Over the years, African ‘feminist’ scholars have expressed reservations about embracing feminism as an analytical framework for theorizing issues that affect African women. This is particularly ...because in many African societies, feminism has been perceived as a negative influence that seeks to tear the cultural fabric and value systems of African communities. Some scholars such as Clenora Hudson-Weems, Chikenje Ogunyemi, Tiamoyo Karenga and Chimbuko Tembo contend that feminism as developed by Western scholars is incapable of addressing context-specific concerns of African women. As a result, they developed womanism as an alternative framework for analysing the realities of women in African cultures. Womanism is premised on the view that African women need an Afrocentric theory that can adequately deal with their specific struggles. Drawing from ideas that have been developed by womanist scholars, this article critically interrogates the portrayal of women in Cynthia Jele’s Happiness is a four-letter word (2010), with particular focus on the choices that they make in love relationships, marriage and motherhood. My argument is that Jele’s text affirms the womanist view that African women exist within a specific cultural context that shapes their needs, aspirations and choices in a different way.
...her third amended statement speaks to a belief in frogs, particularly the tens of thousands of frogs that would emerge after the 'torrential rains that swelled the rivers with the carcases of ...drowned animals' had eased along the Dulgannon River in Victoria to rejoice in the mud (216): 'I believe in those little frogs ... ...as Giorgio Agamben proclaims, 'Law is solely directed toward judgment, independent of truth and justice.'53 For Lyotard, any idea of justice based on fixed criteria cannot be counted as justice. According to an article by Michael Tennesen, Brannon believes that animals 'do not have a linguistic sense of numbers - they aren't counting '"one, two three"' in their heads ... but she believes that ability of summing sets of numbers is innate'. ...lost in the being of her being" (35), Magda seeks a median place from which to articulate herself, and the numbered entries in which she seeks to record this articulation come in turn to constitute Coetzee's act of "doing-writing" in the middle voice: a means, no less, of enumerating (for Coetzee) equally complex negotiations facing the writer in that time and place of contemporary South Africa.
While many critics have read J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace as a redemptive narrative in which the protagonist undergoes an ethical Bildung through his contact with animals, this essay examines ways in ...which any possible moral development is dependent on narrative and embodied violence toward human and nonhuman others.
A VERY STRANGE RELATIONSHIP TWIDLE, HEDLEY
Biography (Honolulu),
01/2018, Letnik:
41, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article considers a controversial biography of Nadine Gordimer, as yet the only life of the South African novelist and Nobel laureate. No Cold Kitchen (2005) by Ronald Suresh Roberts was the ...subject of much media attention when Gordimer revoked her authorization of the project and was accused of “censorship” by her biographer. Beyond the immediate scandal, the Gordimer-Roberts affair reveals latent, unresolved elements within the South African transition. Caught up in the vexed question of critical authority—who can plausibly write about whom in a literary system so warped by colonial and apartheid aftermaths?—it becomes an excessive, overdetermined, and even chaotic life writing project, but one that can still be read against the grain for its wealth of source materials, correspondence, and primary research.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
An obituary for Victoria Michelle Davion, founder and editor of Ethics & the Environment, who died on Nov 5, 2017, is presented. In addition to serving as editor of the journal since its founding in ...1995, Davion was longtime Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Georgia until falling ill earlier this year. Her commitment to the department, the journal, and to the fields of environmental ethics and ecofeminism made her an inspiring mentor and dear friend to countless colleagues, students, and beloved friends around the globe.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, CEKLJ, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
To unfold the "reverence for ordinary people" that Bessie Head says animates her writings and to move beyond the dominant trend of treating Head's work autobiographically, the present study considers ...A Question of Power in light of Njabulo S. Ndebele's theories of the spectacular and the ordinary. For Ndebele, these categories correspond to the dramatic and the mundane, and they map a developmental history in South African fiction that uses the language of "redemptive transformation" to describe how representing ordinary things in ordinary ways critiques apartheid and imagines a new social order. This study argues that A Question of Power contains the spectacular in the dreams, nightmares, and visions that the main character, Elizabeth, suffers. Nevertheless, in the novel's local industries garden, which gathers a cast of common individuals around the simple feat of growing vegetables, Elizabeth finds ordinary work marvellous and venerates the garden and its people. The garden thus becomes both mundane and blessed, and Elizabeth embodies an amalgam of sacred and profane that aligns her with the archetypal and prophetic figure of the holy fool. A Question of Power thus displays the play of serious and ludic elements in Head's aesthetics as she creates a garden-variety holiness that questions apartheid and envisages a more just society.
J.M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) propose levelling critiques of secular humanism. Through his intertextual dialogue with Gabriel García Márquez's The ...General in His Labyrinth (1991), Coetzee tacitly questions the epistemological, ontological, and temporal consequences of the humanistic political “vision” that has been absorbed by postcolonial discourse in the academy. Coetzee shows how this vision ends in an amnesiac posthistory. If reluctantly, he posits that we must revive mystical and transcendent possibility to avoid this fate. Coetzee's openness to religious consciousness tracks with recent announcements of the postsecular age (Jurgen Habermas, among others) yet radically challenges their abiding progressive temporal frame. Coetzee implies that remembrance should form the foundation of a “postsecularity” that strives to ontologically preserve the radical potential of the present moment.
This paper provides an examination of the psychology of oppression in To Every Birth Its Blood by Mongane Serote, and thus, it looks at the novel's bipartite structure as portraitures of the ...psychologies of oppression and liberation respectively. Also, the paper works to deconstruct the seemingly binarist/structuralist orientation of the novel.
This introduction briefly describes key concepts from literary disability studies and crip methodology. After discussing these concepts and giving some examples of modernist writers' use of ...disability metaphors, it raises questions about how disability inflects modernist themes and modernist form. It then offers synopses of the nine essays in the special issue, essays that treat a range of authors from the early to mid-twentieth century. The essays engage with literary theory, various early twentieth-century historical contexts, and issues of race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, and class.
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