Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852700
Damian Shaw
Makhanda ka Nxele has finally received official recognition by the South African government as a national hero. While recent historical research has made great contributions to our knowledge of Makhanda as an historical figure, surprisingly little attention has been paid, except in the case of Thomas Pringle’s poem ‘Makanna’s Gathering,’ to other representations of the man in English literature. This article attempts to fill this gap by comparing four substantial texts on Makanna, starting with Pringle’s poem, and followed by an anonymous novel of 1834, Makanna, Or, The Land of the Savage, Bronze Napoleon, a novel by M. Norbert Morgan (1940), and a slightly later poem by John Cargill Rae, ‘Makanna and The Battle of Grahamstown.’ Makhanda has been depicted in the historical record in a range of guises, from that of a heroic freedom fighter to a very demon. Whether he is praised or vilified, it is hard to deny that Makhanda is a man who emerged from a complex contact zone and used his knowledge of both European and amaXhosa culture to unite the majority of his own people and make a substantial mark on history. This article will investigate how the four authors have situated the character ‘Makanna’ within this dynamic, and then question how literary depictions of Makhanda might function in either negative or positive ways.
Makhanda ka Nxele终于被南非政府正式承认为民族英雄。虽然最近的历史研究为我们了解马汉达作为一个历史人物做出了巨大贡献，但令人惊讶的是，除了托马斯·普林格尔的诗歌《马坎纳的聚会》外，人们很少关注英国文学中马汉达的其他表现。本文试图通过比较四篇关于马坎纳的实质性文本来填补这一空白，从普林格尔的诗开始，接着是1834年的一部匿名小说《马坎纳，或者，野蛮之地，青铜拿破仑》，M.Norbert Morgan（1940）的一部小说，以及约翰·卡吉尔·雷（John Cargill Rae）稍晚的一首诗《马坎娜与格拉汉姆镇之战》在历史记录中，马汉达以各种伪装被描绘，从英雄的自由战士到恶魔。无论他是受到赞扬还是诋毁，都很难否认，马汉达是一个从复杂的接触区走出来的人，他利用自己对欧洲和阿科萨文化的了解，团结了自己的大多数人民，并在历史上留下了重要的印记。这篇文章将调查四位作者是如何将“玛坎娜”这个角色定位在这种动态中的，然后质疑文学对玛坎达的描述是如何以消极或积极的方式发挥作用的。
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1784554
Inderpal Grewal
Theories of authoritarianism and populism are insufficient if they do not take into account the power of gender and sexuality, in relation to other social divisions, within authoritarian power and the erotics that produce populism. Patriarchal power is a more comprehensive approach, showing how the new authoritarians rely on gendered security and securitization to produce the new post-secular and the post-postcolonial nationalisms of today. While populisms are divergent in empire and postcolony, for instance in the US and India, generated by grievances and disappointments of a waning empire on the one hand, and a failed modernization on the other, their authoritarian leaders are linked not just in modes of power and governance but also through sharing technologies of surveillance, security and accumulation.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1780762
A. Levin
Abstract In this article I use Angie Thomas’s popular young-adult novel The Hate U Give as a lens through which to explore how young adult fiction, produced by African American writers, can serve to facilitate social activism and change. In the novel, Thomas’s Black teenage protagonist, Starr Carter, undergoes a transformation from victim and witness to activist after she sees her Black male friend murdered by a white police officer. As I will demonstrate, the novel is guided and shaped by the ideologies of the Black Lives Matter Movement as it explores the complexities of Blackness in both post-racial and communal spaces. By drawing on these ideologies and employing the perspective of a Black teenage girl, Thomas engages her Black female readers in a readerly process in which they reflect on how Starr’s narrative relates to their own lives. In doing so, I argue, she encourages these readers to explore ways in which their own narratives can be used to instigate social activism and change.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1780752
Robyn Pierce
Abstract The chief antagonist of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is the Magisterium, a powerful multinational religious organization reminiscent of the Roman Catholic Church. In the first two novels of the new Book of Dust trilogy, Pullman expands upon the original series and further explores the authoritarian populist tactics utilized by the various branches of the Magisterium to assert its authority and to exert a commanding influence over state politics. Set in opposition to the Magisterium is the republic of heaven, which invokes the underlying principles of Milton’s republicanism and seeks to establish a democratic and egalitarian society. This paper examines Pullman’s representation of authoritarian populism in the agencies of the Magisterium, and contrasts this with the democratic vision of the republic of heaven. It argues that in drawing on Milton’s republicanism, Pullman is less concerned with a specific mode of government than with the underlying principles of republicanism that seek to enable the shared participation of the members of a society in its governance and which serve as a means to circumvent the potential for tyranny that accompanies the concentration of power. In invoking Milton, Pullman, however, fails to account for the tension in Milton’s politics between his support for a free and equal polity and his elitist stance towards governance founded upon a belief in humanity’s inherent fallibility. Unlike Milton, whose view of democracy is informed by a belief in Biblical ‘truth,’ Pullman conceives of democracy as a system that underpins pluralism and which facilitates the dynamic exchange of a socio-political collective. His representation of the Magisterium and the republic of heaven are shown to be directly concerned with the dangers posed by hegemonic ideology, as well as the oppressive forms that it can take.
