Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2085856
E. Smuts
ABSTRACT A central problem in the Anthropocene, according to Rob Nixon, is the representational difficulty involved in rendering forms of injustice legible across different scales of time. This paper argues that Nadine Gordimer’s work can be read as a sustained narrative experiment with dissonant temporalities, and hence that it lays the groundwork for a social critique that extends beyond the limits of apartheid South Africa into the disjunctive planetary present. Her novella “Something Out There,” which intertwines the story of a baboon on the loose in 1980s Johannesburg with a revolutionary plot to blow up a power station, is the focus of my essay. I draw on Homi Bhabha and Benedict Anderson to describe the temporal paradigm of white suburbia in Gordimer’s Johannesburg, and read the baboon as a figure of social critique amid that peculiar modern timescape. The part of the narrative concerning the revolutionaries, I argue, advances the critique by pointing to alternative structurings of time in materialist or more-than-human terms. Perspectives on temporality from Gareth Dale, Michael Hanchard and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others, sustain my conclusion that Gordimer’s stylistic accommodation of alternative timescales gives her work a compelling resonance in our uncertain and unequal planetary present.
摘要罗伯·尼克松认为，人类世的一个核心问题是，在不同的时间尺度上，使各种形式的不公正现象清晰可见所涉及的代表性困难。本文认为，纳丁·戈迪默的作品可以被解读为一个具有不和谐时间性的持续叙事实验，因此它为一种超越种族隔离南非的局限性而延伸到分离的行星当下的社会批判奠定了基础。她的中篇小说《Something Out There》将20世纪80年代约翰内斯堡一只流浪的狒狒的故事与炸毁发电站的革命阴谋交织在一起，是我这篇文章的重点。我引用霍米·巴巴和本尼迪克特·安德森的作品来描述戈迪默的《约翰内斯堡》中白人郊区的时间范式，并将狒狒解读为在那个独特的现代时代背景下的社会批判人物。我认为，叙事中关于革命者的部分，通过用唯物主义或更人性化的术语指出时间的替代结构来推进批判。Gareth Dale、Michael Hanchard和Dipesh Chakrabarty等人对时间性的看法支持了我的结论，即戈迪默对替代时间尺度的风格适应使她的作品在我们不确定和不平等的星球存在中产生了令人信服的共鸣。
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2099172
Philippa Hobbs
ABSTRACT In 1963 a tapestry-weaving project was established at Rorke’s Drift, South Africa, by left-wing Swedes. This poverty-alleviation initiative targeted rural black women affected by the National Party regime’s oppressive apartheid laws. Further centres evolved from this enterprise, including Khumalo’s Kraal Weaving Workshop in KwaZulu-Natal and Thabana li Mele in neighbouring Lesotho. It is little appreciated that tapestries from these workshops might have interrogated the government’s exclusionary racial policies. In uncovering some of the weavers’ agencies and iconographies, the author shows how perceptions of these tapestries have been shaped by apartheid-era narratives, even in contemporary scholarship. Their works are almost invariably represented as the outcome of foreign initiative, and collectivised as obedient iterations by women reconciled with their marginalised status. In a new reading the author argues that these artists not only exercised their individual agencies, but at times even targeted the enormities of apartheid. It also exposes the potentially catastrophic consequences of nationalist ideology and expediency on the tapestry domain itself. Ironically, while the authorities harassed those at Rorke’s Drift, they publicised the Centre’s achievements as a triumph of apartheid policy. Yet as the needs of the Centre and the regime were to some degree aligned, the relationship between them was complicated.
