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This book addresses emancipatory narratives from two main sites in the colonial world, the Indian and southern African subcontinents. Exploring how love and revolution interrelate, this volume is unique in drawing on theories of affect to interrogate histories of the political, thus linking love and revolution together. The chapters engage with the affinities of those who live with their colonial pasts: crises of expectations, colonial national convulsions, memories of anti-colonial solidarity, even shared radical libraries. It calls attention to the specific and singular way in which notions of ‘love of the world’ were born in a precise moment of anti-colonial struggle: a love of the world for which one would offer one’s life, and for which there had been little precedent in the history of earlier revolutions. It thus offers new ways of understanding the shifts in global traditions of emancipation over two centuries.
Ireland was England's oldest colony. Making Empire revisits the history of empire in IrelandEDin a time of Brexit, 'the culture wars', and the campaigns around 'Black Lives Matter' and 'Statues must fall'EDto better understand how it has formed the present, and how it might shape the future. Empire and imperial frameworks, policies, practices, and cultures have shaped the history ofthe world for the last two millennia. It is nation states that are the blip on the historical horizon. Making Empire re-examines empire as processEDand Ireland's role in itEDthrough the lens of early modernity. It covers the two hundred years, between themid-sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century, that e...
A reading of Theory that in tracing when and where Theory arises in the event of reading proposes how Theory might best be handled in the context of higher education today. Arguing against those who propose to avoid Theory in the name of its putative obsolescence, this text sets out to challenge two aspects of this avoidance. On the one hand, Theory has been set aside in the name of identity politics, that is, the proposition that its intellectual pertinence has been overshadowed by a sense of political urgency construed as at odds with Theory. Theory itself has assumed an identity, a profile. On the other hand, implicit within the avoidance of Theory is a concept of “context” that calls for reflection. Resisting the tendency to treat context as either negligible or obvious, this text sets out to trace, in the when and where of Theory, the rudiments of a “sociographic” (think “historiographic”) account of context. In relation to it, the reading that is Theory can be usefully situated as part of a politics of higher education in the era of the global crisis of the university.
Post-apartheid South Africa still struggles to overcome the past, not just because the material conditions of apartheid linger but because the intellectual conditions it created have not been thoroughly dismantled. The system of 'petty apartheid', which controlled the minutia of everyday life, became a means of dragooning human beings into adapting to increasingly mechanized forms of life that stifle desire and creative endeavour. As a result, apartheid is incessantly repeated in the struggle to move beyond it. In Undoing Apartheid, Premesh Lalu argues that only an aesthetic education can lead to a future beyond apartheid. To find ways to escape the vicious cycle, he traces the patterns created by three theatrical works by William Kentridge, Jane Taylor, and the Handspring Puppet Company – Faustus in Africa, Woyzeck on the Highveld, and Ubu and the Truth Commission – which coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid. Through the analysis of these works, Lalu uncovers the roots of modern thinking about race and affirms the need to revitalize a post-apartheid reconciliation endowed with truth – if only to keep alive the rhyme of hope and history.
Hoping for a better life, many migrants have made the journey to South Africa and set up as informal spaza shop traders in small towns and township areas, supplying the local residents with essentials. These traders work hard, open their shops early, close late and support their relatives and kinspeople in starting new businesses. But thriving in environments afflicted by unemployment and crime is almost impossible when armed robberies are a daily reality, protection from law enforcement is not a given, and access to justice is effectively out of reach.?Engaging first-hand with small traders and the Somali communities in Khayelitsha, Kraaifontein and Philippi, Vanya Gastrow investigates the ...
The PhD Experience in African Higher Education, edited by Ruth Murambadoro, John Mashayamombe, and uMbuso weNkosi, addresses the growing call to invest in the humanities and social sciences by exploring the nature of doctoral training in select institutions of higher learning in South Africa. In the past two decades, South Africa has become a key player in the global higher education landscape and dubbed the hub for doctoral training in Africa because of its developed educational infrastructure and highly ranked universities. Given South Africa’s positioning, the contributors in this volume argue that the government, donors, universities, and faculty have a socio-legal duty to ensure that ...
An interdisciplinary volume of essays that engages with what ‘the social’ might mean after apartheid. Remains of the Social is an interdisciplinary volume of essays that engages with what 'the social' might mean after apartheid; a condition referred to as 'the post-apartheid social'. The volume grapples with apartheid as a global phenomenon that extends beyond the borders of South Africa between 1948 and 1994 and foregrounds the tension between the weight of lived experience that was and is apartheid, the structures that condition that experience and a desire for a 'post-apartheid social' (think unity through difference). Collectively, the contributors argue for a recognition of the 'the post-apartheid' as a condition that names the labour of coming to terms with the ordering principles that apartheid both set in place and foreclosed. The volume seeks to provide a sense of the terrain on which 'the post-apartheid' - as a desire for a difference that is not apartheid's difference - unfolds, falters and is worked through.
Ground-breaking multi-disciplinary new study of heritage practice in South Africa from native practitioners and scholars following the implementation of the National Heritage Resources Act.
Recent decades of neoliberal rule have seen authoritarian turns in many governments, and these decades have also been marked by increasing violence against women. The systematic killing of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, has given way to a violent surge that is worldwide in its scope, concentrated in places where the state’s traditional, sovereign functions have broken down. Femicide is no longer just an intimate event: it has become anonymous and systematic, a crime of power. An intensified form of capitalism, the product of a colonial modernity that is still with us, now fuels new wars on women, which destroy society while targeting women’s bodies. Understanding this new, violent turn within patriarchy—which Rita Segato considers the primal form of human domination—means moving patriarchy from the margins to the center of our social analysis. According to Segato, it is only by revitalizing community and repoliticizing domestic space that we can redirect history towards a different destiny. At stake is nothing less than the future of humanity.
Examines the heightened role of politics in contemporary German and Austrian cultural productions and institutions and what it means for German Studies.