Abstract

The removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town in 2015, prompted by the student Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) campaign, represents a window into how questions of race, art and inequality intertwined as they played out some twenty-five years into South African democracy. Since RMF then turned to the artwork exhibited at University of Cape Town, finding in it a collectively degraded vision of blackness − even though much of it was created in support of the anti-Apartheid struggle − this interpretive mismatch then became central to the university’s conflict. The sense of offense felt by RMF over these artworks could, in all probability, not have been negotiated at the time, leading to the abstract question of how such offense might ideally be negotiated. About this, I introduce a dialogical notion, one involving reflection on the part of both parties: the offender and the offended.

摘要

2015 年，在学生 Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) 运动的推动下，开普敦大学移除了 Cecil Rhodes 的雕像，这代表了一个窗口，可以了解种族、艺术和不平等问题在大约 25 年期间如何交织在一起多年进入南非民主。由于 RMF 然后转向在开普敦大学展出的艺术品，在其中发现了一种集体退化的黑人视野——尽管其中大部分是为了支持反种族隔离斗争而创作的——这种解释上的不匹配随后成为大学冲突的核心. RMF 对这些艺术品的冒犯感很可能在当时无法协商，这导致了这样一个抽象的问题，即这种冒犯在理想情况下如何进行协商。关于这一点，我引入了一个对话概念，涉及双方的反思：冒犯者和被冒犯者。