‘A house for dead people’: memory and spatial transformation in Red Location,South Africa

One of several new South African post-apartheid memory projects, the Red Location Museum in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth opened in 2006, in a century-old informal settlement with strong histories of resistance. The museum was intended to acknowledge the area’s contribution to the liberation struggle, and contribute to dismantling apartheid urban geographies by producing a tourist and cultural economy. However, the project was highly contested from its inception by residents who felt that the priority for the neighbourhood should be housing and service delivery. Major housing-related protests erupted on the museum’s doorstep between 2003 and 2005, and in late 2013 the new cultural precinct was closed down indefinitely. This paper examines the politics and controversies surrounding the Red Location developments between 1997 and 2013, using this case study to consider the ways in which the protests around the museum are rooted in historical and political histories made visible through residents’ radical claiming of ownership of the museum building. The Red Location example offers a useful consideration of the complexities of applying notions of ‘participation’ and ‘community ownership’ in practice in fraught situations where major change is needed, and makes a case for the thorough historicisation of contemporary conflicts over development and spatial change.     

‘Being in Being’: Contesting the Ontopolitics of Indigeneity

This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contemporary practice. This shift in approach to indigenous ways of knowing and being, historically derided under conditions of colonialism, is a reflection of the “ontological turn” in anthropology. Rather than seeing indigenous peoples as having an inferior or different understanding of the world to a modernist one, the ontological turn suggests that their importance lies in the fact that they constitute different worlds and “world” in a performatively different way. The radical promise this view holds is that a different world already exists in potentia, the access to which is a question of ontology—of being differently: ‘being in being’ rather than thinking, acting and world-making as if we were transcendent or “possessive” modern subjects. We argue that the ontopolitical arguments for the superiority of indigenous ways of being should not be seen as radical or emancipatory resistances to modernist or colonial epistemological and ontological legacies but rather as a new form of neoliberal governmentality, cynically manipulating critical, postcolonial and ecological sensibilities for its own ends. Thus, rather than “provincializing” dominant western hegemonic practices, such discourses of indigeneity extend them, instituting new forms of governing through calls for adaptation and resilience.     

‘New Heaven and New Earth’

The idea that 19th-century Europeans and Islanders faced each other across virtually impassable linguistic and cultural boundaries has been a model for Pacific ethnohistory and can, perhaps, be traced in part to the Sapir–Whorf theory of linguistic incommensurability. Based on a case study concerning the translation of the Aneityum [Anejom] bible in Southern Vanuatu in the mid-19th century, the article considers whether the engagement between Islanders and missionaries might be better investigated through the dynamic dialogic model of Bakhtin and Voloshinov: thus speakers and interlocutors on Aneityum actively sought to understand each other through debates and dialogues about the new deity and His place in the spiritual cosmos of the island. The article first discusses the Protestant missionary defence of linguistic parity and commensurability and the formal practices of 19th-century British bible translation; then analyses debates on the new God's efficacy between missionary John Geddie and Nohoat, the foremost sorcerer of the area; and concludes by considering the translation of words particularly important to the Christian faith.     

Symbolic Reparation,Heritage and Political Transition in South Africa’s Eastern Cape

This article first examines the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendation of symbolic reparation for apartheid, and its effect on South African heritage. Second, it considers the relationship between public history and civic nation building in South Africa, as well as problems in trying to develop an inclusive public history through museums. Case studies drawn from Grahamstown and Mthatha in the Eastern Cape are explored as examples of the redevelopment of the old and establishment of the new public history as part of the negotiated transition.     

Being and nothingness in Chinese kinship: Three meta‐studies

Baker, Hugh D. R., Chinese Family and Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. xii + 243 pp. including chapter references, index, appendices, and glossary. $17.50 cloth.

Wolf, Arthur P. and Chieh‐shan Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845–1945. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980. xx + 426 pp. including chapter references, index, appendices, and glossary. $18.95 cloth.

Chao, Paul, Chinese Kinship. London: Kegan Paul International, 1983. xiii + 243 pp. including chapter references, index, and glossary. £15 cloth.     

