Browsing Faculty of Arts by Title
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Wittenberg, Hermann (Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: In postcolonial translation studies, increasing attention is being given to the asymmetrical relationships between dominant and indigenous languages. This paper argues that John Francis Cele’s UPrester John (1958), is not simply a subordinated and obeisant translation of John Buchan’s adventure thriller Prester John (1910), but a more complex form of textuality that is both oppositional and complicit with the workings of apartheid. Although Cele’s translation reproduces Buchan’s story of a daring young Scotsman who single-handedly quells a black nationalist uprising, it also ameliorates the novel’s racist language and assumption. Cele’s translation practice is examined in the context of apartheid publishing and Bantu education. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/727 Files in this item: 1
WittenbergRaceresistance2011.pdf (168.2Kb) -
Zinn, Sandy (Library and Information Association of South Africa, 2009)[more][less]
Abstract: E-learning has come of age in South African higher education but scepticism, caution and an inadequate reward system for innovative teaching methods have resulted in a slow uptake by academics. Within this milieu the author pioneered a course in the ACE School Librarianship programme. The study describes the e-learning experiences of the course participants gleaned from questionnaire responses to questions related to experiences of ICTs, the Internet and online learning, ability to navigate the e-learning environment, utilization of elements of the learning management system and implementation of course ideas in their respective schools and personal lives. The study also provides an opportunity for the author to reflect on her pioneering experiences with e-learning and how she would approach it differently next time. The main lessons learned were that 1) the e-learning environment is not necessarily intuitive and participants need opportunities to digest novel features such as the discussion forum; 2) several of the advantages and disadvantages of e-learning that appear in the research literature are identified in this study; and 3) setting up an e-learning course is best achieved incrementally. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/526 Files in this item: 1
ZinnE-learning2009.pdf (350.4Kb) -
Langenhoven, Belinda; Dyssel, Michael (Springer, 2007)[more][less]
Abstract: The article reflects the findings of a survey undertaken in Mitchell’s Plain and presents a case study of the factors that impact recycle-related employment tendencies and opportunities in the area of the Cape Flats in South Africa. The article states recycling also has advantages for the creation of formal and informal employment and it can be enhanced with the encouragement of local authorities through incentives URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/542 Files in this item: 1
LangenhovenMitchellsPlain2007.pdf (978.8Kb) -
Clowes, Lindsay; Lazarus, Sandy; Ratele, Kopano (Medical Research Council, Tygerberg, 2010)[more][less]
Abstract: This article reports on a study that sought to elicit the views of male university students on risk and protective factors to male interpersonal violence. The participants were 116 third-year students who participated in a final year research project in the Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) Programme at the University of Western Cape (UWC). Each of the students conducted six semistructured face to face interviews with male students. Following initial analyses of the interviews, a video-recorded class discussion was held to discuss the research findings. The data from the class discussion was captured under the four levels of individual, relationship, community and society, utilised by the World Health organization (WHO) in its World Health Report on Violence and Health. The analysis of the class discussion and the students’ own research reports revealed that at the individual level, risk and protective factors primarily revolve around the challenges of constructing a viable masculinity in specific social and economic contexts; at the relationship level, the key factors appear to be the experiences and expectations around gender roles and family dynamics; at the community level, it seems that weak or non-existent community networks and activities feed into increasing the risk of male community members becoming involved in violence. Each of these three levels needs to be understood against the historically specific backdrop of the societal ecological level: the gendered cultural values expressed in and reflectedby the wider social, economic and political contexts. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/170 Files in this item: 1
ClowesRisk&Protective2010.pdf (869.8Kb) -
Hayes, Patricia (Wiley - Blackwell Publishing, 2009)[more][less]
