This award-winning collection of essays about culture and identity was written from the perspective of post-apartheid South Africa. Voted best special issue of 2001 by the Council of Editors of Learned Journal.
Manfred B. Steger’s extensive body of work on globalization has made him one of the most influential scholars working in the field of global studies today. His conceptualization of the global imaginary is amongst the most significant developments in thinking about globalization of the last three decades. Revisiting the Global Imaginary pays tribute to Steger’s contribution to our intellectual history with essays on the evolution, ontological foundations and methodological approaches to the study of the global imaginary. The transdisciplinary framework of this field of enquiry lends itself to investigation in diverse sites. This volume of essays explores practices associated with the reproduction of the global imaginary in such diverse sites as mobile money, Irish pubs, cyber-capitalism, urban space, music in post-apartheid South Africa and global political movements, amongst others.
In Black Empire, Michelle Ann Stephens examines the ideal of “transnational blackness” that emerged in the work of radical black intellectuals from the British West Indies in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the writings of Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, and C. L. R. James, Stephens shows how these thinkers developed ideas of a worldwide racial movement and federated global black political community that transcended the boundaries of nation-states. Stephens highlights key geopolitical and historical events that gave rise to these writers’ intellectual investment in new modes of black political self-determination. She describes their engagement with the fate of African Americans within the burgeoning U.S. empire, their disillusionment with the potential of post–World War I international organizations such as the League of Nations to acknowledge, let alone improve, the material conditions of people of color around the world, and the inspiration they took from the Bolshevik Revolution, which offered models of revolution and community not based on nationality. Stephens argues that the global black political consciousness she identifies was constituted by both radical and reactionary impulses. On the one hand, Garvey, McKay, and James saw freedom of movement as the basis of black transnationalism. The Caribbean archipelago—a geographic space ideally suited to the free movement of black subjects across national boundaries—became the metaphoric heart of their vision. On the other hand, these three writers were deeply influenced by the ideas of militarism, empire, and male sovereignty that shaped global political discourse in the early twentieth century. As such, their vision of transnational blackness excluded women’s political subjectivities. Drawing together insights from American, African American, Caribbean, and gender studies, Black Empire is a major contribution to ongoing conversations about nation and diaspora.
In Stereotype confronts the importance of cultural stereotypes in shaping the ethics and reach of global literature. Mrinalini Chakravorty focuses on the seductive force and explanatory power of stereotypes in multiple South Asian contexts, whether depicting hunger, crowdedness, filth, slums, death, migrant flight, terror, or outsourcing. She argues that such commonplaces are crucial to defining cultural identity in contemporary literature and shows how the stereotype's ambivalent nature exposes the crises of liberal development in South Asia. In Stereotype considers the influential work of Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Michael Ondaatje, Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, and Chetan Bhagat, among others, to illustrate how stereotypes about South Asia provide insight into the material and psychic investments of contemporary imaginative texts: the colonial novel, the transnational film, and the international best-seller. Probing circumstances that range from the independence of the Indian subcontinent to poverty tourism, civil war, migration, domestic labor, and terrorist radicalism, Chakravorty builds an interpretive lens for reading literary representations of cultural and global difference. In the process, she also reevaluates the fascination with transnational novels and films that manufacture global differences by staging intersubjective encounters between cultures through stereotypes.
Symptomatic of an emergent shift away from prescriptive and deterministic accounts of change in South Africa, Predicaments of culture in South Africa posits an open-ended and speculative approach to the question and agency of culture. The key question, posed by Justice Albie Sachs of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, 'what does it mean to be a South African?' is shifted from its familiar ontological and epistemological habitat, 'what is identity?', the better to embrace its ethical and political rider, 'what are identities for?', and its more pragmatic possibility, 'what can identities do?' These qualifications - Bhabha's - form the building blocks that skew and enrich existing presumptions about South Africa's history, its present moment and its future. Jamal challenges and qualifies the conflicting and contiguous drives of fatalism, positivism and relativism, which are the dominant claimants upon the South African cultural imaginary. It is this critical non-positionality that forms the distinctive trait of an inquiry which, in eschewing allegiance and closure, opens up the debate about what it means to be South African and the role of culture therein. 'In hindsight, and with the hither side of the future before us', Jamal's driving assumption is that 'world society is advancing towards yet another age of ignorance; an age beyond suspicion and irony, in which thought, whether self-critical or not, is no longer the agent of reason'. Jamal calls for an urgent reappraisal of the absence of love - of lovelessness - which he sees as the infected root of South Africa's inability to create a positively affirmative cultural imaginary.
