Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A13
V. Shigwedha
On 21 March 1990, Namibia gained its independence after 106 years of colonial occupation, first by Germany (from 1884 to 1918) and subsequently by South Africa (1920 to 1990). During colonial times, Namibians were victims of systematised racial and political oppression, as well as state-orchestrated acts of terror involving the racially motivated killing, deportation and disappearance of many people. In this article, I seek to examine the ongoing condition of ambiguity and inconclusiveness surrounding the ‘presence and absence’ of Namibians who went missing during the years of South Africa’s repressive rule in Namibia, and especially during the apartheid period. Among the Namibian families I interviewed, missing persons are ever present, and many of the family members insist that those who went missing during apartheid are still alive despite decades of absence. Against this backdrop, I present a case study from a collection of testimonies that reflect difficult, unresolved histories regarding Efraim Kamati Kapolo, who went missing following his arrest by members of the South African Defence Force (SADF) in September 1966, and who remains missing.1 Kapolo’s disappearance was not an isolated event, and the testimonies resonate with painful experiences of many other Namibians who also went missing during colonial rule. My aim is to suggest a model for exploring the experience of losing loved ones, and for acknowledging the enormity of the pain and suffering that engulf the lives of many families who desire to know the truth about the fate of their missing loved ones and who have never received any acknowledgement or recognition from the state. I focus on the intricacies surrounding the perception that those who went missing were not dead. Perceptions are real and yet difficult to probe. While my conclusions are tentative, the rhetoric accompanying this case study may open up a debate which, in my understanding, is highly relevant to a society with the long-lasting trauma and suffering arising from the experience of colonialism, apartheid, war and terror.2
{"title":"The missing are not dead yet: Efraim Kamati Kapolo and the Impossibility of Disappearing Without a Trace","authors":"V. Shigwedha","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A13","url":null,"abstract":"On 21 March 1990, Namibia gained its independence after 106 years of colonial occupation, first by Germany (from 1884 to 1918) and subsequently by South Africa (1920 to 1990). During colonial times, Namibians were victims of systematised racial and political oppression, as well as state-orchestrated acts of terror involving the racially motivated killing, deportation and disappearance of many people. In this article, I seek to examine the ongoing condition of ambiguity and inconclusiveness surrounding the ‘presence and absence’ of Namibians who went missing during the years of South Africa’s repressive rule in Namibia, and especially during the apartheid period. Among the Namibian families I interviewed, missing persons are ever present, and many of the family members insist that those who went missing during apartheid are still alive despite decades of absence. Against this backdrop, I present a case study from a collection of testimonies that reflect difficult, unresolved histories regarding Efraim Kamati Kapolo, who went missing following his arrest by members of the South African Defence Force (SADF) in September 1966, and who remains missing.1 Kapolo’s disappearance was not an isolated event, and the testimonies resonate with painful experiences of many other Namibians who also went missing during colonial rule. My aim is to suggest a model for exploring the experience of losing loved ones, and for acknowledging the enormity of the pain and suffering that engulf the lives of many families who desire to know the truth about the fate of their missing loved ones and who have never received any acknowledgement or recognition from the state. I focus on the intricacies surrounding the perception that those who went missing were not dead. Perceptions are real and yet difficult to probe. While my conclusions are tentative, the rhetoric accompanying this case study may open up a debate which, in my understanding, is highly relevant to a society with the long-lasting trauma and suffering arising from the experience of colonialism, apartheid, war and terror.2","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81414619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A4
Rinaldo Walcott
What might it mean to imagine the Middle Passage? What work does imagining the Middle Passage do? Despite its centrality in invocations of transatlantic slavery, representations of the Middle Passage are few. By representations of the Middle Passage, I mean artistic representations across literature, film, music, and visual art that seek to offer imaginative insights into its horrors. M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 long poem, Zong! not only documents the murder of some 150 Africans aboard the slave ship from which the poem takes its name, it does something more. The poetics of Zong! enacts those that have gone missing, and thus emerges into a void to place into evidence that which we assumed we had lost. The work of imagination in the poem replaces that which we might think had gone missing prior to its poetic representation. Through reworking and reordering the legal decision in the 1783 court case, Gregson v. Gilbert,1 Philip’s poem recounts the story of the slave ship Zong. The poem re-presents the evidence of the mass murder in the voice of those we might otherwise not hear in such legal documents, in this instance that of Setaey Adamu Boateng. Philip shares authorship of Zong! with Setaey Adamu Boateng, who she tells us guided her and aided her in the recovery and creation the story of the Zong. In this case then, Zong! also exceeds the poem as a form and genre, and even as an event in the proper use of that term. To do