- University of Cape Town, Sociology, Department Memberadd
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Prof Deborah Posel from the Department of Sociology talks about the ethical guidelines and principles followed by Humanities researchers, and about what happens when these principles come into conflict with one another during the research... more
Prof Deborah Posel from the Department of Sociology talks about the ethical guidelines and principles followed by Humanities researchers, and about what happens when these principles come into conflict with one another during the research process.
Research Interests: Anthropology and Africa
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Unexpectedly, sexuality has become one of the principal sites of contestation in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper demonstrates and accounts for the politicization of sex and sexuality in South Africa since 1994. The first part... more
Unexpectedly, sexuality has become one of the principal sites of contestation in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper demonstrates and accounts for the politicization of sex and sexuality in South Africa since 1994. The first part examines the discursive constitution of sexuality and the ways in which this has been informed by wider dimensions of the post-apartheid social order. Drawing on this discussion, the second part proposes a reading of the notorious HIV/AIDS controversy, which drew President Mbeki directly into the political fray. The paper argues that the controversy, although immediately concerned with the science and treatment of HIV/AIDS, is also a struggle over the discursive constitution of sexuality, in a form which dramatizes the ways in which recently contentious struggles over the manner of sexuality are enmeshed in the politics of ‘nation-building’, and the inflections of race, class and generation within it.
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Page 1. WHAT ’ S IN A NAME … Article What’s in a name? Racial categorisations under apartheid and their afterlife Deborah Posel ...
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... Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe , Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ... domination, commodity ownership simultaneously enabled more assertive and subversive strategies of... more
... Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe , Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ... domination, commodity ownership simultaneously enabled more assertive and subversive strategies of racial positioning, with unsettling ...
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One of the most striking features of the South African polity, as the 20th anniversary of democratization draws closer, is the intensity of public arguments about race that show no signs of abating any time soon. In the midst of worsening... more
One of the most striking features of the South African polity, as the 20th anniversary of democratization draws closer, is the intensity of public arguments about race that show no signs of abating any time soon. In the midst of worsening socio-economic inequality, it’s the economic question – of the terms of access to wealth, status and economic power, and of how to erase the residues of apartheid’s economic dispossession – that dominates these arguments. In recent years, the ANC Youth League – a renewal of the Youth League originally created in 1944 and then banned in 1960 – effectively positioned itself at the forefront of this politicization of race. I argue in this essay that from 1994 to early 2012, the contemporary Youth League retained its predecessor’s political persona of precocious provocateur, particularly on matters of race – but differently styled, and deployed to different political ends in the new conjuncture. The repertoire of the Youth League during this period was...
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Peter Duignan and L.H. Gann, The United States and Africa. A History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Pp. xiv+450.William Minter, King Solomon's Mines Revisited. Western Interests and the Burdened History of... more
Peter Duignan and L.H. Gann, The United States and Africa. A History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Pp. xiv+450.William Minter, King Solomon's Mines Revisited. Western Interests and the Burdened History of Southern Africa (New York: Basic Books, 1986). Pp. xiii+401. $21.95.Megan Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Pp. ix+181. £22.50.Andrew Ross,
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The article is the Introductory chapter to Ethical Quandaries in Social Research.
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Chapter 6 Apartheid and Race1 Deborah Posel Apartheid is the state and the condition of being apart. It is the no man's land between peoples. But this gap is not a neutral space. It is the artificially created distance necessary to... more
Chapter 6 Apartheid and Race1 Deborah Posel Apartheid is the state and the condition of being apart. It is the no man's land between peoples. But this gap is not a neutral space. It is the artificially created distance necessary to attenuate, for the practitioners, the very raw reality of racial, ...
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Object relations contains a collection of images and essays in which the contributors trace the power of objects that connects them to ideas, to people and to their pasts. The essays reveal an array of objects that for the authors have... more
Object relations contains a collection of images and essays in which the contributors trace the power of objects that connects them to ideas, to people and to their pasts. The essays reveal an array of objects that for the authors have either emotional associations or provoked their thinking in a significant way. The book draws together ideas about objects through both text and image, a pairing that has evolved from a personal desire for collecting, arranging and photographing objects and using these images in conjunction with narrative.
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This article engages questions of colonial intimacy in the context of the marketspecifically, by white commercial sector in apartheid South Africa to lure black South Africans into burgeoning consumer markets. I focus on the 1960s, when... more
This article engages questions of colonial intimacy in the context of the marketspecifically, by white commercial sector in apartheid South Africa to lure black South Africans into burgeoning consumer markets. I focus on the 1960s, when the exercise in racial domination grew more ambitious and coercive, at the same time as buoyant economic growth efforts spurred consumerist desire. African consumers were largely invisible and incomprehensible to white businesspeople, who turned to advertisers and market researchers to bring 'the African consumer' to light. This was largely an epistemological challengethe pursuit of new modes of knowledge about African people, and especially the material intimacies of their daily lives. This article examines this knowledge-making project, along with the anxieties, lapses and contradictions that inhered in it.