Heeding to the call to decolonise higher education and the law, in this article, I embrace a decolonial lens to grapple with copyright law in South Africa, and specifically the subject of authorship. The central claim is that Abezimu/Badimo (ancestors) are an author in a decolonised notion of copyright law. Whilst this claim is supported by scholarly interventions, as regards the essence of a pluriversal author, the objective is to substantively authenticate the central claim by drawing from contemporary African literature. Specifically, the article engages two of Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s works, these are his debut novel, Broken River Tent, and as well as his subsequent novel, The Wanderers. As part of this authenticating exercise, I contend with Johan van der Walt’s insights in relation to what he calls “the literary exception”. The latter proffers an incisive critique of some approaches in the field of law and literature. I figure that van der Walt requires some engagement, especially if one is to succeed in relying on African literature to authenticate/qualify the central claim that Abezimu/Badimo (ancestors) are an author in a decolonial understanding of copyright law.
Johan van der Walt discusses key themes from his most recent book The Literary Exception and the Rule of Law Oxfordshire Routledge (2023) with Karin van Marle and Wessel le Roux. Van der Walt calls for a genre of law and literature scholarship that does not seek to soften or erase the differences between law and literature, as is typical in most law-as-literature scholarship, but that seeks to highlight the tensions between law and literature (represented by the avant garde poetry of Paul Celan and Paul Valéry). Van der Walt argues that the same event can give rise to a legal and a poetic response. Liberal society exists in the space that is opened up by these opposing trajectories. Liberal law must respect the non-poetic nature of its regulatory function and resist attempts, especially among nationalists and populists, to cure the existential inadequacy of law.
Property law has long relied on its lack of empathy to remain the most loyal servant of capitalism — a discipline shaped by the pursuit of stability, predictability, and the protection of capital. Seeking to present itself as a law of reason, it reflects the logic of a market that demands abstraction over humanity and order over justice. Under Classical Legal Thought, property law’s legal subject became faceless and contextless, a construct designed to serve economic rationality rather than human experience. Yet, in South Africa’s constitutional era, this detachment has been challenged through the emergence of literature as a tool of legal reasoning. This article explores how literature disrupts property law’s formalism by reintroducing empathy, history, and humanity into judicial decision-making. Through an analysis of Constitutional Court judgments, I examine three categories of property law decisions: those that engage with literature and recognise unequal power relations; those that do not rely on literature where parties stand on more equal footing; and those that, despite stark inequalities, remain devoid of literary or empathetic engagement. These case studies demonstrate literature’s ability to pierce through property law’s rational veneer, compelling judges to confront the lived experiences of those before them. By contrasting the formalist rigidity of Classical Legal Thought with the transformative potential of literature, I argue that literature’s narrative and justificatory functions allow for a more humane application of the law, one that allows property law to move beyond its illusion of neutrality — towards empathy, contextual sensitivity, and an engagement with the stories that constitute the human condition.
This article examines the figures of the child, the paedophile, and the cop in the Australian carceral imaginary, focusing on their deployment in legal and cultural narratives to justify state intervention and colonial control over First Nations communities. Through an analysis of Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise (1997), Carpentaria(2006), The Swan Book (2013), and Praiseworthy (2023), the article argues that these figures function as central agents of colonial governance, sustaining state authority through legal fictions of protection and security. Wright’s novels systematically dismantle these mythologies, exposing how settler law constructs First Nations children as vulnerable subjects in need of state intervention, while simultaneously criminalizing First Nations men as threats. The figure of the paedophile, particularly as mobilized during the Northern Territory Intervention, serves as a racialized spectre that legitimates carceral expansion, while the cop operates as a violent enforcer of settler law, suppressing First Nations resistance. Wright’s fiction challenges these colonial representations by centring First Nations epistemologies, storytelling, and law as counter-narratives to state violence. The article situates Wright’s literary interventions within broader socio-legal debates on First Nations sovereignty, the Stolen Generations, and the failures of contemporary child protection policies. By reconfiguring the carceral figures of the child, the paedophile, and the cop, Wright’s work asserts an alternative jurisprudence—one that refuses the legitimacy of settler law and insists on the endurance of First Nations legal authority. The article concludes by considering the implications of Wright’s novels for a decolonial legal framework that transcends the limitations of the settler state.
