The gender-apartheid analogy in the transnational feminist imaginary: Ms. Magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation, 1972-2002

Abstract

This article considers the rhetorical implications of transnational exchange between feminist activists in the late twentieth century. It uses Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine (est. 1972) and the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) as a lens through which to understand the emergence of the gender-apartheid analogy in the 1990s. During the 1970s and 1980s, Ms. demonstrated knowledge of and commitment to the anti-apartheid movement. However, when the FMF and Ms. began using apartheid as an analogy for gender-based oppression in the Middle East after the fall of the apartheid regime, the limitations of transnational understanding became fundamentally apparent. This article traces the historical and rhetorical foundations for the use of race-based analogies in women’s rights activism. It then examines the journalistic and foreign policy perspectives espoused toward the South African apartheid regime and women’s rights abuses under fundamentalist Islamic regimes. At the turn of the twenty-first century, this article argues, the transnational feminist imaginary was shaped by a process of inspiration and appropriation which delimited solidarity and understanding across transnational networks of feminist activists.     

On Music,Censorship, and Globalization

Malik Bendjelloul’s music documentary, Searching for Sugar Man (2012), uses the narrative of its central figure, American rock “n” roll musician Sixto Rodriguez, to allegorize South Africa’s emergence from censorship and isolationism to a post-apartheid and increasingly transnational dispensation. I look at the cultural politics of apartheid-era censorship in attempt to account for Rodriguez’s cult appeal in South Africa, despite his artistic shortcomings and his obscurity in the USA. I then focus on the film’s final concert sequence, featuring Rodriguez’s first South African performance, which Bendjelloul subtly positions as a moment of celebration over the new possibilities enabled by the demise of apartheid and the rise of an increasingly integrated global culture.     

Against the law: Arthur Maimane’s pioneering hard-boiled black detective fiction in Drum Magazine

ABSTRACT

This article sets out to re-examine, and recover, South Africa’s first hard-boiled crime fiction created by a black writer: Arthur Maimane’s crime stories published in Drum magazine in 1953. Maimane wrote a series of stories about a black PI, styled on the American hard-boiled genre for Drum, a popular South African magazine aimed at a black audience, known for its borrowing from American popular culture. Mamaine’s fiction has been widely dismissed by generations of Drum critics, as “derivative” “imitation.” Repositioning the stories within the broader context of crime fiction suggests quite a different reading. Maimane’s stories reveal how tensions between the genre and laws in apartheid South Africa resulted in radical alterations to the hard boiled formula. Since Maimane’s stories precede Chester Himes’s African-American novels, they should be recognized as a pioneering example of black crime fiction that demonstrates the relationship between race and genre.     

Looking from South Africa to the World: A Story of Identity for our Times

The article is a consideration of the question of identity in South Africa, and also in a global context. Just as South Africa has looked to the world in order to understand its place, so too the world might look to South Africa to illuminate patterns less immediately visible elsewhere. Far from being unrepresentative in the apartheid period, South Africa was the ‘state of exception’ that incarnated and concentrated global realities; equally in the current era the reciprocal relations between the South African and the global evoke haunting concerns. The article begins with a consideration of the ‘classic’ generation of anti-apartheid activists, including figures such as Nelson Mandela and Bram Fischer, as they fashioned a new sense of South African identity. Yet it goes on to consider what happens when the classic period is over, and older definitions and oppositions are no longer available. Here the navigations of fiction, both in South Africa and elsewhere, become significant, and the article examines the work of writers from Gordimer, Coetzee and Ndebele, to Caryl Phillips and W. G. Sebald. It ends with a contemplation of the current period, nearly twenty years after the democratic transition in South Africa. In the era of the Marikana massacre and other pressing developments, both music and fiction open up some of the ambiguities and obligations. Drawing on Agamben, I suggest the intrinsic mutuality of the ‘home’ and the ‘foreign’ in establishing a more promising—and challenging—sense of belonging and identity both in South Africa and the world.     