摘要菲利普·普尔曼（Philip Pullman）的《黑暗物质》（His Dark Materials）系列的主要反对者是Magisterium，这是一个强大的跨国宗教组织，让人想起罗马天主教会。在新的《尘埃之书》三部曲的前两部小说中，普尔曼对原系列进行了扩展，并进一步探讨了司法机构各分支为维护其权威和对国家政治施加压倒性影响而使用的威权民粹主义策略。与君主政体相对立的是天堂共和国，它援引了米尔顿共和主义的基本原则，并寻求建立一个民主和平等的社会。本文考察了普尔曼在君主机构中对专制民粹主义的表现，并将其与天国的民主愿景进行了对比。它认为，在借鉴米尔顿的共和主义时，普尔曼与其说关心一种特定的政府模式，不如说关心共和主义的基本原则，这些原则旨在使社会成员能够共同参与其治理，并作为规避权力集中带来的暴政的一种手段。然而，在援引米尔顿的话时，普尔曼没有解释米尔顿政治中的紧张关系，即他对自由平等政体的支持和他对建立在人类固有易犯错误信念基础上的治理的精英主义立场。与米尔顿不同的是，他对民主的看法是基于对《圣经》“真理”的信仰，普尔曼认为民主是一种支持多元主义并促进社会政治集体动态交流的制度。他对君主政体和天国的描绘被证明与霸权主义意识形态带来的危险以及它可能采取的压迫形式直接相关。
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1780753
Wamuwi Mbao
Recent confrontations across institutions of higher learning in South Africa have brought into sharp focus that universities, though they may market themselves as spaces of critical citizenship, are not satisfying the desires of a large section of the students who occupy them. The outbreaks of protests that are untidy and discomfiting – students disrupting classes, occupying the built fabric of the university, or staging spectacular demonstrations – have signaled the possibility that the economy of knowledge-exchange symbolized by universities is exclusionary for these students. The psychic cost of these disruptions has yet to truly be measured. But what has become apparent is that we have entered a transitional after-moment that warrants reading. Indeed, as the surging waters of ‘Fallism’ ebb from the university, it becomes necessary to rethink the ways in which the forms of violence enacted by the universities to defend their solidity demonstrated the limitations of their current form. This article is impelled by the notion that there is no single ‘university’ approached by both students and the network of employees who orchestrate its functions. It asks what other potentials might be realized if we think of the university as a liquid space, rather than a rigidly unyielding one.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1780749
C. Thurman
‘ET TU, BANNON?’ shouted the front page of the New York Post on 4 January 2018, after some of Stephen Bannon’s private comments about Donald Trump had been made public. This was not the first time that New Yorkers were presented with the comparison between the US President and Julius Caesar: the previous summer, the annual Shakespeare production in Central Park had invoked the wrath of Trump’s supporters. Yet the president’s camp has itself indulged in analogies with Caesar, as well as other characters from Shakespeare’s plays. This should be all the warning one needs against the use of Shakespearean paradigms to try and interpret contemporary American politics. There are, however, many examples of attempts to identify Shakespearean precursors to Trump – ranging from Macbeth to Richard III and King Lear – in what has become a subgenre of media coverage of his presidency. Most of these venture a critique of the president-as-demagogue. Shakespeare has also been recruited by a figure like Bannon (whose Shakespearean enthusiasm is eccentric, but certainly not innocuous) into the ambit of white supremacist populism. Teased out, this narrative offers a cautionary tale for scholars in early modern studies, and prompts us to reflect critically both on defences of Shakespeare’s centrality in the classroom and on the practice of what Jeffrey R. Wilson has called ‘Public Shakespeare’.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1780751
Aretha Phiri
