Meleko Mokgosi

“I cannot say that there is anything such as social responsibility because that would be too prescriptive”

“We all know that no one is really black or white, yet we buy into these categories and attach our identities to them”

“my efforts are invested in tracing these untracked histories that almost always counter and reside within already understood and taken-for-granted historical narratives about specific events and geopolitical locations”

“No doubt, I am heavily committed to history, and am trying to figure out how it is constructed and its effects on particular publics”

“This is what I am interested in painting: black skin”

“I think the most important thing for me is if one or two people can see what I’m trying to do and find the ideas interesting, then I’ll be happy”

“And what I appreciate about my students is how they continue to help me to think about critical dialogue in different ways”

“The idea of democracy is not a bad one but it’s just not practiced the way it ought to be”

“Capital itself is not bad, but what is bad is the instrumentalization of capitalism by the human”

“the valuation of the construction of the memory is very different to the actual memory that’s being recalled”

“A lot of times, memorialization tends to create a hierarchy where some things become more important than others, whether it’s the history of our independence or how we imagine our future or something else.”

“What I find interesting about memory is that not all memories have to have happened, or have to be quote unquote “true”

“history is always an incomplete and unstable project that depends on discursivity”

“I was thinking about how I could use something like love to navigate the question of history as an unfinished project”

“what I was doing, and still am trying to do, is investigate the many iterations of love, whether it is friendship or romantic love or the love for your country, which is very different from loving your partner but equally heavily invested”

“the concept of the past, as with the revolution, is exclusionary because for something to be part of the past, it has to be recognized to count”

“gender is also a big part of the class politics of these liberation movements”

“A lot of times in a southern African context, the agents of social mobility are the middle-class people”

“I don’t feel or perceive a big separation between maize meal or looking at Mandela posters because to me, they are part of my lived experience”

“Nostalgia is not just temporal, it is also spatial; if one is of the diaspora, then there develops a distance between being in the diaspora and one’s experience “back home.”