Jonathan Cane is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria. With Noëleen Murray, Research Chair at the University of Pretoria, he is working on a project called “EAST: N4/EN4” which studies minor architectures and infrastructure that connect South African and Mozambique along the N4/EN4 highway corridor. He is the Principle Investigator on the SSRC-funded project “Sounding the Monsoon”. He holds a PhD in Art History from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and is the author of Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld (2019), a queer postcolonial study of gardening in Johannesburg and its surrounds. His practice-based research and design work have be exhibited and published on numerous platforms. His two decades of output has resulted in video artwork, installations, a number of typeset and designed publications and, most recently, web-based works. The recent project, a collaboration with Andrea Hayes, “60+: Queer Old Joburg” (2018) [insert link:http://www.ellipses.org.za/project/60-queer-old-joburg/] is a queer web archive of cruising in Johannesburg during apartheid. He is currently working with Monsoon Assemblages on the design of the virtual exhibition that will conclude the project.
Publications
Cane, J. 2020. ‘The Promises, Poetics and Politics of Verticality in the Really High African City.’ Critical African Studies. [in press]
Cane, J. 2020. ‘Penguins of the Global South Unite!’. Radicalise Bauhaus: Perspectives from the Global South. Fink, Katharina., Opper, Alexander & Siegert, Nadine (eds). Bayreuth: iwalewabooks. [in press]
Cane, J. 2019. Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Cane, J. 2019. ‘Welcome to the Jungle: Tropical Modernism, Decadence, Gardening in Africa’. African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics. Iqani, Mehita & Dosekun, Simidele (eds). Chicago: Intellect, University of Chicago Press, pp. 155–170.
Cane, J. 2019. ‘Cruising Queer, Old Joburg.’ Anthropology Southern Africa. 42(1), pp. 14–28.
Website
Jonathancane.com