This article examines wedding photographs. The wedding day is read as a staging of the achievement of desire and love, articulated through the use of space, objects and artefacts to project a vision of the self. The wedding ritual is not only framed by the presence of the camera, the gaze of the camera actually makes sure that the script is followed. This staging of romance is read through the notion of the 'bridal gaze', which places the figure of the bride at the centre of the achievement of fairytale romance and the promise of a future 'happily ever after'. The images and affects of happiness in these 'love plots' are implicated in processes of identification and subjectivation that rely on relations of the gaze and 'the look', logics of self-image and self-possession, and the ritualised performance of romantic love as a site of freedom. I argue that nostalgia is invoked as a narrative strategy in wedding photographs in ways that place wedding rituals and the photographs produced out of them in and out of time with the present. The promise of happiness shared by the individuals 'in love', and the audiences that share in the ritualised performance of it, reflect the desire for inclusion within the progressive narrative of freedom in post/apartheid South Africa and the recognition of its flimsy presence, absence, promises and failures.

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This special issue on 'Xenophobia, nationalism and techniques of difference' begins with a provocation: a series of flags which can be construed as the legitimate narrative around organisation, celebration and campaigning, an urgent call for action or solidarity. Two versions of the same flag are presented that are essentially formal inversions. Each calls up a specific stylised emblem, beginning with the organisational flaga palisade fence; followed by the rally flag -an eight-point star. The ceremonial flag reads GROIN in bold capital letters, presumably the abbreviated name of the movement, but also a puzzling word, with its bodily or sexual connotations. The parade flags could be read as an architectural detail, and similar to the fence in the first flag points to a barrier or wall. There is only one campaign flag, depicting the shape of a knife or machete poised upward at an angle, with the bottom end of the handle forming a drop. As the last flag in the series it is the most aggressive one, an obvious call to violence, declaring the means and stakes of GROIN. In colour the flags appear more fascist than in their black and white versions, aligning themselves with the forceful graphics and rhetorics associated with extremism. 1