“What is it that We Call the Nation”: Cecilia Lillian Tshabalala’s definition,diagnosis, and prognosis of the nation in a segregated South Africa

Abstract

This paper examines the ideology of Cecilia Lillian Tshabalala who spent 18 years in the United States from 1912 to 1930. Within two years of returning to South Africa, she founded the self-help group, the Daughters of Africa in 1932. Tshabalala used the Daughters and the widely read newspapers—Bantu World and Ilanga laseNatal—to define, construct, and diagnose the African nation she found materially and socially wanting upon her return. Tshabalala’s experience abroad and her exposure to African-American women’s clubs and her participation at the annual Chautauqua conferences in upstate New York provided the platform for her to conduct her own social service gospel in segregated South Africa. This essay, which argues that religion served as Tshabalala’s antidote to all the social ills plaguing the African nation, traces the evolution of her ideology by discussing how she was in conversation with African-American and South African male movements, and also women on the African continent.     

Politics of the left in Taiwan

Abstract

The following interview was conducted in Chinese in the United States during February and March 1980. The interviewee is a Taiwan national whose name and identity have been withheld for protection. “X” has been an understanding & sensitive participant, observer and writer on Taiwan's non-KMT political scene for many years.     

Bint al-Shati's Wives of the Prophet: Feminist or Feminine?

The Egyptian writer and Islamic scholar Dr. ^cA'isha ^cAbd al-Rahman (b. 1913), who originated from the countryside, was a pioneering woman in many respects, although she did not consider herself to be a feminist. She was one of the first Egyptians to write about the agrarian problems of the country and the plight of the peasants; and of the pioneering generation of female Arab literati. She was also the first Muslim woman to undertake Quranic exegesis. Writing under her pen name, Bint al-Shati', she was also one of the first women to deal with the life of the Prophet Muhammad through vignettes of the women in his life. Like many other modern Muslim biographers of the Prophet, she rendered classical Islamic materials in a new style. Although her book on the Wives of the Prophet often portrays women in a negative light, content analysis indicates that the work also reflects feminist themes.     

Between transitional justice and politics: Reparations in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Reparations are a major component of transitional justice in the aftermath of widespread abuse. However, the implementation of reparations programmes often follows the logic of transitional politics, where short-term political interests trump victims’ rights. Using the South African case as a cautionary tale, this article shows that reparations are susceptible to political instrumentalisation and evaluates the role of international redress norms in safeguarding victims’ rights. Civil society groups have used the right to reparations as a basis for political contestation of inadequate reparations programmes and focused primarily on the broadening of redress norms. However, the existing international legislation fails to protect victims’ rights to reparations from political manoeuvring. In conclusion, the article highlights the need for international redress norms to be consolidated and made more concrete in order to more effectively circumscribe the scope states have to avoid meeting their reparations obligations.     

“Cultures of populism: institutions and hegemonic practices” – a brief introduction

ABSTRACT

This short Introduction sets the context for the nine articles included in Safundi’s special issue on “Cultures of Populism: Institutions and Hegemonic Practices” (Vol. 21, no. 3) by establishing connections with the colloquium of the same name that was hosted at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg from 10th until 13th July 2019. At the conference, populism (whether of the political right or the left) was examined in relation to democracy, the role of elites, and possible futures for the Humanities. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, papers considered the diverse histories of populism, as well as varied occurrences of this phenomenon across the globe.     

The life of a Korean communist

Abstract

During thirty-six years of Japanese colonial rule, millions of Koreans left their homeland to live in exile in China and Russia. The best devoted themselves to a struggle against Japan that lasted until 1945. Beginning with the “Righteous Army” that resisted Japanese aggression before the annexation in 1910 and whose survivors retreated to fight in Manchuria, through the massive March First Independence Movement and the subsequent establishment of a provisional government in Shanghai in 1919, through years of terrorist attacks, armed battles, and guerrilla resistance in China, Koreans struggled and fought, suffered torture and ruin, rotted in prison, and died for the liberation of their country. This struggle produced numerous individuals with extraordinary careers of intense involvement in the revolutionary tides sweeping Asia in this century. Although there are many Korean language accounts of their lives, for decades only one book in English, Song of Ariran, has rendered the emotional flavor of their sacrifices and adventures. Ramparts Press has reissued this volume, first published in 1941, with useful editing and annotation by George Totten and further reminiscences by the original author, Helen Foster Snow (Nym Wales). It is the tale of the life of Kim San, a minor but by no means insignificant figure in the anti-Japanese struggle.     

Ravaging India's Bihar Plateau

Abstract

In the name of “tribal development” another huge project has been launched by the World Bank in the Indian state of Bihar. The Bihar Plateau Development Project (BPDP) calls for radical transformation of agricultural practices, construction of roads, and massive new irrigation and drinking-water schemes. Eighty percent of the funds provided by the World Bank for the project are targeted for the development of infrastructure and maintenance of services.     