Winner of the 2001 CELJ Award for the Best Special Issue This special issue of Poetics Today explores the development of a South African literary identity in the face of its staggering cultural, historical, and linguistic diversity. The collection uses the idea of the "global imaginary" to explore the ways the outside world has constructed ideas about South African literature as well as the way South Africans themselves have fashioned their literary selfhood. Articles address the legacy of colonialism and apartheid and wrestle with the fact that in spite of the fact that there are eleven official languages in South Africa and that many of the cultures have historically relied on an oral tradition, the dominant works continue to be those that are written down, in English. As de Kock writes in his introduction, the collection "raises a multiplicity of questions about the colonization of culture." There has been a "trope of binary pairing," he writes, between white and black, civilized and backward, home and exile, colonizer and colonized, which obscures the richness and complexity of the South African literary tradition. This collection promises to at least begin to correct that oversimplification. Contributors: Louise Bethlehem, Jonathan Crewe, Dirk Klopper, Leon de Kock, Loren Kruger, Sonja Laden, Simon Lewis, Peter Merrington, Patricia Watson Shariff, Pippa Skotnes
To date, geography has not yet carved out a disciplinary niche within the diffuse domain that constitutes global health. However, the compulsion to do and understand global health emerges largely from contexts that geography has long engaged with: urbanisation, globalisation, political economy, risk, vulnerability, lifestyles, geopolitics, culture, governance, development and the environment. Moreover, global health brings with it an innate, powerful and politicising spatial logic that is only now starting to emerge as an object of enquiry. This book aims to draw attention to and showcase the wealth of existing and emergent geographical contributions to what has recently been termed ‘critical global health studies’. Geographical perspectives, this collection argues, are essential to bringing new and critical perspectives to bear on the inherent complexities and interconnectedness of global health problems and purported solutions. Thus, rather than rehearsing the frequent critique that global health is more a ‘set of problems’ than a coherent disciplinary approach to ameliorating the health of all and redressing global bio-inequalities; this collection seeks to explore what these problems might represent and the geographical imaginaries inherent in their constitution. This unique volume of geographical writings on global health not only deepens social scientific engagements with health itself, but in so doing, brings forth a series of new conceptual, methodological and empirical contributions to social scientific, multidisciplinary scholarship.
Dreamscapes of Modernity offers the first book-length treatment of sociotechnical imaginaries, a concept originated by Sheila Jasanoff and developed in close collaboration with Sang-Hyun Kim to describe how visions of scientific and technological progress carry with them implicit ideas about public purposes, collective futures, and the common good. The book presents a mix of case studies—including nuclear power in Austria, Chinese rice biotechnology, Korean stem cell research, the Indonesian Internet, US bioethics, global health, and more—to illustrate how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the national and transnational politics of science and technology. A theoretical introduction sets the stage for the contributors’ wide-ranging analyses, and a conclusion gathers and synthesizes their collective findings. The book marks a major theoretical advance for a concept that has been rapidly taken up across the social sciences and promises to become central to scholarship in science and technology studies.
This book considers the key critical interventions on short story writing in South Africa written in English since the year 2000. The short story genre, whilst often marginalised in national literary canons, has been central to the trajectory of literary history in South Africa. In recent years, the short story has undergone a significant renaissance, with new collections and young writers making a significant impact on the contemporary literary scene, and subgenres such as speculative fiction, erotic fiction, flash fiction and queer fiction expanding rapidly in popularity. This book examines the role of the short story genre in reflecting or championing new developments in South African writing and the ways in which traditional boundaries and definitions of the short story in South Africa have been reimagined in the present. Drawing together a range of critical interventions, including scholarly articles, interviews and personal reflective pieces, the volume traces some of the aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities in the genre and sheds new light on questions of literary form. Finally, the book considers the place of the short story in twenty-first century writing and interrogates the ways in which the short story form may contribute to, or recast ideas of, the post-apartheid or post-transitional. The perfect guide to contemporary short story writing in South Africa, this book will be essential reading for researchers of African literature.