Download or read book Predicaments of Culture in South Africa written by Ashraf Jamal and published by Imagined South Africa. This book was released on 2005 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Symptomatic of an emergent shift away from prescriptive and deterministic accounts of change in South Africa, Predicaments of culture in South Africa posits an open-ended and speculative approach to the question and agency of culture. The key question, posed by Justice Albie Sachs of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, 'what does it mean to be a South African?' is shifted from its familiar ontological and epistemological habitat, 'what is identity?', the better to embrace its ethical and political rider, 'what are identities for?', and its more pragmatic possibility, 'what can identities do?' These qualifications - Bhabha's - form the building blocks that skew and enrich existing presumptions about South Africa's history, its present moment and its future. Jamal challenges and qualifies the conflicting and contiguous drives of fatalism, positivism and relativism, which are the dominant claimants upon the South African cultural imaginary. It is this critical non-positionality that forms the distinctive trait of an inquiry which, in eschewing allegiance and closure, opens up the debate about what it means to be South African and the role of culture therein. 'In hindsight, and with the hither side of the future before us', Jamal's driving assumption is that 'world society is advancing towards yet another age of ignorance; an age beyond suspicion and irony, in which thought, whether self-critical or not, is no longer the agent of reason'. Jamal calls for an urgent reappraisal of the absence of love - of lovelessness - which he sees as the infected root of South Africa's inability to create a positively affirmative cultural imaginary.
Download or read book The Predicament of Culture written by James Clifford and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1988-05-18 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Predicament of Culture is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, James Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in post-colonial contexts. His critique raises questions of global significance: Who has the authority to speak for any group’s identity and authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and “the other” clash in the encounters of ethnography, travel, and modern interethnic relations? In chapters devoted to the history of anthropology, Clifford discusses the work of Malinowski, Mead, Griaule, Lévi-Strauss, Turner, Geertz, and other influential scholars. He also explores the affinity of ethnography with avant-garde art and writing, recovering a subversive, self-reflexive cultural criticism. The surrealists’ encounters with Paris or New York, the work of Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris in the Collège de Sociologie, and the hybrid constructions of recent tribal artists offer provocative ethnographic examples that challenge familiar notions of difference and identity. In an emerging global modernity, the exotic is unexpectedly nearby, the familiar strangely distanced.
Download or read book The Predicament of Culture written by James Clifford and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1988-05-18 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Predicament of Culture is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, James Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in post-colonial contexts. His critique raises questions of global significance: Who has the authority to speak for any group’s identity and authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and “the other” clash in the encounters of ethnography, travel, and modern interethnic relations? In chapters devoted to the history of anthropology, Clifford discusses the work of Malinowski, Mead, Griaule, Lévi-Strauss, Turner, Geertz, and other influential scholars. He also explores the affinity of ethnography with avant-garde art and writing, recovering a subversive, self-reflexive cultural criticism. The surrealists’ encounters with Paris or New York, the work of Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris in the Collège de Sociologie, and the hybrid constructions of recent tribal artists offer provocative ethnographic examples that challenge familiar notions of difference and identity. In an emerging global modernity, the exotic is unexpectedly nearby, the familiar strangely distanced.
Download or read book Senses of Culture written by Sarah Nuttall and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyday life in South Africa has been dominated by the politics of racial identities, while such identities form and re-form around a range of cultural activities and practices. This book traces the important dimensions of cultural activity in late twentieth-century South Africa, offering a multidisciplinary assessment between culture and politics. It also explores the ways in which the place of culture is being rethought since South Africa's transition to democracy.
Download or read book Imagining Home written by Sidney J. Lemelle and published by Verso. This book was released on 1994-12-17 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays brilliantly interrogates the often ambivalent place of Africa in the imaginations, cultures and politics of its “New World” descendants. Combining literary analysis, history, biography, cultural studies, critical theory and politics, Imagining Home offers a fresh and creative approach to the history of Pan-Africanism and diasporic movements. A critical part of the book’s overall project is an examination of the legal, educational and political institutions and structures of domination over Africa and the African diaspora. Class and gender are placed at center stage alongside race in the exploration of how the discourses and practices of Pan-Africanism have been shaped. Other issues raised include the myriad ways in which grassroots religious and cultural movements informed Pan-Africanist political organizations; the role of African, African-American and Caribbean intellectuals in the formation of Pan-African thought—including W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James and Adelaide Casely Hayford; the historical, ideological and institutional connections between African-Americans and South Africans; and the problems and prospects of Pan-Africanism as an emancipatory strategy for black people throughout the Atlantic.
Download or read book Losing the Plot written by Leon de Kock and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Losing the Plot, well-known scholar and writer Leon de Kock offers a lively and wide-ranging analysis of postapartheid South African writing which, he contends, has morphed into a far more flexible and multifaceted entity than its predecessor. If postapartheid literature’s founding moment was the ‘transition’ to democracy, writing over the ensuing years has viewed the Mandelan project with increasing doubt. Instead, authors from all quarters are seen to be reporting, in different ways and from divergent points of view, on what is perceived to be a pathological public sphere in which the plot – the mapping and making of social betterment – appears to have been lost. The compulsion to detect forensically the actual causes of such loss of direction has resulted in the prominence of creative nonfiction. A significant adjunct in the rise of this is the new media, which sets up a ‘wounded’ space within which a ‘cult of commiseration’ compulsively and repeatedly plays out the facts of the day on people’s screens. This, De Kock argues, is reproduced in much postapartheid writing. And, although fictional forms persist in genres such as crime fiction, with their tendency to overplot, more serious fiction underplots, yielding to the imprint of real conditions to determine the narrative construction.
