Hoekom “ontlaering”? Die Ontlaeringprojek, geloods in 2018, het ten doel om platforms te skep wat... more Hoekom “ontlaering”? Die Ontlaeringprojek, geloods in 2018, het ten doel om platforms te skep wat dit moontlik maak om die pedagogiek van Afrikaans te herverbeel. Die fokus was aanvanklik op die letterkunde, maar reeds van die begin af was dit duidelik dat die oorbrugging van grense tussen taalen letterkunde ook moontlikhede vir nuwe perspektiewe oopmaak. Die multi-institutionele span (bestaande uit die redakteurs van hierdie uitgawe, sowel as Earl Basson, van die Kaapse Skiereiland Universiteit van Tegnologie; en Wemar Strydom, van die Universiteit van die Witwatersrand) het hulself beywer om elk van drie jaarlikse Ontlaeringgeleenthede te wy aan verskillende maniere waarop die Afrikaanse letterkunde gesitueer kan word, en om ondersoek in te stel na hoe sodanige situerings nuwe moontlikhede ontsluit met betrekking tot die onderrig van Afrikaans. Die bydraes in hierdie spesiale uitgawe van Tydskrif vir Letterkunde spruit uit die tweede Ontlaeringgeleentheid wat in Januarie 2020 op d...
In this review article, we focus on the depiction of the transnational and translingual as a stat... more In this review article, we focus on the depiction of the transnational and translingual as a state of being in-between in Klara du Plessis’s debut poetry collection, Ekke (2018). This in-between state has implications for how identity, place and visual art feature in the collection. Ekke contains fragments of German and French, but consists mainly of English interspersed with Afrikaans. The creation of meaning through this linguistic slippage reflects the idea of identity as always in-process that comes to the fore throughout the collection. Ekke also represents an intervention in South African urban literature, as Bloemfontein, a city not much featured in literature, is represented in several poems. In these poems, the poet/speaker struggles to situate Bloemfontein and its surrounding areas’ histories and symbolism in the transnational networks that she is a part of. The conception of identity and language being constantly in-progress is also conveyed in the collection’s poems abou...
The Afrikaans poetry collections grond/Santekraam (2011) by Ronelda S. Kamfer and bientang (2020)... more The Afrikaans poetry collections grond/Santekraam (2011) by Ronelda S. Kamfer and bientang (2020) by Jolyn Phillips both centralise the ocean and both deal with attempts at recovering repressed black histories. Apart from figuring as a source of spiritual fulfilment and connected to figures in the collection’s livelihoods, the ocean is represented in these collections as the bringer of European colonisers and of slaves to South Africa. In this article I contend that references to slavery and colonialism and the use of words in languages brought to South Africa through slave networks position these collections as products of the transnational Black Atlantic tradition, as theorised by Paul Gilroy. The fact that the narratives of both collections take place in the Overstrand region, near the meeting place of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, gives an indication of how Gilroy’s theory needs to be adapted to be applicable to Afrikaans literature: as many English-language South African theo...
In this co-authored review-reflection, we discuss the African Feminisms 2019 conference, offering... more In this co-authored review-reflection, we discuss the African Feminisms 2019 conference, offering a snapshot of the vital and emboldening African feminist work being conducted by researchers, cultural producers and creative practitioners at all levels of their careers, as well as a sense of the emotional labour that this work entails. We note the particular, shocking event that took place in South Africa just prior to the conference informed the papers, performances and ensuing discussions. We also note that the conference and many of its attendees advocated for a variety of approaches (and more than one feminism) when seeking to challenge power.
