scholarly journals ‘Remember Sharpeville’: Radical Commemoration in the Poetry of the Exiled South African Poets, Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-46
Author(s):  
Karin Berkman
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
South African ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
The Face ◽  
Dennis Brutus ◽  
Fundamental Shift ◽  
Robben Island

The Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 has been widely seen as a watershed moment, marking a fundamental shift in the nature of the resistance to apartheid. Its effect on cultural production was monumental: in the face of a massive government crackdown, almost every black writer and artist of note was forced into exile. The poets who write within the long shadow of the massacre must negotiate its legacy and the fraught question of its commemoration.This article takes as its point of focus two poems by Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile that address the place of Sharpeville in cultural memory. I consider the distinctiveness of the poetics of mourning and commemoration that they fashion in relation to South Africa’s most renowned elegy for the victims of Sharpeville, Ingrid Jonker’s “The Child.” I suggest that Brutus’ anti-poetic, subverted elegy “Sharpeville” re-stages commemoration as an act of resistance that is prospective rather than retrospective. In considering Kgositsile’s poem “When Brown is Black,” I examine Kgositsile’s transnational framing of Sharpeville and its location on a continuum of racial suffering, drawing attention to the significance of the links that Kgositsile forges between Malcolm X and “the brothers on Robben Island,” (42) and between Sharpeville and the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965. This paper suggests that for both Brutus and Kgositsile commemoration is framed as a mode of activism. Keywords: Sharpeville, Ingrid Jonker, Dennis Brutus, Keorapetse Kgositsile, cultural memory, commemoration, elegy

Apartheid Aesthetics and Insignificant Art

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Stephanus Muller
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
South African ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Art Songs ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Small House ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Selection Of

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.

World Literature, the opaque archive, and the untranslatable: J. M. Coetzee and some others

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942098874
Author(s):  
Andrew van der Vlies
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Limit Case ◽  
Global Community ◽  
Theoretical Orientations ◽  
Disciplinary Field

A key concern of recent theoretical orientations in the development of “World Literature” as a discipline has been the question of accessibility to literatures in minor languages, which is to say of literal and metaphorical translatability, even transparency. This essay explores the challenge posed by the occlusion of the possible intertextual influence of works in such languages that are evident only as a trace in texts that now seem indisputably part of a canon of World Literature. What happens when the engagement of writers in this canon with cultural production in languages adjacent to those in which they themselves principally operate is not evident to an increasingly global community of scholars, and perhaps not even evidenced in an author’s archive (whether this is understood to be a material collection or indeed a virtual space conceptualized as the literary ecosystem in which an author has developed)? This essay addresses these questions with reference to the work of South African-born Nobel Prize-winning writer J. M. Coetzee, and to the problem posed by some of his work’s (and his archive’s) others, here specifically Afrikaners and the work of Afrikaans-language writers. This consideration has implications not only for the current shape of Coetzee studies, but for that of World Literature more broadly, presenting something of a limit-case for the translation metaphor that directs some of its formulations as disciplinary field.

Accountability and the Media

2014 ◽  
Vol 652 (1) ◽  
pp. 206-221
Author(s):  
Anton Harber
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Access ◽  
Political Interference ◽  
The Face ◽  
Public Broadcaster ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Poor Management

Two decades of contestation over the nature and extent of transformation in the South African news media have left a sector different in substantive ways from the apartheid inheritance but still patchy in its capacity to fill the democratic ideal. Change came fast to a newly open broadcasting sector, but has faltered in recent years, particularly in a public broadcaster troubled by political interference and poor management. The potential of online media to provide much greater media access has been hindered by the cost of bandwidth. Community media has grown but struggled to survive financially. Print media has been aggressive in investigative exposé, but financial cutbacks have damaged routine daily coverage. In the face of this, the government has turned its attention to the print sector, demanding greater—but vaguely defined—transformation and threatened legislation. This has met strong resistance.

scholarly journals Źródła do odbudowy państwa polskiego w archiwach polonijnych w USA

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 111-136
Author(s):  
Anna Krochmal
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Military Mission ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Commander In Chief

