Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies最新文献

{"title":"Introduction: comparative thinking in an age of corruption","authors":"R. Barnard","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2020.1832795","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2020.1832795","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"2 1","pages":"373 - 381"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82567088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Donald Trump and Jacob Zuma as charismatic buffoons","authors":"R. Southall","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2020.1832799","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2020.1832799","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This analysis uses Walden Bello’s notion of charismatic politics to explain why ordinary people as voters have been complicit with the authoritarian politics of Donald Trump in the USA and Jacob Zuma in South Africa. In both cases, the authoritarian has displayed the capacity to connect with the masses by exploiting the yawning gap between popular aspirations and the messy realities of liberal democracy. Although, given the different contexts, they are different, the authoritarianisms of Trump and Zuma are not only charismatic, but share the quality of buffoonery, the capacity to attract popular support by acting out the charlatan and the fool. Yet the leader who combines charismatic authoritarianism with buffoonery is dangerous, presenting a threat to democracy which in the case of Trump is global and Zuma was local.","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"282 1","pages":"382 - 393"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73325442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Trump, Zuma, Brexit: anti-Black racism and the truth of the world","authors":"Anne-Maria Makhulu","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2020.1835300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2020.1835300","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT “Trump, Zuma, Brexit” aims to articulate a new theory of the “world historical” reversing the relationship of north and south – of “universal knowledge” and “raw fact” – instead establishing a theoretical ground from the southern hemisphere and toward the north. The echoes and parallels of the current political, economic, and social moment across the distinct national geographies of South Africa, the US, and the UK, suggest two things: one, that white supremacy, neoliberal capitalism, and extreme inequality are foundational to the current world order; and two, that South Africa offers a very particular perspective. The paradox of anti-Black racism in South Africa – the fact that Black people remain the primary extractive targets of racial capitalism despite the country’s democratic transition – begins to show how intractable the problem of racial capitalism is both in its geographical extent and given its historical reach from the moment of the rise of Atlantic capitalism into the present.","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"22 1","pages":"493 - 503"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89120654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Trumpism, Zumaism, and the fascist potential of authoritarian populism","authors":"J. Hyslop","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2020.1832803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2020.1832803","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The similarities between Donald Trump and Jacob Zuma, both authoritarian populist leaders, are striking in that they come from differing political trajectories: respectively, from deep reactionary currents and from a radical national liberation movement. This contrast points to the diverse origins of contemporary forms of authoritarian populism. Scholars have rightly identified the important differences between the fascism of the Hitler and Mussolini era and the authoritarian populisms of the years after the Second World War, of which the apartheid-era National Party may be considered an example. However, the article suggests, the radicalization of authoritarian populism internationally is producing a potential slide to something approaching classical fascism. In the US, this danger is ominously threatening, whereas in South Africa the partial defeat of Jacob Zuma, reflecting real strengths in civil society and institutions, seems to have arrested this process.","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"18 1","pages":"464 - 472"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86862984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Unmournable bodies, embodied monuments and bodily truths: rethinking reconciliation in Zulu Love Letter","authors":"S. Adebayo","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2020.1823736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2020.1823736","url":null,"abstract":"Zulu Love Letter is a South African classic and a paragon of exceptional filmmaking in Africa. It is not surprising that it has attracted (and is still attracting) the attention of scholars, critics, and students, as they continuously attempt to unpack, deconstruct, and even understand its goldmine of meanings. For me, the film is mainly about bodies – (un) mournable bodies, missing bodies, bodies in pain, broken bodies, fragile bodies, docile bodies, and so on. The film is full of black bodies acquainted with traumatic grief. The film is, in and of itself, a textual body – a cinematic body – that serves to funeralize the dead and memorialize the past. It also serves as a portable monument for the dead and a gesture to the living not to forget the horrors of apartheid. The recurrent trope of women dressed in black in the film typifies physical, social, and gendered bodies in mourning; it represents how the living literally bears the grave of the dead on their bodies. As Bhekizizwe Peterson has noted, these women are embodied monuments to the missing dead bodies that are yet to be found after the end of apartheid. Although there are numerous accounts of post-traumatic growth in South Africa, especially on a national scale, many bodies are still missing, many deaths are yet to be accounted for, many people are still grieving and the socio-economic conditions of many have not changed. Legacies of the past still influence the emotions of the present. There is a pervading disappointment with democracy and a general disillusionment in the present. The specters of apartheid hover in the air. This unresolved relationship with the past produces some sort of post-apartheid melancholia as conversations about recognition, reparation, and reconciliation are still ongoing in the country. Many victims – and their descendants – still feel that their pain were not given adequate recognition and that they