abstract In this article food and food practices are used as a lens to access the narratives of identity constructed by immigrant Muslim women living in Fordsburg, Johannesburg, an urban space renowned for its many eating places and street food culture. Fordsburg, affectionately known as ‘Foodsburg’ to locals, has played host to diverse communities in its history who have left their influence in numerous ways. The reciprocal impact of person on place and place on person is highlighted through this purposeful selection of Fordsburg as a geographic site of enquiry. Sensory experiences were shared by participants, both positive – the smells of familiar food, the sights of familiar ingredients, the sounds of home language, and negative − the lack of taste and texture in some ingredients, among others. The research collected a number of narratives that weave together everyday practices of food and culture, including purchasing, preparation and consumption across time and place. The voices of the participants highlight the sensuous relationship to food of immigrant women in re-making home in Fordsburg and through re-membering the places that resonate with belonging.

abstract During the COVID-19 pandemic, migrants in South Africa were not only exempted from social allowances such as food parcels but also targeted by xenophobic sentiments. Consequently, migrants who were already pushed to the margins of society experienced an increased sense of alienation from South African society. Based on Food for Change, 1 an online project in which eight forced migrant women from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda living in Gqeberha, South Africa, shared cooking recipes during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article approaches the cultivation of a sense of home and belonging through food. Using the concept of visceral politics, it analyses how food created a visceral experience in which embodied subjects acquire personal pleasure, affiliation with other embodied subjects and a sense of connectedness to their places of origin and South Africa. This approach documents how women exercised creative agency through their cooking by implementing knowledge from their home countries, acquiring new knowledge from other cuisines and adapting local ingredients and techniques to create meals that unite their households around the pleasure of eating ‘exactly like home’. In this way, they were able to reduce the impact that the alienating anti-migrant discourses outside their homes had on the everyday life inside them.

abstract This article focuses on the uses of spice as a method of healing in selected dishes within a Durban Indian foodscape. Beyond its culinary potential (taste, flavour, seasoning), the article motivates spice as having particular utilities and meanings that have bearing upon social, cultural and gender issues pertinent to food preparation as well as consumption which ultimately influences health and well-being. Methodologically it engages conceptual insights from the critical literature on food, including its gendered parameters, and frames a description of a few pertinent dishes drawn from five interviews in a larger project on food focused on its materiality and visceral dimensions.

abstract This focus reads the multiple selves of Dolly Rathebe as represented in popular cultural discourse, particularly in Drum magazine during the 1950s. Black translucent femininity is a conceptual tool, I argue, with opacity and obscurity; afforded is the opportunity to engage Dolly Rathebe and her various representations with complexity, elasticity and multiplicity. This conception of translucent Black femininities allows room for reckoning with selves that would ordinarily not be considered complex and contradictory. I analyse the representations of Rathebe as situated within the popular cultural discourse structured by a white capitalist and heteropatriarchal prism contoured by Black masculinity. I explore pseudonymity as a tool of (re)creating a self and the layered selves of Dolly Rathebe. The self-fashioning of Rathebe displayed in various representations opens the possibility of depicting layered selves, and I intend to show the elasticity of the figure of Rathebe by reading these representations alongside each other. In this way I illustrate the layered and multiple selves that stretch from the primary self of Rathebe – particularly the self-fashioning of the figure of the romantic advice column ‘Dear Dolly’ which appeared in Drum. It is also in the navigation of the various traces of the name Dolly, derivative of the name Dorothy, that I expand on the multiplicity and translucence of urban Black femininity represented by Dolly Rathebe. This informs expansion from singular and flat stereotypical representations to multiple and translucent representations, thus illustrating the elasticity of urban Black femininity as depicted in popular cultural discourse.

