Author Description

"Pax Kaffraria (2010 ? 2014) is an eight-chapter project that takes Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe as case studies, and articulates questions around issues of national identification, colonial history, globalization, trans-nationality, whiteness, "African-ness," and post-colonial aesthetics. In this work, Mokgosi continues his interrogation regarding the implications of established histories, and more broadly the construction of narrative. His work examines notions of time and normative models for the inscription and transmission of history, ultimately disrupting traditional, fundamentally European notions of representation. Mokgosi utilizes cinematic tropes, history painting, post-colonial theory, and psychoanalysis to question accepted understandings and constructions of representation. In doing so, his work offers new epistemological, ideological, and symbolic ways of undercutting normative narrative structures and stories, as a way to posit alternate modes for the creation of knowledge through visual language. Pax Kaffraria brings together two terms. The word ?pax,? taken from the original phrase: ?we Romans have purchased the pax Romana with our blood,? highlights the essence of institutionalized, enforced ?peace? at the height of the Roman Empire. ?Pax Romana,? contrary to conventional belief is not about peace but rather about nationalism; it is precisely about the bond between blood and soil that undergirds nationalist projects and a certain understanding of ?peace.? ?Kaffraria? is a term that was first used by the British in the eighteenth century to establish ?British Kaffraria?: a subordinate administrative entity that was primarily inhabited by the Xhosa. More precisely, ?kaffraria? is a British adaptation of the word ?kaffir,? derived from Arabic and coopted by the Dutch or Boer in South Africa, and used as the equivalent of the derogatory term ?nigger.? Pax Kaffraria then is a forcefully made appellation that is chiefly historical and myt