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The Hidden Debate is a fresh and cutting-edge comparative analysis of the ongoing and highly charged social conflict over affirmative action in South Africa and the United States. The debate over affirmative action has raged for over 30 years in the United States and since the early 1990s in South Africa with minimal agreement or resolution. In part this discord remains because scholars, journalists, politicians, and other social analysts have failed to properly specify and examine the problem.
The Griqua people are commonly misunderstood. Today, they do not figure in the South African imagination as other peoples do, nor have they for over a century. This book argues that their comparative invisibility is a result of their place in the national narrative. In this revisionist analysis of South African historiography, the author analyses over a century's worth of historical studies and identifies a number of narrative frameworks that have proven resilient to change over this time. The Griqua, in particular, have fared poorly compared to other peoples. They appear in, and disappear from, this body of work in a number of consistent ways, almost as though scholars have avoided re-imagining their history in ways relevant to the present. This book questions why that might be the case.
The book breaks new ground in understanding the role of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Africa. The book historicizes NGOs using the Rockefeller Foundation as a case study, looking at its tripartite paradoxical roles as an agent of colonialism, globalization and development/underdevelopment. It deploys interdisciplinary devices to show how the RF projects have engaged in marginalization, patronage and ‘othering’ of African values and customs and the ensuing controversies. Using globalization, postmodern and postcolonial theories the book deconstructs the long-held myths about NGO inviolability, and opens ground for understanding their strengths. It interrogates sites of contesta...
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This book uncovers the reality that new African immigrants now represent a significant force in the configuration of American polity and identity especially in the last forty years. Despite their minority status, African immigrants are making their marks in various areas of human endeavor and accomplishments—from academic, to business, to even scientific inventions. The demographic shift is both welcome news as well as a matter for concern given the consequences of displacement and the paradoxes of exile in the new location. By its very connection to the ‘Old African Diaspora,’ the notion of a ‘New African Diaspora’ marks a clear indication of a historical progression reconnecting continental Africa with the New World without the stigma of slavery. Yet, the notion of trans-Atlantic slavery is never erased when the African diaspora is mentioned whether in the old or new world. Within this paradoxical dispensation, the new African diaspora must be conceived as the aftermath of a global migration crisis.
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions helped to end apartheid by providing a forum that exposed the nation's gross human rights abuses, provided amnesty and reparations to selected individuals, and eventually promoted national unity and healing. The success or failure of these commissions has been widely debated, but this is the first book to view the truth commission as public ritual and national theater. Catherine M. Cole brings an ethnographer's ear, a stage director's eye, and a historian's judgment to understand the vocabulary and practices of theater that mattered to the South Africans who participated in the reconciliation process. Cole looks closely at the record of the commissions, and sees their tortured expressiveness as a medium for performing evidence and truth to legitimize a new South Africa.
This book offers a unique interpretation of Africa’s legacy to the world and the worldwide African Diaspora through bringing to light the sociocultural contributions of the Songhoy people and the cosmopolitan empire they established in West Africa.
Fifty years before his death in 2013, Nelson Mandela stood before Justice de Wet in Pretoria's Palace of Justice and delivered one of the most spectacular and liberating statements ever made from a dock. In what came to be regarded as "the trial that changed South Africa", Mandela summed up the spirit of the liberation struggle and the moral basis for the post-Apartheid society. In this blistering critique of Apartheid and its perversion of justice, Mandela transforms the law into a sword and shield. He invokes it while undermining it, uses it while subverting it, and claims it while defeating it. Wise and strategic, Mandela skilfully reimagines the courtroom as a site of visibility and hear...
In this collection of essays, the authors examine how racial considerations have affected the way social science is conducted; how issues are framed, and data is analyzed. With an assemblage of leading scholars, White Logic, White Methods explores the possibilities and necessary dethroning of current social research practices, and demands a complete overhaul of current methods, towards multicultural and pluralist approach to what we know, think, and question.
There exists a strong tendency within Western literary criticism to either deny the existence of epics in Africa or to see African literatures as exotic copies of European originals. In both cases, Western criticism has largely failed to acknowledge the distinctiveness of African literary aesthetics. This book revises traditional literary canons in examining the social, cultural and emotional specificity of African epics. Mariam Konate Deme highlights the distinguishing features that characterize the African epic, emphasizing the significance of the fantastic and its use as an essential element in the dramatic structure of African epics. As Deme notes, the fantastic can be fully appreciated only against the cosmological background of the societies that produce those heroic tales. This book not only contributes to the scholarship on African oral literature, but also adds reshapes our understanding of heroic literature in general.