Nowhere cool’, a short story by Ama Ata Aidoo, is divided into two sections. In the first, a chil... more Nowhere cool’, a short story by Ama Ata Aidoo, is divided into two sections. In the first, a child sits in a classroom in what is presumably Ghana, feeling alienated by the “familiar things that were begin chased away by the demands of the culture of our conquerors” in the literature discussed by the teacher (2002, p. 136). In the second, a Ghanaian woman travels in a plane across the United States of America (USA). She notices a plastic address tag on the baby of the woman next to her, and starts thinking of plastic as material, of oil and of how slavery makes humans into cargo. This short story therefore consists of philosophical rumination on the nature of humans’ relationship to material and literary objects. I read ‘Nowhere cool’ as part of a black feminist epistemological tradition aimed at exposing the situatedness of supposedly neutral western thought, and at emphasising the embodiment and social embeddedness of all knowledge. I argue that the story’s specific focus on the nonhuman and on extractive economies allows for it to be read as a corrective to the same universalising gestures in posthumanist considerations of the nonhuman. I bring the story into dialogue with Graham Harman’s (2018) Object-oriented Ontology (OOO) to contend that while OOO is aimed at criticising anthropocentrism, a specific human perspective (that of the western white male) is “overrepresented” (Wynter 2003) in it. This has consequences for OOO and posthumanism more generally, since it means that the new relationship to the nonhuman Harman proposes is divorced from the reality of many humans’ relationship with the nonhuman. Posthuman ontologies need to build on the insights of black feminism in order to not replicate the skewed nature and resultant inaccuracies of hegemonic theories of the past.
The science fiction novel Triangulum (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2019) by Masande Ntshanga challenges both... more The science fiction novel Triangulum (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2019) by Masande Ntshanga challenges both the association of the queer with the urban and the use of the city as symbol for the future in science fiction. The verisimilitude of the life of a queer teenager in the rural Eastern Cape of South Africa—a type of rural queer existence not often depicted in literature—is represented in the novel. While the unnamed narrator of the novel does eventually, like many queer characters, leave her rural background behind in order to move to Johannesburg, the Johannesburg of the future is portrayed in dystopian terms. In this novel the future that the city symbolises is the result of extractive and exploitative capitalism. This vision of the future is rejected as unsustainable and unethical. In order to enable another, more hopeful future, the narrator has to return to the rural and embrace ways of living which, like the rural, are associated with the past. The novel's advocacy of a return...
Traditionally the kitchen is seen as the space of the housewife. Her task is to instil ideology i... more Traditionally the kitchen is seen as the space of the housewife. Her task is to instil ideology in the next generation, but not to play an active role in the shaping of it. The American Second Wave feminists reacted to these traditional views by negating the body and the irrational. They distanced themselves from the figure of the housewife, especially after the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963). The protagonist of Louoond, the 1987 novella by Jeanne Goosen, reclaims the kitchen from the patriarchy and uses it as a subversive space in which feminist art and perspectives can be developed. In my paper I argue that the novella provides several models for the creation of provocative, specifically female art. The novella itself is such a model, as is the work of the muses that inspire the protagonist: George Sand, Maria Callas and a female spider.
Mary Watson’s gothic novel, The Cutting Room (2013), deals with a woman who does not feel at home... more Mary Watson’s gothic novel, The Cutting Room (2013), deals with a woman who does not feel at home in her house. Her unease can be attributed to her conflicted feelings about being a wife in South Africa’s colonial and apartheid history, as well as to a fear of crime. Using feminist theories of women’s relationship to the domestic sphere, Freud’s writing on the unheimlich as well as Homi K Bhaba’s notion of the “postcolonial unhomely”, I argue that the genre of the gothic provides appropriate metaphors and an aptly uncanny atmosphere for the exploration of a South African woman’s complex relationship with the home.
