Refiguring the Body: Performance of Identity in Mapantsula and Fools

Abstract

Two South African films, Oliver Schmitz's 1988 Mapantsula and Ramadan Suleman's 1997 Fools, drawing from the revolutionary fervour of Third Cinema, developed a radical consciousness against a backdrop of Anglo-Afrikaner cinema in South Africa. Set in Soweto during the 1980s, both films, in their representation of blackness, address issues of the body, identity and agency. With their anti-heroes at the centre, they explore questions of African identity by imaging the black body differently, and free it from the grip of the apartheid imaginary. Meanwhile, the white body in the films is ‘shot’ as a homogenized symbol of apartheid violence and oppression, thus ‘fixing’ white identity as a strategy for political truth claiming.

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