scholarly journals Political Activism and Family Matters in Nadine Gordimer‘s My Son’s Story (1990)

Author(s):  
Babacar Diakhaté

Before independence, South Africa experienced her most socio-political turbulences because of Apartheid. Peter Abrahams, John Maxwell Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer depict racial discrimination, political and sexual violence and social injustice in the context of Apartheid.  The aims of this article is to portray “political affairs”, “family matters” and private passions in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story. It also brings to light Sonny’s motivation to become a political activist and join the blacks in the resistance against racial discrimination.

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 328
Author(s):  
Şahin KIZILTAŞ

The world has gone through a trauma for centuries. Almost all nations have experienced all sorts of traumatic events and feelings in this period. Among those nations, the black seem to be the most unlucky and ill-fated suffered from traumatic disasters. However, among those black nations, the natives of South Africa have been the most piteous and wretched ones. Their misfortune began in 1652 with the arrival of white colonists in the country. Since then, the oppression and persecution of white European colonists and settlers on natives increasingly continued. Those native people were displaced from the lands inherited from their ancestors a few centuries ago. They were not allowed to have equal rights with white people and to share same environment in public premises. The natives have put up resistance against the racial and colonial practices of white settlers which excluded them from all living spaces; yet, they could not manage, even they came into power in 1994. Today their exclusion and violence victimization still go on and they are still subjected to inferior treatment by (post)colonial dominant white powers. As a white intellectual and writer who had European origins, Nadine Gordimer witnessed the repression and torturing of European settlers on native people in South Africa. In her novels, she has reflected the racial discrimination practiced by white people who have considered of themselves in a superior position compared to the black. This study aims to focus on how Gordimer has reflected the trauma which the black people of South Africa have experienced as a consequence of racist practices. This will contribute to clarify and get across the real and true-life traumatic narratives of native people in the colonized countries.


Author(s):  
Carrol Clarkson

Carrol Clarkson’s chapter wrestles with the contentious question of Coetzee’s relation to the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa of the 1970s and early 1980s, which took its philosophical bearings from Frantz Fanon and found expression in the writings of Steve Biko. Clarkson focuses on the ways in which Coetzee departed from the ideas about writing and resistance that were circulating in his contemporary South Africa, particularly as articulated by novelist Nadine Gordimer. Clarkson discusses two related literary-critical problems: an ethics and politics of representation, and an ethics and politics of address, showing how Coetzee explores a tension between freedom of expression and responsibility to the other. In the slippage from saying to addressing we are led to further thought about modes and sites of consciousness—and hence accountabilities—in the interlocutory contact zones of the post-colony. The chapter invites a sharper appreciation of what a postcolonial philosophy might be.


Author(s):  
Traci C. West

This chapter presents the interdisciplinary framework of the book and its core argument linking issues of racism and religion--particularly heteropatriarchal Christianity--in the cultural support for gender violence. It argues that the conjoined presence of religion, anti-black racism, and sexual violence against women in American history of slavery and colonialism compels a similarly transnational exploration of inspiration from Africana activists and scholars to address U.S. gender violence. A methodological overview describes the book’s theoretical foundations in feminist and womanist studies, and how tools of ethnography, anthropology, and Christian theo-ethics inform the its unconventional narrative approach. The U.S.-based analysis features snapshots of the author’s encounters with leaders and their contexts, not a broad survey or comparison of gender violence in Ghana, South Africa, and Brazil.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1097184X2092587
Author(s):  
Antonella (Toni) Pyke

Changes in political, social, and economic structures in South Africa during the transition from apartheid to democratic governance in 1994 have put men and masculinity/ies under public and scholarly scrutiny. Attention has generally focused on the links between masculinity and violence, particularly among black men from low-income backgrounds, in attempts to understand the widespread levels of sexual violence throughout the country. Together, but in tension with the focus on men and violence, has been a literature that documents gender change in South Africa. This literature argues for example, that men are embracing fatherhood and becoming more engaged in childcare. Nevertheless this is a minority literature that is overshadowed by a focus on men and violence. In this article, I reflect on the lives of a group of men living in Alexandra township in Johannesburg, who are exploring what it means to be a man in a contemporary township setting, and the issues and challenges they face in attempts to transition their masculine identities.


Author(s):  
Chhaya Rai

Global Peace is the summum bonum, so we must know its negative as well as positive meanings. Simultaneously peace must be understood in all its interrelated but theoretically differentiated dimensions as personal, social, national, international and global. Today, humankind is suffering from multidimensional crises such as terrorism, population-explosion, denial of human rights, economic inequality, racial discrimination, ideological extremism, religious intolerance, social injustice, ecological imbalance, consumerism, oppression of weak, etc. These peace-related issues compel us to lay down the fundamental principles of a radical global ethics that expects us to realize our roles and duties regarding global peace. It includes the role and ideals of educationalists, the duties of scientists, philosophers, and thinkers, the inculcation of human values such as nonviolence, love, etc.


Literator ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
G. Cornwell

For a variety of reasons (including its publication history), Alex la Guma’s second novel And a Threefold Cord (1964) has long been neglected by readers and critics. This essay seeks to redress this situation by offering a reading of the novel that demonstrates its artistic integrity. Like A Walk in the Night, And a Threefold Cord avoids the overt propagandizing that arguably mars La Guma’s later work. The political “message” of the text is shown to emerge organically from events that unfold in its presented world. And a Threefold Cord is set in a Cape Flats shantytown, and it analyses the predicament of the shanty dwellers in terms of class inequality and economic exploitation, rather than in terms of racial discrimination. This ensures the novel’s continuing relevance in a South Africa where far too many people are inadequately housed in ever-growing “informal settlements”.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (7) ◽  
pp. e0216449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Jane Steele ◽  
Naeemah Abrahams ◽  
Kristal Duncan ◽  
Nataly Woollett ◽  
Bella Hwang ◽  
...  

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