A tribute to Phyllis Andors, 1942–1992

Abstract

Phyllis Andors died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City on 10 February 1992. In the late sixties Phyllis was one of the founding members of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars that gave rise to the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (BCAS), and in 1975 she edited as well as contributed an article and a book review to two BCAS special issues on women in Asia. Most recently, BCAS published her article “Women and Work in Shenzhen” in volume 20, number 3 (July–September 1988). Phyllis was a very active and much appreciated member of the BCAS editorial board since 1987, not only refereeing articles and contributing money but also taking on special projects such as investigating how BCAS might get grants and being the main editor of a proposed BCAS book about women in Asia. We at BCAS are grateful to Phyllis's husband, Steve, for providing us with much of this tribute to Phyllis so that our readers can join us in appreciating who she was and her unique contribution to those around her and the world.     

Communications: Exchange on the Philippines

Abstract

In the December 1973 issue you printed an article by Ms. Luzviminda Francisco in which she attempted to sketch in the “nature of America's policy of aggression, the depth of popular mass resistance to the American forces and the duration of the struggle….” (p. 3) in order to move against “Filipino false consciousness” (p. 2) of the American connection in the history of the Philippines. It is a brief survey and rather well done, although one may quibble about the relationship of excesses (what a tame word compared to the record she presents!) of war and the nature of imperialism as well as implying that there was a “nation,” a “Philippine society,” or a “national struggle” (p. 3) before the late 19th century, at the earliest.     

Beyond Modern: Shimizu Shikin and “Two Modern Girls”

Abstract

This essay introduces the translation of Shimizu Shikin's “Tōsei futari musume” (Two Modern Girls, 1897), which follows, and argues that by separating the body from gender, Shikin (1868–1933) effectively threatened the dimorphic ideology of sex that underpinned the literary establishment of Meiji Japan. In an essay written in 1896, Shikin posits an hermaphrodite combining allegedly gendered character traits in a “perfect” body, thus asserting that behavioral traits are not limited to one sex. Shikin calls attention not only to “the second sex” but a third sex decades before twentieth-century writers did in Japan and elsewhere, and she was erased because of it.     

MEDIA,IDENTITY, AND STRUGGLE IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CHINA

Abstract

Hayashi Kyoko was born in Nagasaki in 1930, but as a child she lived in Shanghai where her father was working. Except for her father, her family returned to Nagasaki in the spring of 1945 as the Pacific War drew to a close. On 9 August, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki was also the target of an atomic bomb. When the bomb fell Hayashi and fellow students who had been mobilized for the war effort were working in a factory located close to the hypocenter, an area where tens of thousands died instantly.     

Representatives and Represented in England, 1660–89

SUMMARY

This article considers the tensions and ambiguities in the attitudes of members of the English House of Commons towards those they represented. Constitutionally, the Commons assented to laws and taxes in the name of, and on behalf of, the people and presented the nation's grievances to the king. They were thus conscious to some extent of the need to defend the people's interests and to justify their conduct to the electorate and to their neighbours. However, memories of the civil wars made them nervous of popular involvement in politics and strongly resistant to any suggestion that ‘the people’ in whose name they spoke had any right to be consulted on ‘public’ issues, still less to tell them how to act. The latter part of the article explores one aspect of this attitude, the concern to maintain the confidentiality of proceedings in Parliament and to restrict the dissemination of parliamentary news, which meant that only in 1680–81 did the Commons agree to the printing of their ‘votes’.     

The atomic bomb and the citizens of Nagasaki

Abstract

Hiroshima is a universally recognized name today, but Nagasaki, the second city to suffer atomic bombing, is less well known, and in fact its destruction three days after Hiroshima seemed anticlimactic to many observers. The damage to both Japanese cities would be dwarfed in scale by any future nuclear holocaust, but the joint “Hiroshima-Nagasaki” experience, which changed the world forever, still constitutes the indispensable base of knowledge for an understanding of the human and environmental decimation which would be wrought by nuclear war. The way we choose to remember these two bombings will determine whether the human community can assimilate the meaning of these weapons before they are used again, and act decisively to spare our planet from the nuclear nightmare with which it is now threatened. This article is dedicated to helping cultivate the rationality, creative imagination and commitment to human welfare necessary to ensure that Nagasaki will be the last place on earth where nuclear weapons were ever used.     

Review Essay

Abstract

So far in modern world history, social revolutions, though they have entailed elements of class conflict, have plainly not conformed to Marx's theoretical expectations or moral vision. They have occurred in agrarian countries caught behind foreign competitors, not in the most advanced capitalist industrial nations. And even those revolutions that have expropriated domestic capitalist classes in the name of socialist ideals have hardly resulted to date in the prosperous, democratic communist societies envisaged by Marx. (Skocpol, p. 292)     

The British Empire in India,the Gulf pearl and the making of the Middle East

Abstract

Genealogies of the term ‘Middle East’ conventionally focus on a juncture around the 1890s, when it gained new geopolitical currency, promoted by various European and American officials with reference to a space centred around the Arabo-Persian Gulf. This article argues instead that the ‘Middle East’ label should be seen as the culmination of a longer process, led less from London than from India. Over the previous century, this consolidation of ‘British’ India as a distinct regional actor was accompanied by the conceptualisation of its borderlands, including that Gulf-centred space. This space become a theatre for economic and political monitoring strategised from India, seeking to transform what was represented as a pirate-infested margin into a pacified buffer zone. Control and exploitation of pearl fisheries, the main economic activity for Gulf populations, was central to these efforts. Imperial strategy around the Gulf pearl was a key tool in founding an informal Indian empire in the Gulf and its hinterlands, in that very space to which the name ‘Middle East’ would subsequently be given.     

