underground community in the 80s, and which is undoubtedly both an autobiographical account (in the sense that by documenting Mueller, Goldin inevitably documents herself) and a memorial to a memorialist (Cookie herself wrote mostly autobiographical fictions, most of which are out of print now).īecoming animal: liminal rhetorical strategies in contemporary South African art Abstract In this article, I address the liminal therianthropic body in contemporary art that employs hybridity (performed and represented), as a mode of rhetorical potency in the expression of marginal subjectivity. I start by addressing the larger issue of how the representation of the AIDS crisis was transformed by the documentary endeavor of a photographer who was both subject and object of the gaze in an archival project constructed as a gesture of anticipated mourning.

This chapter examines Nan Goldin’s Cookie Portfolio, the well-known series of photographs of her good friend Cookie Mueller from the beginning of their relationship (1976) until Mueller’s death (1989), in order to answer several questions about visuality, autobiography, marginality and death.

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