Seminars

African jazz, also known as mbaqanga and less frequently as Majuba jazz, occupies an important but ambivalent position in the story of South African music.

Every country in the world has now legally abolished slavery, yet millions of people continue to be trapped in forms of human bondage which are widely regarded as similar and/or equivalent to abusive conditions under historical slave systems.

In this paper rather than adjudicate whether Wiehahn represented the first step down the road of reform or the last effort to shore up apartheid, I want to examine closely a specific fissure in South Africa’s industrial relations system considered in great detail by the Commission—that between th

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A study of the Independent Commission of Experts, popularly known as Bergier after its president, set up in Switzerland in the mid 1990s to establish, once and for all, the degree of complicity of the Swiss banks and authorities with the Nazi regime, has inspired me to return to South Africa’s Tr

This introductory essay considers how we might forge a critical language to discuss an emerging constellation of cultural production in South Africa: that which focuses on the work of ‘intimate exposure’ in order to shape a public private sphere, which in turn forges forms of citizens

In  researching  and  writing  change  in  three  cities  on  three  continents,  I  have confronted the question: what to make of ‘southern theory’ (Connell 2007) in relation to cities in the south as well as the north of th

This chapter documents the emergence of the local manufacturing of skin lighteners in South Africa, and the linked and shifting markets for these cosmetics in the United States and South Africa.

The paper explores various aspects in the development of the Palestinian national movement, with a focus on the ways in which it has conceptualized its core political goals. In particular, it looks at the extent to which it can be regarded as an anti-colonial or anti-apartheid movement.

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Social grants have become increasingly important income for many in South Africa. Grants are not welcomed by all however: in the village where I completed fieldwork as many as seventy per cent of its inhabitants rely on grants, people regard such transfers with suspicion.

In every British colony that received indentured workers from India, officials recorded personal and social details for identifying the arriving migrants. In the colony of Natal, just over 152,000 migrants were inscribed into such lists between 1860 and 1911.

This  paper  consists  of  two  parts:  first,  a  historical  summary  of  a broader  project  being  pursued;  second,  a  specific  thread  of   involving  the development  of&nbs

The privatisations of state corporations in South Africa were the local instantiation of the global rolling back of public spending and state intervention which came to be regarded as one of the defining features of ‘neoliberal’ policies.

In the different fields that explore the history of statistics and the history of surveillance, Galton is typically treated as a figure of European intellectual history.

One speaks of biographies and autobiographies in the struggle against apartheid.

Non-state transnational actors have always played a central role in Sahelian economic structures and geopolitical arrangements not least because of their capacity to constitute sources of authority and sustenance outside and across state structures.

I argue that the trial of Jacob Zuma for rape was a story-telling contest, one in which a narrative of traumatising father-daughter rape was pitted against another of “delicious” consensual sex, with the final judgement acting as the authoritative or master narrative.

This paper traces the history of four words central to the political vocabulary of the antiapartheid struggle: 'multi-racial,' "non-racial,' 'multi-racialism,' and 'non-racialism.' The opposition between 'non-racialism' and 'multi-racialism' was ab

This article is an attempt to address at a theoretical level an antinomy in  postcolonial approaches to the question of temporal difference.