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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Political correctness
Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins: The Persistence of the Past in the Architecture of Apartheid interrogates how, in the era of decolonisation, post-apartheid South Africa reckons with its past in order to shape its future. Architects, historians, artists, social anthropologists and urban planners seek answers in this book to complex and unsettling questions around heritage, ruins and remembrance. What do we do with hollow memorials and political architectural remnants? Which should remain, which forgotten, and which dismantled? Are these vacant buildings, cemeteries, statues, and derelict grounds able to serve as inspiration in the fight against enduring racism and social neglect? Should they become exemplary as spaces for restitution and justice? The contributors examine the influence of public memory, planning and activism on such anguished places of oppression, resistance and defiance. Their focus on visible markers in the landscape to interrogate our past will make readers reconsider these spaces, looking at their landscape and history anew. Through a series of 14 empirically grounded chapters and 48 images, the contributors seek to understand how architecture contests or subverts these persistent conditions in order to promote social justice, land reclamation and urban rehabilitation. The decades following the dismantling of apartheid are surveyed in light of contemporary heritage projects, where building ruins and abandoned spaces are challenged and renegotiated across the country to become sites of protest, inspiration and anger. This ground-breaking collection is an important resource for professionals, academics and activists working in South Africa today.
If you paid even a moment’s attention during high-school history lessons, you probably know that 1910 brought about the Union of South Africa, that the 1948 general election ushered in apartheid, and that the Rainbow Nation was born when Madiba triumphed in the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. Spoilt Ballots dishes the dirt on these pivotal events in our history. But it also sheds light on a dozen lesser known contests, starting with the assassination of King Shaka in 1828 and ending with the anointing of President Cyril at Nasrec in 2017. Spoilt Ballots is as much about the people who voted in some of our most decisive elections as it is about those who didn’t get to make their mark. It explains why a black man in the Cape had more political rights in 1854 than at any other point in the ensuing 140 years and how the enfranchisement of women in 1930 was actually a step back for democracy. The book will leave you wondering if Oom Paul Kruger’s seriously dicey win in the 1893 ZAR election might have paved the way for the Boer War and whether ‘Slim Jannie’ Smuts really was that slim after all. It shows how the Nats managed to get millions of English-speakers to vote for apartheid and why the Groot Krokodil’s attempt to co-opt coloureds and Indians into the system backfired spectacularly. Entertaining and impeccably researched, Spoilt Ballots lifts the lid on 200 years of electoral dysfunction in our beloved and benighted nation.
Destructive forces have been eroding the University of Cape Town, Africa’s leading university. This book tells the sad, true tale of what has been transpiring. It is a saga of lunacy, criminality, pandering, and identity politics. The mad and the bad – the deranged, deluded, the depraved – have been granted endless latitude in bullying and abusing others. The decline began in 2015 with the Rhodes Must Fall protest that resulted in the offending statue’s removal within a month, and which spawned similar protests abroad. Emboldened by their local success, the protestors issued new and ever-increasing demands later that year and then again in 2016 and 2017. Their methods also became criminal – including intimidation, assault, and arson. The university leadership capitulated to this behaviour, and this fostered a broader and now pervasive toxic environment within the institution. These developments offer important lessons for universities around the world that are yielding to the forces of a faux “progressivism”.
South African higher education students have for the years 2015 and 2016 stood up to demand not only a free education but a decolonised, African-focused education. The calls for decolonisation of knowledge are the ultimate call for freedom. Without the decolonisation of knowledge, Africans may feel their liberation is inchoate and their efforts to shed Western dominance all come to naught. Over the years various African leaders including Steve Biko wrote about the need to decolonise knowledge. The call for decolonisation is largely being equated with the search for an African identity that looks critically at Western hegemony. Biko sought the black people to understand their origins; to understand black history and affirm black identity. These are all embedded in the struggle to decolonise and search for African values and identities. The contributors in this book treat several but connected themes that define what Africa and the diaspora require for a society devoid of colonialism and ready for a renewed Africa. “The discussions we develop and the philosophies we adopt on Pan Africanism and decolonisation are due to a bigger vision and for many of us the destination is African renaissance”. Everyone has a role to play in realising African renaissance; government, churches, universities, schools, cultural organisations all have a role to play in this endeavour.
