scholarly journals Ontwikkeling – die illusie van die twintigste eeu?

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
B.J. Van der Walt

Development – the illusion of the twentieth century? Extensive research during especially the last decade has indicated inter alia that development has not been the success story so often portrayed; that the concept itself is not as clear as it was supposed to be and that the current kind of development is not necessarily the only way to advance human well-being. The question has even been asked whether development was not the great(est) illusion of the past fifty years. Christians and the various South African denominations which, because of the poverty in society, are getting involved in all kinds of development projects, should take cognisance of these scientific results about development. To prevent ultimate disappointment the aim of this article is not to reject the alleviation of poverty through development. An overview of the massive amount of available material intends to contribute towards more critical insight. By way of a brief historical overview this article first traces the origin and ideal of development. Without ignoring the successful projects, it then draws attention to the general failure of development. This is followed by a more detailed investigation into the possible reasons for its failure. In conclusion the alternative of a Christian perspective on development is considered.

Author(s):  
Angelos Koutsourakis ◽  
Mark Steven

This book examines the oeuvre of Theo Angelopoulos, whose films are deeply immersed in the historical experiences of his homeland, Greece, while the international appeal of his work can be attributed to his firm commitment to modernism as a formal response to the crises and failures of world history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It considers some of the main themes in Angelopoulos' filmography, including the crisis of representation and the force of mediation; the question of representing history and how to come to terms with the past; the failures of the utopian aspirations of the twentieth century; issues of forced political or economic migration and exile; and the persistence of history in a supposedly post-historical present. This introduction discusses the lack of critical attention that Angelopoulos' cinema has received in the Anglophone scholarship and provides a historical overview of Angelopoulos' modernist cinema. It also summarises the individual chapters that follow.


2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Clinton De Menezes

This research aims to critically investigate the changing colonial and post-colonial attitudes towards the South African landscape, as physical space and its representation, through a post-colonial and Post-Modern critique. Chapter One explores the shifting colonial attitudes toward the landscape from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, to provide an historical overview and context for contemporary practice. Section One defines colonialism for the purposes of this study and provides a brief history of colonialism in South Africa. Section Two provides a concise history of European visual representation from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century in order to contextualize the development of South African landscape painting. Section Three analyzes and evaluates changing colonial attitudes and their representation through a discussion of the work of Francois Le Vaillant (1753-1842), Thomas Baines (1820-1875) and J.H. Pierneef (1886-1957). Chapter Two explores attitudes towards the South African landscape between 1948 and 1994 in order to provide a link between colonial representation and post-colonial contemporary practice.


2003 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 87-106
Author(s):  
Benedict Carton

The 2001 launch of the fifth volume of theJames Stuart Archivereinforces this publication's reputation as a mother lode of primary evidence. TheArchive'sexistence is largely due to the efforts of two editors, Colin De B. Webb and John Wright, who transformed a tangle of notes into lucid text. They deciphered the interviews that Natal colonist James Stuart conducted with a range of informants, many of them elderly isiZulu-speaking men. Transcribed by Stuart between the 1890s and 1920s, these discussions often explored in vivid detail the customs, lore, and lineages of southern Africa. Although references to theArchiveabound in revisionist histories of southern Africa, few scholars have assessed how testimonies recorded by Stuart have critically influenced such pioneering research. Fewer still have incorporated the compelling views of early twentieth-century cultural change that Stuart's informants bring to a post-apartheid understanding of South Africa's past.Well before the University of Natal Press published volume 5, the evidence presented in theArchivehad already led scholars of South African history into fertile, unmarked terrain. One example of groundbreaking data can be found in the statements of volume 4's master interpreter of Zulu power, Ndukwana kaMbengwana. His observations of the past anchor recent studies that debunk myths surrounding the early-nineteenth-century expansion of Shaka's kingdom. Ever timely, the endnotes in volume 5 discuss these reappraisals of historical interpretation and methodology. Editor John Wright elaborates in his preface: “By the time we picked up work on volume 5, we were starting to take note … that oral histories should be seen less as stories containing a more or less fixed ‘core’ of facts than as fluid narratives whose content could vary widely.”


