Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1973334
James Ogude
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1960722
Uhuru Phalafala
Bhakti Shringarpure’s important and groundbreaking Cold War Assemblages (2020) is timely for varied reasons, and a welcome addition to the politics of decolonisation in these parts of the world where the Cold War was hot. The scope of the book is staggering, covering India and North Africa, Lusophone and Francophone Africa, the United States and Europe. Shringarpure weaves her methodology of “assemblages” with admirable ease in a language that is at once accessible and intellectually rigorous, making it a valued resource for expert and novice alike. She assembles material cultures from little magazines, letters, speeches, essays, telegram, film, and, most impressively in my view, CIA files, and how they ascribe and mark for assassination both the corporeality of anti-colonial leaders and the bodies of knowledge proliferated by the academy. The book in an enlightening and magnificent way recasts the idea of the Cold War University, the institutions of museum, scholarships and foundations, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the United States Information Agency, digital platforms such as Amazon, Wikipedia, and Google as historical enterprises shaped by the US-USSR political clashes. It becomes very clear through the convincing illustrations of these processes how we are all implicated and inscribed by the worldmaking force of the Cold War. It is a spectre that haunts our contemporary moment, intellectually, politically, socially, culturally and otherwise. I was in fact slightly traumatised by the lucidity with which the book shows that I am a Cold War ruin. I will return to this point later. The central argument of the book is that “the Cold War has had an extraordinary impact in shaping the postcolonial world by bridging the gap between what are seen as two distinct histories: one of the long durée of European colonialism and the other of the 45 year long ideological, intellectual and geopolitical US-USSR rivalry between US and the USSR” (2); that the Cold War “continued the dynamic of European colonialism,” furthering “imperial agendas in a post-World War II universe relying precisely on relationships established by Europe in the previously colonized world” (2). With that, Shringarpure charts new paths of scholarship by exploring “the inherent connectedness between the emergence of the two superpowers and decolonizing Third World,” and addressing “trajectories, linkages, echoes, hauntings and residues” that show the Cold War as a continuation of European colonialism. This radically disrupts our inherited academic traditions and pushes us, as she puts it, to move beyond the over-compartmentalising of knowledge and the burial of radicalism, to open a capacious and epistemologically open future, now. As students of post-independence and decoloniality, the magnitude of this intervention is timely. It illuminates our collective blind spots which have previously created plenty of slippages and oversights in our readings. That the recurring word in the b
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1958300
Aurélie Journo
ABSTRACT Building on Genette’s work on the paratext as a liminal space between the text(s) and the world, where a hybrid discourse – at once social and literary – unfolds, the aim of this paper is to read African small magazines through their paratext. Front and back covers, editorials and illustrations play a key role in magazines’ self-presentation and “ensure the text's material presence in the world, its reception and consumption.” Shifting our gaze to their paratext, with examples ranging from Drum (1951–today) and Joe(1973–1979), Présence Africaine(1947–today), Black Orpheus(1957–1975), Okyeame (1960–1972) and Transition (1961–today) to contemporary magazines like Kwani?(2003–today), and Chimurenga(2002–today) we seek to analyse the two spaces they connect: the textual space within the periodicals and the extratextual space where metatextual discourses about them circulate. Using Meizoz's concept of “posture,” we seek to highlight ways in which paratextual elements participate in their positioning within the “rhizomatic configuration” of continental or pan-African magazines and within intersecting national, continental or global literary and cultural spaces. We argue that the posture(s) and “literary identities” of small magazines emerge from processes of programmatic and dialogic (self-)fashioning whose traces are visible in paratextual elements.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1973335
Katie Reid
ABSTRACT This essay looks to the presence of the publishing “backroom” in the work of South African writer Ivan Vladislavić. Vladislavić was employed by Johannesburg-based Ravan Press as their Social Studies Editor in 1984; his short, overtly anti-realist story, “Tsafendas’s Diary,” was published in Ravan’s flagship magazine Staffrider in 1988 (7 (1)), notably the first issue to which Vladislavić was formally attached as assistant editor. Prior to its appearance in Missing Persons (1989), Vladislavić’s first single-authored collection, this story’s publication in Staffrider provides an opportunity to revisit its critical ethical drives in ways unavailable in the relatively unitary product of the book. I offer a “small” reading of “Tsafendas’s Diary” in its earliest print context as a formative example of Vladislavić’s unique, cooperative way of working with others, arguing for the various ways the text “joins in” with the overlapping sets of the smaller, decentred print communities gathered by the radical activist and anti-apartheid solidarities of the magazine. The centrality of independent publishing, editing and production become legible in this reading, and so, their significance to Vladislavić’s ongoing literary labour and its subtle textual negotiations of his position as a white anglophone writer and editor, art critic and “public intellectual.”