‘Very Brave or Very Foolish’? ‘Gallant Little’ Botswana’s Defiance of ‘Apartheid’s Golden Age’, 1966–1980

The period from 1966 to 1979 is claimed to have been ‘apartheid’s golden age’ when the anti-apartheid forces were alleged to have largely acquiesced in the well-resourced South African government. However, this paper observes that Botswana, a country of about one million people and almost entirely surrounded by extremely hostile white minority regimes, demonstrated a spirit of defiance to apartheid’s golden age. Botswana defied military intimidation and reprisals from South Africa (an African giant) and its ally Rhodesia by continuing to host large numbers of refugees despite Botswana’s severe budgetary constraints. Botswana did this even though it was landlocked and overwhelmingly dependent on South Africa for economic survival. Botswana felt that it was a moral obligation to make sacrifices for the benefit of the oppressed black people of South Africa. This article attempts to demonstrate that despite being defenceless and dependent on South Africa for economic survival, Botswana did not yield in its principled stand against apartheid, a stand which won international acclaim during the period from 1966 to 1980 – apartheid’s golden age. It concludes that in its own small way Botswana demonstrated that apartheid was not entirely invincible.     

Ernest Cole: the perspective of time

Ernest Cole’s photographs reveal the contradictions and paradoxes of apartheid South Africa. At a very young age, and with little formal instruction Cole instinctively produced a significant documentary photo-book titled House of Bondage (1967). This article makes a close reading of some of Ernest Cole’s photographs in relation to the historical circumstances of apartheid and how they can be perceived through the lens of hindsight in postapartheid South Africa. The work offers a potent argument for the power of perception to uncover overlooked moments of the period. As an African, Cole’s photographs construct a narrative of apartheid from the position of an “invisible” black insider. In so doing, they tellingly reveal how he used the system of apartheid to his own advantage in his photographic practice. His photographs ask us to consider his modus operandi and the courage it took to make them at that time, offering the opportunity to behold moments that cut across gaps of space and time.     

Cross-circulations and Transnational Solidarity: Historicizing the US Anti-apartheid Movement Through Song

In encounters with African-American expressive culture, black South Africans at the dawn of the twentieth century recognized possibilities for their own lives—educational institutions free from white intervention, professional advancement, and independent nationalist governance. African-Americans seeking to reconnect with the continent worked for South Africa’s independence from apartheid. Music was a critical component of these engagements, creating lasting connections across national boundaries.

This paper situates the anti-apartheid activism of Sweet Honey in the Rock and In Process…, both African-American women’s a capella ensembles, within a larger historical trajectory. Through cross-circulations between the U.S. and South Africa, music constituted shared interpretive space linking African-American and black South African activist communities in combating systems of racial injustice in both countries. Building on scholarship on the role of performance in social movements, I explore the creation of shared community across national boundaries through the profound circulation of song.     

The Ethics of Waste in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town

Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) uses bodily and material waste to figure larger social processes of marginalization, dispossession, and racial abjection during the apartheid era. As the apartheid regime sought to devalue the lives of those categorized as “Black” and “Coloured,” while simultaneously profiting from their land and labor, it pushed non-white South Africans into dangerous proximity to hazardous and unseemly waste. Waste, in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, becomes both metonymy and metaphor. Wicomb not only uses it to index the historical and material processes of abjection that obtained in twentieth-century South Africa; she also takes up garbage, feces, vomit, and other refuse as an ethical lens for the consideration of how individual and collective subjectivities are formed by what is thrown away. In its relationship to waste of all kinds, the individual body becomes a site in which social processes of acceptance and disavowal play out.     

Ecologies of relation: post-slavery,post-apartheid,and rethinking race across the Atlantic in Zakes Mda’s Cion

This article will argue that Zakes Mda’s 2007 novel Cion stages a dialog, one where two “Souths” – South Africa and the American South – speak to one another and give a critical voice to an under-acknowledged history of transatlantic discursive exchange on race and racial governance. Mda’s fictional South African critique, of an America still struggling with the cultural and political legacies of slavery, gestures towards a history of exchange between the two countries that in many ways is representative of a more global dialog on racial segregation during the first half of the twentieth century – of which both southern (US) segregation and apartheid are seminal examples. Moreover, this article explores various conceptualizations of race as well as the governance of racial relations as they have been articulated through ecological imaginaries, and especially between South Africa and the Southern United States over the course of the twentieth century. In this article, I argue that not only can apartheid (as well as pre-apartheid segregation) be rethought of as part of a global conversation on race and thus less as a South African anomaly, but also that the United States through its examples of various racialist technologies was highly influential across the colonial and apartheid worlds.     

