In commemoration of Women’s Day, 9 August, the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State (UFS) presents the Biennial Gendered Worlds Lecture every second year to reflect on gendered dynamics across a range of fields and topics. The 2023 Biennial Gendered Worlds Lecture by Prof Pamila Gupta titled, ‘Landscaping South Africa’s Gendered Hinterlands’ is presented in digital format in collaboration with the UFS Art Gallery exhibition, Eureka, by artists Prof Janine Allen and Dr André Rose which showed at the Stegmann Gallery from 10 July-11 August 2023.

Prof Gupta was appointed Research Professor at the UFS, taking up her position on the 1st January 2023 at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies. In her lecture she traces the concept of the hinterland, as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present, as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labour precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. 

Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland defined here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. Her lecture is based on her contribution to the forthcoming book titled, ‘Planetary Hinterlands꞉ Extraction, abandonment, and Care,’ (Eds. Pamila Gupta, Sarah Nuttall, Esther Peeren, and Hanneke Stuit, Palgrave, 2023). In this work, Prof Gupta considers South African case studies, namely Jeremy Foster’s evocative description of South Africa’s landscape as one ‘washed with sun’ (2008), to reflect on the shifting spatial thematics of two contemporary male South African non‑fiction writers and academics, Rob Nixon (Dreambirds, 1999) and Jacob Dlamini (Native Nostalgia, 2009). She considers what happens when we view certain locations described in their respective gendered works (a small desert town, Oudtshoorn vs a township, Katlehong) through the prism of hinterlands. 

Prof Gupta argues that the concept of hinterland offers a framework for a new understanding of those places inflected by the rural and urban, helping us to see the small town and township as operating within the same time/space configuration of apartheid South Africa. It highlights also  the importance of human/non‑human relations, with Nixon and Dlamini operating as each other’s hinterland. She suggests the potential of the concept of the hinterland for showcasing  the practice of writing as caught between a reflective self and other; one where Nixon and Dlamini (and she) use landscaped memories of gendered hinterland childhoods to say something about political becoming, and the past in South Africa today.

Prof Gupta, formerly Full Professor based at WiSER at the University of the Witwatersrand (2008-2022), holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her research and writing interests include Portuguese colonial and Jesuit missionary history, in India; diasporas, islands, tourism, heritage, and design in the Indian Ocean; photography, tailoring and visual cultures in East Africa; and architecture, infrastructure, and effect in South Africa.