Thembinkosi Goniwe

Towards a Cosmopolitan Radical Hospitality and the Post-Colony Museum

Dr. Thembinkosi Goniwe

Art Historian, Curator, and Writer, Rhodes University Grahamstown, South Africa.

Museums have never been without anomaly in any modern context, even more so in the post-colony. Compounding this predicament is the improbable desire for normalcy in contexts where ubuntu or hospitality is expected to enable trusted ideals. This conundrum is not confined to museums; it is also a nervous condition that unremittingly shapes the social landscapes of cultural life, everyday practice, dwelling spaces, work places, and ordinary leisure. So understood, post-colonies are themselves theatrical museums underscored by spectacular dramas.

Therefore, museums are not institutions in and with which we just work; they are places of living, haunted by neo-colonial violence, neo-liberalism, and global capitalism. They equally wrestle with African ways of being in the world, struggling against forces that constrain possibilities for African freedom, subjecthood, and aesthetics, even within the idealism of postcolonial reformist projects. This is not pessimism but an underscoring of how the afterlife of colonial hostilities and apparatuses remain active under postcolonial directors, elites, curators, educationists, and related agents.

In this presentation, I intend to explore the above-noted tensions through meditating on the precarities of ubuntu as more than a philosophical proverb when matters of land, memory, heritage, identity, livelihood, and survival are contested. This argument is not to proscribe optimism but reflect on ubuntu’s contradictory folds as a form of postcolonial cosmopolitan hospitality. While it is important to appraise its openness and generosity, it is equally important to be aware of the uncritical idealism of such liberal virtues. The purpose is to develop speculative propositions toward a potential praxis of radical hospitality, understood as both an ethic of being and becoming, as well as a strategy of thought and action in what could be the post-colony museum.

Biography:

Thembinkosi Goniwe is an artist and art historian whose work explores contemporary African visual arts, postcolonial criticism, and radical Black thought. His artworks have been exhibited locally and internationally. He has contributed essays to various publications and has curated exhibitions in South Africa, the United States, Venice, and Edinburgh.

Trained in Fine Art at the University of Cape Town and in History of Art at Cornell University, he has taught at various South African universities and is currently lecturing on Art History and Visual Culture at Rhodes University.