ABOUT
I was born in Johannesburg the year the Berlin Wall came down and the World Wide Web screeched into existence. Decades before, my maternal grandparents met editing the arts page of the Afrikaans paper of record, Die Burger. My paternal grandfather was a radio talk show host, and my mother a magazine editor for many years, at one point of the legendary Drum. As a child, I wanted to write novels: not a real job, I was told, but "you can work as a journalist." The Internet blew up, burst, and blew up again, flinging the media industry into crisis. As the crisis deepened, journalism became an end in itself – particularly the “slow and soft” variety, the journalism of my grandparents and my mother, which documented everyday life as the country -- and the world -- made other plans.
Image: Gareth Smit
LITERARY TRIALS
I am interested in how crime interacts with journalism and how the courtroom functions as a literary device -- how clues are read and testimony interpreted in societies where the reader is by no means stable or assured. My Honours thesis (University of Cape Town, 2012), later adapted as an article for Current Writing (UKZN Press), explored the parallel trends of crime fiction and true-crime in South Africa. Further research considered the function of the courtroom in South African literary journalism, and how writers like Jonny Steinberg and Antony Altbeker have drawn from the American journalist Janet Malcolm.
In 2013, I assisted the journalist Antjie Krog with research on forensics for the memoir Dear Bullet: Or A Letter to My Shooter by Sixolile Mbalo (Jonathan Ball, South Africa, 2014).
CITIES: MOVEMENT AND MAKING
As a writer I have worked for several non-profits, including Equal Education and the Cape Town Partnership, where I developed an interest in how cities function, macroscopically and at the level of the street. I also wrote -- mainly about the history of immigration in the Cape -- for the community newspaper, MOLO, and about Africa's creative economies for Creative Cape Town.
After moving to New York, I worked for the New York Magazine vertical, "Bedford+Bowery," where I wrote about arts, culture, gentrification and displacement in Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and North Brooklyn.
ALGORITHMIC LANGUAGE
In 2016, I earned my Master's in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. In the summer before the presidential election, amid a panic over "alternative facts," I completed a fact-checking internship at Bookforum. During the election itself, I worked as a fact-checker for Associated Press.
From our office overlooking Manhattan’s Javits Center -- where we anticipated the stunning fireworks display of Clinton’s victory party -- it felt like no-one, least of all the fact-checkers, expected a Trump victory.
Secretive tech companies, suspected Russian interference, fake news and echo chambers – how would it all affect the tip of Africa? It was the boomerang effect of the processes that were set in motion the year I was born: the end of the Cold War; the rise of the Internet. What did Berlin have to do with Johannesburg? How did journalism shape -- and respond to -- that ideological overhaul? How is it responding now?
A class at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research deepened my thinking on the limits and possibilities of informed opinion in the context of power structures and runaway technology. I ultimately returned to NYU to take up a doctorate in an attempt to respond to Hannah Arendt's "very simple" proposal: "nothing more than to think what we are doing." I'm interested in how writers, artists, and documentarians have responded to the so-called "end of history," but also how catchphrases and clichés function as code, how what might be called "algorithmic language" shapes our material reality: makes or breaks elections, spreads viruses, mars the earth; disrupts these processes, reverses them, imagines new patterns into being.
I am particularly interested in, and committed to, effectively communicating innovative research in the humanities to a wider, public audience -- and exploring the digital tools to do so.
Say hi: anneke.rautenbach@gmail.com