Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2146265
N. Dube
{"title":"Gender and the spatiality of blackness in contemporary AfroFrench narratives","authors":"N. Dube","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2146265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2146265","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"550 - 551"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43699943","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 : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2146268
Nyanchama Okemwa, A. Topolski
{"title":"On Race and Religion in African Political Communities: An Interview with David Theo Goldberg","authors":"Nyanchama Okemwa, A. Topolski","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2146268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2146268","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"457 - 474"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43752610","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 : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2152544
P. O. Agbo, J. K. Ugwuanyi, Malachy Ike Okwueze
ABSTRACT This study investigates the resurgence of ézèńwànyì (defined broadly as traditional female healer/diviner/priestess) in the patriarchal Ìgbò society of Nigeria. We employ ethnographic methods of observation and interview to study two communities in Ǹsúkká-Ìgbò, Southeastern Nigeria. The study finds that there has been a continuing increase in the number of ézèńwànyì, those who make use of their services and a general expansion of the practices of ézèńwànyì in the area. One of the reasons for this new trajectory, we discovered, is people’s inability to find solutions to life-threatening issues in other religions and the framing and conscious placing of subjective value on some elements in African Religion which include the practice of ézèńwànyì. The rebirth of this tradition shows how difficult it is to abandon a cultural form engraved in the minds of a homogenous group of people irrespective of the sweeping influence of foreign cultures and religions. Our findings contrast the popular opinion that there has been a decline and abandonment of many practices that are common to African Religion. We conclude that here is a new wave of tenacious belief and trust in the efficacy of the ‘healing powers’ of ézèńwànyì.
{"title":"Our gods are as powerful as the God of Abraham: analysing the impetus-agitat on the rise of ézéńwànyì in Ǹsúkkà-Ìgbò, Southeastern Nigeria","authors":"P. O. Agbo, J. K. Ugwuanyi, Malachy Ike Okwueze","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2152544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2152544","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study investigates the resurgence of ézèńwànyì (defined broadly as traditional female healer/diviner/priestess) in the patriarchal Ìgbò society of Nigeria. We employ ethnographic methods of observation and interview to study two communities in Ǹsúkká-Ìgbò, Southeastern Nigeria. The study finds that there has been a continuing increase in the number of ézèńwànyì, those who make use of their services and a general expansion of the practices of ézèńwànyì in the area. One of the reasons for this new trajectory, we discovered, is people’s inability to find solutions to life-threatening issues in other religions and the framing and conscious placing of subjective value on some elements in African Religion which include the practice of ézèńwànyì. The rebirth of this tradition shows how difficult it is to abandon a cultural form engraved in the minds of a homogenous group of people irrespective of the sweeping influence of foreign cultures and religions. Our findings contrast the popular opinion that there has been a decline and abandonment of many practices that are common to African Religion. We conclude that here is a new wave of tenacious belief and trust in the efficacy of the ‘healing powers’ of ézèńwànyì.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"475 - 490"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46530132","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 : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2152546
Josias Tembo
ABSTRACT In this essay, I critically engage with scholarship on race and racism on Africa, which closely connects race and Western Christianity, to argue that modern race and Christianity in Africa are essentially entangled. I will show that race and racism in modernity emerged as the name for religious difference, and racialisation became the process by which human beings were inserted into the Christian history of salvation, only to be kept at a distance from “true” conversion. Christianity meant full humanity and living outside full Christianity meant living outside the constructed category of the human. The physical manifestation of the spiritual quality of Christianity became associated with human phenotype. Simultaneously, political belonging, cultural and economic practices became premised on religious/racial difference. By critically looking at the discourses on reason, commerce (chattel slavery) and modern Western empire(s), this article will show how the three interfaced within Western Christian anthropology which engendered and sustain race and racism in Africa. In conclusion, the article argues that race and racism within Africa and projected on Africa cannot be fully understood without its Western Christian religious foundations and mutations.