摘要1963年，左翼瑞典人在南非罗克漂流区建立了一个挂毯编织项目。这项扶贫倡议针对的是受国家党政权压迫性种族隔离法律影响的农村黑人妇女。该企业发展出了更多的中心，包括位于夸祖鲁-纳塔尔的Khumalo的Kraal织造车间和邻国莱索托的Thabana li Mele。很少有人意识到，这些研讨会的挂毯可能会质疑政府的排斥性种族政策。在揭示一些编织者的机构和图像时，作者展示了种族隔离时代的叙事是如何塑造对这些挂毯的看法的，即使在当代学术界也是如此。他们的作品几乎无一例外地被代表为外国倡议的结果，并被集体化为顺从的迭代，由与边缘化地位和解的女性完成。在一篇新的文章中，作者认为这些艺术家不仅行使了他们的个人职权，有时甚至针对种族隔离的严重性。它还暴露了民族主义意识形态和权宜之计对挂毯领域本身的潜在灾难性后果。具有讽刺意味的是，当当局骚扰Rorke‘s Drift的人时，他们却将该中心的成就宣传为种族隔离政策的胜利。然而，由于该中心和该政权的需求在某种程度上是一致的，它们之间的关系很复杂。
{"title":"Tapestry, ideology and counter voices in Southern Africa during apartheid","authors":"Philippa Hobbs","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2099172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2099172","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In 1963 a tapestry-weaving project was established at Rorke’s Drift, South Africa, by left-wing Swedes. This poverty-alleviation initiative targeted rural black women affected by the National Party regime’s oppressive apartheid laws. Further centres evolved from this enterprise, including Khumalo’s Kraal Weaving Workshop in KwaZulu-Natal and Thabana li Mele in neighbouring Lesotho. It is little appreciated that tapestries from these workshops might have interrogated the government’s exclusionary racial policies. In uncovering some of the weavers’ agencies and iconographies, the author shows how perceptions of these tapestries have been shaped by apartheid-era narratives, even in contemporary scholarship. Their works are almost invariably represented as the outcome of foreign initiative, and collectivised as obedient iterations by women reconciled with their marginalised status. In a new reading the author argues that these artists not only exercised their individual agencies, but at times even targeted the enormities of apartheid. It also exposes the potentially catastrophic consequences of nationalist ideology and expediency on the tapestry domain itself. Ironically, while the authorities harassed those at Rorke’s Drift, they publicised the Centre’s achievements as a triumph of apartheid policy. Yet as the needs of the Centre and the regime were to some degree aligned, the relationship between them was complicated.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47819343","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: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2103617
Mzingaye Brilliant Xaba
ABSTRACT Through land restitution, a component of land reform, the state seeks to restore the dignity of black communities who lost their land during colonial and apartheid times. Land restitution seeks to return the land that was unfairly grabbed from black people or to offer alternative land or cash compensation. Much public discourse and research on South African land reform has been on the failure of land reform projects and on land acquisition debates. Little research has been published foregrounding the voices of beneficiaries. By capturing their lived experiences after land transfer, this paper examines whether these beneficiaries have been “restituted.” My study in the Macleantown and Salem restitution cases shows that access to land has restored the dignity of beneficiaries and produced nostalgia because of the return of ancestors’ land, although the livelihoods of beneficiaries have not improved and these projects have failed to function. I argue that these land compensated beneficiaries have not been properly ‘restituted,’ because the programme has failed to improve their livelihoods or to produce modern solutions for the restitution programme. Land restitution in these areas has largely not led to land justice because beneficiaries are living in poverty.
{"title":"Examining the meanings of ‘restitution’ for beneficiaries of the Macleantown and Salem restitution cases in the Eastern Cape, South Africa","authors":"Mzingaye Brilliant Xaba","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2103617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2103617","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Through land restitution, a component of land reform, the state seeks to restore the dignity of black communities who lost their land during colonial and apartheid times. Land restitution seeks to return the land that was unfairly grabbed from black people or to offer alternative land or cash compensation. Much public discourse and research on South African land reform has been on the failure of land reform projects and on land acquisition debates. Little research has been published foregrounding the voices of beneficiaries. By capturing their lived experiences after land transfer, this paper examines whether these beneficiaries have been “restituted.” My study in the Macleantown and Salem restitution cases shows that access to land has restored the dignity of beneficiaries and produced nostalgia because of the return of ancestors’ land, although the livelihoods of beneficiaries have not improved and these projects have failed to function. I argue that these land compensated beneficiaries have not been properly ‘restituted,’ because the programme has failed to improve their livelihoods or to produce modern solutions for the restitution programme. Land restitution in these areas has largely not led to land justice because beneficiaries are living in poverty.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49308150","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: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2097992
Darlington Mutanda
ABSTRACT This article, using documentary evidence and interviews, discusses the benefits of deploying traditional forms of justice as one of the strategies to address the persistent challenge of political violence in Zimbabwe, especially before, during and after election periods. It argues that it is important to recognise the roles traditional leaders play, particularly in creating cultural social spaces, encouraging social harmony and promoting tolerance in communities. Experiences from states emerging from conflict have shown that justice is usually elusive for the victims. Victims are at most left to feel sorry for themselves. It is therefore important to harness the benefits of traditional justice systems in transforming relationships and bringing social change. While traditional justice predominantly favours lower-level offenders, this can prove invaluable in the short to long-term efforts aimed at building peace in affected communities.
