Face-Work: Making Hair Matter in Sixteenth-Century Central Europe

Bringing gender history, the history of the body and art history into a conversation with material culture studies, this article argues that the sudden fashionability of beards in Renaissance Europe has been intricately linked with a culture of material and visual experimentation. I propose shifting perspectives from a focus on the symbolism of beards towards examining how early modern ways of material engagement with the matter of hair crafted a visual attention to facial hair that made up the sociocultural significance of beards. Focusing on how people made hair matter, I suggest working with the concept of face-work. In particular, this article maps how the Reformation upheavals and the rise of new visual practices dynamised Renaissance protagonists’ creative engagement with facial hair as a means for staging the self.     

The politics of repressing environmentalists as agents of foreign influence

Theoretically, this article reveals the long-term risk for local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) of participating in transnational advocacy networks (TANs), accepting money from foreign sources and throwing ‘boomerangs’ internationally—a strategy used by local NGOs to seek international allies to pressure repressive and unresponsive states at home. Focusing primarily on the suppression of environmental NGOs that oppose natural-resource extraction, this article examines three cases—Russia, India and Australia—to illuminate the consequences of this trend for local civil society and TANs. It also documents a global trend towards states depicting local NGOs with international linkages as subversive agents of foreign interests, justifying legal crackdowns and the severing of foreign funding and ties. State framing of NGOs as agents of foreign interests is repressing local environmental activism, depoliticising civil society and weakening international NGO alliances—a conclusion with far-reaching consequences for the future of TANs, local NGOs and environmental activism.     

Confronting the settler legacy: Indigenisation and transformation in South Africa and Zimbabwe

This article examines attempts to negotiate a perceived residual dominance of settler populations in South Africa and Zimbabwe by means of developmental and cultural policies deemed necessary to restore sovereignty to Africans. Indigenisation has become a preferred strategy for reconstructing post-colonial states in Africa: indigenisation of the economy as part of a Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe and Black Economic Empowerment in the socio-cultural context of Ubuntu in South Africa. These are issues arising from the regional legacy of contested and uneven transitions to majority rule. Identifying how governments frame the ‘settler problem’, and politicise space in doing so, is crucial for understanding post-colonial politics. Indigenisation in Zimbabwe allows the government to maintain a network of patronage and official rhetoric is highly divisive and exclusivist although couched in terms of reclaiming African values and sovereignty. Revival of Ubuntu as a cultural value system in South Africa facilitates a more positive approach to indigenisation, although Black Economic Empowerment displays elitist tendencies and cultural transformation remains controversial and elusive. The perceived need to anchor policy in socially acceptable (i.e., ostensibly indigenous/traditional) contexts has become a prominent feature of post-colonial politics and is indicative of an indigenous turn in Southern African politics.