scholarly journals The Hybridity of South African Working-Class Literature

Author(s):  
Małgorzata Drwal

In this chapter I present an overview of the most prominent trends in South African working-class literature from the beginning of the 20th century until 1994. Since its emergence, South African working class was a heterogeneous formation which encompassed diverse ethnicities, both of European and non-European origin. Each of them created its own literature and culture, using various languages, incorporating traditional elements and means of expression, and merging them with borrowed foreign discourses and literary devices belonging to the repertoire of socialist literature that had been created mostly in the Soviet Union, the USA and other European countries. Consequently, South African working-class literature can be conceived of as conglomerate of heteroglot hybrid forms and manifestations of a subversive counter-discourse of protest literature. The forms presented here include writings of European socialists commenting on South African situation, novels utilizing the Jim goes to Joburg plot pattern, drama incorporating the Soviet socialist realism and references to the Afrikaans farm novel, Afrikaans folk tunes functioning as protest songs, and black workers praise poetry based on tribal oral conventions. As a carrier of a new working-class identity, this literature promoted a modern urban model which, nevertheless, relied on the continuity with local rural traditions.

10.16993/bbf ◽  
2020 ◽  

The aim of this collection is to contribute to the forging of a more robust, politically useful, and theoretically elaborate understanding of working-class literature(s). These essays map a substantial terrain: the history of working-class literature(s) in Argentina, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Singapore, South Africa and Ireland. Together with the essays in a previous volume – which cover Russia/The Soviet Union, The USA, Finland, Sweden, The UK, and Mexico – they give a complex picture of working-class literature(s) from an international perspective, without losing sight of national specificities. By capturing a wide range of definitions and literatures, the two volumes give a broad and rich picture of the many-facetted phenomenon of working-class literature(s), disrupt narrow understandings of the concept and phenomenon, as well as identify and discuss some of the most important theoretical and historical questions brought to the fore by the study of this literature.If read as stand-alone chapters, each contribution gives an overview of the history and research of a particular nation’s working-class literature. If read as a whole (which we hope you do), they contribute toward a more complex understanding of the global phenomenon of working-class literature(s).


2020 ◽  
pp. 245-265
Author(s):  
Арсен Артурович Григорян

Цель данной статьи - описать условия, в которых Армянская Апостольская Церковь вступила в эпоху правления Н. С. Хрущёва, начавшуюся в 1953 г. По содержанию статью можно поделить на две части: в первой даются сведения о количестве приходов на территории Советского Союза и за его пределами, а также о составе армянского духовенства в СССР; во второй излагаются проблемы, существовавшие внутри Армянской Церкви, и рассматриваются их причины. Методы исследования - описание и анализ. Ценность исследования заключается в использовании ранее неопубликованных документов Государственного архива Российской Федерации и Национального архива Армении. По итогам изучения фактического материала выделяются основные проблемы Армянской Апостольской Церкви на 1953 г.: финансовый дефицит, конфликт армянских католикосатов и стремление враждующих СССР и США использовать церковь в своих политических целях. The purpose of this article is to describe the conditions in which the Armenian Apostolic Church entered the epoch of the reign of N. S. Khrushchev, which began in 1953. The article can be divided into two parts: first one gives information about the number of parishes in the territory of the Soviet Union and beyond, and about the structure of the Armenian clergy in the USSR; the second one sets out the problems that existed in the Armenian Church and discusses their causes. Research methods - description and analysis. The value of the study lies in the use of previously unpublished documents of the State Archive of the Russian Federation and the National Archive of Armenia. Based on the results of studying the materials, the main problems of the Armenian Apostolic Church in 1953 are: financial deficit, the conflict of Armenian Catholicosates and the eagerness of USSR and the USA, that feuded with each other, to use the Сhurch for their political purposes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (21) ◽  
pp. 9-28
Author(s):  
Kristo Karvinen

The 1939 invasion of Finland by the Soviet Union attracted more than just journalists to the frigid north. Thousands of volunteers around the world rallied under the Finnish flag, willing to risk their lives for a foreign country. Over ten thousand arrived before the end of the war, with more on their way, coming from Hungary and Estonia, Canada and the USA, Sweden and the UK. Were they all ardent anticommunists or did they have other motives? This article seeks to answer that question, utilising Finnish and British archives as well as contemporary research into war volunteering. The origins and motives of the volunteers are examined, revealing that their motives ran a wide gamut, including such reasons as anti-communism, linguistic fraternity and spirit of adventure, to name a few.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Peacock

