The Wretched of the Earth

Frantz Fanon’s explosive Black Skin, White Masks is a merciless expose of the psychological damage done by colonial rule across the world. Using Fanon’s incisive analytical abilities to expose the consequences of colonialism on the psyches of colonized peoples, it is both a crucial text in post-colonial theory, and a lesson in the power of analytical skills to reveal the realities that hide beneath the surface of things.  
Fanon was himself part of a colonized nation – Martinique – and grew up with the values and beliefs of French culture imposed upon him, while remaining relegated to an inferior status in society. Qualifying as a psychiatrist in France before working in Algeria (a French colony subject to brutal repression), his own experiences granted him a sharp insight into the psychological problems associated with colonial rule.  
Like any good analytical thinker, Fanon’s particular skill was in breaking things down and joining dots. His analysis of colonial rule exposed its implicit assumptions – and how they were replicated in colonised populations – allowing Fanon to unpick the hidden reasons behind his own conflicted psychological make up, and those of his patients. Unflinchingly clear-sighted in doing so, Black Skin White Masks remains a shocking read today.

An Analysis of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

A meta-analysis was conducted on 91 studies to derive a correlation matrix for adult age, speed of processing, primary-working memory, episodic memory, reasoning, and spatial ability. Structural equation modeling with a single latent common cognitive factor showed that all cognitive measures shared substantial portions of age-related variance. A mediational model revealed that speed of processing and primary-working memory appear to be important mediators of age-related differences in the other measures. However, not all of the age-related influences were mediated. An examination of quadratic age effects and correlational patterns for subsamples under and over 50 years of age revealed that (a) negative age-cognition relations were significant for the 18- to 50-year-old sample and (b) the age-related decline accelerated significantly over the adult life span for variables assessing speed, reasoning, and episodic memory.

Meta-analyses of age–cognition relations in adulthood: Estimates of linear and nonlinear age effects and structural models.

The oxic realms of freshwater and marine environments are zones of high prokaryotic mortality. Lysis by viruses and predation by ciliated and flagellated protists result in the consumption of microbial biomass at approximately the same rate as it is produced. Protist predation can favour or suppress particular bacterial species, and the successful microbial groups in the water column are those that survive this selective grazing pressure. In turn, aquatic bacteria have developed various antipredator strategies that range from simply 'outrunning' protists to the production of highly effective cytotoxins. This ancient predator-prey system can be regarded as an evolutionary precursor of many other interactions between prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms.

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Predation on prokaryotes in the water column and its ecological implications

This is the story of how allegories of human value, cast in narrative dualities based on "civilization" and "barbarism", were prescribed, reified and denied in the 19th-century's struggles over human identity in South Africa. As fluid forms of subjectivity and pre-national persuasion slowly emerged into the stratifications, boundaries and principalities later to become "South Africa", a battle was waged to give textual form and narrative shape to conceptions of "proper" human presentation. This process, illustrating how pervasive a broad sense of textuality may have been in the settling of material destinies, coincided with the supremacy of the book and the printed text as ultimate media for resolving questions of all kinds, from the mundane to the transcendental. The book takes a view of colonialism in South Africa - missionary colonialism in particular - as a discursive process rather than "realpolitik" primarily, and in so doing tells an important tale about the stories which were partly responsible for delivering South Africa into the paradoxical "modernity" of segregation and apartheid.

Civilising barbarians : missionary narrative and African textual response in nineteenth-century South Africa

What I want to write about is the penetration, expansion, skirmishing, coupling, mixing, separation, regrouping of peoples and cultures—the glorious bastardisation of men and women mutually shaped by sky and rain and wind and soil. . . . And everywhere is exile; we tend to forget that now. The old ground disappears, expropriated by blood as new conflicting patterns emerge. Breyten Breytenbach, Dog Heart, 

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South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction

Facts and fiction

https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/article/download/33464/27510

An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Summary Proposing a version of whiteness studies for South Africa, this article lays some of the groundwork for a research project that is yet to be comprehensively tackled. Over the past 30 or so years in progressive scholarship in and about South Africa, whiteness has become so deligitimised by virtue of its complicity with apartheid that it has often been rendered “blank”, a taken‐for‐granted negative essence, a place less looked‐into and a site of assumed uniformity. The essay suggests that if one were to reopen the category of South African whiteness and begin to de‐essentialise it, in all likelihood what one might call the “difference within” would both contradict assumptions of uniformity and prove interesting. The article summarises and analyses trends in whiteness studies in the US and suggests ways in which such a project might be differently tackled for South African purposes.

Leon de Kock

Papers

Civilising barbarians : missionary narrative and African textual response in nineteenth-century South Africa

South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction

Facts and fiction

An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Blanc de Blanc : whiteness studies - a South African connection?