In this article, the representations of the ocean in Afrikaans poet Ronelda S. Kamfer’s grond/San... more In this article, the representations of the ocean in Afrikaans poet Ronelda S. Kamfer’s grond/Santekraam (2011) and in ‘Water’, a poem in Koleka Putuma’s Collective Amnesia (2017) are compared. Meg Samuelson’s identification of trends in the representation of the ocean in 21st-century South African prose fiction is used as a reference point. The aim here is to determine whether the same trends are present in these examples of 21st-century South African poetry. The ocean is depicted in the work of both Kamfer and Putuma as a metaphor for repressed historical trauma. In ‘Water’ the historical trauma relates to the ocean as route of slavery and colonialism; in grond/Santekraam it relates to slavery but also to a historical event, namely the forced resettlement of the fishing community of Skipskop. In some of the novels that Samuelson discusses, the ocean symbolises the unknowable, the irrational and spiritual. In ‘Water’ the ocean has a similar connotation. In grond/Santekraam the ocean is not depicted in spiritual terms, but in two poems an underwater town becomes a space in which a mythological version of events can be re-imagined. The unknowability of the ocean floor is depicted as a space in which the tragic influence of historical events on the present can be explored. The way in which the ocean is represented in the poetry of these two South African female poets therefore overlaps with how it is depicted in prose but also differs in the specifity of its metaphorical connotations.
Willem Anker’s debut novel, Siegfried, deals with the experiences of the eponymous character, who... more Willem Anker’s debut novel, Siegfried, deals with the experiences of the eponymous character, who is mentally disabled and whose hands and feet are webbed. In this article, an attempt is made to investigate how the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as object oriented ontologies, can be used to argue that the representation of the character of Siegfried involves a blurring of the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. The second aim of this article is to establish whether such a blurring is ethically problematic, given the cruel ways in which people considered less human than others are often treated. Where the first aim is concerned, it is argued that Siegfried’s interaction with the world challenges hegemonic ideas of human subjectivity, especially ideas of what constitutes normal humanity. In the character of Siegfried traces are found of what can be described, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, as becomings. These becomings serve as lines of flight from blocked form...
In this article, the focus is on Black Panther: a nation under our feet, a comic book series writ... more In this article, the focus is on Black Panther: a nation under our feet, a comic book series written by American public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates. The point of departure is Coates's idea of 'the Mecca', a term he uses in his earlier non-fiction. It refers to a space in which black culture is created in the shadow of collective traumas and memories. We argue that in a nation under our feet the fictional African country of Wakanda functions as a metaphorical Mecca. This version of Wakanda is contextualised in terms of the aesthetics of Afrofuturism and theories on the influence of ideology in comic books. The central focus of the article is how this representation of Wakanda questions the idea of a unified black people and how Wakanda, like the real world Meccas described by Coates, display internal ideological and political struggles among its people. We argue that the various characters in a nation under our feet represent different and conflicting ideological positi...
The problems and potential of domestic space in Klaaglied vir Koos (1984) by Lettie Viljoen Klaag... more The problems and potential of domestic space in Klaaglied vir Koos (1984) by Lettie Viljoen Klaaglied vir Koos (Lamentation for Koos) (1984) is Ingrid Winterbach’s first published novelette, written under the pseudonym Lettie Viljoen. It deals with a nameless female narrator whose husband has left her and their child to fight in the border war for Swapo (the South West Africa People’s Organization) and against the apartheid government. The text consists of the narrator’s consideration of how she should react to her husband’s departure. This article is focused on the feminist-aesthetic and feminist–theoretical value of Klaaglied vir Koos. This value is located primarily in the feminist manner in which traditionally “feminine” topics, such as domesticity and the body, are depicted in the text. My argument is based on Brink’s (1990) analysis of the narrative structure of Louoond (1987) by Jeanne Goosen; Stander’s (1994) review of Karolina Ferreira (1994) by Lettie Viljoen (translated a...