so, Philip must break language and break with language. The very page, the architecture of each page of the poem spatialises the break with language, and its representation on the page, as one of voids and or missingness, and simultaneously fills those gaps with knowledge, with untold history, with people and lives that would otherwise remain unknown. Philip’s Zong! is a poem that is a sort of return, but a return, too, brings with it the problem of the missing, the problem of the void. It is a poem that requires us to think the Atlantic Ocean differently and anew. The pages of Zong! exhibit a labour that is intellectual, psychical and psychic, and demands a certain commitment from the reader. Philip, as poet, does not tell the story. Instead, the poet is the medium for Setaey Adamu Boateng; the poet repeats the story as told to her in the form of the written text. Immediately, Philip draws on a practice that is doubled: the ‘as told to’ is a central element of the slave narrative in
{"title":"Middle Passage: In the Absence of Detail, Presenting and Representing a Historical Void","authors":"Rinaldo Walcott","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A4","url":null,"abstract":"What might it mean to imagine the Middle Passage? What work does imagining the Middle Passage do? Despite its centrality in invocations of transatlantic slavery, representations of the Middle Passage are few. By representations of the Middle Passage, I mean artistic representations across literature, film, music, and visual art that seek to offer imaginative insights into its horrors. M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 long poem, Zong! not only documents the murder of some 150 Africans aboard the slave ship from which the poem takes its name, it does something more. The poetics of Zong! enacts those that have gone missing, and thus emerges into a void to place into evidence that which we assumed we had lost. The work of imagination in the poem replaces that which we might think had gone missing prior to its poetic representation. Through reworking and reordering the legal decision in the 1783 court case, Gregson v. Gilbert,1 Philip’s poem recounts the story of the slave ship Zong. The poem re-presents the evidence of the mass murder in the voice of those we might otherwise not hear in such legal documents, in this instance that of Setaey Adamu Boateng. Philip shares authorship of Zong! with Setaey Adamu Boateng, who she tells us guided her and aided her in the recovery and creation the story of the Zong. In this case then, Zong! also exceeds the poem as a form and genre, and even as an event in the proper use of that term. To do so, Philip must break language and break with language. The very page, the architecture of each page of the poem spatialises the break with language, and its representation on the page, as one of voids and or missingness, and simultaneously fills those gaps with knowledge, with untold history, with people and lives that would otherwise remain unknown. Philip’s Zong! is a poem that is a sort of return, but a return, too, brings with it the problem of the missing, the problem of the void. It is a poem that requires us to think the Atlantic Ocean differently and anew. The pages of Zong! exhibit a labour that is intellectual, psychical and psychic, and demands a certain commitment from the reader. Philip, as poet, does not tell the story. Instead, the poet is the medium for Setaey Adamu Boateng; the poet repeats the story as told to her in the form of the written text. Immediately, Philip draws on a practice that is doubled: the ‘as told to’ is a central element of the slave narrative in","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77271353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A2
Ross Truscott, Maurits van Bever Donker
{"title":"What Is the University in Africa for","authors":"Ross Truscott, Maurits van Bever Donker","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72550135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A7
Janeke Thumbran
In 2007, the University of Pretoria’s office of community engagement arranged for a group of black women from a Pretoria township to travel to the whites-only town of Orania.1 Located in the rural Northern Cape province of South Africa, Orania was first established in 1963 as a housing area for the workers of a dam project. In 1991, it was repurposed as a homeland for Afrikaners unwilling to live in the ‘new’ South Africa.2 Based on the principle of self-werksaamheid, which residents translate into English as ‘self-reliance’, Orania goes against the long-held tradition in South Africa of employing black workers as domestic helpers, builders and the like, requiring the Afrikaners who live there to do their own labour. While the principle of selfreliance serves as a way to live separately from ‘non-whites’, it is also meant to reinforce self-sufficiency and solidarity among residents,3 and it is precisely this form of selfreliance that the black women were meant to learn from their visit. Two arguments emerge from this encounter. The first is that the main objective of the University of Pretoria’s current community engagement initiatives – to foster selfreliance, as demonstrated by the trip to Orania – does not depart significantly from this institution’s history of alignment with separate development and its objective to create self-reliant black subjects during apartheid. By envisioning itself as a trustee of black communities in and around Pretoria, the university used the disciplines of sociology and social work to conduct studies and to intervene in black social problems with the intention of fostering self-reliance. The second argument is that the university’s continued preoccupation with building self-reliant black communities in the post-apartheid present constitutes both a realignment with separate development and a convergence with the neoliberal restructuring of the state and the university in South Africa. These arguments seek to demonstrate that the university’s approach to community engagement cannot be disentangled from the institution’s direct involvement in implementing separate development and suggest that a critical engagement with the effects of separate development must be central to the critique of the university in South Africa. In the 1880s, the first Act of parliament of the South African Republic (ZuidAfrikaansche Republiek, or ZAR) made provision for the establishment of a college
