Critical Arts started in 1980 offering critiques of the way performing arts, television and film, and the media in general engages with apartheid South Africa. The early issues challenged prevailing orthodoxies and opened a space for counter-ideological works.
“Liberation freed the journal Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural and Media Studies from an over-abiding concern with resistance in the same way that artists after 1994 found spaces to conduct their practices without fear,” says editor Keyan Tomaselli. “Although Andries Botha certainly has some stories to tell about his elephants and King Shaka at the new Durban airport.”
From 2011, Critical Arts appears five times annually and has been accepted for coverage in the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index from the 2009 volume onwards.
This issue of Critical Arts (November, 2010) is a special theme issue titled The Address of the Other: The Body And The Senses In Contemporary South African Visual Arts and bears testament to contemporary artists whose work has been debated in this issue by renowned artist, Leora Farber.
The Critical Arts home page can be found at http://ccms.ukzn.ac.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=151&Itemid=87