“Zones of indistinction” and visions of post-reconciliation South Africa in District 9

In this article, I explore the ways in which District 9 reflects South Africa’s current socio-political transition through the problematical representation of the film’s eponymous slum and its impoverished inhabitants as well as its protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s influential ideas of biopolitics, I demonstrate the ways in which the film provides a compelling critique of the effects of neoliberal capitalism on post-apartheid transition and South Africa’s complex geopolitical landscape. In this regard, I analyze how the slum figures as a “zone of indistinction” where political and economic forces combine to produce the paradoxical conditions in which impoverished South Africans are included in a democratic social contract, but are simultaneously excluded from the socioeconomic benefits that it promises.     

Revisiting Colonial Dismemberment in South Africa: On Cultural Text and the Mandela Nuclear Family

Abstract

For many years, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela—in a number of his public statements and writings—frankly expressed his regrets regarding the strain that his anti-apartheid activism put on his immediate and nuclear family. From his marriage to Evelyn Mase, and later to his second marriage to Nomzamo “Winnie” Madikizela, one central thread that permeates both is the impact of colonial-apartheid dismemberment on the Mandela nuclear family. Thus, the focus of this article is on the critical analysis of a cultural text that was authored by the late former statesman to reflect on various aspects of his life. Relying on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, the objective of the article is to understand how such a cultural text registers the idea of colonial-apartheid dismemberment as lived by the Mandela nuclear family under colonial-apartheid oppression. Besides the 27 years spent at Robben Island prison, much of Mandela's life was characterised by his neglect of family responsibilities, as a result of the lived realities of his activism against colonial-apartheid South Africa. Thus, using the case of Mandela's nuclear family structure, the article critically analyses the role of cultural texts such as autobiographies in registering colonial-apartheid dismemberment in South Africa.     

Arts,apartheid struggles,and cultural movements

ABSTRACT

This study i) briefly sketches some anti-apartheid arts initiatives of the 1980s; ii) examines the anti-apartheid academic common sense that assumed that “real struggle” could occur only within the labor movement; while iii) both are discussed in relation to early Afrikaner conservative cultural theory. The role of social theory within these sites of resistance is discussed. The article offers a lived methodology by including evocative observations from some social actors who participated in, and contributed to anti-apartheid art, drama and writing. The objective is to draw out debates on struggle rather than to offer a discussion of arts initiatives themselves. These are examined in terms of Albie Sachs’ pleas for discussion beyond the weaponization of art, one that restores the humanity robbed by apartheid.     

Disempowering Music: The Amandla! Documentary and Other Conservative Musical Projects

Scholars of black South African popular music have established important connections between music and society. Lara Allen’s studies of pennywhistle-kwela, Christopher Ballantine’s research on marabi and African jazz/mbaqanga,and David Coplan’s social history of black city music, among others, have underwritten the new literature in South African musicology and cultural studies. Previous neglect of black popular culture has made oral testimony crucial to the writing of these musical pasts. Recent investigations in the field, which are preoccupied with the articulation of black struggle to music, and the expression of struggle through music, have adopted a more popular format. Within these, the autobiographies of Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela are integral, as is Lee Hirsch’s documentary film, Amandla!. The popularity of these studies and their subjects, and their foregrounded debt to oral testimony and veneration of ‘the Struggle’ has tended to foreclose scrutiny of their representational politics. This article questions whether their homological substitution of music and musicians for anti-apartheid struggles in a postapartheid South Africa enables the radical stories they would tell of that past.     

“Be a Mighty Hard Message”: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Exploration of Whiteness in the Post-Apartheid Classroom

In post-apartheid classrooms students sometimes regard systemic racial oppression as distant history. They often note that they “did” apartheid at school. This paper considers how teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved can prompt a profound self-examination in both black and white South African students. Beloved demands the active participation of the “born free” generation in a deliberate, serious engagement with the traumatic historical past. Furthermore, Morrison’s interrogation of white behavior, white constructions of black people, and the threat of racialized violence that whiteness contains within it, can productively challenge white racial identity. Teaching this novel has provided some insight into the continued articulation of white privilege and aversive racism among white South African students. Some are unnerved, express resistance, or refuse the novel’s inquiry into race. I discuss how I encourage my students to heed Morrison’s call to engage with historical memory so as to move towards a more viable future.     