This article develops a theoretical framework that reconsiders the intersection between law and literature through the psychoanalytic notion of "compromise formation". We propose that both law and literature function as arts of compromise, mediating conflicts that are not only social or institutional, but also psychic and structural. Drawing on literary theory (notably Francesco Orlando’s reinterpretation of Freudian categories) and legal philosophy, the paper argues that both disciplines address ambivalence and contradiction, albeit differently: literature preserves and stages contradiction through figurality, while law resolves conflict through argumentation and decision-making. Three levels of compromise in law are outlined: foundational (the "contractual" basis of civilisation), ontological (legal object construction), and argumentative (interpretation and adjudication). We believe that using the literary model of compromise formation in legal reasoning and argumentation could offer new insights into how the law might handle deep moral and interpretive disagreements—particularly in areas like bioethics or civil rights—without necessarily suppressing contradiction. In doing so, the paper invites a paradigm shift in how we conceive of justice, interpretation, and legitimacy within the legal order.
This article draws on AJ van der Walt’s insights into the legal transformation of society regarding the property law norms inherited at the dawn of constitutional democracy, and proceeds to develop and apply them in the context of contemporary South African copyright law. Specifically, this article reflects on the state of copyright law in South Africa by undertaking a literary analysis of two novels, namely, Kingsley Amis’s You can’t do both and Zakes Mda’s The Madonna of Excelsior. The novels are introduced as glimpses into two very different societies around the same time in history that are both governed by the same proprietary copyright norms. The roles of copyright works in the cultural and knowledge hierarchies within each society are explored, as well as how the characters in the respective novels engage with various forms of art, music and literature. Reflecting on Van der Walt’s utilisation of Amis’s novel to frame the tension between the purported stability anchored in social fundamentalism and the allure of change (and the spectre of anarchy that change presents to some) evident in a spate of Constitutional Court decisions during its 2007 term, this article outlines the same tension in the contemporary popular media rhetoric around the reform of copyright law. The portrayal of post-war England morality in Amis’s semi-autobiographical novel is contrasted to the Apartheid-era South African society depicted in Mda’s work, in which the white population of 1970s South Africa viewed normative pluralism as represented by the inclusion of black people’s interests – the very recognition of their dignity – with profound distrust, as such empowerment posed a direct threat to the socio-economic and political power they enjoyed in the country. This same fear of normative pluralism encroaching upon the entrenched power relations under the contemporary status quo is evident in the apologist rhetoric published in popular media that decries all attempts at copyright reform as simultaneously ignorant, malicious and corrupt. In this regard, the narrative styles of each novel are shown to be an apt illustration of moral agency as reflected in the competing exclusionary (self-interested) and inclusionary (other-regarding) approaches to copyright’s bedrock ideology and operative norms. Finally, the article considers the themes of sex and property as encountered in each novel as proxies for power over others and a means of enforcing normative modalities of self-interest against others, and the implications of the respective copyright norms for the broader political community and individuals’ place in their society are contemplated.
Following the work of Maria Aristodemou, while subtly departing from it, the article proposes a (novel) understanding of the relationship between law and “poetry” (instead of the more familiar “literature”) in the terms of the literary devices of metaphor and metonymy. I propose as the operative inoperative metaphor and metonymy at stake for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between law and poetry, the relationship between the Lacanian analyst and their analysand (in which lack is the central analytic category). From this vantage point, I investigate the visual poetry of three artists – Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko and William Kentridge – who all had one or the other highly specific formative encounter with the law and, so the argument goes, went on transgressively to articulate that encounter with law in (at least some of) their poetry. I contend that each of these artists do not stop at the mere exposure of the lack in law that their poetry exposes, but are, rather also at pains to both proceed from and state the lack in poetry itself, thereby pointing up the existential lack of every subjective constitution. The analysis yields a critical divergence of law and literature, a necessary separation which nonetheless relates intimately, or extimately, in the form of the function of an analytics of law that leaves it in, or brings it to, a state of subjective destitution in which it may at last be able truly to apprehend for itself, the lack that makes it what it is.