{"title":"Unveiling the entanglements of Western Christianity and racialisation in Africa","authors":"Josias Tembo","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2152546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2152546","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this essay, I critically engage with scholarship on race and racism on Africa, which closely connects race and Western Christianity, to argue that modern race and Christianity in Africa are essentially entangled. I will show that race and racism in modernity emerged as the name for religious difference, and racialisation became the process by which human beings were inserted into the Christian history of salvation, only to be kept at a distance from “true” conversion. Christianity meant full humanity and living outside full Christianity meant living outside the constructed category of the human. The physical manifestation of the spiritual quality of Christianity became associated with human phenotype. Simultaneously, political belonging, cultural and economic practices became premised on religious/racial difference. By critically looking at the discourses on reason, commerce (chattel slavery) and modern Western empire(s), this article will show how the three interfaced within Western Christian anthropology which engendered and sustain race and racism in Africa. In conclusion, the article argues that race and racism within Africa and projected on Africa cannot be fully understood without its Western Christian religious foundations and mutations.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"407 - 427"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44343548","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 : 2022-08-30DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2105568
G. Diabah, D. Agyepong
ABSTRACT Gendered discourses in Ghana’s politics are not new. Unlike previous years, however, the gendered discourse in the 2020 election was different because the leading opposition party (NDC) selected a female running mate. Considering that the seat has been rotating between the NDC and NPP since 1992, Ghanaians foresaw a “real” possibility of having a female vice president. With data from online news articles and social media, this paper examines the nature of the gendered discourse that characterised Ghana’s 2020 election. We focus on stylistic devices and other linguistic strategies used with a view to understanding how gender either took a centre stage or “seeped” through the political discourse. Underpinned by Ambivalent Sexism Theory and Post-structuralist Discourse Analysis, findings indicate that although the running mate was sometimes represented in ways that challenge traditional gender stereotypes, she was largely represented in stereotypical ways, thereby corroborating findings from other parts of the world. These were done through devices like allusion, sarcasm, simile, metaphor and rhetorical questions. Findings also show that although it was the NDC that actively played the “gender card” to galvanise support, the NPP also played it to dissuade voters from voting for the NDC.
{"title":"‘The mother of all nations’: gendered discourses in Ghana’s 2020 elections","authors":"G. Diabah, D. Agyepong","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2105568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2105568","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Gendered discourses in Ghana’s politics are not new. Unlike previous years, however, the gendered discourse in the 2020 election was different because the leading opposition party (NDC) selected a female running mate. Considering that the seat has been rotating between the NDC and NPP since 1992, Ghanaians foresaw a “real” possibility of having a female vice president. With data from online news articles and social media, this paper examines the nature of the gendered discourse that characterised Ghana’s 2020 election. We focus on stylistic devices and other linguistic strategies used with a view to understanding how gender either took a centre stage or “seeped” through the political discourse. Underpinned by Ambivalent Sexism Theory and Post-structuralist Discourse Analysis, findings indicate that although the running mate was sometimes represented in ways that challenge traditional gender stereotypes, she was largely represented in stereotypical ways, thereby corroborating findings from other parts of the world. These were done through devices like allusion, sarcasm, simile, metaphor and rhetorical questions. Findings also show that although it was the NDC that actively played the “gender card” to galvanise support, the NPP also played it to dissuade voters from voting for the NDC.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"509 - 532"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44374068","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 : 2022-08-07DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2085859
D. R. Tivenga
ABSTRACT Zimbabwean state leaders have resorted to violent repression of mass protests to secure power. Mass protests, peaceful or not, have turned out to be too risky and impermissible despite the Zimbabwean constitution legalising peaceful protests. This article focuses on the Zimbabwean experience of violent repression and draws on the brutal experiences of protesters at the hands of the police on 16 August 2019. The principal focus of the article is on how ordinary Zimbabweans responded by creating and circulating satirical memes on social media, utilising humour to critique and ridicule police brutality. The analysis is informed by Scott’s concept of the weapons of the weak, the views of Barber on popular culture, by Fiske on popular pleasure and Mbembe on the commandement. I also draw from ideas on the concept of laughter and/or humour posited by Bakhtin, Singh and Taecharungroj and Nueangjamnong. I argue that laughter drawn from satirical memes offers comic relief to a people who have gone through violent repression. It is also a tool that empowers them to make meaning of police brutality, to expose the police’s vices and follies, and to condemn and show resentment towards state and police excesses.