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1960129
Bhekizizwe Peterson
The invitation to participate in a roundtable discussion of Bhakti Shringarpure’s Cold War Assemblages: Decolonisation to Digital (2020) came in the lead up to the 5 East African Literary and Cultural Studies Conference in Lalibela, Ethiopia, 2019. The biannual conferences, as well as the affiliate regional journal, are significant interventions in addressing the power/knowledge problems in the field. Although African Literary and Cultural Studies are not at the centre of Cold War Assemblages, the monograph is an important and timely intervention for a number of reasons. It offers a compelling scrutiny of the Cold War and its afterlives in the Third World as well as postcolonial theory’s apprehensions of the struggles for decolonisation. It does so with an uncommon mindfulness and nuanced appreciation of the longstanding concerns regarding the politics of scholarship and the academy. My participation at the conference was to be on two panels convened in honour of the centenaries of Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi, and Es’kia Mphahlele. Abrahams, Jabavu, and Mphahlele, like many other South African artists who were then in exile, visited, stayed, and worked in Kenya and Uganda, so East Africa was formative in their thinking and writing. In addition, all four centenarians were actively involved in projects aimed at promoting creative/cultural work and linkages and, to varying degrees, Pan-Africanist and Third World formations. As such, foundational writers and scholars in modern African Literature were enmeshed in the discrete but the interlinked spheres of culture, history, and politics and cognisant of the limits and possibilities of national, continental, Third World, and international networks and solidarities in the struggles against racial capitalism and imperialism. Days before the start of the conference, the vagaries of religion, politics, and ideology threatened to cancel the Lalibela conference. The exact reasons are too complicated to distil in the limited space available, but they threw into sharp relief important factors. They gestured to the ever-present socio-economic, cultural, ideological, and political contradictions that bubble underneath the convening of conferences and access to/ participation in local and international professional bodies. In response to the local political and organisational developments and missteps, a reconfigured version of the conference was relocated from Lalibela to Barhir Dar. As a result, delegates either cancelled their trips, proceeded to elsewhere in the region, and some who, like me, were already in Lalibela, either decided for and against journeying to Barhir Dar.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1966245
Bhakti Shringarpure
As I read the rigorous and thought-provoking reviews of my book from Bhekizizwe Peterson, Uhuru Phalafala, Christopher Ouma, and Grace A. Musila, I find myself fixated on certain phrases and terms that they have activated, perhaps re-activated. “Untidiness,” “obfuscation,” “networks,” “magazines,” “Africa” and “I am a Cold War ruin” struck me the most, and I respond with a short glossary of these terms. I compile these in the shadow of the memory of a brisk and cool Johannesburg evening first spent at the University of Witwatersrand, and then at a seaside-themed Greek restaurant where conversations continued heatedly and happily, utterly unaware of a plague to come only a month later, which was to steal so much from us.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1963570
S. Kasembeli
ABSTRACT Early histories of the Cape refer to a remote littoral; uninhabitable land with a difficult terrain and hostile environment. Yet, the Cape Littoral was also described as desirable by the Dutch East India Company for its establishment as a provision fort on the sea route to Asia. This paper examines how two novels published in the post-apartheid present (Kites of Good Fortune (2004) and The Slave Book (1998)), reimagine the inventions of these two simultaneous yet contrasting positions of the Cape Littoral. I show how the representation in Kites of Good Fortune reiterates the construction of the hardships of the Cape Littoral for the colonial administrator and the manumitted slave/descendants, and consequently reproduces the oppressive exploitation of its land and wealth. I use this analysis on the colonial constructions of marginality as a basis to understand how The Slave Book unsettles constructions of inhospitability in its imagination of narratives of patriarchal white desire. The analysis exposes how the novels overlap in their representations of undesirability and hospitability. This discussion considers these narratives as representations of continued forms of violence across the Enlightenment, slavery and colonial eras, and which, through literary representation haunt the post-apartheid present. I deploy re-memory as a metaphor that demands engagement with the structural violence of slavery and colonialism.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1972763
Christopher E. W. Ouma, M. Krishnan
