3 Review(s)

Landscapes in Southern Africa continue to bear traces of colonial control, civil conflict, poverty, and unequal land distribution. Increasingly urgent documentary projects have emerged in relationship to place over the transition years from apartheid to post-apartheid. This book examines critical aesthetic innovations and responses to contemporary social and political issues visible through marks, structures and absences on the land, investigating emerging critical documentary aesthetics in relation to landscape and identity, by examining the work of photographers, artists and filmmakers in Southern Africa and its diaspora. These practitioners engage with landscape as a social product that can reveal something about the highly complex and fractured nature of postcolonial and contemporary identities. In this context, the enquiry both challenges and re-evaluates the politics of place and the original grounds of more traditional documentary approaches. Today these developing nation-states form part of a globalised world and aspire to neoliberal democratic reforms; however, they continue to grapple with growing economic and social instability. Landscapes Between Then and Now demonstrates why these particular documentary modes are critical now and how they can provide new possibilities for social and political engagement.