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the relationship between childhood, consumption and the Cold War in 1950s America and the Soviet Union. The author argues that Soviet and American leaders, businessmen, and politicians worked hard to convince parents that buying things for their children offered the easiest way to raise good American and Soviet kids and to do their part in waging the economic battles of the Cold War. The author explores how consumption became a Cold War battleground in the late 1950s and suggests that the history of childhood and Cold War consumption alters the way we understand the conflict itself. Design/Methodology/Approach – Archival research in the USA and the Russian Federation along with close readings of Soviet and American advertisements offer sources for understanding the global discourse of consumption in the 1950s and 1960s. Findings – Leaders, advertisers, and propagandists in the Soviet Union and the USA used the same images in the same ways to sell the ethos of consumption to their populations. They did this to sell the Cold War, to bolster the status quo, and to make profits. Originality/Value – This paper offers a previously unexplored, transnational perspective on the role that consumption and the image of the child played in shaping the Cold War both domestically and abroad.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-182
Author(s):  
Alexander Ivanovich Repinetskiy

The paper is devoted to history of childrens home 25 established in 1946 on the territory of the Kuibyshev Region. Children of Russian emigrants living in Austria were accommodated there. These children were transferred to representatives of the Soviet authorities by the American administration. Under the terms of the agreements between the USSR, the USA and Great Britain signed at the Yalta conference (1945) people with the Soviet nationality were transferred to the Soviet Union. Children of Russian emigrants born in Austria didnt belong to this category but despite it they were transferred to the Soviet Union. Local authorities didnt know what to do with repatriated children. That is why the childrens home was established in a remote rural area; life and material conditions of its inhabitants were heavy: there was no necessary furniture or school supplies. Its tutors and staff were in a more difficult situation. Some of them lost their jobs. Some children were returned to parents. Unfortunately, available documents do not allow tracking the future of the children from this childrens home.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-160
Author(s):  
Alexey V. Antoshin ◽  
Dmitry L. Strovsky

The article analyzes the features of Soviet emigration and repatriation in the second half of the 1960s through the early 1970s, when for the first time after a long period of time, and as a result of political agreements between the USSR and the USA, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews were able to leave the Soviet Union for good and settle in the United States and Israel. Our attention is focused not only on the history of this issue and the overall political situation of that time, but mainly on the peculiarities of this issue coverage by the leading American printed media. The reference to the media as the main empirical source of this study allows not only perceiving the topic of emigration and repatriation in more detail, but also seeing the regularities of the political ‘face’ of the American press of that time. This study enables us to expand the usual framework of knowledge of emigration against the background of its historical and cultural development in the 20th century.


Author(s):  
Lindy Steibel

Lewis Nkosi is increasingly recognized as one of South Africa’s foremost literary critics, and also as an iconoclastic writer of novels and plays. His years as an exile during the apartheid era meant, however, that his reputation within South Africa was for some time less secure than it was abroad. Born in Chesterville, a black Durban township, Nkosi came from a female-headed, working-class family. He was mission-schooled in Eshowe and then embarked on a career that began with a short but important journalistic stint at Drum magazine. To take up a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 1961, Nkosi left South Africa on a one-way exit permit. For the rest of his life he lived variously in England, Zambia, Poland, the USA and Switzerland, following a writing and academic career. Nkosi’s style is a distinctive one, at odds with much of the naturalist writing that characterized South African black ‘protest’ fiction of the apartheid years. Influenced by the writings of Faulkner, Kafka and Joyce, Nkosi’s style is modernist, suggestive and symbolic. His loyalty to form, and to the stringent demands of a modernist perception of art, is evident in his critical essays, gathered into three collections: Home and Exile (1965), The Transplanted Heart: essays on South Africa (1975), and Tasks and Masks: themes and styles of African literature (1981).


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-363
Author(s):  
Birk Engmann

The present article reports on the life and work of a protagonist of the concept of reflexology. While the concept itself has its roots in Russia, in Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s research on conditioned reflexes, and was then shaped to a large extent by Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev, the contributions of Naum Efimovich Ischlondsky (Ishlondsky) have been largely forgotten. Moreover, he developed this concept throughout his life up to the 1960s, by which time he was living in the USA. In contrast, in the Soviet Union, the concepts of reflexology based on the work of Bechterev and his followers had already been abandoned by the 1930s for largely political reasons.


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