{"title":"Separate Development and Self-Reliance at the University of Pretoria","authors":"Janeke Thumbran","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A7","url":null,"abstract":"In 2007, the University of Pretoria’s office of community engagement arranged for a group of black women from a Pretoria township to travel to the whites-only town of Orania.1 Located in the rural Northern Cape province of South Africa, Orania was first established in 1963 as a housing area for the workers of a dam project. In 1991, it was repurposed as a homeland for Afrikaners unwilling to live in the ‘new’ South Africa.2 Based on the principle of self-werksaamheid, which residents translate into English as ‘self-reliance’, Orania goes against the long-held tradition in South Africa of employing black workers as domestic helpers, builders and the like, requiring the Afrikaners who live there to do their own labour. While the principle of selfreliance serves as a way to live separately from ‘non-whites’, it is also meant to reinforce self-sufficiency and solidarity among residents,3 and it is precisely this form of selfreliance that the black women were meant to learn from their visit. Two arguments emerge from this encounter. The first is that the main objective of the University of Pretoria’s current community engagement initiatives – to foster selfreliance, as demonstrated by the trip to Orania – does not depart significantly from this institution’s history of alignment with separate development and its objective to create self-reliant black subjects during apartheid. By envisioning itself as a trustee of black communities in and around Pretoria, the university used the disciplines of sociology and social work to conduct studies and to intervene in black social problems with the intention of fostering self-reliance. The second argument is that the university’s continued preoccupation with building self-reliant black communities in the post-apartheid present constitutes both a realignment with separate development and a convergence with the neoliberal restructuring of the state and the university in South Africa. These arguments seek to demonstrate that the university’s approach to community engagement cannot be disentangled from the institution’s direct involvement in implementing separate development and suggest that a critical engagement with the effects of separate development must be central to the critique of the university in South Africa. In the 1880s, the first Act of parliament of the South African Republic (ZuidAfrikaansche Republiek, or ZAR) made provision for the establishment of a college","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86624744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A13
Aidan Erasmus
{"title":"To the technical media themselves: On Wolfgang Ernst's Sonic Times Machines","authors":"Aidan Erasmus","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A13","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81039962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A4
S. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
The decolonial departure point of this article is that every human being is born into a valid and legitimate knowledge system. This means that African people had their own valid and legitimate indigenous systems of education prior to colonisation. However, the dawn and unfolding of Eurocentric modernity through colonialism and imperialism unleashed a particularly racial ethnocentric attitude that led European colonialists to question the very humanity of African people. This questioning and sometimes outright denial of African people’s humanity inevitably enabled not only genocides but epistemicides, linguicides and cultural imperialism. The long-term consequence was that Western education became propagated as the only valid and legitimate form of socialisation of humanity across space and time. Needless to say, indigenous African systems of education were displaced as the idea of the modern university took root in Africa. This article flashes back to precolonial African/Nilotic/Arab/Muslim intellectual traditions in its historical reflection on the idea of the university in Africa. It posits a ‘triple heritage’ of higher education, which embraces Western imperial/ colonial modernity and anti-colonial nationalist liberatory developmentalism in its engagement with the contested idea of the university in Africa. The article critically examines the long and ongoing African struggles for an ‘African university’. It locates the struggles for an African university within the broader context of African liberation struggles, the search for modern African identity, autonomous African development and self-definition. Four core challenges constitutive of the struggle for an African university are highlighted: the imperative of securing Africa as a legitimate epistemic base from which Africans view and understand the world; the task of ‘moving the centre’ through shifting the geography and biography of knowledge in a context where what appears as ‘global knowledge’ still cascades from a hegemonic centre (Europe and North America); the necessity of ‘rethinking thinking itself ’ as part of launching epistemic disobedience to Eurocentric thinking; and the painstaking decolonial process of ‘learning to unlearn in order to relearn’, which calls on African intellectuals and academics to openly acknowledge their factory faults and ‘miseducation’, cascading from their very production by problematic ‘Western-styled’ universities, including those located in Africa, so as to embark on decolonial self-re-education.