Concession or compromise? The politics of abortion in United Germany

Most GDR policies instituted to secure women's equality between 1949 and 1989 have been dismantled in the name of German unity, including freedom of choice regarding abortion. That right ceased to exist in May 1993, when the Constitutional Court imposed a number of western restrictions on eastern women as the new law of the land. This study addresses the post‐unity search for an acceptable compromise between the western constitutional mandate of foetal protection and the eastern guarantee of a woman's right to choose. It argues that a three‐year reform process which should have provided a positive introduction to the art of democratic compromise served instead as a negative socialising experience for Germans in the new Lander. Besides denying them a chance to render a meaningful policy contribution to their new state, the nature of the process has distorted East German perceptions of the quintessential ‘balance of power’ between legislative and judicial institutions under democracy. ‘Compromise’ has been attained, but consequences for the German Rechtsstaat are not all positive.     

Ameyuki-San No Uta: Yamada Waka No Satsuki Naru Shōgai

Abstract

Yamada Waka was a leader in Japan's feminist movement during the 1920s and 1930s. The wife of a well-known professor, she had access to the most progressive social and intellectual circles in Tokyo at the time . While Japan moved through the post–World War I decades with an upsurge of democratic thought and then a slow march toward the militarism that was to result in World War II, Yamada labored to raise the consciousness of Japanese women about their potential to contribute to the building of a better world and about the narrow roles society had decreed for them. She published a number of books, lectured widely in Japan and the United States, and opened a half-way house for the rehabilitation of prostitutes.     

Domesticating Ivoirité: Equating xenophobic nationalism and women’s marginalisation in Tanella Boni’s Matins de couvre-feu (2005)

Abstract

Tanella Boni, an author engaged with African women’s emancipation, has written cautionary essays since the 1990s decrying the xenophobic nature of government-sanctioned ivoirité in the Ivory Coast. Forced into exile owing to the subsequent strife (2000-2010), she wrote Matins de couvre-feu (2005), an allegorical novel in which the woman’s status as a second-class citizen is equated with that of a foreigner in a xenophobic state. This representation plays on the domestic / public space dichotomy, considered by feminist discourse to be a social barrier to women’s equal citizenship. Drawing on Boni’s own ‘feminist’ monograph, Que vivent les femmes d’Afrique? (2008), this article explores the internalisation of national politics (the public sphere) through the ‘domestication’ of an anonymous female narrator who is placed under house arrest. Thereafter an analysis of Kanga Ba, a character who is a victim of xenophobic nationalism, is used to substantiate the equation of the woman’s social and political marginalisation as being that of the foreigner. The argument concludes that Boni’s representational framework ultimately subverts the very notion of a public / domestic dichotomy through narrative strategies that illustrate the porous nature of both spaces, thus eliding the separation between private and national experiences.     

The U.S. military and sexual violence against women

Abstract

The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (BCAS) created the “Notes from the Field” section in 1992 in an attempt to bring BCAS closer to its activist origins and goals by publishing brief reports on events and issues of particular concern in the world today. Not intended to duplicate BCAS's usual in-depth and well-documented analysis and research, these reports are meant to be a less formal equivalent of “field notes” describing what is happening or being debated or studied out there in the world of action. Although analysis is usually a valuable part of these presentations, the “Notes” are more akin to urgent notices or offerings for discussion. The name “Notes from the Field” is not meant to imply the colonialist concept of people reporting back from the so-called Third World, and even though the name can be seen to loosely apply to the field of Asian studies, it does not refer to reporting on the more strictly academic aspects of fields of study within academia. The hope is that the information and opinions presented in these “Notes from the Field” will inspire readers to concern themselves with issues that matter, either through further study and analysis or by speaking out or taking action more directly.

It has been reported that on 4 September 1995 two U.S. Marines and one U.S. Navy man stationed at Camp Hansen Marine Base in Kin, Okinawa, raped a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl. This situation caught the Okinawan, Japanese, and international media's attention, brought out an Okinawan demonstration of 90,000 people in the latest of “U.S. Bases Out Of Okinawa” demonstrations that go back at least to 1972 with the reversion of Okinawa to Japan, made apologies by U.S. president Clinton mandatory, and resulted in the turning over of the three servicemen to the justice of Japanese courts, itself an act reflecting the need of the U.S. military and civilian authorities to try to defuse the situation.     

The Geography of Empire

Abstract

Wealth and poverty, overdevelopment and underdevelopment, are sides of the same coin; in a capitalist system the one cannot exist without the other. This is as true at the global level as at the national level, and the U.S. Empire consists of both external and internal colonies (e.g. the ghettoes or the Indian and Chicano communities of the Southwest).