were pressured into terminating their griefs precipitously. The film suggests that the word “reconciliation” – at least within the framing of the TRC – is limited in capturing and negotiating the complexities of issues and layers of contentions in post-apartheid South Africa. In this regard, Thandeka tells her daughter: “nothing can compensate me for what I went through. And there is no talk of either arresting them or paying the abused families.” Also, Bouda’D tells Thandeka that “reparations are a must, or else we look like fools in front of the reconciliation commission”. What this seemingly knotty situation tells us, in a Derridean sense, is that true","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"69 1","pages":"7 - 10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77225094","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Yearning for rootedness in a femicidal landscape","authors":"G. Musila","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2020.1823740","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2020.1823740","url":null,"abstract":"A lot has changed since I first watched Zulu Love Letter in 2005, and much has remained the same about the traumas of post-1994 South Africa, which preoccupy the film. This piece comments on two issues – the lingering violence of apartheid trauma and state neglect of the disabled – by examining the film alongside two sets subsequent incidents: the publication of lead actress Pamela Nomvete’s memoir Dancing to the Beat of the Drum: In Search of my Spiritual Home (2012) and various high-profile incidents which underlined fatal state neglect of disabled South Africans. These two sets of incidents resonate with the film’s commentary on state violence and its production of unbelonging. If, as Bhekizizwe Peterson writes, “Zulu Love Letter is about two mothers in search of their daughters,” both literally and symbolically lost to apartheid brutality, then one of these mothers – Thandeka in the film – was also in search of herself in the actor Pamela Nomvete’s real life – owing to apartheid displacement. When I first watched the film, I was stunned by Nomvete’s powerful interpretation of the character Thandeka as an invincible, deeply wounded and angry journalist, mother, and activist. Born in Ethiopia in March 1963, Nomvete grew up in exile, in Ethiopia, Lusaka, and London among other places, before returning to South Africa in 1994. She had been an up-and-coming theater actress in London, and soon landed the role of Nstiki Lukhele on the premier South African soap opera, Generations, which catapulted her to celebrity as a household name. The fame and money drew one Collins Marimbe into her life. They married in 2002, but by 2007, Nomvete was bankrupt, homeless, and seeking divorce from the abusive Marimbe. There are uncanny parallels between Thandeka’s trauma and Nomvete’s breakdown in real life. In Zulu Love Letter, Thandeka wrestles with alienation: her relationships with her child, her parents, her child’s father, and her colleagues are all under terrible strain from her anger and survivor’s guilt about the murder of Mike, her child’s deafness, and unprocessed trauma of witnessed horrors. Nomvete’s memoir Dancing to the Beat of the Drum reveals that while she dazzled onscreen as Thandeka, offscreen, her life was spiraling out of control. After delivering an award-winning performance as Thandeka, at the end of the workday, Nomvete was going home to an emotionally and financially abusive marriage. The opening scene of the film featuring Thandeka passed out in her car was to be prophetic: a few short years later, the actress was destitute, living in her car. If Thandeka’s role in the film is as a witness – both literally, having witnessed Dineo’s murder, and symbolically, as a journalist and a witness to Me’Tau and Bouda’D’s grief – then I suggest that her offscreen life and subsequent memoir bears witness to the institutional corrosiveness of patriarchy and South","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"450 1","pages":"15 - 18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82968379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Memory in haunted times: a roundtable discussion of Zulu love letter","authors":"S. Adebayo","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2020.1823735","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2020.1823735","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This roundtable is curation of broad-ranging and multidisciplinary reflections on the continuing relevance of Zulu Love Letter, fifteen years after its release. The connecting strand in all the reflections is how the film invites us to ponder on the enduring legacies and the disturbing specters of apartheid, especially in these tumultuous times characterized by all sorts of political, economic, gender, xenophobic and ableist violence. The recurring concern in all the contributions is how to make sense of these specters of apartheid that linger in the post-apartheid landscape. While some of the reflections in the roundtable show how Zulu Love Letter forces us to rethink our assumptions about reconciliation in South Africa, others point to the recalcitrant presence of the past inscribed on individual bodies and in rebellious mournings. Some reflections also touch on the cinematic qualities of the film in order to locate it within the genre of counter cinema, especially on account of its remarkable tendency to disrupt linearity. The copious use of flashbacks – or interludes – in the film helps to foreground the argument about haunting in post-apartheid South Africa. In all, we reflect on the making, reception, public life as well as the revived intellectual interest in the film. We note how, since the calls for fees must fall and decolonization, the film appears to be interpolated in inter-generational reassessments of the gains and losses of the post-apartheid period in South Africa.","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"515 1","pages":"4 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77093043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A love letter to those who passed on and those still tasked with creating a better future for all","authors":"Bhekizizwe Peterson","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2020.1823741","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2020.1823741","url":null,"abstract":"I would like to express appreciation to the contributors to the roundtable for their incisive and stimulating discussion of Zulu Love Letter. I particularly value their foregrounding of the problematics on the socio-political, economic, and stylistic complications that impinge on the challenges, contingencies, and intersections that relate to our strives to make sense of our pasts, presents, and futures. The reflections offered speak to the complex relations