{"title":"The emergence and trajectories of struggles for an 'African university': The case of unfinished business of African epistemic decolonisation","authors":"S. Ndlovu-Gatsheni","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A4","url":null,"abstract":"The decolonial departure point of this article is that every human being is born into a valid and legitimate knowledge system. This means that African people had their own valid and legitimate indigenous systems of education prior to colonisation. However, the dawn and unfolding of Eurocentric modernity through colonialism and imperialism unleashed a particularly racial ethnocentric attitude that led European colonialists to question the very humanity of African people. This questioning and sometimes outright denial of African people’s humanity inevitably enabled not only genocides but epistemicides, linguicides and cultural imperialism. The long-term consequence was that Western education became propagated as the only valid and legitimate form of socialisation of humanity across space and time. Needless to say, indigenous African systems of education were displaced as the idea of the modern university took root in Africa. This article flashes back to precolonial African/Nilotic/Arab/Muslim intellectual traditions in its historical reflection on the idea of the university in Africa. It posits a ‘triple heritage’ of higher education, which embraces Western imperial/ colonial modernity and anti-colonial nationalist liberatory developmentalism in its engagement with the contested idea of the university in Africa. The article critically examines the long and ongoing African struggles for an ‘African university’. It locates the struggles for an African university within the broader context of African liberation struggles, the search for modern African identity, autonomous African development and self-definition. Four core challenges constitutive of the struggle for an African university are highlighted: the imperative of securing Africa as a legitimate epistemic base from which Africans view and understand the world; the task of ‘moving the centre’ through shifting the geography and biography of knowledge in a context where what appears as ‘global knowledge’ still cascades from a hegemonic centre (Europe and North America); the necessity of ‘rethinking thinking itself ’ as part of launching epistemic disobedience to Eurocentric thinking; and the painstaking decolonial process of ‘learning to unlearn in order to relearn’, which calls on African intellectuals and academics to openly acknowledge their factory faults and ‘miseducation’, cascading from their very production by problematic ‘Western-styled’ universities, including those located in Africa, so as to embark on decolonial self-re-education.","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75721542","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A10
P. Hayes
My first point concerns strong photos. In recent debates about photographic archives and the idea of nation, Elizabeth Edwards argued that certain nations have strong photographs that speak to their nation-ness, or the process through which they became a nation. They offer ‘strong history’.2 It is frequently pointed out how South Africa in particular has a rich and dense photographic archive of the anti-apartheid struggle, and that particular photographs took on iconic status during that time and have continued to shape the memory and meaning of how South Africa came into being. Thus, at the opening of the vast EyeAfrica exhibition at the Cape Town castle in 1998, curated by Revue Noire, the European ambassador who opened the exhibition stated in his speech that the entire world knew the South African struggle through its photographs, most notably Sam Nzima’s photograph of Hector Pieterson from 1976. As this exhibition was an attempt to launch a different kind of imagery from across the continent and more innovative recent South African work, this homogenising remark was not well received by everyone. Despite numerous critics and scholars who have sought to nuance or even reject the documentary decades leading up to South Africa’s transition to the post anti-apartheid,3 a number of strong tropes still operate for an older generation in relation to a global perception of South African history through photographs. Such tropes were efficacious in arousing widespread support and solidarity for different aspects of organisation, opposition, protest, fund raising, withdrawal of
{"title":"The blur of history: student protest and photographic clarity in South African universities, 2015-2016","authors":"P. Hayes","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A10","url":null,"abstract":"My first point concerns strong photos. In recent debates about photographic archives and the idea of nation, Elizabeth Edwards argued that certain nations have strong photographs that speak to their nation-ness, or the process through which they became a nation. They offer ‘strong history’.2 It is frequently pointed out how South Africa in particular has a rich and dense photographic archive of the anti-apartheid struggle, and that particular photographs took on iconic status during that time and have continued to shape the memory and meaning of how South Africa came into being. Thus, at the opening of the vast EyeAfrica exhibition at the Cape Town castle in 1998, curated by Revue Noire, the European ambassador who opened the exhibition stated in his speech that the entire world knew the South African struggle through its photographs, most notably Sam Nzima’s photograph of Hector Pieterson from 1976. As this exhibition was an attempt to launch a different kind of imagery from across the continent and more innovative recent South African work, this homogenising remark was not well received by everyone. Despite numerous critics and scholars who have sought to nuance or even reject the documentary decades leading up to South Africa’s transition to the post anti-apartheid,3 a number of strong tropes still operate for an older generation in relation to a global perception of South African history through photographs. Such tropes were efficacious in arousing widespread support and solidarity for different aspects of organisation, opposition, protest, fund raising, withdrawal of","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81420961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A5