{"title":"Laughter in the face of police brutality: an analysis of satirical memes on police brutality in Zimbabwe on August 16, 2019","authors":"D. R. Tivenga","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2085859","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2085859","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Zimbabwean state leaders have resorted to violent repression of mass protests to secure power. Mass protests, peaceful or not, have turned out to be too risky and impermissible despite the Zimbabwean constitution legalising peaceful protests. This article focuses on the Zimbabwean experience of violent repression and draws on the brutal experiences of protesters at the hands of the police on 16 August 2019. The principal focus of the article is on how ordinary Zimbabweans responded by creating and circulating satirical memes on social media, utilising humour to critique and ridicule police brutality. The analysis is informed by Scott’s concept of the weapons of the weak, the views of Barber on popular culture, by Fiske on popular pleasure and Mbembe on the commandement. I also draw from ideas on the concept of laughter and/or humour posited by Bakhtin, Singh and Taecharungroj and Nueangjamnong. I argue that laughter drawn from satirical memes offers comic relief to a people who have gone through violent repression. It is also a tool that empowers them to make meaning of police brutality, to expose the police’s vices and follies, and to condemn and show resentment towards state and police excesses.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"491 - 508"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48605491","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 : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2099174
C. Soudien
ABSTRACT This article undertakes a critical review of the lecture on “The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World Civilisation” which the left-wing Cape Town intellectual Ben Kies makes in Cape Town in 1953. The argument is made that the lecture signals not only a break with dominant thinking about human progress, but in its framing of world history both anticipates the contribution of the Indian subaltern movement and offers new analytics for explaining social, cultural and economic development. In redrawing the lines of human development over the last 5,000 years it not only introduces to socio-cultural history what Jaffe called a world systems theory, but, also, critically, a decentred explanation of how the world system worked. In prioritising, however, the place of human beings in the world, he essentially re-centred his explanation behind a modernism which was premised entirely on the subjugation of nature. In this he was firmly invested, as was almost every other socialist tradition of the time, in what O’Connor describes as a “productivist” view of human life – the idea that greater productivity, economic growth in the main, is needed to create more free- or leisure-time for human beings to develop to their full potentialities.
{"title":"A re-reading of Ben Kies’s “The Contribution of the Non European Peoples to World Civilisation”","authors":"C. Soudien","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2099174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2099174","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article undertakes a critical review of the lecture on “The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World Civilisation” which the left-wing Cape Town intellectual Ben Kies makes in Cape Town in 1953. The argument is made that the lecture signals not only a break with dominant thinking about human progress, but in its framing of world history both anticipates the contribution of the Indian subaltern movement and offers new analytics for explaining social, cultural and economic development. In redrawing the lines of human development over the last 5,000 years it not only introduces to socio-cultural history what Jaffe called a world systems theory, but, also, critically, a decentred explanation of how the world system worked. In prioritising, however, the place of human beings in the world, he essentially re-centred his explanation behind a modernism which was premised entirely on the subjugation of nature. In this he was firmly invested, as was almost every other socialist tradition of the time, in what O’Connor describes as a “productivist” view of human life – the idea that greater productivity, economic growth in the main, is needed to create more free- or leisure-time for human beings to develop to their full potentialities.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"191 - 206"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43916898","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 : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2099175
S. Adebayo
ABSTRACT This paper reads contemporary South Africa through the lens of melancholia and situates the experience of loss at the heart of social entanglements in the country. It argues that the purchase of melancholia lies partly in the fact that the problem of disarticulated and disenfranchised loss is common to post-apartheid modernity in general. It suggests that post-apartheid melancholia is a resultant effect of the country’s fraught engagement with loss and (be)longing. It also notes that post-apartheid melancholia is a result of structural traumas and moral anguish that have not been worked through. This paper shows how melancholia manifests in the different modes of attachments to, and identifications with victimhood; it explains why each identity group lays il/legitimate claims to victimhood in South Africa. In addition, this paper conceptualises post-apartheid melancholia along racial and generational lines. That is, it examines the ways in which personal testimonies and meditations shed light on the prospects of white, black and intergenerational melancholia in post-apartheid South Africa. In all, this paper argues that melancholia is an affective structure of the everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa which – if we are not quick to pathologise it – may help combat hurried attempts at closing the door on the past.
