ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA最新文献

{"title":"Memory Book as a New Genre of Illness Writing: How a Ugandan Mother Wrote about HIV","authors":"M. Oike","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2021.1969122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2021.1969122","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A memory book is a therapeutic document and personal testament – a workbook written, most commonly, by a HIV-positive caregiver or parent for their child, about the family’s background and the parent’s life experiences, to guide the child in the parent’s absence. In Uganda, memory projects first emerged in 1998 as public health outreach for people with HIV. They encourage writers, often agrarian widows with limited literacy, to deliver their messages to their children and the world. While reports have focused on the psychosocial support the projects provide to the beneficiaries, the content, and modes of representation in individual books, have received little attention. This article undertakes a close textual analysis of the words and images in one memory book, written in English by a subsistence farmer with seven years’ schooling. Using the frameworks of narrative therapy and illness writing, it examines how this reticent writer represents, obliquely, through textual gaps and contradictions, her painful memories of her child’s abuse by her husband and her co-wife and the difficult experience of living with HIV. This article argues that memory books as a new genre of illness writing can help less literate, less heard people with HIV write their stories in their own words and can help us, the readers, understand their experiences and lifeworlds from their perspectives.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"64 1","pages":"192 - 208"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43208374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"COVID-19 and African Postage Stamps","authors":"Damian Shaw","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2021.1969118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2021.1969118","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates how African nations have portrayed the COVID-19 pandemic in their postage stamps. After an introduction, a timeline offering short descriptions of global editions of this theme from its inception until March 2021 will be established. The timeline will consider most issues to the above date, with the caveat that additional examples might still be found, and that more will no doubt be produced after the publication of this paper, as the pandemic persists. Major design types will then be determined based on the preceding information. Then various publications related to Africa will be discussed. These primarily concern the so-called ‘Stamperijia’ issues, produced in Lithuania, and then bogus stamps produced in the name of various African countries. Apart from the ‘Stamperijia’ and similar issues, it is noted that only two African nations have produced a COVID-19-themed stamp on the continent itself up to 20 March 2021. The implications of this will be discussed in the conclusion, with suggestions for future action.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"64 1","pages":"168 - 179"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47460615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hero","authors":"David Medalie","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2021.1969108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2021.1969108","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"64 1","pages":"146 - 151"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45547337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"COVID-19: Between Panic, Racism and Social Change","authors":"Omar Moumni","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2021.1972602","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2021.1972602","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The emergence of the novel coronavirus has led to panic, vulnerability and racism all over the world. This paper traces the roots and routes of the different faces and facets of such responses and explores their impact on individual and collective behaviour. It focuses on the un/ethics of self-care and collective care and the impacts these responses have had on Moroccan society. It argues that the pandemic pushed individuals to behave ‘globally’ against local and cultural norms, demonstrating new societal behaviour that is based on avarice, self-interest and self-care.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"64 1","pages":"242 - 254"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42156983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An End in Itself: Genre, Apocalypse and the Archive in Deon Meyer’s Fever","authors":"D. Daniels","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2021.1969106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2021.1969106","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract What are the affordances of reading apocalyptic fiction under apocalyptic conditions, when a realism without apocalypse hardly seems realistic at all? What does it mean that our attempts to imagine a future beyond capitalism seem tethered to such an apocalyptic event, and what might these attempts tell us about the present – and the past – from which they emerge? While apocalyptic fiction contends to imagine a world beyond capitalism, I argue that it is more effective at exposing the apocalyptic nature of our present. I tether my analysis to a novel as prototypical of the genre as it is exceptional: Fever by the South African crime novelist Deon Meyer. I explore this protean text through a variety of generic frames – as fictional memoir, as Bildungsroman, and as multi-genre hybrid – to consider what the post-apocalyptic genre is and can be. Ultimately, I propose that, by rerouting our readings of post-apocalyptic and other speculative fictions towards what they reveal of our present cultural logics, this literature and our readings of it hold the capacity to escape the confines of anticipatory mourning towards the politically urgent task of recognizing and reckoning with the world of late capitalism and the affective trap of capitalist realism.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"64 1","pages":"121 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44692937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Two Poems by Leanne Stillerman Zabow","authors":"Leanne Stillerman Zabow","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2021.1969126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2021.1969126","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"64 1","pages":"223 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48970881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Plague Years: An Introduction","authors":"M. Titlestad, G. Musila, Karl van Wyk","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2021.1969092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2021.1969092","url":null,"abstract":"This is not the apocalypse. While some of the customary signs are there – deserted streets, masks and hazmat suits, empty supermarket shelves, hospitals and morgues overflowing – the four horsemen are not gathering at the horizon. Yet the pervasive register in reportage and on social media over the last two years has been biblical, as if eschatology