When Anton Kannemeyer and Conrad Botes founded their underground satirical comic magazine Bitterkomix in 1992, they put themselves at the forefront of the international expressionist comix movement. Their assault on mainstream Afrikaner culture has continued to be challenging, outrageous and controversial. This book is an essential chronicle, catalogue and visual cornucopia of the work of the Bitterkomix artists -- from Pub. info.

One of the most surprising features of the South African cultural landscape since the early 1990s has been the appearance of a series of satirical underground comics created by Conrad Botes and Anton Kannemeyer, two lecturers in graphic design at the University of Stellenbosch.

At head of title on cover: Joe Dog, Bitterkomix presents.

Encompassing black-and-white linoleum cuts made at community art centres in the 1960s and 1970s, resistance posters and other political art of the 1980s, and the wide variety of subjects and techniques explored by artists in printships over the last two decades, printmaking has been a driving force in contemporary South African artistic and political expression. Impressions from South Africa: 1965 to Now, published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, introduces the vital role of printmaking through works by more than twenty artists in the Museum's collection. The volume features prints by John Muafangejo and Dan Rakgoathe, a selection of posters produced for anti-apartheid coalitions in the 1980s, and nuanced political work by SueWilliamson, Norman Catherine andWilliam Kentridge. The book features many more recent projects, demonstrating the contemporary relevance of the medium in South Africa today. The work, presented in a generous plate section, is contextualized in an introduction by Judith B. Hecker, and accompanied by brief biographies of the artists, a timeline of relevant events in South African history, and a selected bibliography.

Social commentary and political satire are presented through critically acclaimed graphics and confrontational illustrations in this brilliant and outrageous collection. Marked by an all-encompassing irony, a destruction of cultural taboos, and a love of cutting edge graphic art, the collection is a testament to the contentious history of Bitterkomix and its attacks on the Afrikaner culture and language that have developed into biting criticisms on South African society itself.

An illustrated A-to-Z guide to the absurdities of life in the democratic South Africa, this informative account challenges the myth of the “rainbow nation” with acute humor and critique. Dissecting the issues, events, and personalities that confound the country through paintings, drawings, and prints, it examines South Africa’s racially-tense past and present through the use of political satire and underground comics.

Drawing together the insights of postcolonial scholarship and cultural studies, Popular Postcolonialisms questions the place of ‘the popular’ in the postcolonial paradigm. Multidisciplinary in focus, this collection explores the extent to which popular forms are infused with colonial logics, and whether they can be employed by those advocating for change. It considers a range of fiction, film, and non-hegemonic cultural forms, engaging with topics such as environmental change, language activism, and cultural imperialism alongside analysis of figures like Tarzan and Frankenstein. Building on the work of cultural theorists, it asks whether the popular is actually where elite conceptions of the world may best be challenged. It also addresses middlebrow cultural production, which has tended to be seen as antithetical to radical traditions, asking whether this might, in fact, form an unlikely realm from which to question, critique, or challenge colonial tropes. Examining the ways in which the imprint of colonial history is in evidence (interrogated, mythologized or sublimated) within popular cultural production, this book raises a series of speculative questions exploring the interrelation of the popular and the postcolonial.

By means of a South African comic - Bitterkomix - this study deals with two current debates in Cultural Anthropology: Visual Culture and Indigenous Ethnography. Bitterkomix is a comic anthology which criticises and subverts the Afrikaans culture from within. The main contributors - Afrikaner themselves - do so mostly in the fields of sexuality, racism, religious and cultural bigotry and the use of Afrikaans as the ideological and psychological connection of the Boers. In Visual Culture the producer and the recipient are in close correlation, therefore the editors are looked at as such - recipients and producers of comics and thereby culture. Their ethnographic comics about childhood, sexuality, conscription and identity through language are treated as a self-reflecting project, and so this book is able to contribute in an extraordinary way as an indigenous ethnography of the Boers.

Examines the political significance of rugby in South Africa's post-apartheid present