Ghosts in the Shell: On South Africa,the USA and Japan

This article surveys American literary responses to the rise of Japan as an economic power during the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, and examines how these responses were anticipated in the writings of the South African author Laurens van der Post. Paying particular attention to van der Post’s autobiography, Yet Being Someone Other (1982), I suggest that the author’s formative experiences aboard a Japanese trading vessel in 1926, coupled with South Africa’s close-knit trading relationship with Japan in the 1980s, enabled a perspective on Japan’s economic ascendancy that was markedly less reactionary than those in the USA. By emphasizing the historical contexts that held true at the time of publication, I situate Yet Being Someone Other in a framework that deliberately circumvents—without necessarily confronting—van der Post’s preferred version of his life story. Rather than “recovering” the author’s ‘place in the canon of South African literature, this article is intended to incorporate the author’s work into ongoing discussions of the representation of Japan and the Japanese in twentieth-century Anglophone writings.     

“Like photographs of ghosts”: representing post-apartheid South Africa in Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) heard its first testimony in April of 1996. Two years later, in 1998, the first volume of the report of the commission was published. While it aims to be a document representing closure in terms of the history of apartheid, the TRC report is rife with gaps and omissions across the long history of apartheid. Approaching this history and its legacy in literary prose, Ivan Vladislavi?’s Double Negative (2010) serves as a counter-history to the TRC’s narrative of closure. Extending formal strategies from his earlier works, including composite literary form and performative modes of writing, Vladislavi? employs photography and ghosts within his text to unsettle official history and to offer a melancholic approach to the past of apartheid and its ongoing effects in post-apartheid South Africa.     

(In)civility and online deliberation: readers’ reactions to race-related news stories

Reacting to an increase in gratuitous racist and sexist comments made by readers in response to online articles, media outlets in South Africa have begun closing down their comments sections, an action that has been repeated many times over across the globe. After a particularly abusive tirade against a young women who wrote an article about being black in Cape Town, Independent Media established an advisory panel in 2014 to investigate the nature of user-generated content (UGC) on their news site, Independent Online (IOL). One of the panel’s recommendations was that what is meant by “uncivil” discourse on online news sites be delineated more accurately and narrowly. Employing computer-mediated discourse analysis, we explore the nature of civility and incivility generated by readers of online news. We look at readers’ posts in response to race-based topics and uncover the complexities inherent in describing both (in)civility and deliberative discourse precisely. Our sample is drawn from the South African newspaper Mail & Guardian Online, one of the few national media establishments that permitted user comments during our data collection phase.     

Confronting disillusionment: on the rediscovery of socialist archives in recent South African cultural production

In recent years, South African literature, art, and cultural criticism have been registering the feelings of disappointment, nostalgia, and of a general impasse that signify a crisis of postapartheid imaginations. At the same time, we can observe a turn in cultural production toward reexamining South Africa’s socialist archives and reconnecting them to the present-day predicaments and emerging social movements. Reading these processes in Imraan Coovadia’s latest novel, artworks by Haroon Gunn-Salie, and an exhibition by the Stellenbosch Open Forum, this article argues that they confront the feelings of postapartheid disillusionment by critically re-invoking memories of the 1970–80s socialist practices in South Africa and the transnational frameworks they involved. It argues that these changing approaches to the socialist archives can be read as a decolonial critique, which links the described trends in South African culture to other “post-dependence” (and specifically, post-socialist) contexts worldwide.     

Apartheid,Jim Crow,and Comparative Literature

This article examines John Greyson’s film, Proteus, for the way it figures queer masculinity and race in South Africa’s national historical narrative. The film offers an esthetic rendering of an eighteenth century interracial sodomy trial set on Robben Island. Drawing on contemporary queer theory and recent South African narratives of masculinity that privilege heternormativity and nationalism, this paper argues that the film carves out a space for queer identity within national history where it had previously been denied. The paper traces the way that the film interjects queer narratives into South Africa’s national identity, disrupts the heteronormalization of various sites of national iconography on South Africa’s historical terrain (such as Robben Island), and offers a queer masculinity that resists racial segregation. Moreover, this paper traces the ways that the film has implications for contemporary queer communities within South Africa.     

Study and revolt

This essay is an inquiry into the forms of life and writing that emerge in the relation between study and revolt. After an initial sketch of the problem of “normal emergency” as it presents itself in post-apartheid South Africa, the essay then turns to a first reading of Richard Rive’s 1990 novel Emergency Continued in order to ask about the relations of study and revolt under conditions of a state of emergency. To deepen its reading of Rive, the essay makes a detour into the utopian theory of education set forth in 1972 by Richard Turner. The essay then turns to a second reading of Rive’s Emergency Continued in order to elucidate the unexpectedly utopian kernel of that text. The essay concludes with a reading of Zoë Wicomb’s short story “A Clearing in the Bush,” and a reflection on the relation between study and revolt under contemporary conditions.