abstract The South African legend of Pinky Pinky presents a striking opportunity to think with Hortense J. Spillers’ theorising of incubus in Harriet Jacobs’ Life of a Slave Girl (Brent 1973). These demons of urban legend enable my theoretical intervention on the question of Black gender which breaks with Human gender subjectivity, and which implies that there can be no solidarity between Human women and Black wxmxn. I utilise Spillers’ historical materialist, theoretical and psychoanalytic inspired formulation of Black Flesh to think the structuring relation of the Black wxmxn in modern South Africa’s political ontology in order to consider our emancipation dreams within the confines of the modern Enlightenment's Human and their ontological struggle for difference against a quintessential Other, the Black. This critical intervention concerning feminist solidarity and hindrances to Black intramural unity strives to reframe and constitute afresh the organising sentiment and politics of any ideological outlook which considers itself. That is that Black Feminism has been structurally excommunicated from the community of the Human and its gender-forming terms, which demarcate the domestic spaces wherein gendering processes are possible. I conclude that shared experiences of violence between Humans and Black wxmxn do not preclude the Madam from her Master function as phallic potentiality for the violent sexual gatekeeping required to secure the Human, nor should this be conflated with the ontological violence necessary to produce the Black for the Human. Blackness’ constitutive social death structures the Black wxmxn/slave as always and already coerced under the Human’s political prerogative, under a parasitic relation with no worldly emancipation path.

abstract This article considers the symbolic methods of reading the text through black women’s experimental strategies of abstract cartographies and labyrinthine imaginations. It thinks about the problem of ‘transnational’ mapping and motion from the experimental and symbolic realm of (playful) abstraction. I am primarily concerned with Katherine McKittrick’s reinvocation of Sylvia Wynter’s play on the mathematical concept of “Demonic Grounds” and Nongenile Masithathu Zenani’s labyrinthine puzzles in the realm of isiXhosa folkloric imagination. According to Katherine McKittrick, cartographic methods that arise from plantation modernity symbolically render black people “ungeographic” (McKittrick 2006). That is, geography as a scientific and discursive method of interpreting and mapping the material and immaterial conceptions of the world tends to mark out or make absent the presence of blackness in space, time, and motion. If we were to read the modern spatial world as a text (Harris 1999; Hateb 1990), then cartographic logics would submerge blackness under “sub-zero degrees” of knowledge and the imagination (Spillers 1987; Morrison 1995). This is what Sylvia Wynter calls the “demonic grounds” of abstract conception (McKittrick 2006, p. xxiv). McKittrick asserts, “In mathematics, physics and computational science, the demonic connotes a working system that cannot have a determined, or knowable outcome. The demonic is a nondeterministic schema: it is hinged on uncertainty and non-linearity because the organizing principle cannot predict the future” (McKittrick 2006, xxiv). My question is: How do we begin to excavate, move through and fashion different models of the world in this submerged space of ‘demonic grounds’? Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, a master Xhosa folklorist and mythologist, traces a legendary figure’s journey through a puzzling labyrinthine journey under these ‘sub-zero zones’ or ‘demonic grounds’ of symbolic abstraction. This article synthesises and conjoins black women’s abstract and symbolic practices from different parts of the black world.

abstract This article highlights a set of gendered consequences in the ‘world of work’ resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic in Cuba. It also conveys the tensions between programmes targeting gender inequalities and more general social justice policies that, at least at the discursive level, are embedded in self-defined socialist contexts, as in the case of Cuba. Building on pre-existent inequalities and data, the article uses a feminist lens regarding the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on women in the labour markets, differentiating between the State and the non-State sectors (own-account workers in particular) and in the unpaid care work sector in Cuba. It analyses the extent to which Government strategies have not adequately incorporated gender criteria in their policy decisions toward recovery. Despite the lack of data, we conclude that Cuban women – regardless of their employment status – are bearing the cost of the crisis in disproportionate ways, as their unpaid domestic and care work has intensified. This seems to be aggravated for rural and racialised women. Hence, universal public protection policies, which are undoubtedly a strength of the socialist programme, also reproduce inequalities if a gender approach is not considered.