Abstract: Born in 1956, Santu Mofokeng formed part of the Afrapix Collective that engaged in exposé and documentary photography of anti-apartheid resistance and social conditions during the 1980s in South Africa. However, Mofokeng was an increasingly important internal critic of mainstream photojournalism, and of the ways black South Africans were represented in the bigger international picture economy during the political struggle. Eschewing scenes of violence and the third-party view of white-on-black brutality in particular, he began his profound explorations of the everyday and spiritual dimensions of African life, both in the city and in the countryside. His formal techniques favor “fictions” that contain smoke, mist, and other matters and techniques that occlude rather than expose. Using angularity and ambivalence, he also ruptures realist expectations and allows space for the uncanny and the supernatural. He works with the notion of seriti (a northern seSotho term encompassing aura, shadow, power, essence, and many other things). The essay follows strands in Mofokeng’s writings and statements in relation to certain of his photographs, most recently repositioned in the substantial 2007 exhibition Invoice, to argue that he has pushed for a desecularization and Africanization of photography from the 1980s to the present. In more recent work the scourge of apartheid has been replaced by the HIV/AIDS virus, a mutation of nature, exacerbating the spiritual insecurities of many people in postapartheid South Africa. The essay concludes that Mofokeng’s work poses a critique of the parallel paradigms of Marxist-influenced social history and documentary photography in 1980s South Africa, both still highly influential, by attempting to reinsert aura (seriti) into photography and by highlighting what secular Marxism has concealed and proscribed. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/559 Files in this item: 1
HayesSantuMofokeng2009.pdf (660.2Kb) -
Clowes, Lindsay; D’Amant, Toni; Nkani, Vuyo (HSRC Press, 2012)[more][less]
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Hart, Genevieve (2012)[more][less]
Abstract: South Africa is a youthful society with 54% younger than 24 years. South African young people face disproportionately high rates of unemployment, HIV-AIDS infection, and violent crime. Even in post-apartheid South Africa, the disparities between the historically white and black sectors of schooling are still evident. The implications of the “youth bulge” for South African librarianship are clear. However, public and school libraries face daunting challenges. Fewer than 10% of schools have functioning school libraries and millions of South Africans do not have access to public libraries. Clearly innovative models of service must be found to reach more than the current tiny minority of library users. The paper reports on two case studies of community library services: one a group of dual-use libraries set up in six remote schools as public library “outreach”, and the second a so-called “satellite” library in a township on the outskirts of Cape Town. Their environments and operations are very different; but what they have in common is a willingness to break down conventional barriers and to move into fresh ground. The paper argues that they point to new models of service which, by moving beyond the concept of “outreach”, offer solutions to developing new kinds of library services in South Africa and perhaps in other countries with similar challenges. The sites might well fall short of rigorous international standards but both are imaginative attempts to meet the needs of young South Africans. Description: Paper presented at the Libraries for young people: Breaking through boundaries, IFLA section libraries for children and young adults, Joensuu, Finland, 9-10 August 2012 URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/451 Files in this item: 1
HartIFLA2012.pdf (203.7Kb) -
Hart, Genevieve (Community High Education Service Partnership, 2008)[more][less]
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Hart, Genevieve (Library and Information Association of South Africa, 2007)[more][less]
Abstract: The article argues that the construct of social capital offers South African public librarianship fresh vision – urgently needed if it is to fulfil its potential role in social inclusion. Social capital refers to the stocks of social trust, norms and networks that a community can draw on to solve common problems. A wide body of research in Southern Africa bears witness to its role in the success of development projects. Restrictive economic policies, coupled with new demands, have put pressure on public libraries and research points to a prevailing low morale among their staff, who, it is suggested, find themselves caught in the transition towards new models of service. Government’s acceptance of social capital as a crucial tool in the developmental state and the news of its intervention to transform South African public libraries suggest the need to articulate the library as “a place for all”. In reaction to neglect in the literature of social capital, internationally, librarians have documented their building of social capital through their education, information and community programmes. This work offers South African librarians a rich resource to draw on in their search for new direction and vision URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/583 Files in this item: 1
