?Mark Sanders
is professor of comparative literature and English at New York
万博体育官网 and professor extraordinary in the Department of Afrikaans
and Dutch.
He will be talking to Prof Andries Visagie about his latest book, which takes stock of the relations among computerisation, labour and the arts in South Africa.
In A Will for the Machine,
Mark Sanders outlines South Africa’s entry into the computer age in the
1960s and ’70s and explains how it coincided with the high point of
apartheid. South Africa’s government viewed automation and
computerization as one way of barring Black Africans from skilled work
and reserving it for whites. Sanders unpacks this peculiar history,
relates it to early twentieth-century struggles around mechanization in
mining and telephony in South Africa, and analyzes responses to it by, among others, the writers Miriam Tlali (1933–2017), J. M. Coetzee (b. 1940) and Willem Anker (b. 1979), the
artist William Kentridge (b. 1955), and Handspring Puppet Company.
Showing how the arts realize ideas about the ethics and politics of
automation, Sanders contributes to debates about locally divergent
understandings of computer technology and human-computer interaction.
The talk will be mostly in English.