The arrival of mobile internet services came with significant promise of a potentially democratic public sphere mediated through digital media technology. However, rather than achieving this promise, these technologies ushered in a new economic age: surveillance capitalism, which revolutionised propaganda and misinformation in ways which pose clear threats to civil order and democratic processes. This paper updates and integrates Jürgen Habermas's model of the public sphere and communicative rationality with the realities of surveillance capitalism's new economic logics and the ways in which they undermine the public sphere. (1) The selective distribution of content by sorting algorithms fosters cultures of insularity and antagonism which (2) fragment and disintegrate the sphere, contributing to the breakdown of public discourse into echo chambers and filter bubbles. Furthermore, (3) sorting algorithms facilitate the evasion of scrutiny as these individually selected messages bypass public attention and criticism. This lack of scrutiny encourages the use of (4) engagement-farming tactics like the use of inflammatory misinformation. This has often led to (5) patterns of migration; wherein users migrate away from the platform to find more corresponding information about the conspiracy or mythology in question – further breaking down public discourse. Lastly, answering the new revenue model's demand for content often results in (6) content from botnets, troll farms, and misinformation networks being platformed and circulated with little to no repercussions.
This paper analyses a social media phenomenon which I term rebellious hyper-femininity, in which a hyper-feminine identity (involving, for example, embracing the colour pink, self-beautification, or other stereotypically feminine traits and characteristics) is adopted in response to the devaluation of femininity by patriarchal culture. Drawing on the trend bimbocore as an example of this phenomenon, I argue that such an adoption of hyper-femininity is rebellious and involves subversive feminist praxis because, by reclaiming a devalued identity, it engages in a critique of gender norms and anti-feminine sentiment. Rebellious hyper-femininity, as an identity largely performed through the sharing of content on social media, also involves a critique of capitalist society and other socio-political issues by these content creators. Rebellious hyper-femininity has the potential to be the kind of femininity which Marcuse (1974) believed was the antithesis to patriarchal and capitalist oppression. However, I argue that rebellious hyper-femineity’s radical potential as mode of subversive praxis is undermined by its being primarily enacted and popularised on social media. I argue that social media exhibits characteristics which Adorno and Horkheimer identify in their analysis of the Culture Industry and which Marcuse identifies in his analysis of one-dimensional society, such as an emphasis on conformity, standardisation, and the subsuming of that which might destabilise the status quo. In particular, social media turns rebellious hyper-femininity into a trend, a purely aesthetic, easily replicable identity stripped of its subversive intentions. As a trend, it perpetuates the very structures it originally aimed to destabilise, and thus social media undermines hyper-femininity as a potential mode of subversive praxis against patriarchal-capitalist oppression.
This paper re-examines Theodor W Adorno's critique of the culture industry through a close analysis of the musical and aesthetic logic of Bridgerton (2020- ). Drawing on Adorno's essays ‘The radio symphony’ (1941) and ‘On the fetish character in music and the regression of listening’ (1938), it traces how the series reproduces the same mechanisms of standardisation and pseudo-individualisation that characterised radio music in Adorno's time. In Bridgerton, orchestral adaptations of popular songs aestheticise repetition, offering the illusion of refinement while diminishing the listener's capacity for critical engagement. Classical music becomes a decorative and affective device, subordinated to narrative function rather than autonomous contemplation. The paper argues that Bridgerton exemplifies the persistence of the culture industry's logic: the transformation of art into administered pleasure. By translating Adorno's mid-20th-century concerns into a contemporary televisual context, the analysis reveals how the commodification of listening continues to erode the emancipatory potential of musical experience.
Environmental knowledge is an area of epistemology in which the elderly population, particularly in rural areas, are recognised as integral transmitters. One of the traditional ways in which this knowledge is imparted to the younger generations is through the use of entertainment such as indigenous games (Bogopa 2012: 246). Indigenous games are not merely a socialisation tool; instead, they are often used to facilitate the transmission of values and norms directed towards the preservation and conservation of nature. Despite their significance, there continues to be a lack of recognition of these alternative mediums and indigenous knowledge holders. Using critical theory rooted in a decolonial position, I aim to critically analyse indigenous games in the growing digital landscape by considering the intersectional consequences of dismissing the ecological episteme gained from indigenous games as well as considering how this affects epistemic hubs such as the elderly population – particularly ooMakhulu (elderly women). I will argue that the failure to integrate indigenous games on to digital platforms poses further risks on multiple axes, which include the extinction of the elderly’s roles in the younger generation’s lives, the loss of important cultural and heritage values, and the obliteration of indigenous environmental teachings.
