Decolonisation is now: photography and student-social movements in South Africa. Issue 1 (2nd January 2018) - Thomas, Kylie
Abstract : The 2015–2016 student protest movements to decolonise universities and to bring about free education in South Africa have been accompanied by striking images that capture the Zeitgeist of the post-apartheid state. This paper focuses on photographs taken by students who also took part in the protests and argues that a new iconography has emerged that references the past but that also breaks away from the social documentary forms of representation that characterised the struggle against apartheid. I explore how the resurgence of black consciousness is made manifest in visual images and argue for reading photographs by student-protestor-photographers as tangible signs of the emerging 'woke' subjectivities of young black people in South Africa today.