The article discusses the role of Polish and Polish diaspora organizations in the USA, and the role of their archives, libraries, and museum deposits in the study of the first years of the independent Polish state. The most important ones, created in the USA in the 19th and the 20th century by Polish immigrants, are the Józef Piłsudski Institute of America (located in New York), the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (located in New York), the Polish Army Veterans’ Association in America (located in New York), the Polish Museum of America (located in Chicago), the Polish Archive in the Polish Catholic Mission in Orchard Lake near Detroit, and the Polish Music Center in Los Angeles. The key role in the study of the restoration of the Polish state in 1918-1923 plays the Józef Piłsudski Institute of America, established on 4 July 1943 as a descendant of the Institute for Research into the Modern Polish History functioning in Warsaw between 1923 and 1939. The institute holds the so-called Belvedere Archives, saved in 1939 from Warsaw and taken from Europe to New York. It contains the documents of the Adjutancy Commander in Chief from the years 1918-1922, illustrating the struggle for the borders of the restored Polish state; documents of the Ukrainian Military Mission, showing Polish-Ukrainian cooperation in the face of the threat from Bolshevik Russia; documents from three Silesian uprisings, and archives of well-known supporters of Piłsudski, e.g. General Julian Stachiewicz and Marshal Rydz-Śmigły. Other additional sources from the years 1918-1923 are stored by Polish diaspora institutions, including priceless and understudied documents concerning the prominent composer, diplomat, and politician Ignacy Jan Paderewski, as well as unique materials concerning Polish volunteers from the USA fighting along with General Józef Haller’s so-called Blue Army.

scholarly journals An attack on the Cross: Spiritual leaders’ accounts of fear and resilience during COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mammusa Rosinah Lekoa ◽  
Sibusiso Louis Ntuli
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Spiritual Leaders ◽  
Vulnerable Communities ◽  
Difficult Time ◽  
Essential Services ◽  
The Face ◽  
African Context ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

This paper provides accounts on the impact that COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdown(s) had on the Church and its leaders in the South African context. The study explores challenges that the leaders faced and how they dealt with them to remain standing despite their fears. The context is COVID-19 pandemic, which brought mass deaths, fear, confusion and frustration to congregations globally. Church leaders faced a challenge to show resilience amid fear because they too were directly affected. Governments introduced regulations that imposed lockdowns to control the spread of the virus. Limiting contact by restricting distance amongst citizens. The church was one sector that could not operate. Although some sectors were never declared essential services like churches, this left vulnerable communities without support in the face of fear. Spiritual leaders had to demonstrate resilience to support the congregants. The key question the researchers seek to understand is to what extent did the church remain resilient during COVID-19 pandemic? And how did the church leaders deal with fear despite anointing and expectations from the congregants and communities? A qualitative approach was used in this study. COVID-19 has shown that Church leaders are humans and they are also fearful, however their faith in God has assisted them to show resilience even at this difficult time. The study also asserts that governments should consult different groupings of faith-based organisations, not only those that are under organised bodies before embarking on restrictions for pandemic control. Communities encompass many churches and leaders require support to assist them from church members.

Moving Social Policy from Mental Illness to Public Wellbeing

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
MATTHEW FISHER
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Universal Access ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Theory Of Change ◽  
Psychological Wellbeing ◽  
Policy Action ◽  
Recent Theoretical Work ◽  
The Face ◽  
Fundamental Shift

Abstract In the face of global epidemics of mental ill-health, the future of social policy lies with promotion of public wellbeing. This article aims to provide an explanatory rationale and methods for a fundamental shift in social policy; away from a remedial focus on mental ill-health defined in terms of disease or aberrant behaviour and toward a focus on universal access to social conditions favourable to psychological wellbeing. The paper begins with prefacing argument about the urgent need for such a shift, noting the high rates of mental ill-health globally and the failure of current biomedical responses to reduce these. Building on recent theoretical work on public wellbeing and evidence on social determinants of mental health, the paper then proposes nine domains for social policy and broader public policy action, to create conditions supportive of wellbeing abilities. Finally, the paper presents several conceptual issues relating to the challenge of putting such action into practice and concludes that contemporary understanding of wellbeing offers a theory of change to shift social policy from mental illness to public wellbeing.

Terry Gilliam

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Set Design ◽  
No Production ◽  
Brothers Grimm ◽  
Terry Gilliam ◽  
The Face ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Monty Python

With a directorial career spanning over forty years, Terry Gilliam (b. 1940) remains rooted in the sensibilities of his early work in animation. Born in Minnesota and raised in the Los Angeles area, Gilliam, sometimes classified as a British filmmaker, has lived in England since the 1960s, renouncing his US citizenship in 2006. As the resident animator of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–1974), Gilliam created surreal and absurd vignettes from cutout images that complemented the live sketches. After partnering with fellow Python Terry Jones in directing Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Gilliam struck off on his own with Jabberwocky (1977). Many films followed in which one or more members of Monty Python appeared as actors under his direction. Though Gilliam’s works ostensibly cover diverse subjects—bureaucracy, virus outbreaks, and the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, to name only a few—all engage with questions of the power and problems of the imagination in the face of an often-grim or oppressive reality. The overall look of a Gilliam film is unmistakable as well, with off-kilter shots meant to disorient the viewer and crowded mises-en-scène. His use of wide-angle lenses is so extensive that the 14-millimeter lens has been nicknamed “the Gilliam.” Deeply involved not only in camerawork but in many other aspects of production such as costuming, set design, and scriptwriting, Gilliam would seem to fit the definition of an auteur. However, in numerous interviews, Gilliam resists that label, stressing his collaborative approach and openness to suggestions. Indeed, the process of making and distributing his films has sometimes garnered as much, if not more, attention than the films themselves. Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Brothers Grimm (2005), and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2014) all faced disruptions and setbacks of various kinds. No production was bedeviled so long and in so many ways as The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), taking nearly thirty years to reach the screen. Frequently identifying with the main characters of his films in progress, Gilliam perhaps most resembles Don Quixote in his unstinting commitment to his vision, whether commercially successful or not, whether brilliant or baffling to critics or audiences.