HartSocialcapital 2007.pdf (204.7Kb) -
Bhana, Deevia; Clowes, Lindsay; Morrell, Robert; Shefer, Tamara (Unisa Press and Taylor & Francis, 2008)[more][less]
Abstract: Since the promulgation of the South African Schools Act in 1996 it has become illegal to exclude pregnant girls from school. Influenced by feminist research, policy has sought to assist pregnant girls and young parents to continue and complete their schooling on the understanding that having children often terminates school-going limiting future employment and work opportunities. This paper seeks to examine how the new policy has been understood and implemented. We focus on the views and experiences of principals and teachers as they are the authorities at school with the responsibility for ensuring that the policy is implemented. The paper draws on qualitative data collected by a larger study on being and becoming a parent at diverse group of schools in Kwazulu-Natal and the Western Cape. In the paper we investigate the extent to which schools’ responses to pregnancy and parenting reflect and/or reproduce normative gender roles and practices with respect to schooling and parenting in contemporary South Africa. We show also that despite familiar stereotypes about young parents and pregnancy, both teachers and principals take their pastoral responsibilities seriously. They do care and do try to help. But many teachers were judgemental and moralistic particularly in response to young girls. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/151 Files in this item: 1
BhanaPregnentGirls2008.pdf (2.038Mb) -
Bock, Zannie (University of Stellenbosch, 1999)[more][less]
Abstract: This article outlines the development of a beginner English course called 'Speak Out' for adults in Adult Basic Education and Training classes in the early 1990s. The course uses an innovative roleplay methodology which builds on the experiences and language knowledge of the adult learners. It was conceptualised and developed within a participatory approach to adult learning and materials development. The article explores the tension between the ideals of the participatory approach and the constraints exerted by contextual and other factors. The article begins with an introduction of the context within which the materials were conceptualised, then offers a brief overview' of the participatory approach, and then considers the following aspects of the 'Speak Out' course; the language learning methodology, issues of teacher competence and development, and lastly, the materials development process itself. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/280 Files in this item: 1
BockSpeakOut.pdf (8.863Mb) -
Wittenberg, Hermann (Institute for the Study of English in Africa, Rhodes University, 2008)[more][less]
Abstract: With the publication of In the Heart of the Country by the London publisher Secker & Warburg in 1977, J. M. Coetzee had achieved international recognition for his second novel, transcending the narrow national literary culture of South Africa. Although In the Heart of the Country, with its overtly South African subject matter and setting certainly strengthened his credentials as a significant new South African writer, a careful look at the publication history of this novel shows a degree of ambivalence in the way Coetzee's authorship emerged in the force-field of tension between the local and the global. On the one hand, In the Heart of the Country's British publication was a further step in Coetzee's transnational authorship, a process that I have argued took place already with the writing and local South African publication of Dusklands (1974) ; on the other hand, Coetzee was also addressing himself for the first (and possibly last) time in a very particular and focused manner to a local readership. This complex doubled form of authorship was reflected in the dual publication history of In the Heart of the Country, both as an international version for the metropolitan Anglophone market (with a parallel United States edition), and as an edition published by Ravan Press in the following year, licensed for distribution only in South Africa. The South African edition distinguished itself not only by a different imprint and jacket design, but was decidedly local, with much of the novel's extensive dialogue in Afrikaans. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/761 Files in this item: 1
WittenberghTheTaintof the Censor2008.pdf (639.2Kb) -
Ratele, Kopano; Shefer, Tamara; Clowes, Lindsay (Sage Publications, 2012)[more][less]
