This article examines the representation of time in narratives of childhood experience in Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959) and Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History (1963). These two ...autobiographies are among the most widely-known works by the group of South African writers who have been loosely associated with Drum magazine in the 1950s. Originating from the early years of the anti-apartheid struggle and resonating widely with the heightened anticolonial resistance movements across the continent, writings by the so-called Drum writers, many of whom later went into exile, have often been viewed and criticized as “protest literature”, as literary works whose aesthetic merits are somehow compromised by the overt political purposes they appear to serve. This article seeks to revise such a reading by revisiting the politics of the stylistic innovations in these autobiographical narratives. Themes and motifs directly derived from the rhetoric of political protest, as I argue, in fact problematize a developmental logic governing the biographical transition from childhood to adulthood and contribute to a radical critique of linear temporality and teleological historiography. While writing from polemical positions and from inside the historical juncture of political resistance, these writers’ narrative reflections on and re-orderings of the relationship between the past and the present also partake of the process of refashioning modern black subjectivity, a significant move of literary intervention that still has profound resonance in our postcolonial, post-apartheid, and post-revolutionary present.
Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate the level of progesterone and progesterone-induced blocking factor (PIBF), an immune mediator, in non-obese patients with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). ...Materials and Methods: Totally 72 patients were recruited into study and divided into 2 groups: The first group was patients diagnosed with PCOS (n = 36) and the second was the healthy control group (n=36). The diagnosis of PCOS was made according to Rotterdam diagnostic criteria. All patients were 18–35 years old and non-obese (body mass index (BMI) < 25 kg/m2). Follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), luteinizing hormone (LH), estradiol (E2), thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), prolactin (PRL), total testosterone, and dehydroepiandrostenedione sulfate (DHEA-S) levels were measured on the third day of the menstrual cycle. On the 21st day of the same menstrual period, fasting blood glucose, insulin, progesterone, and PIBF levels were measured. Results: Demographic and clinical characteristics of study participants were similar between the two groups. Serum FSH, E2, TSH, PRL, DHEA-S, total testosterone, fasting blood glucose, fasting insulin, homeostatic model assessment for insulin resistance (HOMA-IR), and hemoglobin A1c values were similar between the groups. Differences in LH, LH/FSH ratio, serum progesterone, and serum PIBF were statistically significant. Conclusion: Progesterone and PIBF levels decreased in non-obese PCOS patients. We suggest that even in the absence of obesity, which is the origin and enhancer of inflammation in PCOS, low PIBF as the underlying immunomodulator will drive complications.
Amaç: Bu çalışmanın amacı obez olmayan polikistik over sendromlu (PKOS) hastalarda progesteron ve bir immün mediatör olan progesteron kaynaklı bloke edici faktör (PIBF) düzeylerini değerlendirmektir. Gereç ve Yöntem: Hastalar iki gruba ayrıldı. Birinci grup PKOS tanısı alan hastalar (n=36), ikincisi sağlıklı kontrol grubu (n=36) idi. Rotterdam tanı kriterlerine göre PKOS tanısı konuldu. Hastalar 18-35 yaşları arasındaydı, obez değildi (Vücut kitle indeksi (VKİ)
William Bloke Modisane, the African writer and journalist, attracted wide notice with his autobiography, Blame Me on History, which was banned in South Africa in 1963, the year in which it received ...its first publication. The sociologist's interest in Modisane's autobiography can be located in several basic themes (among these can be counted the problem of his cultural dilemma as a member of the African middle class), but for present purposes, we need to note only one aspect of the book which I think has been constantly ignored, namely the sociological tradition that informs the meaning of his concept of the community- Sophiatown. The name "Sophiatown" carries a profoundly important meaning in Modisane's autobiography. I will argue that in the sociological sense in which the Drum writer uses the name, he articulates the central notions of what the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies regards as a Gemeinschaft social order. There is a different, though related, point that needs to be made about Modisane's use of the term "community": if we read his book carefully, we can see that it contains two different narratives about Sophiatown, a positive one which appears to have been slightly romanticised, and a negative one, which focuses on the community's darker side, showing it up to have been a Gemeinschaft in an unusual way. It is through this binary opposition that Modisane creates in his autobiography that he shows his ambiguity with regard to his Gemeinschaft community.
