scholarly journals ‘Op die limiete’: Karel Schoeman se Verkenning (1996)

Literator ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 57-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Van Vuuren
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Creative Imagination ◽  
Intercultural Relationships ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
New Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

‘At the limits’: Karel Schoeman’s Verkenning (1996)Written from the postcolonial vantage point of the new South Africa, Karel Schoeman's Verkenning (Reconnaissance) deals with the colonial era of the early nineteenth century. Through metafictional commentary the reader is alerted to the provisionality and tentativeness of historical fiction, as fiction and historical facts are constantly juxtaposed. At the same time the novel can be read as an attempt to fathom the ‘darkness’ of the bygone era, and to throw ‘light’ on the nature of intercultural relationships during the period of the Batavian Republic (1803-1806). Of central importance, however, is the way in which the consciousness of a new era is suggested through the subtle functioning of numerous intertexts. These intertexts deal with various forms of transitional consciousness, such as those associated with the French Revolution. A remarkable characteristic of the novel is its historiographic metafictionality, an innovative element in Schoeman’s oeuvre. Verkenning (Reconnaissance) is a polyphonic novel in which a collage of voices is foregrounded and presented in the process of ‘exploring’. From within the politically transformed multicultural South Africa of the late twentieth century, the creative imagination explores the roots of this society in the history of almost two centuries ago. In this respect Verkenning may be characterised as a postcolonial narrative construct and thus part of "oorgangsliteratuur" or “Wendeliteratur”, a term coined for the literature produced after the political change in 1989/1990 in Germany.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alys Moody
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This book has traced a history of modernism’s decline and of its doubters. In post-Vichy France, the US circa 1968, and late apartheid South Africa, modernism’s fate was precarious, its reputation tarnished, and its politics reviled. The inescapability of the political in these contexts compromised the structural conditions of the autonomous literary field on which modernism had been built. In turn, it threw into crisis the philosophical defense of autonomy and the literary legacies of modernism, which grew out of and were guaranteed by this autonomous literary field. The stories we tell about late twentieth-century literary history reflect this dilemma. According to received wisdom, the period between 1945 and 1990 saw postmodernism replace modernism in both literature and scholarship, and new waves of postcolonial literature and theory discredited the Eurocentric specter of modernism. ...

Writing self and kin: diasporic mourning in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet

2019 ◽  
pp. 151-174
Author(s):  
Gigi Adair
Keyword(s):  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Queer Diaspora ◽  
Kinship Bonds ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Contemporary Britain

This chapter considers how queer diaspora may be generated via mourning. Jackie Kay’s novel shows how mourning makes visible and performatively constructs kinship bonds, and that it is also an active process which rewrites the lives of the dead and living. This process of mourning and the constitution of self and kin in the novel takes place in the ‘diaspora space’ of contemporary Britain. Mourning is a force which creates queer diasporic bonds, affirming connections with the dead and transforming the living, enfolding the past into the future. It becomes clear that mourning and kinship are not only individually determined, but also influenced by a shared Black Atlantic history of loss, displacement and racialization. The novel suggests that two modes of kinship – one state-recognized, governed by genealogy or legal recognition, the other mobile, performative and created by shared experience and aesthetic creation – coexist in the context of late twentieth-century Britain, and that these latter, queerly diasporic notions of kinship have shaped contemporary Britain in numerous ways.

“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

URBAN DISPLACEMENT AND LOW-INCOME COMMUNITIES: THE CASE OF THE AMERICAN CITY FROM THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 06 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Knight ◽  
Mohammad Gharipour
Keyword(s):  
Urban Communities ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Urban Redevelopment ◽  
Minority Populations ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Cultural Connections ◽  
American Cities ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

How can urban redevelopment benefit existing low-income communities? The history of urban redevelopment is one of disruption of poor communities. Renewal historically offered benefits to the place while pushing out the people. In some cases, displacement is intentional, in others it is unintentional. Often, it is the byproduct of the quest for profits. Regardless of motives, traditional communities, defined by cultural connections, are often disrupted. Disadvantaged neighborhoods include vacant units, which diminish the community and hold back investment. In the postwar period, American cities entered into a program of urban renewal. While this program cleared blight, it also drove displacement among the cities’ poorest and was particularly hard on minority populations clustered in downtown slums. The consequences of these decisions continue to play out today. Concentration of poverty is increasing and American cities are becoming more segregated. As neighborhoods improve, poorer residents are uprooted and forced into even more distressed conditions, elsewhere. This paper examines the history of events impacting urban communities. It further reviews the successes and failures of efforts to benefit low-income communities.

The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Colby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodernMuslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforceof critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both throughits engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the presentand through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. Asits title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternativelypromoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth atdifferent points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalistapproach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favoramong Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarilyat specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholarsof history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interestedin the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, andthe interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim beliefand practice ...