Abstract: The absence of biological fathers in South Africa has been constructed as a problem for children of both sexes but more so for boy-children. Arguably the dominant discourse in this respect has demonized non-nuclear, female-headed households. Fathers are constructed as either absent or ‘bad’. Thus it has become important to explore more closely how male care-givers have been experienced by groups of men in South Africa. This article examines discourses of fatherhood and fatherlessness by drawing on qualitative interviews with a group of 29 men who speak about their reported experiences and understandings of being fathered or growing up without biological fathers. Two major and intertwined subjugated discourses about adult men’s experiences of being fathered that counter- balance the prevailing discourses about meaning of fatherhood and fatherlessness became evident, namely, ‘being always there’ and ‘talking fatherhood’. The importance of the experience of fatherhood as ‘being there’, which relates to a quality of time and relationship between child and father rather than physical time together, is illustrated. It is not only biological fathers who can ‘be there’ for their sons but also social fathers, other significant male role models and father figures who step in at different times in participants’ lives when biological fathers are unavailable for whatever reason. Second, many positive experiences of fathers or father figures that resist a traditional role of authority and control and subscribe to more nurturant and non-violent forms of care, represented as ‘talking’ fathers, are underlined. If we are to better understand the impact of colonial and apartheid history and its legacy on family life in contemporary society, there is a need for more historically and contextually informed studies on the meaning of fatherhood and fatherlessness. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/716 Files in this item: 1
Ratele SouthAfricanFathers2012.pdf (582.9Kb) -
Krog, Antjie (Philosophical Society of Southern Africa, 2008)[more][less]
Abstract: Regular reference is made, within the discourse around the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to the fact that ubuntu, an indigenous world view, played a role in the process. This paper tries to show that despite these references, important analysts of the TRC (as well as many South Africans) had insufficiently accounted for this worldview in their critical readings of the Commission’s work and therefore found aspects of the process incoherent and/or morally and legally confused. I am not arguing that the TRC was not a deeply flawed process, but want to establish how powerfully this indigenous world view brought a coherency that not only enabled the TRC to do its work without incidences of revenge, but imbued politically and legally trapped concepts with new possibilities. The pervasiveness of this world view within eg. the second round of TRC testimonies is noticeable and show how often the critique on the TRC fails to take this dominant role into account and how many, seemingly contradictory or confusing, positions become coherent when regarded within this worldview. This view of interconnectedness, consistently expressed throughout the life of the commission, has wide implications for the interpretation of healing, the asking of amnesty, the rehabilitation of perpetrators, the interdependence of forgiveness and reconciliation in the process of achieving full personhood within a healed society. In the footsteps of Richard Bell, this paper locates this world view within a particular framework formulated as ubuntu by Desmond Tutu, as communitarianism by Kwame Gyekye, as ethnophilosophy by Paulin Hountondji etc. The paper also tries to understand how this interconnected moral self is formed and who the community could or should be that influences this moral self. URI: http://repository.uwc.ac.za/xmlui/handle/10566/187 Files in this item: 1
KrogReconciliation2008.pdf (93.7Kb) -
Wittenberg, Hermann (Institute for the Study of English in Africa, 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: This essay seeks to explore the question of origins: the beginnings of the literary career of arguably South Africa's most significant author, and the development of a form of authorship that was, at its inception, situated both locally and globally. An archaeology of the publication history of the debut novel Dusklands (1974) can shed light on the emergence of a particularly complex form of transnational authorship that J. M. Coetzee came to assume, a form locating itself within the South African literary landscape while simultaneously connecting itself to broader international literary currents. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/771 Files in this item: 1
WittenbergTowardsAnArchaeology2011.pdf (2.284Mb) -
Conradie, Ernst (University of Kwazulu-Natal School of Theology, 2005)[more][less]
Abstract: This essay defends the significance of the Christian doctrine of sin with reference to the many contemporary manifestations of evil, including the problems of environmental devastation, environmental injustuce and rampant consmerism. It offers a survey of various attempts towards an ecological reformulation of the doctrine of sin. It argues that theological circumspection is required in order not to confuse and conflate the problems of natural suffering and human finitude with the human roots of evil. It argues that theological attention on the relationship between nature and grace should not inhibit a primary theological focus on the tension between sin and grace. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/408 Files in this item: 1