In this article I suggest a different view on Sophiatown's existence, both in terms of it standing as mythical icon and as a suburb. Instead of continuing the look 'from afar' (Hannerz
1994
), which ...positions Sophiatown within the category of desirable 'global icons', I turn my gaze deeper into Sophiatown, both as a suburb and an icon. I use the lens of transnationalism to zoom into three scenes in Sophiatown in order to examine what has been ignored and overlooked in previous narratives. Where the global icon stays and focuses on the surface, the transnational perspective focuses on the everyday lives within the icon. Through a series of vignettes, looking at women in Sophiatown's history, at coffee making with a Greek immigrant, and tales of home with Senegalese businessmen, through a consideration of Bloke Modisane's post-Sophiatown career, I examine how the time established by focusing on these transnational lives is a time of presence which spans multiple locations. I conclude the article with a final point about the 'unrepresentability' of a diverse history in the current ways of narrating history in Sophiatown; and the necessity of extending spaces of representation for other, alternative perspectives.
Each portrait is, however, a tale of how exercising this option leads to failure."Because he had a high school certificate and could speak English, Modisane, like other writers and journalists of his ...time, thought of himself as educated and thus civilized.(217) Modisane's life history is not just his story but the story of the South Africa of his time....six chapters in the book deal with apartheid legislation such as the Group Areas Act, the Population Registration Act and the Separate Amenities Act.(186) Contradictions of liberal individualism The organising principle in Modisane's autobiography seems to be the ideology of individual liberalism associated with the white world from which he is excluded....another important form of translation in Modisane's story of his life is to be found in what seems to have been his deliberate decision not to take part in collective activities aimed at ending apartheid.Throughout his autobiography he is at pains to demonstrate that he is an individual with distinctive personal qualities, interests and talents....in Blame Me on History we are constantly reminded of the conflict between public obligations (which are of a recognisably political nature) and the writer's private interests.
In 1957, American filmmaker Lionel Rogosin arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, determined to make a film about apartheid. "Anti-apartheid Solidarity Networks and the Production of Come Back, Africa" ...discusses the film's historical and cultural significance, and- a topic which deserves more attention- the film's production. The article examines the interconnected and international nature of early anti-apartheid activism. International movements against apartheid may have been relatively small between 1957 and up until March of 1960, but Come Back Africa's production shows that anti-apartheid activists and artists were becoming increasingly connected in a transnational web spanning the Atlantic with hubs in South Africa, Europe, and the United States. In the case of Come Back, Africa, relationships forged between Rogosin, black South African artists-activists (such as Lewis Nkosi, William "Bloke" Modisane, and Miriam Makeba) and white liberal anti-apartheid activists (including Father Trevor Huddleston, Reverend Michael Scott, and Mary Benson) proved mutually beneficial.
The best-known elements of urban popular English speech are all represented in the Oxford English Dictionary, but a faintly proscriptive attitude lingers on in the relative disregard for the origins ...and early history of such terms, which are often classified as cant, slang, gypsy jargon, popular, and so on. Entries in the dictionary for the four words considered in this note, slum, bloke, slut, and slattern -- all without satisfactory etymologies -- carry caveats that they have not been updated for over a century. It is to be hoped that the more ample historical information that is increasingly found in the OED Online will remedy this dearth, although a change in attitude must accompany the change in technology.
The Sentimental Bloke was a hugely popular multi-media phenomenon in Australia during the First World War and early interwar years. I explore the work as a heterosexual “masculine romance”: a love ...story expressing heterosexual romantic feeling from a masculine point of view and in a self-consciously masculine way. The Bloke phenomenon demonstrates that “ordinary” Australian men were more interested in certain forms of romantic popular culture than previously allowed. It also points to the fact that avowedly masculine constructions of romantic feeling were emerging in this period in response to criticism of elaborate Victorian-era expressions of romance on the one hand, and of commodified approaches to romantic love on the other. This point has implications for romance studies, which has paid little attention to the concept or even the possibility of masculine romance. In Australia, there was an insistent emphasis on plainness and straightforwardness as the hallmarks of a sturdily masculine approach to romance in the 1910s and 1920s. My hope is that this discussion will prompt other romance scholars to consider the particular inflexions given to masculine constructions of romance in other localities in the same period.
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