scholarly journals ‘Interrupting the Present’

2022 ◽  
pp. 57-67
Author(s):  
Katja Gentric
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Shared Memory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Student Protests ◽  
The Past ◽  
Liberation Movements ◽  
Historical Reenactments

A sense of repetition pervades contemporary South African political and cultural debate. Several recent studies have drawn attention to the fact that the renewed student protests since March 2015 parallel several features of the resistance and liberation movements of the 1970s and 1980s. At a pivotal position between the two moments of political struggle stands the ‘miracle’ of the peaceful transition in 1994. Within this set of circumstances a group of curators, artists, and writers, Gabi Ngcobo and Kemang Wa Lehulere, amongst others, formed a collective under the name CHR (Center for Historical Reenactments) in Johannesburg in 2010. The CHR has pursued several questions that interrogate the complexity of a shared memory bridging segregated Apartheid legacy: how do readings of the past inform contemporary urgencies, and what are the political potentials of artistic interpretations of histories? How do they participate in the formation of new subjectivities?

New Rights – New Laws: South African Legal Literature in a Time of Transition

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 390-416
Author(s):  
Amanda Barratt
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Political System ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Legal Literature ◽  
Substantive Law

The title of this paper follows the 2003 Meeting theme: Law in a Time of Transition. Speakers thus far have discussed the various ways in which South African substantive law has changed since 1990. With such far-reaching changes in the political and legal landscape, one would expect to see some changes in the legal literature. There have indeed been profound changes in the forms of legal publication over the past few years, some of which would seem to be a direct result of the new legal and political system. I refer in this context not so much to the content and substance of our statutes and decided cases, but rather to the forms in which they are made available.

Le mouvement pentecôtiste chilien et la politique

1978 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Tennekes ◽  
M. Fl. Jacques
Keyword(s):  
Political Orientation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Large Majority ◽  
The Political ◽  
Present System ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
The Past ◽  
Common Position ◽  
The Right

This article is an interpretation of the principal results of a survey conducted in 1971 and 1973, regarding the attitude of chilean Pentecostals towards the political life of their country. On the basis of this study it appears that during Allende's period there was a big difference in the political sympathies between the Pentecostal leaders — mainly oriented towards the right — and the mass of the Pentecostal faith ful — who in a large majority entertained sympathies for the left. In spite of this difference in political orientation, the leaders and the other Pentecostals joined in a common position of condemnation of active participation in the political struggle fought at that time, and in general they adopted an attitude of reserve in regard to anything concerning politics. This lign of conduct was not only caused by a concern about dissension in the ecclesial community, but it was also motivated by the idea that politics, as it existed before the coup of 1973, was morally reprehensible. If this background is taken into account, there should be not too much attention paid to the manifestations of support of the present system of government expressed by many Pentecostal leaders in the past few years. It is improbable that these manifestations reflect the feelings of the mass of the Pentecostal believers.

Afrikaanse gereformeerde kerke in die sleurgang van die tydgees

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-78
Author(s):  
Pieter Kruger
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
The Political ◽  
African Society ◽  
Pluralistic Society ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
South African Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

During the past nearly 30 years the epochs of democratisation and globalisation became intertwined with the South African society, determining its spirit of the age. The democratisation of South African since 1994 has its own history of radical rather than evolutionary transformative measures which brought about constructive changes to the political and social fibre of a secularised South Africa. In conjunction, globalisation as dominant worldview became evident in the transposition of South Africa into a secular, liberal, capitalistic, pluralistic society. Over this period the Afrikaans-speaking churches of reformed tradition were not immune to these influences, channelled via their members’ experiences of and responses to their changing social and economic setup. These churches have since also changed. Their influence on society and social matters has dwindled. The contexts of their congregations changed. Their traditional collective forms of institutionalised religion are changing due to the influence of a plurality of different personal, religious beliefs and practices. These developments challenge these churches to rethink their denominational identities and consider the way in which they approach society and what they can contribute to the ecumenical church.

‘Know Thyself’: What Kind of an Injunction?

1992 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 211-227
Author(s):  
Rowan Williams
Keyword(s):  
North Atlantic ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Complex Character ◽  
Disadvantaged Groups ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
The Right

To be told, ‘know thyself’ is to be told that I don't know myself yet: it carries the assumption that I am in some sense distracted from what or who I actually am, that I am in error or at least ignorance about myself. It thus further suggests that my habitual stresses, confusions and frustrations are substantially the result of failure or inability to see what is most profoundly true of me: the complex character of my injuries or traumas, the distinctive potential given me by my history and temperament. I conceal my true feelings from my knowing self; I am content to accept the ways in which other people define me, and so fail to ‘take my own authority’ and decide for myself who or what I shall be. The therapy-orientated culture of the North Atlantic world in the past couple of decades has increasingly taken this picture as foundational, looking to ‘self-discovery’ or ‘self-realization’ as the precondition of moral and mental welfare. And the sense of individual alienation from a true and authoritative selfhood mirrors the political struggle for the right of hitherto disadvantaged groups, especially non-white and non-male, to establish their own self-definition. The rhetoric of discovering a true but buried identity spreads over both private and political spheres. The slogan of the earliest generation of articulate feminists, ‘The personal is the political’, expresses the recognition of how this connection might be made.