between the personal, social, institutional, and aesthetic dimensions that inform the film and cultural production. I will confine myself to some brief observations on these aspects in the hope that they will elucidate the thinking and questions that shaped the project and the public life of the film. The writing of the script presented the usual creative and social challenges typical in the making of art. When it came to production and distribution, the film entered a convoluted public space particularly with regards to its making and reception and that still confounds. When we formed Natives At Large in 1995, Ramadan Suleman and I were clear that we wanted to create work that is informed by the following political and creative visions: the work must primarily address an African audience and it must do so in ways that facilitate dialogic and critical deliberations on individual and collective experiences and dreams; celebrate African ontologies, epistemologies, and identities while avoiding provincialism (or South African exceptionalism) by remaining attuned and receptive to ideas, experiences and aesthetics from anywhere as long as they constituted part of the complicated and congenial storehouse on the human condition; explore the quotidian by centralizing the lives of ordinary people (the underclasses and those who are oppressed and exploited in private and public spaces) and to do so in ways that celebrated their knowledge, agency, resilience, hopes, and fears (all these are the everyday senses and ways of being that are often ignored, downgraded, or erased by the lenses favored by parochial and patriarchal nationalists, capitalists, and whiteness in society and culture); and, lastly, to pursue the preceding principles by making films that are grounded in the use of African cultural repertoires and artistic practices. In 1995, after numerous possible names for our production company, we settled on Natives At Large, a statement we found in Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa. Plaatje uses the phrase to indicate the marginal social status and exclusion of black people under colonialism (and apartheid, post-apartheid, and imperialism from our vantage point). We also read it as an enticing and subversive call to embrace a political and creative","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"23 - 25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82478614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Zulu love letter: drawing in and re-assembling","authors":"Hugo Canham","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2020.1823737","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2020.1823737","url":null,"abstract":"Watching Zulu Love Letter again in 2020, I was attentive to what the film did to me corporeally. I was curious as to what truths I would be moved to feel in my body. This is my entrée to this discussion. Does Zulu Love Letter have any resonance for the present or was it a product of a particular time whose concerns have been overtaken by issues of a rapidly changing world? Zulu Love Letter transports us to what now seems like a different time. I feel a hint of nostalgia that draws me affectively to the past. This drawing towards the past is also embodied. We feel the pain of a historic moment that is both past and ongoing. Karl Marx’s assertion that the past is not even past rings true. Me’Tau, the old woman’s searching for an explanation of her daughters’ death triggers our own searching for things and memories lost. The drawing in unsettles us affectively. Our bodies are moved and therefore interpolated into the film. We become part of the ongoing historical arc of themes probed by the film. This speaks to affects historical and temporal contours. Affects emerge in the confluence of intraand inter-generational social influences and the effects are manifested and experienced through the body. Years later, the film is able to draw us in and move us. We are moved bodily and we articulate this drawing is as a language of the body. Watching Zulu Love Letter with an embodied lens drew my attention to the sensorial as represented by its tactility. The beading, drawing, signing, gluing, and games played by Simangaliso and her grandmother, all involve active touching. The tactile character of the film draws us in. The film relies on the affect of sensoriality to reach beyond language but also to draw viewers in. The use of affect in the film enables an analysis that overcomes the shortcomings of narrowly conceived discursive and representational theorizations. The film also uses haunting and dreams to make temporal connections between time scales. This temporal uncertainty enables an epic timescale that can be read to encompass the present. I rely on assemblage thinking for my reading of Zulu Love Letter. Assemblage thinking is useful for making meaning of affect. This includes the centering of affectivity, memory, sensoriality, multi-temporality, and political effects. Haunting is one of the central genres of the film. Zim Ngqawana’s music shrieks through the film. He was a haunted artist whose music was of here and the ancestral realm. It represents madness when history is topsy-turvy and it boomerangs at unpredictable speed. Haunting relies on the memory of things past but","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"7 1","pages":"11 - 14"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86911608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The apartheid divestment movement at George Washington University: the legacy of student activism and GW Voices for a Free South Africa","authors":"Andrew Novak","doi":"10.1080/17533171.2020.1796471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2020.1796471","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The antiapartheid protests at George Washington University were the campus’s largest student protests since the Vietnam War. As at other universities, students advocated divestment of university finances in businesses with operations in South Africa, including through the now-iconic “shantytown” protests, which symbolized South African living conditions on campus. Under pressure from a student group, GW Voices for a Free South Africa, university leadership under President Lloyd Elliott seriously considered moving the University’s stock portfolio to a South Africa-free fund but ultimately decided such a fund was too risky. Unlike other universities of its size and prestige, GW never divested. The location of the University and the size of its South African-affected stock holdings hampered divestment efforts.","PeriodicalId":43901,"journal":{"name":"Safundi-The Journal of South African and American Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"26 - 47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83060720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}