The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Freidenfelds
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Maternal Education ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Unrealistic Expectation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy is a history of why Americans came to have the unrealistic expectation of perfect pregnancies and to mourn even very early miscarriages. The introduction explains that miscarriage is a common phenomenon and a natural part of healthy women’s childbearing: approximately 20 percent of confirmed pregnancies spontaneously miscarry, mostly in the first months of gestation. Eight topical chapters describe childbearing and pregnancy loss in colonial America; the rise of birth control from the late eighteenth century to the present; changes in parenting from the early nineteenth century to the present that increasingly focused attention on the emotional relationship between parent and child; the twentieth-century rise of prenatal care and maternal education about embryonic growth; the twentieth-century blossoming of a consumer culture that marketed baby items to pregnant women; the abortion debates from the mid-twentieth century to the present; the late twentieth-century introduction of obstetric ultrasound and its evolution into a pregnancy ritual of “meeting the baby” as early as eight weeks’ gestation; and the late twentieth-century introduction of home pregnancy testing and the identification of pregnancy as early as several days before a missed period. The conclusion offers suggestions for how women and their families, health-care providers, and the maternity care industry can better handle pregnancy and address miscarriage.

scholarly journals Adapting Wives and Daughters for Television: Reimagining Women, Travel, Natural Science, and Race

Adaptation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gill Ballinger
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Black People ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
The Novel ◽  
African People ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Abstract This essay examines the depiction of women, travel, natural science, and race in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66) and Andrew Davies’s BBC adaptation of the novel (1999). It argues that the adaptation offers a recognizable transposition of Gaskell’s text, but makes some significant adjustments that reveal its contemporary reimagining of the novel’s gender and racial politics. In particular, Davies transforms Gaskell’s unexceptional female protagonist Molly Gibson into a proto-feminist naturalist adventurer, and revisions the casual racism the novel expresses towards black people in line with late-twentieth-century sensibilities. Each text, novel and film, reveals the period-specific ideological forces that shape its portrayal of Englishwomen and African people.

scholarly journals Pharmaceuticals and modern statecraft in South Africa: the cases of opium, thalidomide and contraception.

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 253-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Parle ◽  
Rebecca Hodes ◽  
Thembisa Waetjen
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Pharmaceutical Regulation ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Histories ◽  
Pharmaceutical Governance

This article provides a history of three pharmaceuticals in the making of modern South Africa. Borrowing and adapting Arthur Daemmrich’s term ‘pharmacopolitics’, we examine how forms of pharmaceutical governance became integral to the creation and institutional practices of this state. Through case studies of three medicaments: opium (late 19th to early 20th century), thalidomide (late 1950s to early 1960s) and contraception (1970s to 2010s), we explore the intertwining of pharmaceutical regulation, provision and consumption. Our focus is on the modernist imperative towards the rationalisation of pharmaceutical oversight, as an extension of the state’s bureaucratic and ideological objectives, and, importantly, as its obligation. We also explore adaptive and illicit uses of medicines, both by purveyors of pharmaceuticals, and among consumers. The historical sweep of our study allows for an analysis of continuities and changes in pharmaceutical governance. The focus on South Africa highlights how the concept of pharmacopolitics can usefully be extended to transnational—as well as local—medical histories. Through the diversity of our sources, and the breadth of their chronology, we aim to historicise modern pharmaceutical practices in South Africa, from the late colonial era to the Post-Apartheid present.

EXODUCTION

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Schechner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Oral Transmission ◽  
Transmission Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This essay by Richard Schechner dedicated to a mythical figure of the theater of the late twentieth century; a work of critical reconstruction that has contributed decisively to consolidating the legacy of Grotowski, just a few months after his death. In addition to fixing some essential terms of the vocabulary, together with the contents and the periodization of the Grotowskian work (aspects that Grotowski in life were entrusted exclusively to oral transmission), the essay retraces the formation of Grotowski, the aspects linked to his character, the specific forms of his research and his transmission of knowledge, the exercise of leadership, the role of his collaborators, the sources, the mystical side, his relationship with the spirit of time, the importance (and weakness) of his opera, in the history of twentieth century theater.

Mourning Otherwise

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Athena Athanasiou
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
Military Violence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
A Site ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter engages the discursive conditions that made ethno-nationalist ideologies and armed conflicts of the 1990s possible and probable. Indeed, the question of how to recall the late twentieth-century history of former Yugoslavia constitutes a central aspect of the Women in Black labour of memory. The dissolution of Yugoslavia, especially the normalization of nationalist military violence in the mid-1990s, has manifested gendered norms as constitutive of nationalist discourses. Drawing on the ways in which the movement performatively brings forth an alternative public to embody the potentiality of displaced memory, this chapter argues in favor of breaking through the universalist, moralist, and humanist scripts of mourning. It seeks to make sense of the politically enabling ways in which these activists stage mourning as a site of agonistic resignification in order to interrogate the injustices and foreclosures which sustain dominant regimes of grievability, in Judith Butler’s terms.

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