Entgrenzte Figuren – bewegte Erinnerungen. Migration im Spannungsfeld von Literatur und Begriff

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 109-139
Author(s):  
Hamid Tafazoli
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Aesthetic Perception ◽  
Migration Literature ◽  
External Space ◽  
The One

Abstract My paper discusses the controversial relationship between literature and literary studies by using the example of the term ›migration literature‹. It demonstrates in the first part that ›migration literature‹ as a term in literary studies does not expose explications of rational reconstructions of a conceptual content in Harald Fricke’s and Klaus Weimar’s understanding. In its history (Adelson 1991; 2004), ›migration literature‹ goes back to a chain of different terms and definitions as Gastarbeiter- or Ausländerliteratur and reflects strategies of homogenization and exclusion. From the 1980s forward, those terms produce in cultural contexts a semantic field that propagates culture based on a definition of ex negativo (Tafazoli 2019). The first part of my paper describes an outline of influences of homogenization and reductionism on the discourses of migration in literary studies and explains in the second part an asymmetrical relationship between motive on the one hand and terminology on the other. The term ›migration literature‹ seems to dominate this relationship by determination of a source of ›accepted truths‹ related to the life and background – specifically to the place of birth and the origin – of the author (Bay 2017). By prioritization of criteria beyond narrative reality, literary studies led in the 1980s and 1990s discourses on migration on the sidelines of canon of German speaking literature (Weigel 1991; Wilpert 2001). With regard to terminological determination in order to produce interpretative sovereignty (Foucault 1994), my paper exemplifies in the second part that the term ›migration literature‹ collects selected and limited fields of social, historical and political knowledge in perspective adjustment and in order to classify literature beyond aesthetic criteria. By this means, inductive standards (Müller 2010a; 2010b) classify the literary object ›migration‹ ontologically and regardless of factuality of the author’s life on the one hand and fictionality of narrative text on the other. The ontological classification has been used, for example, in contexts that replace the figure of stranger (Fremder) by the figure of migrant and determines the latter as figuration of external space of culture. The replacement suggests a perspective rigidity in the cultural production of knowledge that flows into a terminological classification and claims with the term ›migration literature‹ sovereignty over culture. From this point of view, the author and his work should be located in the external space of canonized literature. The second part of my paper comes to the conclusion that the term ›migration literature‹ has been developed in politicized frames of external-textual ›accepted truths‹ and bases its stability on cultural essentialism and exclusion regardless of heterogenetic appearance (Bhatti 2015). With regard to theories of »literature on the move« (Ette 2001), my paper understands that migration has always formed a considerable part of literary production. Therefore, migration could be understood as a literary motive. This meaning would undermine an ontological understanding of culture. Narrative texts develop poetics of migration and create by figurations of migration a poly-perspectivity in which migration advances to a polysemantic motive. My paper discusses these thoughts in the context of cultural memory in the third part and understands varied and multifaceted constructions of cultural memory on all sides of cultural borders. This part confronts the asymmetrical relationship between motive and terminology with discussions on migration as narrative of cultural memory that belongs to cultural majority and minority equally, at the same time and in the same space. Based on this understanding, my paper argues that migration as a motive construct shapes and leads discourses of culture under the conditions of global re-formation. The shift of the perspective from conceptual classification to close-readings of literary constructions should lead us to considerations about the openness of the narrative in distinction to terminological unity and should also initiate a paradigm shift in locating migration in discourses of literary studies. The theoretical considerations will be exemplified in the fourth section by Mohammad Hossein Allafis Frankfurter Trilogie that is a collection of the novels Die Nächte am Main (1998), Die letzte Nacht mit Gabriela (2000) and Gabriela findet einen Stapel Papier (2012). The fourth part of my paper examines in Frankfurter Trilogie a reading that integrates migration as a motive into the discourse of cultural memory of global challenges. Using the example of the Trilogie, this part of my paper demonstrates that discussions on migration in the context of cultural memory could initiate a shift in the perspective of reception from conceptual homogenization to narrative openness. The shift of perspective shows that literature translates the questions of community into the aesthetic perception of the form of culture and civilization in which the community actually articulates and appears itself and shows also that reading of migration as a statement about one nation has lost its explanatory power. The last part of my paper resumes my thoughts and takes position in the current fields of research in literary studies.

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