South African Gothic

2019 ◽  
pp. 233-248
Author(s):  
Rebecca Duncan
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
World Order ◽  
Graphic Narrative ◽  
Literary Periodicals ◽  
Key Dimensions ◽  
New Millennium

The period following the second decade of the millennium has witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of Gothic forms in what is frequently called ‘post-transitional’ South African fiction. Readily identifiable in the work of young writers in particular, these should be understood as an enunciation of real anxiety breeding in the postapartheid nation. The fall of apartheid marks South Africa’s postcolonial incorporation into a neoliberal world order, and the disorientation and unease of these circumstances is appearing in the fiction of South Africa’s new millennium in uneasy, indeed Gothic forms. This chapter outlines key dimensions of this millennial South African Gothic, focusing specifically on emerging speculative production in diverse media, including short fiction, graphic narrative, literary periodicals and film.

The putative addressee in the persuasion of diplomatic discourse: China’s communication efforts through South African English-language newspapers

2021 ◽  
pp. 175048132110020
Author(s):  
Liping Tang
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
English Language ◽  
World Order ◽  
Xi Jinping ◽  
Discursive Strategy ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

This article explores the putative addressee in the persuasion of diplomatic discourse by adopting White’s recent proposals as to putative reader/addressee positioning to specifically examine China’s communication efforts through South African English-language newspapers in the Xi Jinping era. Likemindedness is found to be predominantly construed, meticulously balanced with relative frequent construal of uncommittedness and very rare construal of un-likemindedness. And a set of 12 interrelated discourses are identified as fundamental ideological tenets in legitimating China’s African engagement and its vision of world order. Findings show that the classical political discursive strategy of Us/Them polarization is typically deployed. The analysis and discussion illustrates how White’s proposed framework can be systematically applied to offer new lines of analysis of persuasion and shed some light on understanding contemporary Chinese diplomatic discourse.

As the Postcolonial Moment Deepens: A Response to Green, Sonn, and Matsebula

2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 420-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Steyn
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
State Power ◽  
World Order ◽  
Whiteness Studies ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Racial Privilege

Green, Sonn, and Matsebula's (2007) article is useful in helping to establish and develop whiteness studies in South African academia, and thus to shift the academic gaze from the margins to the centre. The article is published in the wake of three waves of international whiteness studies, which successively described whiteness as a space of taken-for-granted privilege; a series of historically different but related spaces; and, finally, as part of the global, postcolonial world order. Green, Sonn, and Matsebula's (2007) contribution could be extended by more fully capturing the dissimilarity in the texture of the experience of whiteness in Australia and South Africa. In South Africa whiteness has never had the quality of invisibility that is implied in the ‘standard’ whiteness literature, and in post-apartheid South Africa white South Africans cannot assume the same privileges, with such ease, when state power is overtly committed to breaking down racial privilege.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE ORIGIN OF MYTHS OF POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICAN FOREIGN POLICY

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo De Rezende Saturnino Braga
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
South African ◽  
World Order ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Iconic Image

The foreign policy narrative of South Africa is strongly grounded in human rights issues, beginning with the transition from a racial segregation regime to a democracy. The worldwide notoriety of the apartheid South Africa case was one factor that overestimated the expectations of the role the country would play in the world after apartheid. Global circumstances also fostered this perception, due to the optimistic scenario of the post-Cold War world order. The release of Nelson Mandela and the collapse of apartheid became the perfect illustration of the victory of liberal ideas, democracy, and human rights. More than 20 years after the victory of Mandela and the first South African democratic elections, the criticism to the country's foreign policy on human rights is eminently informed by those origin myths, and it generates a variety of analytical distortions. The weight of expectations, coupled with the historical background that led the African National Congress (ANC) to power in South Africa, underestimated the traditional tensions of the relationship between sovereignty and human rights. Post-apartheid South Africa presented an iconic image of a new bastion for the defence of human rights in the post-Cold War world. The legacy of the miraculous transition in South Africa, though, seems to have a deeper influence on the role of the country as a mediator in African crises rather than in a liberal-oriented human rights approach. This is more evident in cases where the African agenda clashes with liberal conceptions of human rights, especially due to the politicisation of the international human rights regime. 

