Racial appropriation in white expatriate South African discourses: Reading race on social club websites

Abstract

In South Africa the African moral philosophy ubuntuism is periodically raised as a framework for African normative media theory. At this stage, the ubuntu discourse cannot be described as a focused effort to develop a comprehensive theory on the basis of which media performance could be measured from ‘an African perspective’. It should rather be seen as an intellectual quest to rediscover and re-establish idealised values of traditional African culture(s) and traditional African communities. Yet, given South Africa's history of apartheid in which Christian nationalism was misused as a moral philosophy to mobilise a patriotic media in the service of volk (nationhood) and vaderland (fatherland), it is not too early to ask critical questions about ubuntuism as a possible framework for normative media theory. Such questioning is the purpose of this article. Against the background of postmodern and postcolonial perspectives on normative theory, questions related to the following are raised: the expediency of ubuntuism in the context of changed African cultural values, the distinctiveness of ubuntuism as an African moral philosophy, the vulnerability of moral philosophy to political misuse, ubuntuism in the context of the future of normative theory in a globalised world and changed media environment, and the implications of ubuntuism for journalism practice. It is concluded that ubuntuism may pose a threat to freedom of expression. Given the nature of contemporary South African society and its media system, the postmodern emphasis on diversity and pluralism as the cornerstone of future normative theory, is supported.     

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No solid ground: Max Aub’s roots and routes

While Max Aub’s unique and prolific body of work has been the subject of numerous studies and monographs, his work remains undervalued in transnational contexts. An analysis of two of his plays, San Juan (1943) and El rapto de Europa (1946), and a collection of poems, Diario de Djelfa (1944), makes it possible to rethink the ways in which aesthetic projects, produced either during World War II or shortly afterwards, reveal a geography of the war’s forced displacements, in which the Spanish Civil War, European colonialism in North Africa, and its enduring postcolonial remainders become the most important landmarks. While the present analysis centers on Aub’s routes between Spain, France, Algeria, and, finally, Mexico, a persistent yearning for roots, for a sense of belonging, or, to use one of his characters’ words, for “solid ground” haunts his writing. The interplay between roots and routes therefore makes it possible to consider Aub’s work in a postcolonial context and within a transnational memory.     

“A garden had been left to grow wild there”: considering nature in Ivan Vladislavić’s Johannesburg

Johannesburg has frequently been subjected to critical examinations that conceive the city as a metropolis dominated by late capitalist excess and gold mining hyperbole. Along these particular lines, much of the literary scholarship that considers Vladislavi?’s city texts have focussed on his conception of the built environment that critiques its exploitative extractive history and its simulacral tendencies. However, sustained critical attention of his treatment of nature in the urban space has largely been neglected or underplayed. The natural Highveld environment, for Vladislavi?, occupies a fraught and liminal space in the city, pushed to the margins of a brutalizing modernity. Nature in Johannesburg, he opines, is a construction, an imposition and inheritance that belies the city’s colonial and European settler history. However, there are moments in which, when human attention is turned away, nature in its untended and generative capacity works to unmake the structural obduracy of the settled city. This manifests in episodes that embrace the quiet potency of wild gardens that disrupt the urban status quo.     

Either or? Reconciling Findings on Mental Health and Extremism using a Dimensional Rather than Categorical Paradigm

The background for this paper is the debate over what role mental illness plays in radicalization to violent extremism. While one camp points to cases of abnormal functioning of perpetrators, another argues that normal psychological mechanisms are central. Through a review of these perspectives, it becomes clear that mental illness cannot be ruled out as an epi‐phenomenon, but is not a necessary condition either. The paper draws on work in psychiatric nosology on dimensional and categorical conceptions of illness and argues that the perspectives in this literature reflect a categorical approach to normal and abnormal functioning. Under a dimensional perspective, findings converge. The paper concludes by showing how this new dimensional approach to the role of mental illness in radicalization has implications for the design of risk assessment tools and leads to the recommendation for stronger inter‐agency cooperation between mental health professionals, social services, and police and intelligence services.     

