Written out, writing in : orature in the South African literary canon
- Authors: Seddon, Deborah Ann
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:2263 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004695
- Description: As described by Duncan Brown, South African orature represents "our truly original contribution to world literature" (Brown, Voicing the Text 1). This paper explores how orature might be successfully 'written into' the South African literary canon whilst promoting recognition of its existence as an oral form. My recent experiences of the difficulties, challenges, and benefits of teaching South African orature within the Rhodes University English department, have alerted me to the urgent need for the creation of a student- and teacher-friendly anthology which would collect, re-voice, and adequately contextualise a selection of the seminal works of South African oral poets from the colonial to the post-apartheid periods. Much of this poetry already exists in print-form but, despite an increasing recognition of oral poetry through a number of endeavours such the Poetry Africa Festival, the Lentswe Poetry Project on SABC 2, the Timbila Poetry Project and others, South African orature remains marginal in the country's literary canon. It is largely absent from the curriculum in the literature departments of its universities. The need to redress this situation is crucial, but the process of setting up and teaching an undergraduate course in South African oral poetry, while possible, is complicated. The works of our most important oral poets are scattered in a variety of books, libraries, and collections. The usual process of drawing up a booklist of set texts is undermined by the stark reality that many of the books are out of print. Fully giving voice to these texts is even harder to achieve - CD and video recordings of performances (if they exist at all) are not easily accessed or disseminated.
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- Date Issued: 2008
‘Boys will be boys’: traditional Xhosa male circumcision, HIV and sexual socialisation in contemporary South Africa
- Authors: Vincent, Louise
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141500 , vital:37980 , DOI: 10.1080/13691050701861447
- Description: Ritual male circumcision is among the most secretive and sacred of rites practiced by the Xhosa of South Africa. Recently, the alarming rate of death and injury among initiates has led to the spotlight of media attention and government regulation being focused on traditional circumcision. While many of the physical components of the ritual have been little altered by the centuries, its cultural and social meanings have not remained unchanged. This paper attempts to understand how some of these cultural and social meanings have shifted, particularly with respect to attitudes towards sex and the role that circumcision schools traditionally played in the sexual.
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- Date Issued: 2008
‘Who? what?’: an uninducted view of towards a new psychology of women from post-Apartheid South Africa
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6251 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007869 , http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959353508092088
- Description: From the text: Towards a New Psychology of Women (TPNW) promises a new psychology of “women”. On the cover of the second edition, the Toronto Globe and Mail is cited as acclaiming the book as “nothing short of revolutionary” as it “set out to recognize, re-define and understand the day-to-day experience of women”. But when we take a closer look at these “women” we discover that they are in fact “white”, (for the most part) middle-class women living in heterosexual relationships in a liberal democracy. This kind of exclusionary inclusion, in which the use of the generic term “woman” disguises the normative assumptions made about the race, class, sexual orientation and location of women, replicates the phallocentrism evidenced in the normalising masculinist terms “mankind” or “Man”. By now, of course, these kinds of critiques of “white” Western feminism by African American writers (e.g. Collins, 1999) postcolonial feminists (e.g. Mohanty, 1991), African feminists (e.g. Ogundipe-Leslie, 1994; Mangena, 2003), and queer theorists (e.g. Jackson, 1999) are well known.
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- Date Issued: 2008