This research aims to indicate the sense in which African conceptions of persons can be considered gendered, ableist and anti-queer. In making the case for this I look at the Force Thesis, Shadow Thesis and Ifeanyi Menkiti’s normative conception of person.
This paper would like to explore some of my initial research for my PhD in film studies around the role of film in the production of the colonial imagination.
Cedric Nunn (b.1957-) is a South African anti-apartheid photographer and a long time biographic chronicler of identity. Classified as coloured, yet self-identifying as black, Nunn resisted the complicity that was inextricable from coloured classification during apartheid.
In 1961 Frantz Fanon, seriously weakened by leukaemia, and aware that his life was rapidly coming to an end, dictated his last thoughts in a flat in Tunis. The Damned of the Earth was published at the end of that year, shortly after his death.
For the period that we might loosely call "late pre-industrial" in both Southern Africa and North America: What was the relationship between colonialism and profound indigenous developments--new social formations, family arrangements, scales of war, relationships with the environment, a
This paper considers the history of an experiment in architectural education that took place at what is today the University of Nairobi, between 1965 – 1967.
The isiZulu word ‘isithunguthu’ (pl. izithunguthu) is today hardly known outside a small circle of scholars. It does not appear in modern isiZulu dictionaries, nor is it known to isiZulu-speaking academics whom we have consulted. There is no entry for it in A.T.
This paper is a work in progress. Key references, including quotations, are missing. Please do not circulate. The remarks I am about to make are shaped in no small part - but not exclusively - by the turmoil in South African academy over the last two years.
In his 2014 book Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle historian Jacob Dlamini considers why collaborator Glory Sedibe turned from being a commander in the ANC’s military arm to working with fervour for the apartheid Security Branch.
There has been increasing interest (particularly on online forums) on the apparent underrepresentation of African-based scholars in economics scholarship on Africa.
This paper examines the recent history of population registration and credit surveillance in Kenya. It argues that the events taking place there are important because they mark out the development of new kinds of administratively created informational collateral which, for the first time, m
Nations, as Isabel Hofmeyr long ago observed, are forged, in part, from words. Many, perhaps most, of those words are in the nature of history, stories of the past that provide explanation, justification, a charter for present arrangements. What are the politics of this process?
Partial or complete absence of the melanin pigment in the skin, eyes, and hair shape varied cultural expressions and labels denoting albinos or persons with albinism (PWA).
It is well-established in the South African historiography that the apartheid government adopted a new “language of legitimation” (Posel, 1984) in the aftermath of the 1976 student uprisings.
This paper examines the various types of experimentation that are built into the practice of oncology within Rwanda’s developing national infrastructure, with a focus on historicizing malignancy there by examining trajectories of research and treatment from the early 20th century until the
South Africa’s legal system forms part of the lifeline of its democratic dispensation and is the foundation upon which it depends. It is crucial for social demands for service delivery, ensuring protection and general relief from the state for civil society.
In this paper, which draws from a book manuscript in progress on feminist/queer politics in India, I show how ‘activism’ is informed by multiple rationalities and techniques of governing the self and other.