Sarah Nuttal
'Upsurge’
Acts of Transgression
(Pather and Boulle, 2019)
In this essay, Nuttal examines how times of turbulence or 'upsurge' like the #FeesMustFall, #rhodesmustfall or the ex-president Jacob Zuma’s time in office are difficult to ascribe meaning to or even name conclusively since its very nature is never in the past, as its repercussions are grappled with in the present. Assigning meaning becomes a complex nexus of the recorded and unrecorded, omission and inclusion, emotions, all further complicated by hindsight, vantage and subjective points of view. She says: 'what the event is and what shape it will take carries, simultaneously, a political and philosophical opacity and luminescence' (Nuttal, 2019).
About Sarah Nuttal
Sarah Nuttall is Research Professor in Literary and Cultural Studies at WISER at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research from 2013 to 2022. She has published widely about post-apartheid South Africa, including on topics in literary theory, cultural theory, urban theory, and aesthetics.
