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Perceiving Pain in African Literature
An analysis of literary accounts of suffering from sub-Saharan Africa, this book examines fiction and life-writing in English and French over the last forty years. Drawing on writers from the canonical to the less well-known, it uses close readings to examine the personal, social and political consequences of representing pain in literature.
There was this Goat
On April 23, 1996, Notrose Nobomvu Konile lifted her hand and swore to tell the truth to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She was the mother of Zabonke Konile, a young man killed in what has become known as the Gugulethu Seven incident. Antjie Krog, reporting as a journalist at the time, was struck by the seeming incoherence of the testimony. In 2004, colleagues Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele joined Krog in a closer investigation of Mrs. Konile's words. The resulting three-year collaboration, drawing on different disciplinary and social backgrounds, has produced a fascinating account that leaves no detail of Mrs. Konile's narrative unexplored and poses questions about the unacknowledged assumptions that underpin research in this country. In addition, the book sheds light on the larger and highly relevant issues of how black and white South Africans can build bridges towards understanding one another across the cultural, social, and economic divides that threaten the country's democracy.
The Stone Virgins
An uncompromising novel by one of Africa’s premiere writers, detailing the horrors of civil war in luminous, haunting prose. Winner of the Macmillan Prize for African Adult Fiction In 1980, after decades of guerilla war against colonial rule, Rhodesia earned its hard-fought-for independence from Britain. Less than two years thereafter when Mugabe rose to power in the new Zimbabwe, it signaled the beginning of brutal civil unrest that would last nearly a half decade more. With The Stone Virgins, Yvonne Vera examines the dissident movement from the perspective of two sisters living in a small township outside of Bulawayo. In a portrait painted in successive impressions of life before and aft...
A Companion to Comparative Literature
A Companion to Comparative Literature presents a collection of more than thirty original essays from established and emerging scholars, which explore the history, current state, and future of comparative literature. Features over thirty original essays from leading international contributors Provides a critical assessment of the status of literary and cross-cultural inquiry Addresses the history, current state, and future of comparative literature Chapters address such topics as the relationship between translation and transnationalism, literary theory and emerging media, the future of national literatures in an era of globalization, gender and cultural formation across time, East-West cultural encounters, postcolonial and diaspora studies, and other experimental approaches to literature and culture
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The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up to deal with the human rights violations of apartheid during the years 1960-1994. However, as Wilson shows, the TRC's restorative justice approach to healing the nation did not always serve the needs of communities at a local level. Based on extended anthropological fieldwork, this book illustrates the impact of the TRC in urban African communities in Johannesburg. While a religious constituency largely embraced the commission's religious-redemptive language of reconciliation, Wilson argues that the TRC had little effect on popular ideas of justice as retribution. This provocative study deepens our understanding of post-apartheid South Africa and the use of human rights discourse. It ends on a call for more cautious and realistic expectations about what human rights institutions can achieve in democratizing countries.
Identities in Transition
In many societies, histories of exclusion, racism and nationalist violence often create divisions so deep that finding a way to deal with the atrocities of the past seems nearly impossible. These societies face difficult practical questions about how to devise new state and civil society institutions that will respond to massive or systematic violations of human rights, recognize victims and prevent the recurrence of abuse. Identities in Transition: Challenges for Transitional Justice in Divided Societies brings together a rich group of international researchers and practitioners who, for the first time, examine transitional justice through an 'identity' lens. They tackle ways that transitional justice can act as a means of political learning across communities; foster citizenship, trust and recognition; and break down harmful myths and stereotypes, as steps toward meeting the difficult challenges for transitional justice in divided societies.
Barbaric Civilization
Why have the largest mass murders in human history taken place in the past hundred years? Why have European colonizers so often denied the humanity of the colonized? InBarbaric CivilizationChristopher Powell advances a radical thesis to answer these questions: that civilization produces genocides. From its beginnings in the early twelfth century, the Western civilizing process has involved two interconnected transformations: the monopolization of military force by sovereign states and the cultivation in individuals of habits and dispositions of the kind that we call "civilized." The combined forward movement of these processes channels violent struggles for social dominance into symbolic per...
Gathering Seaweed
This anthology introduces the African literature of incarceration to the general reader, the scholar, the activist and the student. The visions and prison cries of the few African nationalists imprisoned by colonialists, who later became leaders of their independent dictatorships and in turn imprisoned their own writers and other radicals, are brought into sharper focus, thereby critically exposing the ironies of varied generations of the efforts of freedom fighters. Extracts of prose, poetry and plays are grouped into themes such as arrest, interrogation, torture, survival, release and truth and reconciliation. Contributors include: Kunle Ajibade, Obafemi Awolowo, Steve Biko, Breyten Breyte...
After Evil
The way in which mainstream human rights discourse speaks of such evils as the Holocaust, slavery, or apartheid puts them solidly in the past. Its elaborate techniques of "transitional" justice encourage future generations to move forward by creating a false assumption of closure, enabling those who are guilty to elude responsibility. This approach to history, common to late-twentieth-century humanitarianism, doesn't presuppose that evil ends when justice begins. Rather, it assumes that a time before justice is the moment to put evil in the past. Merging examples from literature and history, Robert Meister confronts the problem of closure and the resolution of historical injustice. He boldly challenges the empty moral logic of "never again" or the theoretical reduction of evil to a cycle of violence and counterviolence, broken only once evil is remembered for what it was. Meister criticizes such methods for their deferral of justice and susceptibility to exploitation and elaborates the flawed moral logic of "never again" in relation to Auschwitz and its evolution into a twenty-first-century doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect.