ABSTRACT This special issue introduction maps the trajectories, histories, ecologies and genealogies of small magazine production and circulation in Africa, within the broader contexts of print cultural histories that frame intellectual, political and cultural communities in Africa and its diasporas in the long twentieth century. It argues for the ways in which the small magazine not only creates alternative audiences and publics, but frames the ecologies of literary and cultural production in the continent in relation to its diasporas. In this way, the introduction brings to sharper focus the ways in which small magazines have been part of a network, an “assemblage” at the intersection of the projects of decolonisation and anti-apartheid activism in relation to a broader project of Pan-Africanism that span the continent and its diasporas.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1960127
G. Musila
Cold War Assemblages: Decolonisation to Digital (Shringarpure 2020) is an incisive response to the paucity of sustained engagement with the legacies of the Cold War in postcolonial literary and cultural studies despite the stark historical reality that the iron curtain was partly sustained by turning the Third World into a battlefield where “proxy wars, coups, assassinations, weapons flooding, installation of dictators, and massive cultural interventions became commonplace” (110). This richly textured intervention insists that, contrary to perceptions of European colonialism and the Cold War as disparate epochs in postcolonial experience, the Cold War overlapped with the decolonisation project in the Third World, plunging these nations into cycles of chaos that persist to date, conventionally described in the short-hand of endemic violence, fallen revolutionaries and failed states. Temporality has been a highly charged vector in postcolonial studies, as exemplified by works such as David Scott’s (2013) rethinking of the Grenada revolution; Keguro Macharia’s (2020) notion of belatedness as a discursive frame that maps colonial modernity’s delegitimisations of Africans; and Andrew van der Vlies’ (2017) reflection on the ostensible collapse of time in post-apartheid South Africa; or, to paraphrase Scott (2004), what happens when the futures once imagined now lie behind us, with their promises undelivered. Cold War Assemblages extends these explorations, by asking: “how does one theorise the ontology of a nation from whom time itself was stolen?” (17). The book is framed in two parts: the first explores the question of violence through leader-thinker figures of revolution – Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Sankara, Amilcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba – each of whom variously grappled with colonial violence and the challenge of nation formation in the era of decolonisation. On Fanon and Gandhi, Shringarpure is interested in the challenges emerging from their attempts to simultaneously theorise and lead anticolonial movements in their respective contexts of India and Algeria; and the contradictions resulting from these competing demands for objective theorisation and pragmatic interventions in anticolonial revolutions. In its discussion of the systematic assassinations of three major revolutionary leaders in Africa – Sankara, Lumumba and Cabral – Cold War Assemblages contests arguments about the failures of the postcolonial Marxist left, by excavating the Cold War’s
《冷战组合:从去殖民化到数字化》(Shringarpure, 2020)是对后殖民文学和文化研究中缺乏与冷战遗产持续接触的深刻回应，尽管严酷的历史现实是，铁幕在一定程度上是通过将第三世界变成“代理人战争、政变、暗杀、武器泛滥、独裁者的安装和大规模文化干预变得司空见惯”的战场而维持的(110)。与欧洲殖民主义和冷战是后殖民时期不同时代的看法相反，这本内容丰富的干预书坚持认为，冷战与第三世界的非殖民化项目重叠，使这些国家陷入持续至今的混乱循环，通常用当地暴力、堕落的革命者和失败国家的简称来描述。在后殖民研究中，时间性一直是一个高度敏感的载体，例如大卫·斯科特(2013)对格林纳达革命的反思;Keguro Macharia(2020)的迟来性概念作为一种话语框架，描绘了殖民现代性对非洲人的非合法性;安德鲁·范德弗利斯(Andrew van der Vlies, 2017)对后种族隔离时代南非表面上的时间崩溃的反思;或者，用斯科特(Scott, 2004)的话来说，当我们曾经想象的未来已经离我们而去，而承诺却没有兑现时，会发生什么。《冷战汇编》扩展了这些探索，提出了这样的问题:“一个人如何将一个时间本身被偷走的国家的本体论理论化?””(17)。本书分为两部分:第一部分通过革命思想家领袖人物——弗朗茨·法农、圣雄甘地、托马斯·桑卡拉、阿米尔卡·卡布拉尔和帕特里斯·卢蒙巴——探讨暴力问题，他们每个人都以不同的方式应对殖民暴力和非殖民化时代国家形成的挑战。关于法农和甘地，施林加pure对他们在印度和阿尔及利亚各自背景下试图同时提出理论并领导反殖民运动所带来的挑战感兴趣;在反殖民革命中，客观理论化和实用主义干预的竞争需求导致了矛盾。在讨论有系统地暗杀非洲三位主要革命领导人——桑卡拉、卢蒙巴和卡布拉尔的过程中，《冷战汇编》通过挖掘冷战的失败，对后殖民马克思主义左翼的失败进行了争论
{"title":"Roundtable on Bhakti Shringapure’s Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (New York and London, Routledge, 2020, 218 pages, ISBN 9780367670900)","authors":"G. Musila","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2021.1960127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2021.1960127","url":null,"abstract":"Cold War Assemblages: Decolonisation to Digital (Shringarpure 2020) is an incisive response to the paucity of sustained engagement with the legacies of the Cold War in postcolonial literary and cultural studies despite the stark historical reality that the iron curtain was partly sustained by turning the Third World into a battlefield where “proxy wars, coups, assassinations, weapons flooding, installation of dictators, and massive cultural interventions became commonplace” (110). This richly textured intervention insists that, contrary to perceptions of European colonialism and the Cold War as disparate epochs in postcolonial experience, the Cold War overlapped with the decolonisation project in the Third World, plunging these nations into cycles of chaos that persist to