Recovering the transnational life of Charlotte Maxeke: an interview with Zubeida Jaffer

Abstract

A conversation with Zubeida Jaffer, discussing her recent book Beauty of the Heart: The Life and Times of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke (2016) and Maxeke’s perspectives towards colonialism, women’s rights, and transnational pan-African movements during the twentieth century.     

Breaking boundaries,defying borders: transnational networks of gender and race in South Africa and the United States

Abstract

This special issue examines transnational connections and collaborations among women and People of Color from South Africa and the United States, from the late nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century: it considers how connections were fostered and how ideologies travelled. Key figures include Emily Hobhouse, Charlotte Maxeke, Cecilia Lilian Tshabalala, Maude White Katz, Madie Hall-Xuma, Elizabeth Mafeking, Miriam Makeba, Gloria Steinem, and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Actively and symbolically, each of these non-state actors approached the relationship between the two nations differently, through political and religious affiliations, and as individuals and through organizations. Many challenged and transcended the restrictions imposed upon them officially, through state-sanctioned segregation and apartheid, but also socially, on account of their gender. These women fostered intellectual and social connections with each other, as well as for their nations, through interpersonal relationships and in print, but also simply – and perhaps most problematically – through abstracted ideas about humanitarianism, motherhood, apartheid, and nation. Such travels and intellectual journeys could prove both mutually beneficial and hierarchically imbalanced, but nonetheless reiterate the continued transnational relevance and resonances between South Africa and the United States.     

Is sexual difference a probelem

The paper offers a semiotic analysis of Macedonia's emotional architecture as represented in Manchevski's film entitled Before the Rain. Using a Deleuzean theoretical framework, the paper examines the paranoic, the schizzo and the depressive as three main, and deeply entwined, modes of Macedonian subjectivity. The paper particularly focuses on the filmic representation of the relentless struggle between the paranoid codings of Macedonian desires, the schizoid escapes of those same desires, and the depressive compromise formations peculiar to desiring Macedonian subjects.     

Expert Evidence in the English Civil Courts, 1550–1800

This article identifies the changing nature of expert evidence in the English civil courts between 1550 and 1800. The changes are of two types: the first represents developments in the roles that experts adopted in making their contribution to the fact-finding process; the second represents changes in the substance of expert evidence, particularly with the increasing complexity of the specialist inferences involved. A proper understanding of these changes requires that we distinguish the different procedural contexts within which expert evidence was being used during this period and in particular the different court systems in operation.     

Contracting for Indigenous Health Care: Towards Mutual Accountability

In Australia and other industrialised countries, governments contract with the non‐government sector for the provision of primary health care to indigenous peoples. Australian governments have developed policies and funding programs to support this health sector, but the current arrangements are unduly complex and fragmented. The results of our study show that the complex contractual environment for Aboriginal Community‐Controlled Health Services (ACCHSs) and their funders is an unintended but inevitable result of a quasi‐classical approach to contracts applied by multiple funders. The analysis in this article highlights potential policy and program changes that could improve the effectiveness of funding and accountability arrangements, based on the use of an alliance contracting model, better performance indicators and greater clarity in the relative roles of national and jurisdictional governments.