"Over the past two decades, Nene has gained a reputation both locally and internationally as a thought-leader in diversity and inclusion, values-driven leadership and transformation. She has authored numerous publications, including contributing to the book Leadership Perspectives from the Front Line. She is a member of the Diversity Collegium, a think tank of globally-recognised diversity experts. She is an associate lecturer at GIBS on Global Diversity and Unconscious Bias, as well as an associate lecturer on Transformation Strategy for the Stellenbosch Business School. She is a sought-after speaker for conferences around the world." "The ideas and experiences shared by author Nene Molefi speak directly to the troubling prejudices and inequities that persist in our world. Diversity and inclusion are more pressing than ever. Injustices and deep social divisions persist, personally and systemically. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of fear and hatred are not isolated. They remain embedded and they demand courageous, deliberate work. In this book, Nene uses her own story to cast a bright light on the transformation journey. Nene’s book quite vulnerably takes the reader on Nene’s personal journey. In addition to the deeply personal content, each chapter ends with practical guidelines on how to lead inclusively. Nene’s book offers hope and substance in our vision of a diverse and inclusive and just society." —Justice Edwin Cameron
Can racism and intimacy co-exist? Can love and friendship form and flourish across South Africa’s imposed colour lines? Who better to engage on the subject of hazardous liaisons than the students with whom Jonathan Jansen served over seven years as Vice Chancellor of the University of the Free State. The context is the University campus in Bloemfontein, the City of Roses, the Mississippi of South Africa. Rural, agricultural, insular, religious and conservative, this is not a place for breaking out. But over the years, Jansen observed shifts in campus life and noticed more and more openly interracial friendships and couples, and he began having conversations with these students with burning questions in mind. Ten interracial couples tell their stories of love and friendship in their own words, with no social theories imposed on their meanings, but instead a focus on how these students experience the world of interracial relationships, and how flawed, outdated laws and customs set limits on human relationships, and the long shadow they cast on learning, living and loving on university campuses to this day.
It's time to fight back. Each day, more South Africans are targeted, labelled, and hounded out of society for expressing their opinions - ordinary opinions that just a few years ago were accepted as rational common sense. Have you been "cancelled" by an online mob that won't stop harassing you until you're fired from your job? Helen Zille almost was - but she survived by fighting back. In #StayWoke: Go Broke, the bestselling author and defining South African political figure explains why the woke Left constitutes a greater threat to South Africa's future than the populist Right does. Now more than ever, liberals must strengthen their spines and fight for their values - or be eviscerated in the Culture Wars raging across the English-speaking world. If you're looking for an incisive, indispensable survival guide through this tumultuous period of South African history, then #StayWoke: Go Broke is for you.
"This book is not an analysis of South Africa’s problems. It is an outline of what we must change to have the South Africa of our dreams. In these pages, I challenge myself and all those who are willing to take a chance to pursue a higher ideal, something bigger than any individual, a belief that we can be the stewards of our own destiny. This is a manifesto." For millions of South Africans, the promise of democracy, a promise our Constitution attempts to set out in its preamble, will not be realised in their lifetime. Some who are yet to be born will live and die poor and marginalised because their country was not ready to provide the tools that would help them to make their lives meaningful, healthy and prosperous. This situation is no accident. While the structural conditions that created the initial inequalities are a result of colonialism and apartheid, the worsening of this condition after 2010 is the result of political negligence, incompetence and rampant corruption borne out of a deep disconnection between the political elites and the real needs of the people. South Africa is in urgent need of a comprehensive overhaul of its political and state institutions, its social structures and institutions as well as its economy and policies. Manifesto presents a challenge to the professional class, black and white – who should know that turning the country around will take much more than good intentions – to urgently return to public life. They are key to moving South Africa towards modern democratic politics and can help to grow its economy to fit in and thrive in a rapidly evolving world. South Africa will get nowhere if the most able continue to be on the periphery of politics. Instead, we must adopt a different mindset and take on a new generational mission to accept the responsibility of leadership so that South Africa can finally have the future it has been waiting for the ANC to deliver.