Catarina Gomes
In spite of an extreme diversity in terms of institutional designs, political environment and economic predicaments, the global landscape of higher education systems nowadays faces common trends that raise a number of perplexities and reframe the idea and the practice of the university. Those same trends compel us to analyse the university’s contemporary challenges and conundrums, especially in terms of its social function and the core issue of its existence: critical thinking and intellectual freedom. Thus, central to this endeavour is questioning what critical thinking and intellectual freedom are, as well as what both imply in terms of educational practices and knowledge production. Quite beyond their market-oriented usefulness, the exercise of critical thinking and intellectual freedom might be best understood as the foundational condition for avoiding coercive normalisation, that is, the tools through which individuals and communities can sustain democratic control over institutions and exercise critical and conscious choices around identity matters and what futures to build. In this sense it is argued that critical thinking – itself an experience of freedom – should be translated into forms of transcendence through which historical limits imposed on individuals and communities can be challenged. The conundrum is to assess, in present-day conditions, how the university can pursue and defend critical thinking and intellectual freedom.
{"title":"On freedom, being and transcendence: the quest for relevance in higher education","authors":"Catarina Gomes","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A5","url":null,"abstract":"In spite of an extreme diversity in terms of institutional designs, political environment and economic predicaments, the global landscape of higher education systems nowadays faces common trends that raise a number of perplexities and reframe the idea and the practice of the university. Those same trends compel us to analyse the university’s contemporary challenges and conundrums, especially in terms of its social function and the core issue of its existence: critical thinking and intellectual freedom. Thus, central to this endeavour is questioning what critical thinking and intellectual freedom are, as well as what both imply in terms of educational practices and knowledge production. Quite beyond their market-oriented usefulness, the exercise of critical thinking and intellectual freedom might be best understood as the foundational condition for avoiding coercive normalisation, that is, the tools through which individuals and communities can sustain democratic control over institutions and exercise critical and conscious choices around identity matters and what futures to build. In this sense it is argued that critical thinking – itself an experience of freedom – should be translated into forms of transcendence through which historical limits imposed on individuals and communities can be challenged. The conundrum is to assess, in present-day conditions, how the university can pursue and defend critical thinking and intellectual freedom.","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86324908","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2017/V43A11
G. Arunima
The university is often imagined by many in the teaching profession as a crucible for critical thought, autonomy and democratic practices, even as the reality of our intellectual and professional existence in such spaces may belie such ideas. This is because the university is a paradoxical space – at once intimate and embattled – and because teaching is hierarchical, conducted in classrooms that are often deeply stratified and sometimes fraught spaces, where the mismatch between desire and actualisation is always present as an undercurrent. As Indian sociologist Shiv Visvanathan said rather provocatively in an early iteration of how one might envisage the university, ‘One must begin by stating that the university is an outrageous hypothesis, and its survival a miracle. Yet one also feels that if it did not exist, it would have to be invented.’1 In this paper, which has two different, though mutually constitutive parts, I wish to think about the sites from where we ask the question: ‘What is the university for?’ This mutual constitutiveness – that of the intersection of state policies on higher education with student politics – may seem somewhat counterintuitive yet is, I would argue, integral to understanding one of the most significant contemporary sites of crisis today: the steady erosion of the public university. This crisis is a matter of concern not merely for the global South, but is one that has generated heated academic and political debates all over the world.2 The first part of the paper, then, is an attempt to read an older imagination of the university against India’s draft National Policy on Education (NPE) 2016,3 announced by the Bharatiya Janata Party government last year, which threatens to undo the last vestiges of a state-supported, liberal education system and replace it with privatised skills building. This move is not unfamiliar, and aspects of this are visible in different parts of the world where a managerial imagination is helping to create educational systems that are geared towards generating ‘economic value’. While this is usually
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