date, conventionally described in the short-hand of endemic violence, fallen revolutionaries and failed states. Temporality has been a highly charged vector in postcolonial studies, as exemplified by works such as David Scott’s (2013) rethinking of the Grenada revolution; Keguro Macharia’s (2020) notion of belatedness as a discursive frame that maps colonial modernity’s delegitimisations of Africans; and Andrew van der Vlies’ (2017) reflection on the ostensible collapse of time in post-apartheid South Africa; or, to paraphrase Scott (2004), what happens when the futures once imagined now lie behind us, with their promises undelivered. Cold War Assemblages extends these explorations, by asking: “how does one theorise the ontology of a nation from whom time itself was stolen?” (17). The book is framed in two parts: the first explores the question of violence through leader-thinker figures of revolution – Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Sankara, Amilcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba – each of whom variously grappled with colonial violence and the challenge of nation formation in the era of decolonisation. On Fanon and Gandhi, Shringarpure is interested in the challenges emerging from their attempts to simultaneously theorise and lead anticolonial movements in their respective contexts of India and Algeria; and the contradictions resulting from these competing demands for objective theorisation and pragmatic interventions in anticolonial revolutions. In its discussion of the systematic assassinations of three major revolutionary leaders in Africa – Sankara, Lumumba and Cabral – Cold War Assemblages contests arguments about the failures of the postcolonial Marxist left, by excavating the Cold War’s","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/02533952.2021.1960127","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48782247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1899737
Gcobani Qambela
ABSTRACT In Inxeba (2017, dir. John Trengove), an initiate, Kwanda, asks his ikhankatha (initiate guardian), Xolani, why he keeps coming back to entabeni (the mountain). Xolani responds that it is important to return with his “hand” to help the initiates’ journey to manhood. We later learn that Xolani’s return to entabeni can further be explained by his ongoing passionate affair with Vija – another initiate guardian, who is married to a woman. While much of the analysis of Inxeba has focused on this dynamic and volatile relationship between Xolani and Vija, this paper returns to Kwanda’s question: why do seemingly urbanised men like Xolani and Kwanda’s father, Khwalo, in Inxeba, and Solomon and his brother, “Bra Lucas” Mahlangu in Kalushi’s (2016, dir. Mandla Dube), perceive leaving the city as important for the attainment of personhood and manhood? While Inxeba is set in the rural areas, and Kalushi is set in the city, both postapartheid films represent what I call the “New South African Man” (NSAM). Building on the conceptual terrain of the “New South African Woman” (NSAW), developed by scholars such as Pumla Gqola, Nthabiseng Motsemme and Athambile Masola, among others, this paper employs the concept of the NSAM as a conceptual term to unpack the cinematic representation of postapartheid Black masculinities in these films.
{"title":"“There is only one place for me. It is here, entabeni” Inxeba (2017), Kalushi (2016) and the difficulties of “the urban” for the New South African Man","authors":"Gcobani Qambela","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2021.1899737","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2021.1899737","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Inxeba (2017, dir. John Trengove), an initiate, Kwanda, asks his ikhankatha (initiate guardian), Xolani, why he keeps coming back to entabeni (the mountain). Xolani responds that it is important to return with his “hand” to help the initiates’ journey to manhood. We later learn that Xolani’s return to entabeni can further be explained by his ongoing passionate affair with Vija – another initiate guardian, who is married to a woman. While much of the analysis of Inxeba has focused on this dynamic and volatile relationship between Xolani and Vija, this paper returns to Kwanda’s question: why do seemingly urbanised men like Xolani and Kwanda’s father, Khwalo, in Inxeba, and Solomon and his brother, “Bra Lucas” Mahlangu in Kalushi’s (2016, dir. Mandla Dube), perceive leaving the city as important for the attainment of personhood and manhood? While Inxeba is set in the rural areas, and Kalushi is set in the city, both postapartheid films represent what I call the “New South African Man” (NSAM). Building on the conceptual terrain of the “New South African Woman” (NSAW), developed by scholars such as Pumla Gqola, Nthabiseng Motsemme and Athambile Masola, among others, this paper employs the concept of the NSAM as a conceptual term to unpack the cinematic representation of postapartheid Black masculinities in these films.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/02533952.2021.1899737","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49330444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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