scholarly journals Black and White in Ink: Discourses of Resistance in South African Cartooning

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 385-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDY MASON
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
Black South African ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Vexing Question

ABSTRACT This author contends that cartooning in its various forms in South Africa played an important role in crystallising issues of allegiance and identity, introducing revolutionary concepts into public discourse, undermining the ideological hegemony of the apartheid state and legitimating the political struggle against apartheid. However, in spite of the fact that numerous black newspapers have subsisted to this day, there remains a dearth of black cartoonists in South Africa. The vexing question of why so few black cartoonists have emerged demands an answer. The villains of the piece appear to be the editors of the socalled 'liberal' newspapers who did nothing (and continue to do very little) to identify indigenous cartooning talent or promote the development of black South African cartooning, choosing rather to share the services of a few white cartoonists and to buy syndicated comic strips. Mason analyses this situation and offers a remedy for solving the problem.

PEACEFUL MEMORIES: REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN KANGWANE, SOUTH AFRICA

Africa ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shireen Ally
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Popular Memory

ABSTRACTDespite its manifest, if largely undocumented, histories of menacing violence and perilous politics, the thrust of popular memory in the former apartheid bantustan of KaNgwane insists that it was a peaceful, even apolitical, place. In a contemporary South African memorial culture that idealizes memories of victimization by (and resistance to) apartheid and its political violence, why would some in KaNgwane persistently narrate the past through tropes of peaceful order and disavowals of the political? Are these mnemonic effacements in KaNgwane best conceived of as forms of forgetting? This article challenges such a proposition. First, it recovers the hitherto unrecognized politics and violence in KaNgwane, in part (and paradoxically) out of the very same narratives that deny such histories. Second, it explores the dialectical co-implication of remembering and forgetting, and of memory and history, in KaNgwane's supposed anamnesis. And third, it proposes that the occlusions and assurances of memory in KaNgwane are structured by a localized semiotics in which politics is retrospectively signified by order and restraint, and negated by disorder and revolt. In this ‘memory work’, KaNgwane's past is anaesthetized of violence, and heroism is recovered not from rehearsals of victimization and resistance, but from memories of pacified civility instead.

scholarly journals The study to examine the effectiveness of the BoTT approach for water schemes to rural areas

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Vasanthie Munnery
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
New South ◽  
Development Programme ◽  
The Political ◽  
South African Government ◽  
African Government ◽  
The Past ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
The Government

The new South African Government that came into power in 1994 faced a daunting task of undoing the political injustices of the past. The government immediately introduced a Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) to address these injustices

scholarly journals Interregnum as a Legal and Political Concept: A Brief Contextual Survey

2016 ◽  
pp. 109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Theophanidis
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Main Section ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Political Concept

I propose to trace the dialogical path of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘interregnum’ briefly mentioned in one of his prison notebooks which was rediscovered in recent years and used in various political writings. I will first examine the meaning of the concept of interregnum in the context of Roman law, where it originates. Second, I’ll show how the Italian writer used it in a two-page note included in his Quaderni del carcere to describe the political crisis of our times. I will also briefly sketch the renewal of the idea of interregnum from the 1980s onward, when a specific quote from Gramsci’s note was used to frame various political crises, from South African apartheid to the civil war in Syria, all the way to the rise of a new far right ideology. In the third and main section, I’ll explore in more detail how, in the past five years, Keith Tester, Zygmunt Bauman, and Étienne Balibar all explicitly engage with the idea of interregnum in an open dialogue. While referencing one another, they used Gramsci’s interpretation of the concept in an effort to understand and address the contemporary problem of political synthesis. In the fourth part, and in the spirit of keeping discussion open, I will raise some issues regarding the various paths proposed by Bauman and Balibar to find our way ‘out of the interregnum.

Settling on a Shared Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fanie du Toit
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
South African ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Political Transition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Peace Accord ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Reality

This chapter challenges the assumption that a society should first deal with its past before moving on to a new future, arguing instead that settling on a shared future provides the basis for dealing with the past. A key question is what kinds of processes can take reconciliation forward and turn it into a political reality characterized by durability and deep-seated institutional change toward inclusivity and fairness. I highlight four mechanisms created during the South African transition that I consider the most important and relevant to reconciliation. These platforms—the National Peace Accord (NPA), the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), the Multi-Party Negotiating Forum (MPNF), and the TRC—carried out vitally important work, expanding the political transition across lines of political conflict. Analyzing the first three mechanisms in terms of their inclusivity and fairness occupies most of the chapter, as well as to understand how they built on, and complemented, one another.

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