Nowhere cool’, a short story by Ama Ata Aidoo, is divided into two sections. In the first, a chil... more Nowhere cool’, a short story by Ama Ata Aidoo, is divided into two sections. In the first, a child sits in a classroom in what is presumably Ghana, feeling alienated by the “familiar things that were begin chased away by the demands of the culture of our conquerors” in the literature discussed by the teacher (2002, p. 136). In the second, a Ghanaian woman travels in a plane across the United States of America (USA). She notices a plastic address tag on the baby of the woman next to her, and starts thinking of plastic as material, of oil and of how slavery makes humans into cargo. This short story therefore consists of philosophical rumination on the nature of humans’ relationship to material and literary objects. I read ‘Nowhere cool’ as part of a black feminist epistemological tradition aimed at exposing the situatedness of supposedly neutral western thought, and at emphasising the embodiment and social embeddedness of all knowledge. I argue that the story’s specific focus on the nonhuman and on extractive economies allows for it to be read as a corrective to the same universalising gestures in posthumanist considerations of the nonhuman. I bring the story into dialogue with Graham Harman’s (2018) Object-oriented Ontology (OOO) to contend that while OOO is aimed at criticising anthropocentrism, a specific human perspective (that of the western white male) is “overrepresented” (Wynter 2003) in it. This has consequences for OOO and posthumanism more generally, since it means that the new relationship to the nonhuman Harman proposes is divorced from the reality of many humans’ relationship with the nonhuman. Posthuman ontologies need to build on the insights of black feminism in order to not replicate the skewed nature and resultant inaccuracies of hegemonic theories of the past.
In this article, the focus is on Black Panther: a nation under our feet, a comic book series writ... more In this article, the focus is on Black Panther: a nation under our feet, a comic book series written by American public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates. The point of departure is Coates's idea of 'the Mecca', a term he uses in his earlier non-fiction. It refers to a space in which black culture is created in the shadow of collective traumas and memories. We argue that in a nation under our feet the fictional African country of Wakanda functions as a metaphorical Mecca. This version of Wakanda is contextualised in terms of the aesthetics of Afrofuturism and theories on the influence of ideology in comic books. The central focus of the article is how this representation of Wakanda questions the idea of a unified black people and how Wakanda, like the real world Meccas described by Coates, display internal ideological and political struggles among its people. We argue that the various characters in a nation under our feet represent different and conflicting ideological positi...
Book Title: Travels with My Father. An Autobiographical Novel Book Author: Karen Jennings London... more Book Title: Travels with My Father. An Autobiographical Novel Book Author: Karen Jennings London: Holland Park, 2016. 177 pp. ISBN: 978-1-907320-69-9.
Hoekom “ontlaering”? Die Ontlaeringprojek, geloods in 2018, het ten doel om platforms te skep wat... more Hoekom “ontlaering”? Die Ontlaeringprojek, geloods in 2018, het ten doel om platforms te skep wat dit moontlik maak om die pedagogiek van Afrikaans te herverbeel. Die fokus was aanvanklik op die letterkunde, maar reeds van die begin af was dit duidelik dat die oorbrugging van grense tussen taalen letterkunde ook moontlikhede vir nuwe perspektiewe oopmaak. Die multi-institutionele span (bestaande uit die redakteurs van hierdie uitgawe, sowel as Earl Basson, van die Kaapse Skiereiland Universiteit van Tegnologie; en Wemar Strydom, van die Universiteit van die Witwatersrand) het hulself beywer om elk van drie jaarlikse Ontlaeringgeleenthede te wy aan verskillende maniere waarop die Afrikaanse letterkunde gesitueer kan word, en om ondersoek in te stel na hoe sodanige situerings nuwe moontlikhede ontsluit met betrekking tot die onderrig van Afrikaans. Die bydraes in hierdie spesiale uitgawe van Tydskrif vir Letterkunde spruit uit die tweede Ontlaeringgeleentheid wat in Januarie 2020 op d...
In this review article, we focus on the depiction of the transnational and translingual as a stat... more In this review article, we focus on the depiction of the transnational and translingual as a state of being in-between in Klara du Plessis’s debut poetry collection, Ekke (2018). This in-between state has implications for how identity, place and visual art feature in the collection. Ekke contains fragments of German and French, but consists mainly of English interspersed with Afrikaans. The creation of meaning through this linguistic slippage reflects the idea of identity as always in-process that comes to the fore throughout the collection. Ekke also represents an intervention in South African urban literature, as Bloemfontein, a city not much featured in literature, is represented in several poems. In these poems, the poet/speaker struggles to situate Bloemfontein and its surrounding areas’ histories and symbolism in the transnational networks that she is a part of. The conception of identity and language being constantly in-progress is also conveyed in the collection’s poems abou...