In this article it will be argued that Gabor Maté’s published/online works, along with Maurizio and Zaya Benazzo’s documentary film The Wisdom of Trauma (2021), collectively comprise a digital nomadic war machine; one that works to heal the trauma otherwise precipitated by the State Apparatus’s majoritarian channelling of certain desires for profit. As will be discussed, Maté’s analysis of trauma not only rhizomatically connects Michel Foucault’s theorisation of disciplinary/bio-power society with Gilles Deleuze’s conception of control society, but also extends an earlier minoritarian vector of healing – ranging from Jean-Martin Charcot’s to Francine Shapiro’s works. And while this vector initially sought to address the increasing trauma deriving from disciplinary/bio-power’s normalising judgement, and more recently has focused on vestiges thereof in our neoliberal/digital societies of control, its extension has a bearing on democracy, because the persistence of such trauma inhibits the agency required for the functioning and development of this political system.
Walter Benjamin was a critical theorist and lover of architecture, and he spent most of his career studying urban spaces and places. In this paper, we use his theory of architecture to develop a normative critique that can be used to analyse public architecture in the context of the South African built environment. In this regard, we argue that architecture has to function simultaneously as a cultural sign and a material presence, and that failure to meet these criteria will result in the creation of oppressive structures. Since the advent of modernity, architecture has, for the most part, failed to function as both a cultural sign and a material presence. This is especially true of public architecture in contemporary South Africa, and the consequence is that public buildings continually fail to meet their objectives. By way of demonstrating our analysis, we apply our framework to the Mangaung Intermodal Transport Facility (MITF), a public building located in the Central Business District (CBD) of Bloemfontein that was designed in the spirit of modern architecture. Infamous as an oppressive structure in the urban fabric, we aim to use our analysis to better understand why this is the case. By developing and applying our Benjaminian critique, we hope to bring to light some of the challenges facing the South African built environment, and call for a deeper understanding of the architecture that is being produced in, and for, the country's communities.
This paper explores philosophical themes present in the film Shock Treatment (1981), a musical comedy written by Jim Sharman and Richard O'Brien. The film, which serves as a partial sequel to the better-known Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), was a critical and commercial failure at the time and has been largely overlooked subsequently. This paper offers a philosophical reconsideration of Shock Treatment. It argues that there are a number of themes developed within the film's narrative that correspond closely to the central concerns of the Frankfurt School, particularly those developed by Herbert Marcuse. It further argues that the film provides a way to explicate and critically reflect upon those themes in relation to contemporary online civilisation, with particular regard to the commodification and subversion of Eros within the capitalist system. As a result the film holds considerable potential as a teaching resource for courses on Frankfurt School critical theory.
From online flame wars, to hostile responses to international university protests, to contested legal cases at the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, it is clear that there is a profound breakdown on consensual understanding of what is taking place in "the Middle East". This analysis argues that rather than focusing only on the veracity of specific events, there is value in analysing the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza in terms of how competing discursive constructions of violence and opposing subject positions are being created, the technologies through which these are mediated, and the interests which they serve. The phrase 'say no to genocide' can be understood in three different ways: to resist the current genocide in Gaza; to resist a historical recurrence of the Holocaust; and to denounce the use of the term 'genocide' to refer to the unfolding situation in Palestine. The work here is to analyse how streams of competing digital accounts are not simply aggregations of information, but are better understood as shaped by the technological systems through which they are distributed, and the meaning they are given by already established narratives. They further both construct and reflect incompatible subject positions linked to deeper historical processes. Here the analysis attends to both the systems of power in which these interpellations occur and the intergenerational trauma, ranging from colonisation to the Holocaust, which invests them with affect. This helps to account for the seeming intractability of the conflict and radical incommensurability of the accounts offered, while suggesting a set of problems to be solved before peace and social justice can be achieved.
This study aims to critically approach representations of class in specific recent popular drama/horror films and TV series, notably Parasite, Joker, Squid Games (Season 1) and The Menu, which achieved worldwide popularity and success over the last few years. Produced in times of various global crises, such as economic recession, environmental catastrophes, pandemics, and war, these productions reflect the current, critical historical conjuncture. Class is a central denominator of crisis symptomatic of late capitalist reproduction processes. Drawing on narrative analysis, class constructions are theorised through the psychoanalytical notion of the abject (Kristeva 1982). The ridiculed, feared, and loathed working-class is abjected; simultaneously though, the upper class also emerges as abject, demystified and represented as mediocre, and sinister. A political understanding of class struggle, however, remains absent in these productions. This is connected to the material and structural limitations of popular culture.
