Abstract
The essay identifies several ways in which an artist’s identities intersect with the creativity from which artistic expression emerges. It considers the juxtaposition of theories of social construction and those of agency, testing these theories against narratives of artists in South Africa as they dealt with the history of apartheid and its aftermath. The essay begins with a presentation of ideas of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka concerning the process by which the creative forces of the logos of life surface in individual human agents with a double-sidedness of social embeddedness and revolt. The narratives of South African black artists are then investigated for elements of socially constructed historical identities (pre-colonial, colonized, and post-colonialist) and then for traces of individually constructed identities (artist, individual, co-creator of the new South Africa). The investigation uncovers a wide variety of identities, mixed and mobile, rather than finding any one identity predominating.
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Larrabee, M.J. (2010). Between a Rock and a Soft Place: Finding Creativity in the Face of Oppression. In: Coohill, P. (eds) Art Inspiring Transmutations of Life. Analecta Husserliana, vol 106. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9160-4_9
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