{"title":"Traditional justice mechanisms and reconciliation in Zimbabwe: assessing the benefits","authors":"Darlington Mutanda","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2097992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2097992","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article, using documentary evidence and interviews, discusses the benefits of deploying traditional forms of justice as one of the strategies to address the persistent challenge of political violence in Zimbabwe, especially before, during and after election periods. It argues that it is important to recognise the roles traditional leaders play, particularly in creating cultural social spaces, encouraging social harmony and promoting tolerance in communities. Experiences from states emerging from conflict have shown that justice is usually elusive for the victims. Victims are at most left to feel sorry for themselves. It is therefore important to harness the benefits of traditional justice systems in transforming relationships and bringing social change. While traditional justice predominantly favours lower-level offenders, this can prove invaluable in the short to long-term efforts aimed at building peace in affected communities.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46088692","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 : 2022-03-25DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2049156
Saibu Mutaru
ABSTRACT This article is the outcome of my fieldwork among women accused of witchcraft who lived in accused women’s settlements in Dagbon, Mamprugu and Nanung in northern Ghana. These women, whom I describe in this article as “morally compromised strangers,” often fled their native villages to these settlements to begin life afresh without husbands and kinsmen. Their gender and morally compromised status coupled with their status as “strangers” often denied them access to land, a key natural resource which locals largely depended on for most of their livelihoods. Faced with the stain of witchcraft and deprivation, these accused women resorted to the local notion of songsim to access arable land. In this article, I explore how these vulnerable and compromised women negotiated access to land in the host communities through the local moral economy of songsim. I argue that access to land by these women could never be achieved through long stay or improved living conditions in the host communities; it was facilitated through participation in the local discourse of songsim.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2042961
Reshma Maharajh
ABSTRACT Situated within rasa, an Indian aesthetic philosophy, and drawing on Kasulis’s philosophical model that compares integrity with intimacy in understanding the world, this paper will aim to explore and expand on levels of resilience so that as I analyse buffeting in my creative projects, I access the energies that allow me to return to equilibrium, to balance, to wholeness and to Oneness. The notion of resilience requires the pursuit of a solution to a problem. The integrity approach fosters the artist as being “outside” the problem and solution, employing strategic tactics in the pursuit of meaning. The intimacy model fosters an immersion process, and I draw on the dynamics of rasa and the underlying, interwoven principles of integration. The understanding of the integrity model focuses on the notion of art-artist and the problem of strategic separation, whilst rasa looks at the embodiment and subject formation from the body/mind intimacy perspective. My creative practice offers a stance as the intermediary between conceptualisation, creation, understanding and methodology between the embodied self and resilience.
{"title":"Rasa and resilience: where to from here","authors":"Reshma Maharajh","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2042961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2042961","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Situated within rasa, an Indian aesthetic philosophy, and drawing on Kasulis’s philosophical model that compares integrity with intimacy in understanding the world, this paper will aim to explore and expand on levels of resilience so that as I analyse buffeting in my creative projects, I access the energies that allow me to return to equilibrium, to balance, to wholeness and to Oneness. The notion of resilience requires the pursuit of a solution to a problem. The integrity approach fosters the artist as being “outside” the problem and solution, employing strategic tactics in the pursuit of meaning. The intimacy model fosters an immersion process, and I draw on the dynamics of rasa and the underlying, interwoven principles of integration. The understanding of the integrity model focuses on the notion of art-artist and the problem of strategic separation, whilst rasa looks at the embodiment and subject formation from the body/mind intimacy perspective. My creative practice offers a stance as the intermediary between conceptualisation, creation, understanding and methodology between the embodied self and resilience.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47925232","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 : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2045751
M. N. Smith, C. Lester
ABSTRACT Black Consciousness (BC) has inspired many individuals and political formations since the formation of the South African Student’s Association (SASO) in 1968. We argue that BC, as articulated in the writings of Steve Biko, is beset with internal contradictions and ambiguities, and its limits are revealed in the concrete attempts to realise a politics of “Black solidarity” and the affirmation of “Black values.” We engage in a comparative historical analysis of two moments in which BC was prominent in South African politics namely the late 1960ʹs and 1970ʹs and during 2015–16 within the RhodesMustFall (RMF) student movement at the University of Cape Town. In each case, those claiming fidelity to BC were inevitably forced to ground their politics in something other than “Blackness.” Moreover, the way the internal contradictions of BC theory are overcome become shaped by particular historical circumstance and available political options. While Biko’s generation were afforded opportunities to engage and contribute to various currents of the broader anti-Apartheid liberation movement, contemporary South African social dynamics, where progressive forces are mute and reactionary political currents are on the rise, threaten to turn the politics of “Black solidarity” and the affirmation of “Black values” towards regressive ends.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2054145