dictates that we conceive of the COVID-19 pandemic as, paradoxically, an iteration of the last days. Without making the routine observation that the apocalypse is never now but always deferred, we might wonder why apocalypticism is the default script in relation to immanent disasters and future imaginaries. Until recently, we largely lacked a lexicon and grammar for global contagion, its social and political consequences and its possible containment. Bubonic plague and even Spanish flu are too remote to be serviceable in this respect and, anyway, our epidemiological knowledge has meant that our experience of COVID-19 has been distinct from historical pandemics. HIV, the cause of one of our most recent pandemics, could have been comparable were it not for the medical developments of ARV therapy, which, in many cases, has turned the disease into a chronic illness. It has also proved less likely to mutate than coronaviruses. It is glib and unethical to suggest that this absence amounts to a ‘crisis of representation,’ for the only real ‘crises’ are infection, death and bereavement, in comparison with which the struggle to come to terms with the coronavirus and its effects is at least secondary. Yet, the humanities must concern itself with representation: how the virus, its spread and its effects have been inscribed and understood existentially and mobilized politically. It is too brazen to suggest that the world will never be the same again because the pandemic has only exacerbated existing dynamics: it has fuelled populism, reinforced capitalism and increased the reach of hedge fund managers and others who profit off risk. And climate change – despite a short-lived lull in carbon emissions and a brief flourishing of wildlife in empty cities – is only becoming more evident in its effects and its outcomes increasingly predictable. Much has remained the same. But even as humanity marches unwaveringly (even triumphantly) towards its own destruction, we can acknowledge that representation is integral to both understanding and mobilization, even if not constitutive. It is in this that the current volume coheres: how has COVID-19 entered discourses; on what archives have we drawn in","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"64 1","pages":"1 - 3"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42744834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Active Thumbs, Confined Bodies: Eluding the ‘Insect’ in Times of the Plague","authors":"M. D. El Maarouf, Taieb Belghazi, Ute Fendler","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2021.1972599","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2021.1972599","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines games during the COVID-19 pandemic as ontological barriers or barzakhs (singular: barzakh). The traditional meaning of barrier as separation is coupled with the Greek meaning of play as Poiesis (which may also be understood as describing acts of creation). We expand the semantics of ‘barrier’ so as to describe pandemic phenomena that exist at the points at which opposites meet: synthetic game and the world of real game; the infected and the healthy; the player and the character being played; life and death. Our perception of both home and the exterior world has changed significantly in the time of the plague. At-home gaming, far from signalling our modern confinement, enables moments in which we may challenge our imprisonment. To bring this idea home, we deploy barzakh as a moral imperative, a site of both necessary isolation and opportunities of engagement, proof of our need for both interaction and distance, a place for the enactment of our knowing and strategic waiting in relation to the pandemic. Through the term, we theorize the link between barrier and other similar categorical divides (distances, masks, gloves, borders and quarantines) which we activate during lockdown to work through our puzzlement, win the social game of civil goodness and to downplay, and ultimately survive, the pandemic of our times.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"64 1","pages":"225 - 241"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45976216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dust Explodes for All to See: Narrating the Actual in a Time of Continuous Disaster","authors":"Kyle Allan","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2021.1969115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2021.1969115","url":null,"abstract":"On 31 December 2019, scientists announced to the world the discovery of a new strain of coronavirus, COVID-19, in the city of Wuhan, China. COVID-19 soon spread globally, and by March had been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. In that same month, South Africa began a nationwide lockdown, which was divided into various stages, implemented according to the severity of the pandemic and its potential to cause extreme and rapid loss of life, particularly among South Africa’s vulnerable populations. The impact of COVID-19 further exposed all the wounds and ruptures within contemporary society. Using the poetry of Mxolisi Nyezwa and Angifi Dladla as an analytical lens, this article critiques the distinction between a recognized state of disaster and the everyday state of violence in which the marginalized live and argues that the precarious are living in a state of continuous disaster. It recognizes the vitality and power of critique through literature that engages with the actuality of the present moment. Furthermore, it foregrounds the term ‘the actual’ as preferable to ‘the real’ or ‘reality,’ framed as those terms are by realist epistemologies and the heroic materialism of real capitalism.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"64 1","pages":"152 - 167"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41957356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Some Speculative Musings on COVID-19 Affectivity, Raymond Williams’ ‘Structure of Feeling’ and Zadie Smith’s Intimations","authors":"R. Frenkel","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2021.1969125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2021.1969125","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays (2020) is a partial history of affectivity of the present, which I am speculatively positioning as a type of transnational archive of privileged pandemic-circumscribed life. Raymond Williams’ work on a ‘structure of feeling’ is useful here to understand new patterns of experience that have emerged during this pandemic. Williams uses the phrase a ‘structure of feeling’ to distinguish between formally held beliefs or ideologies, and meanings and values as they are lived and felt in relation to those beliefs or ideologies. Theories of emotion, atmosphere and feeling broadly correspond to Williams’s correlation of material, social and affective structures. Smith can help us theorize emergent affectivity from inside a pandemic-strained world through the narration of the ambiguous operational logic that her essays describe. She has created a continuum made up of affective normativities and transformative affectivities on either end, with her essays tracing the rhythms of privileged life across locales, to help us understand pandemic inspired change.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"64 1","pages":"212 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48816219","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}