South Africa’s democracy is often seen as a story of bright beginnings gone astray, a pattern said to be common to Africa. The negotiated settlement of 1994, it is claimed, ended racial domination and created the foundation for a prosperous democracy – but greedy politicians betrayed the promise of a new society. In Prisoners Of The Past, Steven Friedman astutely argues that this misreads the nature of contemporary South Africa. Building on the work of the economic historian Douglass North and the political thinker Mahmood Mamdani, Friedman shows that South African democracy’s difficulties are legacies of the pre-1994 past. The settlement which ushered in majority rule left intact core features of the apartheid economy and society. The economy continues to exclude millions from its benefits, while racial hierarchies have proved stubborn: apartheid is discredited, but the values of the pre-1948 colonial era, the period of British colonisation, still dominate. Thus South Africa’s democracy supports free elections, civil liberties and the rule of law, but also continues past patterns of exclusion and domination. Friedman reasons that this ‘path dependence’ is not, as is often claimed, the result of constitutional compromises in 1994 that left domination untouched. This bargain was flawed because it brought not too much compromise, but too little. Compromises extended political citizenship to all but there were no similar bargains on economic and cultural change. Using the work of the radical sociologist Harold Wolpe, Friedman shows that only negotiations on a new economy and society can free South Africans from the prison of the past.
This book explores South Africa’s tumultuous history from the aftermath of the Second Anglo-Boer War to the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on never-before-published documentary evidence – including diaries, letters, eyewitness testimony and diplomatic reports – the book follows the South African people through the battles, elections, repression, resistance, strikes, massacres, economic crashes and health crises that have shaped the nation’s character. Tracking South Africa’s path from colony to Union and from apartheid to democracy, History of South Africa documents the influence of key figures including Pixley Seme, Jan Smuts, Lilian Ngoyi, H.F. Verwoerd, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, P.W. Botha and Jacob Zuma. The book also gives detailed accounts of definitive events such as the 1922 Rand Revolt, the Defiance Campaign, Sharpeville, the Soweto uprising and the Marikana massacre. Looking beyond the country’s borders, it unpacks military conflicts such as the World Wars, the armed struggle and the Border War. The book explores the transition to democracy and traces the phases of ANC rule, from the Rainbow Nation to transformation to state capture. It examines the divisive and unifying role of sport, the ups and downs of the economy, and the impact of pandemics from the Spanish flu to AIDS and COVID-19. As South Africa faces a crisis as severe as any in its history, the book shows that these challenges are neither unprecedented nor insurmountable, and that there are principles to be found in history that may lead us safely into the future.
Cognisant of the globalising context in which we find ourselves, as intellectuals we ought to ensure relevance in what we teach. This orientation, that prizes pedagogic relevance, has been raised as an objection to the decolonial call, being – at times – used to resist democratic change in the South African University. The contributions in this volume highlight the implications of the global relevance discourse through revealing the impact of decontextualised curricula. Similarly, institutional democratisation and decolonisation ought not to be a turn to fundamentalist positions that recreate the essentialisms resisted through calls for decolonisation. As a critical response to such resistance to democratisation, this book showcases how decolonisation protects the constitutionally enshrined ideal of academic freedom and the freedom of scientific research. We argue that this framing of decoloniality should not be used to protect interests that seek to undermine the transformation of higher education. Concurrently, however, it is critical of decolonial positions that are essentialist and narrow in their manifestation and articulation. Decolonisation as Democratisation suggests what is intended by a curriculum revisionist agenda that prizes decolonisation through bringing together academics working in South Africa and the global academy. This collaborative approach aims to facilitate critical reflexivity in our curriculum reform strategies while developing pragmatic solutions to current calls for decolonisation.
In this interdisciplinary application of rhetorical analysis, Donald Lazere argues that college educators should publicly address and teach students to be aware of the conservative biases in American politics, media, and education itself that are generally assumed to be the norm of 'business as usual.' Because only bias on the left has been publicly 'marked, ' mainstream discourse shuts out any proportionate comparison with all the biases on the right--surveyed here at length. Lazere appeals to conservative scholars and intellectuals to engage in good-faith dialogue with leftist counterparts toward a balanced assessment of opposing biases.
We live in an age of crises that are global in scale and potentially apocalyptic in severity, affecting the lives of millions billions of people. Peter Lee examines the struggle for truth at the heart of these crises to show how political leaders attempt to shape individual behavior, attitudes and identity.
