The Wretched of the Earth

What is the meaning of Africa and of being African? What is and what is not African philosophy? Is philosophy part of Africanism ? These are the kind of fundamental questions which this book addresses. North America: Indiana U Press

The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge

Masks of conquest: Literary study and British rule in India

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Melissa Steyn. "Whiteness just Isn't What It Used to Be": White Identity in a Changing South Africa. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. xxxix + 228 pp. References. Indexes. No price reported. Paper. Melissa Steyn's "Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used to Be" is an interpretation of white South Africans' narratives of their whiteness. It is based on the analysis of a questionnaire pertaining to the implications of being white. In comparison to the situation in Europe or North America, whiteness in South Africa no longer carries social privilege. With black political leadership and increasing African social and cultural assertiveness, white identity is challenged to adapt to new circumstances. Steyn identifies five narratives that try to come to terms with these new conditions. The first two are based on the Eurocentric belief in white superiority and never question the existence of a white identity that is in a dichotomous relationship with a denigrated blackness. The first narrative is unapologetic about the superiority of white culture and identifies with the paternalist task of "furthering the progress of humankind" (67) in South Africa; the second bemoans the injustice of the new social order and looks upon whites as the victims of a reversal of fortunes. The remaining narratives accept to varying degrees that white identity may change. Still projecting a strong affiliation with white identity, the third narrative concerns the possibility of using qualities supposedly inherent in white culture to succeed in the new South Africa. The more pragmatic version, which is based on liberal humanism with its trust in the individual and the belief in racial equality and democratic pluralism, seeks common ground with the black leadership. White guilt is acknowledged by way of critical self-observation, and such introspection has the potential to "envision possibilities of new forms of subjectivity within more inclusive structures" (99). The fourth narrative denies that whiteness has any implications in relation to people of color. Instead, an unproblematic white African or a South African identity is asserted. A lifelong commitment to racial equality culminates in the claim that color blindness has been achieved. Authors of this narrative are those who supported the struggle and in some way or another resisted apartheid. It is understandable that they find it particularly difficult to review their attitude to whiteness since they, after all, lived with the ideal of nonracialism. …

"Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used to Be": White Identity in a Changing South Africa

This thesis explores how Anglophone literature debated the rise of modern international law since the late nineteenth century, including the founding of the United Nations and the 1948 declaration of human rights. While international law has its origins in the early modern period, it was largely at the turn of the century, with the Berlin Conference, that it began taking shape as a colonial and then a postcolonial, global ethics. In this thesis, I lay claim to literature’s capacity to legislate by examining instances where Anglophone novelists—including Joseph Conrad, Bryher, Vladimir Nabokov, Chinua Achebe, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—work through the promises and problems of international jurisprudence. More than a mere reflection of international law’s evolving theory and practice, the literature I treat registers the law’s presumptions and first principles while interrogating its capacity to follow through with its declarations. In spreading the law’s claims while also submitting them to the scrutiny of close reading, these novels are both advocates of and at times stubborn liabilities for international law’s normative worlds. Collectively, these Anglophone novelists scrutinize international law’s ability to shape the ways we come to know ourselves and one another as rights-bearing individuals, international actors, advocates, and activists. Recent work in the humanities has begun to address the ways in which international law is a set of interlocked narratives that claim

For All Peoples and All Nations: Anglophone Literature and the Imaginative Work of International Law (1884-2017)

(2002). Raced Encounters, Sexed Transactions: 'Luso-tropicalism' and the Portuguese Colonial Empire. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 27-39.

Raced Encounters, Sexed Transactions: 'Luso-tropicalism' and the Portuguese Colonial Empire

The last three decades have witnessed a radical transformation in the political and social make-up of Southern Africa, evidenced especially than in the areas of race and power relations. ‘Narrating a White Africa: autobiography, race and history’ examines the ways in which life-writing forms are being ‘conscripted’ to make sense of the fraught and traumatic political and historical conditions of postcolonial Africa. That in the context of life-writing this occurs through the highly charged notions of intimate suffering and traumatic aftermath highlights the significance of the link between race, identity and history in contemporary memoirs by White African writers.

Narrating a White Africa: Autobiography, Race and History

This essay examines two recent novels by the Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus ([2003] 2005) and Half a Yellow Sun (2006), placing them first in a dialogue with each other, and more broadly with selected Nigerian writing on the Biafra conflict. Arguing with Adesanmi that Adichie belongs to a ‘third generation’ of African literary work, it traces the novels' work of historical revisionism through gendered and embodied discourses of pain and violence. Adichie returns the reader to an aesthetics of excess firmly grounded on potently disturbing images of the ‘body in pain’, in Elaine Scarry's memorable phrase (1983): the battered, bruised and scarred body emerges as a key image, a corporeal evocation of the individual self that is traced in both novels to a legacy of colonial and post-colonial relations, and specific gendered configurations.

Embodied genealogies and gendered violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's writing

This paper analyzes the concept of what can be called an "insider Whiteness," at once African and inevitably always already out of Africa. Specifically, it explores life writing narratives by White Africans as a rich setting for an analysis of how White people both relate to the continent as a physical and imaginary space and negotiate their ability to call Africa "home." Through detailed textual analysis of Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart (1990) and reference to a number of works by J. M. Coetzee, Gillian Slovo, Breyten Breytenbach and Doris Lessing, the paper proposes that the continuing debates about identity and race in post-Apartheid South Africa show that it takes a great deal of work for the White person truly to belong in Africa.

/pdf/on-your-knees-white-man-african-un-belongings-in-rian-malan-2eegn4s49e.pdf

"On Your Knees, White Man": African (Un)Belongings in Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart

This essay engages with the focus on 'generations' adopted in this issue of LiNQ by exploring how the private story of self so often will take on the quality of a cultural document that captures the complex social and political history of a place and a time. In this way, it is concerned with the way "the 'I' as an enunciatory site is a point of convergence of autobiographical politics and the politics of memory" in Sidonie Smith's words, but also of the politics of the postcolonial nation and of the literary representation of Africa.That, in a sense, is the double bind McCall Smith refers to in the first of the above epigraphs.

/pdf/longing-belonging-and-self-making-in-white-zimbabwean-life-3c76x053sa.pdf

Tony Simoes da Silva

Papers

Raced Encounters, Sexed Transactions: 'Luso-tropicalism' and the Portuguese Colonial Empire

Narrating a White Africa: Autobiography, Race and History

Embodied genealogies and gendered violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's writing

"On Your Knees, White Man": African (Un)Belongings in Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart

Longing, Belonging, and Self-making in White Zimbabwean Life Writing: Peter Godwin's When a Crocodile Eats the Sun