ConradieEcologicalReformulation2005.pdf (1.701Mb) -
Hart, Genevieve (Walter de Gruyter, 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: The article describes an interpretive case study of a group of six dual use school community libraries in one remote region of South Africa. Its focus is rather more on the libraries as school libraries than public libraries. The recent government sponsored LIS Transformation Charter has placed a spotlight on the backlogs in school and public library provision. The case study, conducted in April 2009, investigates if dual or joint use libraries might help fill gaps and, if so, under what conditions. The article describes background, research questions, methodology, site and some of the findings. The study highlights the relationships among role-players, the realities of dual use functioning and the complex issue of librarian identity. The study concludes that, although many of the international criteria for dual use libraries are not met, the six libraries do provide a crucial service for their schools and other schools in the surrounding areas. And they offer a tantalising picture of the possibilities of dual use for rural information services. The article suggests that with more dynamic leadership these possibilities could be fulfilled. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/442 Files in this item: 1
HartCommunityLibraries2011.pdf (315.5Kb) -
Israel, Paolo (History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2009)[more][less]
Abstract: This article engages a historical reconstruction of the formation of Makonde revolutionary singing in the process of the Mozambican liberation struggle. The history of ʻUtopia liveʼ is here entrusted to wartime genres, marked by heteroglossia and the use of metaphor, and referring to moments when the ʻspace of experienceʼ and the ʻhorizon of expectationʼ of the Struggle were still filled with uncertainty and the sense of possibility. Progressively, however, singing expressions were reorganised around socialismʼs nodes of meaning. Ideological tropes, elaborated by Frelimoʼs ʻcourtlyʼ composers, were appropriated in popular singing. The relations between the ʻpeopleʼ and their leaders were made apparent through the organization of the performance space. The main contention of the article is that unofficiality, heteroglossia, metaphor and poetic license, although they feature in genres that have been marked out as ʻpopularʼ in academic discourse, are by no means intrinsically ʻpopularʼ. Much on the contrary, they are the first victims of populist modes of political actions, that is, of a politics grounded on a concept of ʻpeopleʼ. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/102 Files in this item: 1
IsraelUtopia2009.pdf (3.176Mb) -
Akuupa, Michael (Forum Press, 2010)[more][less]
Abstract: Social scientists who have written about the dynamics of festival rituals have analysed such practices variously as celebrations of commonality, as the enhancement of social cohesion, or as expressions of nostalgia. Festivals have also been studied as spaces, where information is disseminated to the public. This paper demonstrates that in postcolonial Namibia, cultural festivals have become avenues where discourses of difference and belonging are emphasised and contested by local people, festival participants and state officials through a range of ethnic-cultural presentations. The paper is primarily concerned with the ‘making’ of Kavango identity as distinctively different from that of other ethnic groups in postcolonial Namibia. This process takes place in a particular political space, that of the culture festivals, which the state has organised and staged since the mid-1990s. Every year during the Annual National Culture Festivals representatives of Namibia’s various ethnic groups gather to ‘showcase’ and express their diversity. Representatives of the state have time and again emphasised, couched in a discourse of ‘unity in diversity’, the importance of bringing together the country’s previously segregated population groups. The paper shows that while the performers act out diversity through dance and other forms of cultural exhibition, the importance of belonging to the nation and a larger constituency is simultaneously highlighted. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/639 Files in this item: 1
AkuupaCulturalFestivals2010.pdf (248.7Kb) -
Moolla, Fiona F. (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012)[more][less]
Abstract: The article discusses Somali literature, with particular focus given to the influence of Somali oral poetry and folk tales on modern novels. The difference between the concepts of orature and oral literature is examined, and the history of print and oral literary culture coexisting in Somalia is commented on. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/603 Files in this item: 2
MollarOratureBecomesLiterature2012_1.pdf (232.2Kb)