scholarly journals The power of branding: Revisiting an “old friend”

2003 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-177
Author(s):  
E. J. North ◽  
T. Kotzé ◽  
O. Stark ◽  
R. De Vos
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Branding Strategies ◽  
World Class ◽  
New Millennium ◽  
Marketing Executives

Branding is a key strategic tool used to create awareness, reputation and build the organisation’s image. Marketers consider brands as carriers of values, and the development and implementation of branding strategies and programmes have lately expanded to include more than the traditional corporate, product and service domains of branding. In this article we set out to define and briefly discuss the nature of branding and indicate how brands are used to define the product to the customer. One of the major challenges facing South African business and marketing executives in the new millennium is to create world-class brands that will put South African brands on the national and international map.

Towards a Critical Nostalgia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew van der Vlies
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Zoe Wicomb ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
The One

South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb is a key postapartheid literary figure; her oeuvre complicates assumptions about locatedness, ethnicity, and cosmopolitanism. This chapter reads her novels—David’s Story (2000), Playing in the Light (2006), October (2014)—and select short fiction—in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) and The One That Got Away (2008); ‘In Search of Tommie’ (2010)—to consider how Wicomb stages text itself as a privileged space within which to hold open the promise of the ‘loose end’ (a recurring metaphor), exploring its potential to unravel older formations in the social fabric to suggest new narrative and relational threads. It argues that the prevalence of queer subjects in her fiction mirrors Wicomb’s formally ‘queer’ strategies, including meta- and intertextuality, which offer more than the textual equivalent of characters’ displacements or the author’s own restless transnationalism (here October’s debts to Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home are canvassed).

Archaeology, aviation, and the topographical projection of ‘Paradoxical Modernism’ in 1940s South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-148
Author(s):  
Jeremy Foster
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
World Order ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Commercial Aviation ◽  
Phd Thesis ◽  
First Time

At the time of his premature death in 1942, Rex Martienssen, the gifted South African architect who had helped make Johannesburg an outpost of modernism, had just completed a seminal PhD thesis on Greek space, and was documenting the layout of remote African settlements in South Africa's highlands. Martienssen's writings suggest that the link between these disjunct projects was topographical thinking, a form of architectural seeing and thinking that ontologically articulates time, place and culture. His research project was informed by the white colonial national intellectual search for an alternative to the racialised imaginary geography being promoted by white nationalism in the 1930s, a paradoxical modernity that would be progressive and cosmopolitan, yet also respected a timeless order threatened by European modernity. This re-envisioning of the 'place' of Western culture in Africa was encouraged by two seemingly-unrelated engagements with the sub-continent's terrain: archaeology and commercial aviation. Both practices came into their own in Southern Africa during this period, deploying Western technique and rationality in ways that constructed a vision of the subcontinent that unsettled the territorial limits and historical narratives of the post-colony, and inaugurated perceptions of the African landscape as modern and transcultural, yet situated in the Hegelian geographical movement of history. This made it possible to imagine, for the first time, that the topographical organisation of indigenous settlements might yield a spatial logic for new urban areas. A key figure in understanding this multiscalar geo-historical subjectivity was Le Corbusier, who had close ties with Martienssen and what he called le Groupe Transvaal. Le Corbusier's global journeys during the 1930s had made him increasingly interested in the anthropo-geographic traces left by the 'natural order of things' in human environments, and the possibility of a neo-syndicalist world order based on geo-political regions that were latitudinally complementary.

The “labour aristocracy” in the early 20th-century South Africa

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ercüment Çelik
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
Labour History ◽  
Territorial Boundaries ◽  
Key Dimensions

Drawing on a review of key literature, this article analyses the labour aristocracy in early 20th-century South Africa, going beyond traditional conceptual and territorial boundaries created through a methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism since the emergence of labour history as an academic discipline. It identifies some key dimensions attributed to the labour aristocracy in mainstream approaches that focused on Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and attempts to illustrate how these could be considered in analysing the particular South African case. The article mainly focuses on how the understanding of labour aristocracy would be reconstructed by demonstrating an aristocracy of labour that merges with an aristocracy of colour in South Africa.

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