{"title":"Post-apartheid melancholia: negotiating loss and (be)longing in South Africa","authors":"S. Adebayo","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2099175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2099175","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper reads contemporary South Africa through the lens of melancholia and situates the experience of loss at the heart of social entanglements in the country. It argues that the purchase of melancholia lies partly in the fact that the problem of disarticulated and disenfranchised loss is common to post-apartheid modernity in general. It suggests that post-apartheid melancholia is a resultant effect of the country’s fraught engagement with loss and (be)longing. It also notes that post-apartheid melancholia is a result of structural traumas and moral anguish that have not been worked through. This paper shows how melancholia manifests in the different modes of attachments to, and identifications with victimhood; it explains why each identity group lays il/legitimate claims to victimhood in South Africa. In addition, this paper conceptualises post-apartheid melancholia along racial and generational lines. That is, it examines the ways in which personal testimonies and meditations shed light on the prospects of white, black and intergenerational melancholia in post-apartheid South Africa. In all, this paper argues that melancholia is an affective structure of the everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa which – if we are not quick to pathologise it – may help combat hurried attempts at closing the door on the past.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"275 - 293"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46917031","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 : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2085857
Sally Gaule
ABSTRACT When Matlala and Matom first began photographing their respective worlds in the 1980s, demand for political images of apartheid overshadowed quotidian concerns. Since then, a shift away from the political to the personal in South African photography has offered a space of reflection for the kinds of images that they sought to make. This paper focuses on the historical, social and political aspects of these two photographers’ photo-archives. It attempts to place their work and photographic concerns within the broader archive of South African photography and to demonstrate continuities and ruptures between the past and the present.Photographs are first and foremost, records, and markers of time. Although photographs might be seen to be of their time, of everyday occurrences, they also transcend time. Thus, their relationship to time is necessarily complex, and requires interpretation and analysis within a disciplinary and discursive frame, which in this paper is work and the everyday.
{"title":"South African photography and the lives of workers","authors":"Sally Gaule","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2085857","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2085857","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT When Matlala and Matom first began photographing their respective worlds in the 1980s, demand for political images of apartheid overshadowed quotidian concerns. Since then, a shift away from the political to the personal in South African photography has offered a space of reflection for the kinds of images that they sought to make. This paper focuses on the historical, social and political aspects of these two photographers’ photo-archives. It attempts to place their work and photographic concerns within the broader archive of South African photography and to demonstrate continuities and ruptures between the past and the present.Photographs are first and foremost, records, and markers of time. Although photographs might be seen to be of their time, of everyday occurrences, they also transcend time. Thus, their relationship to time is necessarily complex, and requires interpretation and analysis within a disciplinary and discursive frame, which in this paper is work and the everyday.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"224 - 254"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43999713","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 : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2088088
Matthias Pauwels
ABSTRACT In its nine-year existence, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) consolidated itself as South Africa’s third-largest party, despite continuous, damaging denunciations of some of its key aspects. I argue that a highly aestheticised politics is key to understanding this persistence, necessitating a political-aesthetic reading. I especially focus on the EFF’s adoption of a militarised party aesthetic in its self-stylisation as a contemporary black liberation army, identifying six ways in which it serves to differentiate the party ideologically from its adversaries and manage its organisational challenges. I further examine how the EFF’s highly aestheticised and militarised politics might confirm recurrent criticisms of fascist tendencies. Based on Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of fascism, I consider the functioning of aestheticisation and militarisation as diversions from the EFF’s duplicitous commitment to revolutionary socialism. Being found too limited in engaging the aesthetic as a relatively autonomous dimension of politics, the Benjaminian reading is supplemented with one that takes the EFF leaders’ conspicuous display of material wealth to function as an important, unofficial party aesthetic rooted in black emancipatory politics. The EFF’s political aesthetics is thus conceptualised as a contradictory and perplexing, yet not ineffective mixture of a socialist-revolutionary and bling-bling aesthetic.
{"title":"The aesthetic politics of fighting for black economic freedom: between militant socialism, fascism and bling-bling","authors":"Matthias Pauwels","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2088088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2088088","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In its nine-year existence, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) consolidated itself as South Africa’s third-largest party, despite continuous, damaging denunciations of some of its key aspects. I argue that a highly aestheticised politics is key to understanding this persistence, necessitating a political-aesthetic reading. I especially focus on the EFF’s adoption of a militarised party aesthetic in its self-stylisation as a contemporary black liberation army, identifying six ways in which it serves to differentiate the party ideologically from its adversaries and manage its organisational challenges. I further examine how the EFF’s highly aestheticised and militarised politics might confirm recurrent criticisms of fascist tendencies. Based on Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of fascism, I consider the functioning of aestheticisation and militarisation as diversions from the EFF’s duplicitous commitment to revolutionary socialism. Being found too limited in engaging the aesthetic as a relatively autonomous dimension of politics, the Benjaminian reading is supplemented with one that takes the EFF leaders’ conspicuous display of material wealth to function as an important, unofficial party aesthetic rooted in black emancipatory politics. The EFF’s political aesthetics is thus conceptualised as a contradictory and perplexing, yet not ineffective mixture of a socialist-revolutionary and bling-bling aesthetic.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"357 - 375"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47823602","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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