The long and winding road

2021 ◽  
pp. 194277862110472
Author(s):  
Kevin R Cox

Growing up in a capitalist society means induction into a set of taken for granted concepts that seemingly get realized through the way that world works. As a result, a grasp of the very different fundamentals of Marxism has to be a lifetime pursuit. For the author, it started in secondary school for reasons that were both personal and intellectual. In terms of the overall geohistorical trajectory of the author’s life, it bears emphasis that it is unlikely that that would have occurred in the US as it was at that time. Nevertheless, the American university system would then allow, often unintendedly, a deepening of that understanding. There have been diversions and distractions, most notably the distributional emphasis of much critical work in the 1970s and then critical realism in the 1980s, but overcoming them served to further enhance a critical grasp. A visit to South Africa in 1982 played a part in that. The trajectory has been simultaneously geohistorical and dialectical.

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.


Author(s):  
Hilde Roos

Opera, race, and politics during apartheid South Africa form the foundation of this historiographic work on the Eoan Group, a so-called colored cultural organization that performed opera in the Cape. The La Traviata Affair: Opera in the Time of Apartheid charts Eoan’s opera activities from its inception in 1933 until the cessation of its work by 1980. By accepting funding from the apartheid government and adhering to apartheid conditions, the group, in time, became politically compromised, resulting in the rejection of the group by their own community and the cessation of opera production. However, their unquestioned acceptance of and commitment to the art of opera lead to the most extraordinary of performance trajectories. During apartheid, the Eoan Group provided a space for colored people to perform Western classical art forms in an environment that potentially transgressed racial boundaries and challenged perceptions of racial exclusivity in the genre of opera. This highly significant endeavor and the way it was thwarted at the hands of the apartheid regime is the story that unfolds in this book.


2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Stephanus Muller

Stephanus Le Roux Marais (1896−1979) lived in Graaff-Reinet, South Africa, for nearly a quarter of a century. He taught music at the local secondary school, composed most of his extended output of Afrikaans art songs, and painted a number of small landscapes in the garden of his small house, nestled in the bend of the Sunday’s River. Marais’s music earned him a position of cultural significance in the decades of Afrikaner dominance of South Africa. His best-known songs (“Heimwee,” “Kom dans, Klaradyn,” and “Oktobermaand”) earned him the local appellation of “the Afrikaans Schubert” and were famously sung all over the world by the soprano Mimi Coertse. The role his ouevre played in the construction of a so-called European culture in Africa is uncontested. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the rich evocations of landscape encountered in Marais’s work. Contextualized by a selection of Marais’s paintings, this article glosses the index of landscape in this body of cultural production. The prevalence of landscape in Marais’s work and the range of its expression contribute novel perspectives to understanding colonial constructions of the twentieth-century South African landscape. Like the vast, empty, and ancient landscape of the Karoo, where Marais lived during the last decades of his life, his music assumes specificity not through efforts to prioritize individual expression, but through the distinct absence of such efforts. Listening for landscape in Marais’s songs, one encounters the embrace of generic musical conventions as a condition for the construction of a particular national identity. Colonial white landscape, Marais’s work seems to suggest, is deprived of a compelling musical aesthetic by its very embrace and desired possession of that landscape.


Author(s):  
Shreya Atrey

Why has intersectionality fallen by the wayside of discrimination law? Thirty years after Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’, discrimination lawyers continue to be plagued by this question across a range of jurisdictions, including the US, UK, South Africa, India, Canada, as well as the UN treaty body jurisprudence and the jurisprudence of the EU and the ECHR. Claimants continue to struggle to establish intersectional claims based on more than one ground of discrimination. This book renews the bid for realizing intersectionality in comparative discrimination law. It presents a juridical account of intersectional discrimination as a category of discrimination inspired by intersectionality theory, and distinct from other categories of thinking about discrimination including strict, substantial, capacious, and contextual forms of single-axis discrimination, multiple discrimination, additive discrimination as in combination or compound discrimination, and embedded discrimination. Intersectional discrimination, defined in these theoretical and categorial terms, then needs to be translated into doctrine, recalibrating each of the central concepts and tools of discrimination law to respond to it—including the text of non-discrimination guarantees, the idea of grounds, the test for analogous grounds, the distinction between direct and indirect discrimination, the substantive meaning of discrimination, the use of comparators, the justification analysis and standard of review, the burden of proof between parties, and the range of remedies available. With this, the book presents a granular account of intersectional discrimination in theoretical, conceptual, and doctrinal terms, and aims to transform discrimination law in the process of realizing intersectionality within its discourse.


2004 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
P.G.J. Meiring

The author who served on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), focuses on the Hindu experience in South Africa during the apartheid years. At a special TRC Hearing for Faith Communities (East London, 17-19 November 1997) two submissions by local Hindu leaders were tabled. Taking his cues from those submissions, the author discusses four issues: the way the Hindu community suffered during these years, the way in which some members of the Hindu community supported the system of apartheid, the role of Hindus in the struggle against apartheid, and finally the contribution of the Hindu community towards reconciliation in South Africa. In conclusion some notes on how Hindus and Christians may work together in th


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Carolyn E. Holmes

ABSTRACT This article explores the ethical difficulties that arise because of the interaction between fieldwork practitioners and their sites, in terms of the positionality of the researcher. What are the ethics of blending in or of standing out? This question stems from my experience of 12 months of fieldwork in South Africa in two distinct locales and among two different populations, one in which I could “pass” and another in which I was marked as various degrees of “outsider.” Drawing on this fieldwork, as well as an overview of the literature in political science on positionality, I argue that our discipline—because of the way it shapes interactions and research outcomes—must take positionality seriously in ethical training and practice.


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