Contemporary artworks and archival documents celebrating 500 years of anticolonial activism. This volume illuminates 500 years of anticolonial resistance in the Global South, examining colonial violence and oppression and its ongoing repercussions, and paying homage to the people who resisted it in various ways and whose stories have hardly ever been told or heard to this day. The works of more than 40 contemporary artists from the Global South and the diaspora tell stories of rebellion and war, violence and trauma as well as survival and resilience. Their stories are complemented by historical documents and numerous objects from the RJM collection in Cologne. Artists include: Florisse Adjanohoun, Christie Akumabor, Osaze Amadasun, Kader Attia, Roger Atikpo, Belkis Ayón, Marcel Djondo, Omar Victor Diop, Nwakuso Edozien, Robert Gabris, Jimoh Ganiyu, Anani Gbeteglo, Ayrson Heráclito, indieguerillas, Patricia Kaersenhout, Eustache Kamouna, Grada Kilomba, Mohammed Laouli, Alao Lukman, Peter Magubane, Dhuwarrwarr Marika, Tshibumba Kanda Matulu and Medu Art Ensemble.
The past decade has seen the emergence of new types of trade union representatives attracting new and more diverse activists; this book explores their motivations and values, drawing upon the voices of the activists themselves and capturing the relationship between work, social identity and class consciousness.
Is populism fueled by a feeling of manhood under attack? If gender is its driving force, are there better ways to respond? COVID-19 delivers a stark warning: the global surge of populism endangers public health. Wronged and Dangerous introduces "viral masculinity" as a novel way to meet that threat by tackling the deep connection of our social and physical worlds. It calls us to ask not what populism says, but how it spreads. Leading with gender without leaving socioeconomic forces behind, it upends prevailing wisdom about populist politics today. You do not need to know or care about gender to get invested. You only need to be concerned with our future.
Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates Northeast India's spirited political sphere, including the categories and values through which its peoples conceive of their 'political' lives. Fourteen essays by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into the region's political life and sense. Collectively they show how different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities, and how forms and politics of indigeneity assume a life of its own as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by peoples.
Is populism fueled by a feeling of manhood under attack? If gender is its driving force, are there better ways to respond? COVID-19 delivers a stark warning: the global surge of populism endangers public health. Wronged and Dangerous introduces "viral masculinity" as a novel way to meet that threat by tackling the deep connection of our social and physical worlds. It calls us to ask not what populism says, but how it spreads. Leading with gender without leaving socioeconomic forces behind, it upends prevailing wisdom about populist politics today. You do not need to know or care about gender to get invested. You only need to be concerned with our future.
Hands, face, space. Curfews. Don't drink. Bend your knees. Conform, obey, comply - surrender. British life has become infested by bossiness. Boris Johnson won power as one of life's free-wheelers but his first year as PM saw a fever of finger-wagging. The real pandemic? Passive-aggressive ninnying by politicians, scientists and officialdom. From Sage with its graphs to BBC grandees telling us not to sing 'Rule Britannia', the National Trust with its slavery mania, to calorie counts on menus: why won't they leave us alone? Theatre directors beat us over the head with their agitprop. Militant cyclists scream at us from their saddles. Meghan Markle ticks us off for not being more Californian. Bossiness: did it begin when Moses came down from the mountain with his tablets? Cromwell beat Chris Whitty to it by four centuries and banned Christmas. A. Hitler, B. Mussolini and J.V. Stalin: they liked to throw their weight around, but today's self-serving dictators are more subtle. They do it with a caring smile. Tell us it's for our own good. They claim to be liberals! Following his best-selling Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain and his 2017 Christmas favourite Patronising Bastards, parliamentary sketchwriter Quentin Letts storms back into hard covers with a vituperative howl against the 'bossocracy'. They tell us what to do, what to say, how to think. Letts gives them a prolonged, resonant raspberry. He names the guilty men and women: Dominic Cummings, Prof Neil Ferguson, that strutting self-polisher Nicola Sturgeon, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cressida Dick, Michael Gove, even the sainted Sir David Attenborough. Bang! They all take a barrel. And then there's publicity-prone plonker Matt Hancock posing for photographs while doing his 'Mr Fit' press-ups. Reasonable people have had enough of being bossed about. And when reasonable people stop respecting the law, society has a problem.
Raised during the Rhodesian bush war in the 1970s and then immigrating to South Africa at the age of 11, Terry is shaped by a white culture that is racist, unstable, privileged and deeply divided. Her childhood appears idyllic but it is tragically bizarre as the adults around her insist on living their version of normality while the world falls apart. The first time Terry Angelos has sex with a black man, she's paid £300, working as a 19 year-old call girl in London. Back home it's 1989 and South Africa is being torn apart by political unrest. It's a year before Nelson Mandela is released and 5 years before the country's first democratic election. White Trash is a remarkable memoir told in vivid detail, laced with dark humour and savage honesty as the narrator unravels what it means to be a white African and what draws her into the brutal world of teenage sex work. But ultimately it's a story about finding a shard of light in the darkness, in a heroic quest to reinvent the self.