The Afrikaans poetry collections grond/Santekraam (2011) by Ronelda S. Kamfer and bientang (2020)... more The Afrikaans poetry collections grond/Santekraam (2011) by Ronelda S. Kamfer and bientang (2020) by Jolyn Phillips both centralise the ocean and both deal with attempts at recovering repressed black histories. Apart from figuring as a source of spiritual fulfilment and connected to figures in the collection’s livelihoods, the ocean is represented in these collections as the bringer of European colonisers and of slaves to South Africa. In this article I contend that references to slavery and colonialism and the use of words in languages brought to South Africa through slave networks position these collections as products of the transnational Black Atlantic tradition, as theorised by Paul Gilroy. The fact that the narratives of both collections take place in the Overstrand region, near the meeting place of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, gives an indication of how Gilroy’s theory needs to be adapted to be applicable to Afrikaans literature: as many English-language South African theo...
In this co-authored review-reflection, we discuss the African Feminisms 2019 conference, offering... more In this co-authored review-reflection, we discuss the African Feminisms 2019 conference, offering a snapshot of the vital and emboldening African feminist work being conducted by researchers, cultural producers and creative practitioners at all levels of their careers, as well as a sense of the emotional labour that this work entails. We note the particular, shocking event that took place in South Africa just prior to the conference informed the papers, performances and ensuing discussions. We also note that the conference and many of its attendees advocated for a variety of approaches (and more than one feminism) when seeking to challenge power.
Nowhere cool’, a short story by Ama Ata Aidoo, is divided into two sections. In the first, a chil... more Nowhere cool’, a short story by Ama Ata Aidoo, is divided into two sections. In the first, a child sits in a classroom in what is presumably Ghana, feeling alienated by the “familiar things that were begin chased away by the demands of the culture of our conquerors” in the literature discussed by the teacher (2002, p. 136). In the second, a Ghanaian woman travels in a plane across the United States of America (USA). She notices a plastic address tag on the baby of the woman next to her, and starts thinking of plastic as material, of oil and of how slavery makes humans into cargo. This short story therefore consists of philosophical rumination on the nature of humans’ relationship to material and literary objects. I read ‘Nowhere cool’ as part of a black feminist epistemological tradition aimed at exposing the situatedness of supposedly neutral western thought, and at emphasising the embodiment and social embeddedness of all knowledge. I argue that the story’s specific focus on the nonhuman and on extractive economies allows for it to be read as a corrective to the same universalising gestures in posthumanist considerations of the nonhuman. I bring the story into dialogue with Graham Harman’s (2018) Object-oriented Ontology (OOO) to contend that while OOO is aimed at criticising anthropocentrism, a specific human perspective (that of the western white male) is “overrepresented” (Wynter 2003) in it. This has consequences for OOO and posthumanism more generally, since it means that the new relationship to the nonhuman Harman proposes is divorced from the reality of many humans’ relationship with the nonhuman. Posthuman ontologies need to build on the insights of black feminism in order to not replicate the skewed nature and resultant inaccuracies of hegemonic theories of the past.
The science fiction novel Triangulum (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2019) by Masande Ntshanga challenges both... more The science fiction novel Triangulum (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2019) by Masande Ntshanga challenges both the association of the queer with the urban and the use of the city as symbol for the future in science fiction. The verisimilitude of the life of a queer teenager in the rural Eastern Cape of South Africa—a type of rural queer existence not often depicted in literature—is represented in the novel. While the unnamed narrator of the novel does eventually, like many queer characters, leave her rural background behind in order to move to Johannesburg, the Johannesburg of the future is portrayed in dystopian terms. In this novel the future that the city symbolises is the result of extractive and exploitative capitalism. This vision of the future is rejected as unsustainable and unethical. In order to enable another, more hopeful future, the narrator has to return to the rural and embrace ways of living which, like the rural, are associated with the past. The novel's advocacy of a return...
