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For nearly ten years – indeed more if we include his period of influence under Mandela’s presidency – Thabo Mbeki bestrode South Africa’s political stage. Despite attempts by some in the new ANC leadership to airbrush out his role, there can be little doubt that Mbeki was a seminal figure in South Africa’s new democracy, one who left a huge mark in many fields, perhaps most controversially in state and party management, economic policy, public health intervention, foreign affairs and race relations. If we wish to understand the character and fate of post-1994 South Africa, we must therefore ask: What kind of political system, economy and society has the former President bequeathed ...
This book explores some of the various ways in which hip hop has tragically and perilously been misused by scholars and how the study of hip hop often entrenches antiblackness as well as other social problematics. In the end, the book is a collection that provides a much-needed perspective on hip hop culture as well as some new ways to think about the study of hip hop. It is an event of sorts: an interdisciplinary collection of debates and interventions by scholars and intellectuals in Black Studies, Cultural Studies, Theatre Art, Gender Studies, and English. The perspectives are theoretical and practical, philosophical and historical, engaging a variety of theories and practices.
From contemporary deployments of taxidermy, magic lanterns and microscopy to the visualization of forgotten lives, marginalized narratives and colonial histories, this book explores how the work of artists including Mat Collishaw, Yinka Shonibare, Tessa Farmer, Mark Dion, Dorothy Cross and Ingrid Pollard reimag(in)es the Victorians in the ‘present’. Examining how recent paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations and films revisit and re-present nineteenth-century technologies, practices and events, the book’s rich interdisciplinary approach applies literary, media and linguistic theories to its analysis of visual art, alongside in-depth discussions of the Victorian inventions, c...
This book reflects on the complex and contested idea of South Africa, drawing on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. Ever since the delineation of South Africa as a country, the many diverse groups of people contained within its borders have struggled to translate a mere geographical description into the identity of a people. Today the new struggles ‘for South Africa’ and ‘to become South African’ are inextricably intertwined with complex challenges of transformation, xenophobia, claims of reverse racism, social justice, economic justice, service delivery, and the resurgent decolonization struggles reverberating inside the universities. This book covers the genealogy of the id...
Fight for Democracy is a penetrating and critical scrutiny of the ANC’s treatment of the print media since the inception of democracy in 1994. In this book, Glenda Daniels does not hide behind a veil of detachment, but instead makes a passionate argument for the view that newspapers and journalists play a significant role in the deepening of democratic principles. Glenda Daniels examines the pattern of paranoia that has crept into public discourse about the media and the ANC, and their conflictual relationship. She analyses this fraught relationship through various popular media stories, such as Manto and Mondli, Zapiro and Zuma. Her argument is that there is some hysteria on the part of t...
This volume focuses on how music and arts in the global Africana world are used for political and social change. It will be an essential resource for scholars and students in African studies, Africana, Afro-Atlantic studies, diaspora studies, sociology, music, literature, politics and culture. The volume is divided into three sections, namely “Music and Politics”, “Case Studies of Experiential Practices in Healing and Education”, and “Literature, the Arts, and Political Expression”, which cross subject areas such as nationalism, political identity, post-coloniality, health, education, orality, and cultural expressivity. Diverse topics are covered, such as the African thematics of jazz, the Y’en a Marre/Fed Up movement in Senegal, the Occupy Nigeria movement, NGO activism in Brazil, and Africana performance traditions, as well as the dynamics of oral and written literature. The articles explore works by Joseph Conrad, Nathaniel Mackey, Kofi Awoonor, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, as well as the artistic expression of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Legacies of Enslavement in the French Republic explores the complex dynamics between social movements invested in remembering and addressing the legacies of African enslavement and the French State. Exploring 25 years of activism, from the build-up to the 150th anniversary of the Abolition Act (1998) through to the present day, the book: Investigates strategies used by the French State to delink the recognition of France’s enslaving past from contemporary issues with anti-Black racism and reparation. Asks why, in the wake of the first Taubira law that recognized slavery as a crime against humanity (2001), the state has legitimized the work of certain activist groups, while delegitimizing o...
In Rising Up, Living On, Catherine E. Walsh examines struggles for existence in societies deeply marked by the systemic violences and entwinements of coloniality, capitalism, Christianity, racism, gendering, heteropatriarchy, and the continual dispossession of bodies, land, knowledge, and life, while revealing practices that contest and live in the cracks of these matrices of power. Through stories, narrations, personal letters, conversations, lived accounts, and weaving together the thought of many—including ancestors, artists, students, activists, feminists, collectives, and Indigenous and Africana peoples—in the Americas, the Global South, and beyond, Walsh takes readers on a journey of decolonial praxis. Here, Walsh outlines individual and collective paths that cry out and crack, ask and walk, deschool, undo the nation-state, and break down boundaries of gender, race, and nature. Rising Up, Living On is a book that sows re-existences, nurtures relationality, and cultivates the sense, hope, and possibility of life otherwise in these desperate times.
What does it mean to be Black in an anti-Black world? In Black X: Liberatory Thought in Azania, Tendayi Sithole offers a compelling example of how to engage South Africa differently. Set in the Black point of view as a site of critical reflection, he confronts the question of colonial conquest, social cohesion and justice. Since South Africa is a name given to the country by its conquerors, not by its indigenous inhabitants, for true liberation, a renaming needs to occur. The concept of Azania holds this emancipatory gesture. The post conquest, post 1994 liberal narratives mute the prevalence of racism while valorizing non-racialism and the transcendence of race. To indicate this silencing, ...
In The Letter in Black Radical Thought, Tendayi Sithole unmasks the logics of dehumanization in the terrain of black radical thought by looking at the letter as the site of examination and political intervention. Through his expansive demonstration and original argument, he analyzes the letters of Sylvia Wynter, Assata Shakur, George Jackson, Aìme Césaire, and Frantz Fanon. Through illuminating critical takes by these black radical thinkers, Sithole orchestrates a thematic approach, revealing the challenges to dehumanization which emerge in these letters. All the afore-mentioned figures are read anew through the typology of the letters they have penned. This typology consists of epistemic, fugitive, intramural, and resignation letters. The Letter in Black Radical Thought shows how these letters confront and combat dehumanization in novel ways.