Mixing It Up: New Audiovisual Cultures in South Africa

This article explores the representation of social mixing in contemporary South African films, where apartheid-era anxieties around racial mixing have now developed into newer anxieties applied to realms beyond race, such as sexuality, nationality, and class. Beyond exploring the politics and aesthetics of films such as Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon (dir. Khalo Matabane, 2005), we remember differently (dir. Jyoti Mistry, 2005), and Sea Point Days (dir. François Verster, 2008), however, the article also engages more broadly with the concept of “mixing” as it is performed in cultural and scholarly production in contemporary South Africa. The article surveys scholarship on films made in and about South Africa, identifying varied and overlapping movements in which conventional cinema studies are being eclipsed by interdisciplinary research on audiovisual cultures, research which makes use of mixed methodologies in exciting new ways, and research that pays attention to the complex relationships between formal and informal media practices and flows. The author also reflects on her own changing pedagogical practice in relation to her desire to disrupt and “mix up” apartheid-era chronologies in the way South African film and history are taught.