‘Without free speech there is no true thought.' -Jordan Peterson ‘You're telling me I'm being sensitive, and students looking for safe spaces that they're being hypersensitive. If you're white, this country is one giant safe space.' -Michael Eric Dyson Is political correctness an enemy of free speech, open debate and the free exchange of ideas? Or is it a progressive force, eroding the dominant power relationships and social norms that exclude marginalised groups from society?
Billionaires, Boris Johnson, big tech monopolies, raging inequality, Russian oligarchs, cancel culture, superyachts, spaceships to Mars, Twitter wars, a potentially devastating global inflation crisis… These may seem like entirely disparate issues, but they are all connected. Not for many generations has the world been brimming with this level of uncertainty, whether it’s a virus scouring the planet, the threat of nuclear war in Europe or the unravelling of political lies in yet another government scandal. The Age of Menace pulls these apparently disconnected strands together, illuminating the driving forces that have led us to this unique and chaotic point in human history. From the authors of critically acclaimed The End of Money comes a book that explains the state of the world today. In the words of Michael Avery, it is ‘essential reading for our times’.
While the 1950s in Canada were years of social conformity, it was also a time of political, economic, and technological change. Against a background of growing prosperity, federal and provincial politics became increasingly competitive, intergovernmental relations became more contentious, and Canada's presence in the world expanded. The life expectancy of Canadians increased as the social pathologies of poverty, crime, and racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination were in retreat. 1950s Canada illuminates the fault lines around which Canadian politics and public affairs have revolved. Chronicling the themes and events of Canadian politics and public affairs during the 1950s, Nelson Wiseman reviews social, economic, and cultural developments during each year of the decade, focusing on developments in federal politics, intergovernmental relations, provincial affairs, and Canada's role in the world. The book examines Canada's subordinate relationship first with Britain and then the United States, the interplay between Quebec's distinct society and the rest of Canada, and the regional tensions between the inner Canada of Ontario and Quebec and the outer Canada of the Atlantic and western provinces. Through this record of major events in the politics of the decade, 1950s Canada sheds light on the rapid altering of the fabric of Canadian life.
"An invaluable resource for both new and veteran allies...obvious and necessary" (Library Journal, starred review) information for everyone who wants to learn more about how to navigate gender diversity in today's families, communities, and workplaces. The days of two genders-male, female; boy, girl; blue, pink-are over, if they ever existed at all. Gender is now a global conversation, and one that is constantly evolving. More people than ever before are openly living their lives as transgender men or women, and many transgender people are coming out as neither men nor women, instead living outside of the binary. Gender is changing, and this change is gaining momentum. We all want to do and say the right things in relation to gender diversity-whether at a job interview, at parent/teacher night, and around the table at family dinners. But where do we begin? From the differences among gender identity, gender expression, and sex, to the use of gender-neutral pronouns like singular they/them, to thinking about your own participation in gender, Gender: Your Guide serves as "a warm, inviting guide to a complicated area" (The Globe and Mail, Toronto). Professor and gender diversity advocate Lee Airton, PhD, explains how gender works in everyday life; how to use accurate terminology to refer to transgender, non-binary, and/or gender non-conforming individuals; and how to ask when you aren't sure what to do or say. It provides the information you need to talk confidently and compassionately about gender diversity, whether simply having a conversation or going to bat as an advocate. Just like gender itself, being gender-friendly is a process for all of us. As revolutionary a resource as Our Bodies, Ourselves, Gender: Your Guide is "greatly needed...an impactful tool for creating a world more supportive of people of all genders" (INTO! Magazine).
Across the democratic West, politics has become deeply polarised and profoundly personal. Challenge someone's political views and increasingly you challenge their very being. And yet, do our political tribes even make sense? Look carefully, and on the most important ethical issues of the age – assisted dying, social welfare, sexual liberation, abortion, gun control, the environment, technology, justice – the instinctive positions of both the Left and the Right are riven with contradictions. In this refreshing and eye-opening book, James Mumford, a public thinker and independent commentator, questions the basic assumptions of our political groups. His challenge is simple: 'Why should believing strongly about one topic mean the automatic adoption of so many others?' Vexed is an essential and provocative account that will appeal to anyone of independent thought, and a welcome call for new reflection on the moral issues most relevant to our modern way of life. |
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