2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 797-832 ◽  
Author(s):  
DEEPAK NAYYAR

This paper situates the economic performance of independent India in historical perspective to evaluate the past and reflect on the future. It shows that the turning point in economic growth was circa 1951 in the long twentieth century and circa 1980 in India since independence. Thus, it is not possible to attribute the turnaround in India's performance to economic liberalization beginning 1991. During the period 1950–1980, economic growth in India was respectable, for it was a radical departure from the past and no worse than the performance of most countries. During the period 1980–2005, economic growth in India was impressive, indeed much better than in most countries. The real failure in both these periods was India's inability to transform this growth into well-being for all its people. And India's unfinished journey in development cannot be complete as long as poverty, deprivation and exclusion persist. Even so, with correctives, it should be possible to reach the destination.


Author(s):  
Martin P. Botha

The following article is the concluding half (part 1 published in Kinema Spring 2006) of a three-section historical overview of South African cinema from early beginnings as newsreels during the Anglo-Boer War to the recent international acclaim for features such as Tsotsi. Some of the veterans of South African cinema are also acknowledged. The last section of this article is dedicated to South African documentary filmmaking. (2) PROFILES OF VETERAN DIRECTORS ALTHOUGH 1994 saw the birth of democracy in South Africa our film industry is much older; in fact, our great documentary film tradition dates back to 1896 and the Anglo-Boer War.(1) While celebrating the past ten years of democracy, we shouldn't forget those filmmakers who created films against all the odds. Jans Rautenbach (Jannie Totsiens), Ross Devenish (Marigolds in August) and the younger generation of the 1980s challenged moral and political censorship, a severe lack of...


Historia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Sabata-mpo Mokae

There has been an upswing in attention to South African biography in the past few decades, with a welcome trend towards remaking or revising the canon of important figures from the South African past. This has included edited collections of the works of prominent individuals, and notable among these have been early-twentieth century black African politicians and writers. Historical Publications Southern Africa (renamed from its previous moniker, the Van Riebeeck Society) has published four edited collections of the writings of such individuals since 2008, including Isaac Williams Wauchope, Richard Victor Solope Thema, and A.B. Xuma. A Life in Letters, a collection of Solomon T. Plaatje's correspondence, is the fourth such volume in just over a decade. There are 260 letters, written from 1896 to 1932, included in the book. Most are in English, but some are in Setswana, Dutch/Afrikaans, and a few are in German. Although a number of the letters are from the collections of the Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand, the reviewer counted twenty-seven different collections across three continents. The book is thus an excellent resource not only for historians, but also for students and the general public who now have access to a wide range of Plaatje's thoughts, opinions, and emotions that are evident in his letters.


2020 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 187-206
Author(s):  
CHRISTIAN SPENCER-ESPINOSA

AbstractThis article presents a historical overview of traditional music studies in Chile, pointing out some of the main achievements and problems. It describes the origins of traditional music studies through the establishment of the Chilean Folk Society in 1909 and then offers a periodisation of studies during the twentieth century, followed by a critical review of the preference for facts over processes. Finally, it explores the renaissance of traditional music studies during the last 30 years (1990–2020), analysing 123 dissertations about traditional music and the concepts of “tradition” they employ. It concludes that Chilean folk studies have changed from a scientific to a humanistic approach, using the idea of tradition as a comprehensive concept and the idea of folklore as behaviour or performance.


Crisis ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lourens Schlebusch ◽  
Naseema B.M. Vawda ◽  
Brenda A. Bosch

Summary: In the past suicidal behavior among Black South Africans has been largely underresearched. Earlier studies among the other main ethnic groups in the country showed suicidal behavior in those groups to be a serious problem. This article briefly reviews some of the more recent research on suicidal behavior in Black South Africans. The results indicate an apparent increase in suicidal behavior in this group. Several explanations are offered for the change in suicidal behavior in the reported clinical populations. This includes past difficulties for all South Africans to access health care facilities in the Apartheid (legal racial separation) era, and present difficulties of post-Apartheid transformation the South African society is undergoing, as the people struggle to come to terms with the deleterious effects of the former South African racial policies, related socio-cultural, socio-economic, and other pressures.


What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.


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