Mothers,Maidens and the Myth of Origins in the Irish Constitution

This article examines the ``hidden' ideological appeal which the 1937 Irish Constitution attempted to make by the invocation of the rural ideal, a hybrid of Irish nationalism, Catholicism and, most importantly, Gaelic romanticism. In this move, the historical legitimacy of the new state could be defined through the constitution by an appropriation of diverse symbols from an imagined past, a golden age of Gaelic unity and moral certainties. Particular attention will be paid to the image of woman as a representation of the nation in the 1937 Constitution, and to the context of Irish nationalist discourse generally, where she repeatedly appears in the archetypal forms of either mother or virgin. The predominance of the image of woman as mother in the Constitution, in contrast to her appearance in pre-independence nationalist discourse (where she regularly figured as a combination of mother, helpless maiden, seductress and destroyer) will be examined in terms of the Lacanian themes of Lack and jouissance (or enjoyment). This cultural (and legal) shift will be examined in terms of the renunciation of enjoyment inherent in this new national imagery, and in relation to the redemptive potential of the image of woman as mother; themes which appear significant in relation to post-colonial political formations generally, and to post-independence Irish political discourse in particular.     

Tracing two generations in twentieth century Indian women's education through analysis of literary sources: selected writings by Padmini Sengupta

ABSTRACT

This article uses literary sources written by Padmini Sengupta, 1906–1988 (daughter of Kamala Satthinadhan, 1880–1950, educator, writer, and editor of the Indian Ladies’ Magazine) to map two generations of women in India from reformist backgrounds and their education and writing. Padmini's biography of her mother, The Portrait of an Indian Woman, 1956, is analyzed at length. Here, Sengupta offers at once a memoir of her own growing years and a biographical portrait of her mother Kamala Satthianadhan. Supplementing this analysis is an examination of how women's education is represented in Sengupta's novel Red Hibiscus, 1962. Padmini wrote many works of a non-fictional and biographical nature. In analyzing her writing, we also understand better how Indian women writers representing their own educational trajectories in the print and public sphere shortly after Indian independence lay the groundwork for the later development of women's history and Women's Studies in India.     

African tourist art as tradition and product of the postcolonial exotic

ABSTRACT

Figurative art made in Central and West Africa for the global market is a form of tourist art – a category that has been plagued in art historical research by misconstrued concepts such as the authenticity of traditional/precolonial art. Following its categorisation as a commodity, studies focused on the decontextualisation of the object, thus marginalising the producing culture. In this article I investigate the role of the artist in preserving tradition and the role of the trader who, as cultural broker, exoticises the object. Since it can be argued that these are acts of decolonising, African tourist art can be regarded as a product of the postcolonial exotic, as defned by Graham Huggan (2001). Accepting the inescapability of postcoloniality, tourist art can be repositioned as a successful attempt to preserve and promote African cultural traditions and identity in the new era.     

Manicheism delirium: desire and disavowal in the libidinal economy of an emerging economy

This paper explores the motivations behind the outward foreign direct investment (ofdi) decisions in the past decade of an East Asian government-linked corporation (glc), the largest company of its kind in the world in terms of sectoral specialisation. This glc has travelled far from its origins as an agent of European imperialism to its current controversial role spearheading postcolonial extra-territorialisation strategies. I argue that financial predation is the synechdoche for territorialisation in the new imperialism. Consequently emerging economies pre-empt the financial siege by embarking on ofdi strategies themselves to create economic buffer territory. I construct a psychoanalytical framework for examining how anxiety is acted out in the global economy. I apply concepts of the traumatic moment, anxiety and the defence mechanisms of disavowal, splitting, introjection and projection to analyse the glc’s investments as territorial displacements of the libidinal economy.     

Caste and democratization in postcolonial India: an ethnographic examination of lower caste politics in Bihar

This article examines the case of lower-caste politics in the populous north Indian state of Bihar in order to show the ways in which the liberal democratic model fails to capture the realities of democracy in postcolonial India. In order to explain the rise of lower-caste politics, I examine the ways in which relationships between state institutions, caste networks and locally dominant groups shape contemporary political possibilities, necessitating a re-evaluation of the relationship between liberalism and democracy in India. With state institutions being unable to effectively enforce rights, a caste-based notion of popular sovereignty became dominant – as an idea (the lower-caste majority should rule) and as the everyday rough-and-tumble of an electoral politics that ultimately revolves around the force of numbers. It is inadequate, and actually unhelpful, to simply point out the obvious fact that the enforcement of rights is routinely and systematically undermined in practice and to call for more effective implementation. In fact, I argue that effective implementation in places such as Bihar could only be possible through a radical restructuring of local power that can only come from below, through democratic practice itself.