‘Enormous Opportunities’ and ‘Hot Frontiers’: Sub-Saharan Africa in U.S. Grand Strategy, 2001-Present

Abstract

This article argues that, in the 21st century, there has been a significant turnaround in the US approach to Sub-Saharan Africa. No longer is the region viewed solely as the site of human tragedy and internal wars where Washington has no tangible interests. Instead, US policymakers have increasingly viewed this part of Africa as a site of valuable commercial, geopolitical, and security interests—with particular emphasis on petroleum reserves, the market potential of its growing population, and its apparent locus as a site of transnational Islamist terrorism. Sub-Saharan Africa is now considered in grand strategic terms. Unintended consequences of US intervention are already visible, however; as it integrates the region into its global strategic calculus, the United States has begun to repeat mistakes made in other key regions of the world.     

The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity,Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914

In a Crystal Land: Canadian Explorers in Antarctica by Dean Beeby. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 262, illus., maps. £19.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–8020–0362–1.

Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth‐Century Montreal by Louise Dechêne, translated by Liana Vardi. Montreal and Kingston: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1993. Pp. xxi + 428, map, tables. £52.25 (hardback); £21.00 (paperback). ISBN 0–7735–0658–6; 0–7735–0951–8.

While the Women Only Wept: Loyalist Refugee Women by Janice Potter‐MacKinnon. Montreal and Kingston: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1993. Pp. xvi + 200. £29.70 (hardback). ISBN 0–7735–0962–3.

The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492–1992: A Regional Geography by Bonham C. Richardson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. vi + 235, maps, tables. £30.00 (hardback); £11.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–521–35186–3; 0–521–35977–5.

Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London's Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement 1786–1791 by Stephen J. Braidwood. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994. Pp. x + 324, maps. £16.50 (paperback). ISBN 0–85323–377–2.

The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. Volume I: From Early Times to c.1800 edited by Nicholas Tarling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xv + 655, maps, illus. £55.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–521–35505–2.

India's Colonial Encounter: Essays in Memory of Eric Stokes edited by Mushirul Hasan and Narayani Gupta. New Delhi: Manohar, 1993. Pp. vi + 412. Rs.400. ISBN 81–7304–007–9.

Welteroberung und Christentum: Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der Neuzeit by Horst Gründer. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1994. Pp. 751, maps and illustrations. DM 128. ISBN 3–579–00136–1.

Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo‐British Identity, 1689‐c.1830 by Colin Kidd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xiii + 322. £35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–521–43484‐X.

Academe and Empire: Some Oversees Connections of Aberdeen University 1860–1970 by John D. Hargreaves. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1994. Pp. x + 142. £8.95. ISBN 1–85752–220–6.

Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904) by Julia A. Clancy‐Smith. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994. Pp. xxiii + 370. $45.00. ISBN 0–520–08242–7.

Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land: The Emigration of Single Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 1820–1939 by Cecillie Swaisland. Oxford: Berg Publishers/University of Natal Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 186, illustrations. £25.00 (hardback); £10.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–85496–745–1; 0–85496–870–9.

God's Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster by Donald Harman Akenson. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Pp. xiv + 404, maps. $32.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–8014–2755‐X.

Regiments: Regiments and Corps of the British Empire and Commonwealth 1758–1993. A Critical Bibliography of their Published Histories. Compiled and published by Roger Perkins, Newton Abbot, 1994. Pp. 806. £92.50 (hardback). ISBN 0–9506429–3–2. Available from Roger Perkins, PO Box 29, Newton Abbot, Devon TQ12 1XU.

The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 by David Omissi. London: Macmillan, 1994. Pp. xx + 313. £45.00. ISBN 0–333–55049–8.

Public Health in British India: Anglo‐Indian Preventive Medicine 1859–1914 by Mark Harrison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xviii + 324. £19.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–521–46688–1.

Hong Kong in Chinese History: Community and Social Unrest in the British Colony, 1842–1913 by Jung‐Fang Tsai. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Pp. xvix + 375, maps. $52.00. ISBN 0–231–07932‐X.

European Imperialism, 1860–1914 by Andrew Porter. Basingstoke, London: Macmillan, 1994. Pp. xiii + 119, maps. £5.99 (paperback). ISBN 0–333–48104–6.

Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918 by Robert H. MacDonald. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Pp. viii + 259. £22.75. ISBN 0–8020–2843–8.

The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux by James O. Gump. Lincoln, Nebraska and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 178, maps. £23.95 (hardback). ISBN 0–8032–2152–5.