Traditionally the kitchen is seen as the space of the housewife. Her task is to instil ideology i... more Traditionally the kitchen is seen as the space of the housewife. Her task is to instil ideology in the next generation, but not to play an active role in the shaping of it. The American Second Wave feminists reacted to these traditional views by negating the body and the irrational. They distanced themselves from the figure of the housewife, especially after the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963). The protagonist of Louoond, the 1987 novella by Jeanne Goosen, reclaims the kitchen from the patriarchy and uses it as a subversive space in which feminist art and perspectives can be developed. In my paper I argue that the novella provides several models for the creation of provocative, specifically female art. The novella itself is such a model, as is the work of the muses that inspire the protagonist: George Sand, Maria Callas and a female spider.
Mary Watson’s gothic novel, The Cutting Room (2013), deals with a woman who does not feel at home... more Mary Watson’s gothic novel, The Cutting Room (2013), deals with a woman who does not feel at home in her house. Her unease can be attributed to her conflicted feelings about being a wife in South Africa’s colonial and apartheid history, as well as to a fear of crime. Using feminist theories of women’s relationship to the domestic sphere, Freud’s writing on the unheimlich as well as Homi K Bhaba’s notion of the “postcolonial unhomely”, I argue that the genre of the gothic provides appropriate metaphors and an aptly uncanny atmosphere for the exploration of a South African woman’s complex relationship with the home.
In this article, the representations of the ocean in Afrikaans poet Ronelda S. Kamfer’s grond/San... more In this article, the representations of the ocean in Afrikaans poet Ronelda S. Kamfer’s grond/Santekraam (2011) and in ‘Water’, a poem in Koleka Putuma’s Collective Amnesia (2017) are compared. Meg Samuelson’s identification of trends in the representation of the ocean in 21st-century South African prose fiction is used as a reference point. The aim here is to determine whether the same trends are present in these examples of 21st-century South African poetry. The ocean is depicted in the work of both Kamfer and Putuma as a metaphor for repressed historical trauma. In ‘Water’ the historical trauma relates to the ocean as route of slavery and colonialism; in grond/Santekraam it relates to slavery but also to a historical event, namely the forced resettlement of the fishing community of Skipskop. In some of the novels that Samuelson discusses, the ocean symbolises the unknowable, the irrational and spiritual. In ‘Water’ the ocean has a similar connotation. In grond/Santekraam the ocean is not depicted in spiritual terms, but in two poems an underwater town becomes a space in which a mythological version of events can be re-imagined. The unknowability of the ocean floor is depicted as a space in which the tragic influence of historical events on the present can be explored. The way in which the ocean is represented in the poetry of these two South African female poets therefore overlaps with how it is depicted in prose but also differs in the specifity of its metaphorical connotations.
Willem Anker’s debut novel, Siegfried, deals with the experiences of the eponymous character, who... more Willem Anker’s debut novel, Siegfried, deals with the experiences of the eponymous character, who is mentally disabled and whose hands and feet are webbed. In this article, an attempt is made to investigate how the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as object oriented ontologies, can be used to argue that the representation of the character of Siegfried involves a blurring of the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. The second aim of this article is to establish whether such a blurring is ethically problematic, given the cruel ways in which people considered less human than others are often treated. Where the first aim is concerned, it is argued that Siegfried’s interaction with the world challenges hegemonic ideas of human subjectivity, especially ideas of what constitutes normal humanity. In the character of Siegfried traces are found of what can be described, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, as becomings. These becomings serve as lines of flight from blocked form...
In this article, the focus is on Black Panther: a nation under our feet, a comic book series writ... more In this article, the focus is on Black Panther: a nation under our feet, a comic book series written by American public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates. The point of departure is Coates's idea of 'the Mecca', a term he uses in his earlier non-fiction. It refers to a space in which black culture is created in the shadow of collective traumas and memories. We argue that in a nation under our feet the fictional African country of Wakanda functions as a metaphorical Mecca. This version of Wakanda is contextualised in terms of the aesthetics of Afrofuturism and theories on the influence of ideology in comic books. The central focus of the article is how this representation of Wakanda questions the idea of a unified black people and how Wakanda, like the real world Meccas described by Coates, display internal ideological and political struggles among its people. We argue that the various characters in a nation under our feet represent different and conflicting ideological positi...