Janeke Thumbran, R. Sacks
ABSTRACT This article, as the introduction to the Rethinking Resilience special issue, lays out the political and historical terrain of thinking with resilience, from South Africa, in 2021. It outlines the urgencies of the current moment, while delving into how the use of “resilience” has been adapted from scientific disciplines into various fields and broader popular culture. We discuss the two primary interlinking and overlapping themes of Rethinking Resilience: resilience as a historical and contemporary governance discourse with consequences and implications; and resilience as a concept tied to the Anthropocene along with the material properties of matter. As colonial and apartheid histories reveal, certain parts of the population have always been assumed to have more resilience than others, demonstrating how, in the present day, it is marginalised communities who are tasked with being resilient in order to survive. It is this assumption that the black gendered body has an innate natural facility to overcome all obstacles that also resonates with anthropocentric thinking. Through discussing these two overlapping themes, this special issue introduction shows how we bring together work that reveals the slippages in resilience, highlighting how the different uses and meanings of resilience can be productive
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2042985
M. Okafor
ABSTRACT Since earliest known histories, the materiality of clay together with its processes of transformation to ceramics has presented itself as a metaphor for the human self. In this article, I use process philosophy to interrogate the intersection between ceramics practice and the processes of becoming and transitioning. Through my own studio explorations of ceramics, I analyse the material quality of clay and demonstrate how distinct themes that can be inferredfrom its making processes parallel those of rites of passage. In doing so, I argue that as a reflective practice, the ceramic process lends itself to transformations and transitioning common to rites of passage. Acknowledging my positionality as a black female of Igbo descent, I critique the Phalli Series, a set of thirteen clay phallus objects that I created and exhibited, to problematise and reflect on select circumcision and Baptismal rites of passage in (South) Africa.
{"title":"[Re-]Creative rites: exploring the materiality of clay and its making processes","authors":"M. Okafor","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2042985","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2042985","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Since earliest known histories, the materiality of clay together with its processes of transformation to ceramics has presented itself as a metaphor for the human self. In this article, I use process philosophy to interrogate the intersection between ceramics practice and the processes of becoming and transitioning. Through my own studio explorations of ceramics, I analyse the material quality of clay and demonstrate how distinct themes that can be inferredfrom its making processes parallel those of rites of passage. In doing so, I argue that as a reflective practice, the ceramic process lends itself to transformations and transitioning common to rites of passage. Acknowledging my positionality as a black female of Igbo descent, I critique the Phalli Series, a set of thirteen clay phallus objects that I created and exhibited, to problematise and reflect on select circumcision and Baptismal rites of passage in (South) Africa.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49365992","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 : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2022.2017602
Sindi-Leigh McBride
ABSTRACT This article investigates a new dam proposed on the lower Orange/Gariep river at the Vioolsdrift/Noordoewer border between South Africa and Namibia, an arid borderland region vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The proposed dam is employed as both a material object and a boundary concept to contribute to geographical imaginations of this understudied area. By speculatively submerging the concept of resilience in the river, the article revisits the Anthropocene thesis and rethinks resilience theory, revealing a nexus of issues that open questions about the meaning and potential of the term resilience in the context of the climate crisis.
{"title":"Rethinking river resilience: the lower Orange/Gariep river","authors":"Sindi-Leigh McBride","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2022.2017602","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2017602","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article investigates a new dam proposed on the lower Orange/Gariep river at the Vioolsdrift/Noordoewer border between South Africa and Namibia, an arid borderland region vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The proposed dam is employed as both a material object and a boundary concept to contribute to geographical imaginations of this understudied area. By speculatively submerging the concept of resilience in the river, the article revisits the Anthropocene thesis and rethinks resilience theory, revealing a nexus of issues that open questions about the meaning and potential of the term resilience in the context of the climate crisis.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42739037","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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