A History of Ethiopia by Harold G. Marcus. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of Calfornia Press, 1994. Pp. xv + 261, maps. $35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–520–08121–8.

Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936, by Paul E. Lovejoy and Jan S. Hogendorn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xvii + 391. £45.00 (hardback); £16.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–521–37469–3; 0–521–44702‐X.

The Atlantic Provinces in Confederation edited by E. R. Forbes and D. A. Muise. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 628. $60.00 (hardback); $29.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–8020–5886–8; 0–8020–6817–0.

Australian History in New South Wales 1888 to 1938 by Brian H. Fletcher. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1993. Pp. vii + 228. $24.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–86840–269–9.

Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend by Alistair Thomson. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. vi + 282; photographs. £18.95 (hardback). ISBN 0–19553491–3.

Broken Promises: Popular Protest, Indian Nationalism and the Congress Party in Bihar, 1935–1946 by Vinita Damodaran. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xiv + 398, 5 maps, 3 figures, 18 tables, 3 appendices. £18.95. ISBN 0–19–562979–5.

Rajani Palme Dutt: A Study in British Stalinism by John Callaghan. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993. Pp. xi + 213. £19.99. ISBN 0–85315–7790.

Immigration, Ethnicity and Racism in Britain, 1815–1945 by Panikos Panayi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Pp. vi + 170. £29.99 (hardback); £7.99 (paperback). ISBN 0–7190–3697–6; 0–7190–3698–4.

Macmillan by John Turner. London: Longman, 1994. Pp. vii + 302. £24.99 (hardback); £10.99 (paperback). ISBN 0–582–21880–2; 0–582–55386–5.

The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan by Robert J. McMahon. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 431, maps. £25.00. ISBN 0–231–08226–6.

The Twilight of British Ascendancy in the Middle East: A Case Study of Iraq, 1941–1950 by Daniel Silverfarb. London: Macmillan, 1994. Pp. xii + 306, 2 maps. £34.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–333–62525–0.

The Wars of French Decolonization by Anthony Clayton. London: Longman, 1994. Pp. x + 234, maps. £32.00 (hardback); £11.99 (paperback) ISBN 0–582–09802–5; 0–582–09801–7.

Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government by Nicholas Thomas. Oxford: Polity Press, 1994. Pp. viii + 238. £45.00 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–7456–0871‐X; 0–7456–1215–6.     

Commemorating ‘Struggle Heroes’: Constructing a Genealogy for the New South Africa

This article focuses on new commemorative monuments, memorials and statues in post‐apartheid South Africa. The identification, preservation, celebration and display (not least for tourists) of heritage, especially the heritage of those previously marginalised, are flourishing throughout the country. This article examines how new monuments contribute to constructing new identities in the post‐apartheid context. It will first discuss the perceived need for monuments generally, and the identification and public commemoration of ‘heroes’ in particular. It then explores how selected heroes are linked to processes of identity formation. It will be suggested that by identifying and celebrating new heroes, we, as communities and as a nation, create a genealogy, a chosen ancestry—not in biological but in ideological terms—which serves as a foundation for the construction of our preferred identity.     

Rewriting apartheid South Africa: race and space in Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo’s novels*

This article employs oppositional black geography as a lens to examine spatiality in the novels of two black South African women writing during apartheid, Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo. In analyzing Tlali’s Muriel at Metropolitan and Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die, it argues that the authors used a critical spatial analysis of the nation to critique apartheid and its oppressive policies. It holds that by insisting on authoring their own worlds in a country that sought to deny them creative agency, Tlali and Ngcobo carved out intellectual space that enabled them to critique dominant ideologies of Afrikaner nationalism and white supremacy, while imagining and writing alternatives to a nation to which their relationships were primarily ones of disavowal and subjugation. Both Tlali and Ngcobo render visible the fissures within the seemingly naturalized apartheid sites they construct in their fiction, revealing the inherent contradictions and injustices of apartheid spatiality. Through their fiction, they were thus engaged in situated knowledge production and a reconfiguration of apartheid space into a more socially just place. In narrating subaltern discourses in their novels from the standpoint of those most oppressed by apartheid law and ideology and by creatively engaging the spatiality of apartheid, Tlali and Ngcobo offer new modes for reading the nation, valuable for elucidating the ways in which the national space genders black women, and how black women, in turn shape and reshape that space.