The problems and potential of domestic space in Klaaglied vir Koos (1984) by Lettie Viljoen Klaag... more The problems and potential of domestic space in Klaaglied vir Koos (1984) by Lettie Viljoen Klaaglied vir Koos (Lamentation for Koos) (1984) is Ingrid Winterbach’s first published novelette, written under the pseudonym Lettie Viljoen. It deals with a nameless female narrator whose husband has left her and their child to fight in the border war for Swapo (the South West Africa People’s Organization) and against the apartheid government. The text consists of the narrator’s consideration of how she should react to her husband’s departure. This article is focused on the feminist-aesthetic and feminist–theoretical value of Klaaglied vir Koos. This value is located primarily in the feminist manner in which traditionally “feminine” topics, such as domesticity and the body, are depicted in the text. My argument is based on Brink’s (1990) analysis of the narrative structure of Louoond (1987) by Jeanne Goosen; Stander’s (1994) review of Karolina Ferreira (1994) by Lettie Viljoen (translated a...
Nowhere cool’, a short story by Ama Ata Aidoo, is divided into two sections. In the first, a chil... more Nowhere cool’, a short story by Ama Ata Aidoo, is divided into two sections. In the first, a child sits in a classroom in what is presumably Ghana, feeling alienated by the “familiar things that were begin chased away by the demands of the culture of our conquerors” in the literature discussed by the teacher (2002, p. 136). In the second, a Ghanaian woman travels in a plane across the United States of America (USA). She notices a plastic address tag on the baby of the woman next to her, and starts thinking of plastic as material, of oil and of how slavery makes humans into cargo. This short story therefore consists of philosophical rumination on the nature of humans’ relationship to material and literary objects. I read ‘Nowhere cool’ as part of a black feminist epistemological tradition aimed at exposing the situatedness of supposedly neutral western thought, and at emphasising the embodiment and social embeddedness of all knowledge. I argue that the story’s specific focus on the nonhuman and on extractive economies allows for it to be read as a corrective to the same universalising gestures in posthumanist considerations of the nonhuman. I bring the story into dialogue with Graham Harman’s (2018) Object-oriented Ontology (OOO) to contend that while OOO is aimed at criticising anthropocentrism, a specific human perspective (that of the western white male) is “overrepresented” (Wynter 2003) in it. This has consequences for OOO and posthumanism more generally, since it means that the new relationship to the nonhuman Harman proposes is divorced from the reality of many humans’ relationship with the nonhuman. Posthuman ontologies need to build on the insights of black feminism in order to not replicate the skewed nature and resultant inaccuracies of hegemonic theories of the past.
In this article, the focus is on Black Panther: a nation under our feet, a comic book series writ... more In this article, the focus is on Black Panther: a nation under our feet, a comic book series written by American public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates. The point of departure is Coates's idea of 'the Mecca', a term he uses in his earlier non-fiction. It refers to a space in which black culture is created in the shadow of collective traumas and memories. We argue that in a nation under our feet the fictional African country of Wakanda functions as a metaphorical Mecca. This version of Wakanda is contextualised in terms of the aesthetics of Afrofuturism and theories on the influence of ideology in comic books. The central focus of the article is how this representation of Wakanda questions the idea of a unified black people and how Wakanda, like the real world Meccas described by Coates, display internal ideological and political struggles among its people. We argue that the various characters in a nation under our feet represent different and conflicting ideological positi...
Book Title: Travels with My Father. An Autobiographical Novel Book Author: Karen Jennings London... more Book Title: Travels with My Father. An Autobiographical Novel Book Author: Karen Jennings London: Holland Park, 2016. 177 pp. ISBN: 978-1-907320-69-9.
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