With the shock election and subsequent inauguration in 2017 of its 45th president, Donald Trump, America appeared to go into mourning. Propagating discriminatory and divisive sentiment and instituting an exhaustive list of retrograde and repressive policies, Trump’s administration augured what political pundits viewed as national extinction. Yet, in eliding how African Americans in particular have historically lived, constantly and constitutionally, with the fear or threat of death, the apocalyptic populist discourse disseminated primarily by mainstream, white society has initiated within black communities a counter-discursive, restitutional cultural populism that risks similarly hierarchical and exclusionary, separatist iterations. Motivated by Judith Butler’s analysis in Precarious Lives of the exclusory mechanisms of national melancholia and influenced by (re)visionary contemporary black feminist theory and poetics, this essay first interrogates, in what are read to be variant but converging strains of populist discourse, who and what makes for a ‘grievable life’? Through a close reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the essay demonstrates how its inspired articulation of African American slave life proffers a necessary lament for a disremembered past and dead black subjectivity and culture that at the same time revives in the present and for the future a broader, more inclusive, alternative vision and ontological idiom. In this way, the novel creatively expresses (particular and universal potential for) what is lost in the current moment – responsive and responsible, transhuman modes of being (and becoming) in the world.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1780747
Marie Kruger
At a time when populist rhetoric appears to have evacuated justice and ethics from public debates, I am interested in the extent to which our work as humanities scholars can contribute towards rebuilding viable public spheres, networks of solidarity, and – in the case of memorial sites – physical and imaginative spaces of encounter for audiences with diverse needs and interests. Focusing on Constitution Hill, a heritage precinct in the centre of Johannesburg, I examine what the humanities have to offer for the design of structured narrative environments on memorial sites, for the collaborative work between curators and witnesses, for the possibility of eliciting responsible forms of witnessing, and for the mass-mediated translation of heritage into popular culture. As experts in storytelling, do we have disciplinary and pedagogical toolkits that allow us to contribute to the reinvigoration of public spheres invested in fundamental processes of democracy and social justice, so as to counteract the relegation of ethical concerns ‘[to] the private space of the individual, to be enjoyed only at certain times in our day’ (Temelkuran 120)?
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1780760
D. Attwell
While the damage done by populist leaders to the social fabric and aspirations of ordinary citizens is a staple of postcolonial African fiction across the continent, the subject is still relatively under-explored in South African novels written since the end of apartheid. There is a substantial and ever-growing body of dystopian writing focusing on the disappointments of everyday life in the rainbow nation, but the question of leadership has yet to emerge as the subject of serious or sustained attention. The anomaly is doubly curious, given that leaders are sharply scrutinized in the political press, in print and online. With reference to Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason, the essay takes a long view of a century of South African writing and proposes that there is a fault-line between populism, as a manipulative and sectarian appeal to ‘the people,’ and the popular, as an ethically credible and often necessary rallying point. The essay teases out this tension in some key historical fictions of the New African period and then examines further, nuanced elaborations in A.C. Jordan’s Ingqumbo Yeminyana (The Wrath of the Ancestors), Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, correspondence between Mongane Serote and Lionel Abrahams, and later fiction and poetry. The essay reaches the obvious but nevertheless polemical conclusion that the very power and durability of the popular throughout the decades of apartheid might also be the impediment that has to be overcome if the dangers of populism are to be squarely confronted.
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