Download or read book Forays into Contemporary South African Theatre written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the end of Apartheid, South African theatre was characterized by a remarkable process of constant aesthetic reinvention. This multivocal volume documents some of the various ways in which the “rainbow” nation has forged these innovative stage idioms.
Download or read book Culture Education and Development in South Africa written by Ali A. Abdi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2001-10-30 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the fall of apartheid in South Africa, expectations were high for the enfranchisement of the acutely underdeveloped majority in South Africa. But problems abound, and this educational study looks critically at the educational situation and puts forth a number of proposals that could produce better results in contemporary South Africa. Abdi urges that beyond the celebratory platforms of the political triumph over apartheid, there must be effective and culturally inclusive programs of education for the development of the highly disenfranchsed majority in South Africa. Deliberate programs of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa resulted in inferior education, cultural marginalization, political oppression, economic exploitation and resulting underdevelopment in the lives of the disenfranchised majority. In addition to historical and contemporary analysis, this study looks at the possibilities of formulating and implementing new programs of education and development that could effectively deal with such current problems as chronic unemployment, skyrocketing crime rates, stagnating learning systems, and the continuing formations of a huge underclass that may be losing its stake in the promised post-apartheid project.
Download or read book The Predicament of Blackness written by Jemima Pierre and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the meaning of blackness in Africa? This title tackles the question of race in West Africa through its post-colonial manifestations. Pierre examines key facets of contemporary Ghanaian society, from the pervasive significance of 'whiteness' to the practice of chemical skin-bleaching to the government's active promotion of Pan-African 'heritage tourism'.
Download or read book Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice written by Catherine Cole and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-10-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of state-perpetrated injustice, a façade of peace can suddenly give way, and in South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, post-apartheid and postcolonial framings of change have exceeded their limits. Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice reveals how the voices and visions of artists can help us see what otherwise evades perception. Embodied performance in South Africa has particular potency because apartheid was so centrally focused on the body: classifying bodies into racial categories, legislating where certain bodies could move and which bathrooms and drinking fountains certain bodies could use, and how different bodies carried meaning. The book considers key works by contemporary performing artists Brett Bailey, Faustin Linyekula, Gregory Maqoma, Mamela Nyamza, Robyn Orlin, Jay Pather, and Sello Pesa, artists imagining new forms and helping audiences see the contemporary moment as it is: an important intervention in countries long predicated on denial. They are also helping to conjure, anticipate, and dream a world that is otherwise. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of African studies, black performance, dance studies, transitional justice, as well as theater and performance studies.
Download or read book A Decade of Democracy written by Iziko Museums of Cape Town and published by Juta and Company Ltd. This book was released on 2004 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fitting way of reflecting on the changes of the last decade and assessing the extent to which transformation has had an impact on South Africa
Download or read book South African Literature and Culture written by Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Described as a prophet of the post-apartheid condition, Njabulo Ndebele is a prize-winning author, poet and critic and one of the leading lights in South Africa's literary world. These essays, beginning in 1984, were written over the storm years of the democratic struggle and are reprinted here with a new introduction by Graham Pechey.
Download or read book Experiments in Freedom written by Anton Krueger and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experiments in Freedom examines ways in which identities have been represented in recent South African play texts published in English. It begins by exploring descriptions of identity from various philosophical, psychological and anthropological perspectives and elaborates ways in which drama is uniquely suited to represent—as well as to effect—transformations of identity. In exploring the fraught terrain of identity studies, the book examines a selection of play texts in terms of five different discourse of identity—gender, nationalism, ethnicity, syncretism and race. Instead of building a sustained thesis throughout his text, Krueger writes in short bursts about a multiplicity of topics, extending his explorations rhizomatically into the crevices of a new South African society loath to relinquish its stranglehold on the politics of identity.
Download or read book Modern African Poetry and the African Predicament written by Romanus N. Egudu and published by Springer. This book was released on 1978-10-12 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa written by Tejumola Olaniyan and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How has the state impacted culture and cultural production in Africa? How has culture challenged and transformed the state and our understandings of its nature, functions, and legitimacy? Compelled by complex realities on the ground as well as interdisciplinary scholarly debates on the state-culture dynamic, senior scholars and emerging voices examine the intersections of the state, culture, and politics in postcolonial Africa in this lively and wide-ranging volume. The coverage here is continental and topics include literature, politics, philosophy, music, religion, theatre, film, television, sports, child trafficking, journalism, city planning, and architecture. Together, the essays provide an energetic and nuanced portrait of the cultural forms of politics and the political forms of culture in contemporary Africa.
Download or read book Culture in the New South Africa written by Abebe Zegeye and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished panel of contributors explore social, political and economic problems, especially the requirements of global capitalism, their impact on the development of a new sense of nationhood, and on the diverse people of South Africa.
Download or read book Culture Power and Difference written by Ann Levett and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 1997 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the eyes of the world watching South Africa, this book provides a unique window on the transition to democracy through an analysis of the practice of power in language.
