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Out of the ashes: rethinking loss in the African archive Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Edwina D. Ashie-Nikoi
African archives were predominantly outgrowths of the colonialist machinery, essential armoury in the mechanisms of control which paid little attention to comprehensively documenting the cultures a...
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Johannesburg’s shitty little river: faecal discourse and discontent regarding the Jukskei Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2024-03-10 Jessica Webster, Mehita Iqani
This paper theorises the discursive construction of sewerage and sewage in relation to Johannesburg’s Jukskei river. In the context of failing national and local water infrastructures, rivers in So...
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“Little research value”: African Estate records and colonial gaps in a post-colonial national archive Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2024-03-10 Nashilongweshipwe Sakaria
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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The work of repair: capacity after colonialism in the timber plantations of South Africa Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Matthew Wingfield
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Asserting identity in stifling spaces: multisemioticity in Nigerian queer-positive Instagram Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Paul Ayodele Onanuga
Queer visibility continues to be a mirage in many African countries. Unsurprisingly, the queer community has continued its appropriation of digital spaces in the propagation of its activism for pub...
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Mixed memories: rethinking the loss and transformation of the colonial heritage archive in the aftermath of the Jagger Library inferno and Rhodes Must Fall Movement Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Robert T. Nyamushosho, Njabulo Chipangura
In this article we look at how colonial heritage as an archive is being curated, and in some cases obliterated within selective priorities in South Africa and Zimbabwe that are informed by decoloni...
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Archive history in Zambia as a history of loss Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Duncan Money, Miyanda Simabwachi
This article is about how both the accidental and intentional loss of archives in Zambia has shaped what kind of history can be written about the region and who can write this history. The loss of ...
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“All who care to look”: loss and renewal in the wake of the Jagger library fire Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk, Martha Evans
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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The dysfunctional copy: “Mali Magic,” loss and the digital remake of the Timbuktu archive Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Susana Molins Lliteras
In 2012, the manuscript collections of Timbuktu were feared to be at risk of destruction after rebel groups overtook the city. Rumours of the burning of the library and the destruction of thousands...
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Reflections on fire as postcolonial metaphor of rupture Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Litheko Modisane
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Ghosts of archive: deconstructive intersectionality and praxis Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Carine Zaayman
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Editorial note of thanks Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Social Dynamics
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Vol. 49, No. 3, 2023)
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The queen mothers’ struggle for breath: the colonisation of an institution Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Nomathamsanqa C. Tisani
The institution of queen motherhood, or remnants thereof, is found across the African continent. A study of queen motherhood during the nineteenth century in the south-eastern region of Africa coin...
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On maternal legacies of knowledge, ukwambathisa, and rethinking of the sociology of Eastern Cape, South Africa Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Babalwa Magoqwana, Pamela Maseko
This volume excavates and explores maternal knowledge histories from ordinary and everyday ways of knowing that have been repudiated in ontological and epistemic foundations in formal institutions ...
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Ukuzwa ngenkaba: connecting with African ways of knowing through the umbilical cord Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Nomalanga Mkhize, Mathe Ntšekhe
The Nguni term inkaba refers both to the umbilical cord and the navel. In this paper, we use the idea of the umbilical cord to explain an enduring intellectual connection that many African scholars...
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The road to democracy in South Africa Vol. 9, South African democracy education trust: the power and authority of African women in the Southern African and African diaspora during “precolonial” and colonial times Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Siphokazi Tau
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Vol. 49, No. 3, 2023)
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Strategic protest and the negotiation of legibility in Cape Town: a case study of Reclaim the City Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Matthew Michael Wingfield
The forms of protest and the related tactics that structure them are often linked to a deliberate logic of disruption and contestation. From pickets aiming to impede foot traffic in public spaces, ...
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Intellectual decolonisation and the danger of epistemic closure: the need for a critical decolonial theory Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Helen-Mary Cawood, Mark Jacob Amiradakis
This paper draws from the paradigm of Critical Theory (CT) and Decolonial Theory to engage in an introductory discussion on the need for a new methodological paradigm, namely a Critical Decolonial ...
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Commanding the respect of all who knew her: recovering the marginalised history of Eleanor Xiniwe and the challenges of the colonial archive Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Denver A. Webb
Early mission-educated African intellectuals and activists in the Cape Colony in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have received some attention from historians, but other than Charl...
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Rituals, family connections, and BoRakgadi Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Grace Khunou
African feminists and decolonial scholars have shown the importance of centring African socio-cultural context in our study of African societies. This includes the signifying of African languages, ...
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Why recognition? Deciphering justice claims in 2016 Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Nancy Ngum Achu, Assel Tutumlu
Scholars attribute the 2016 Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon to systematic marginalisation of the English-speaking minority whose rights are constitutionally guaranteed but remain violated. However, m...
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Rethinking Africa: indigenous women re-interpret Southern Africa’s pasts Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Chanel van der Merwe
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Vol. 49, No. 3, 2023)
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Pan-Africanism and psychology in decolonial times Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Daniel Herwitz
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Vol. 49, No. 3, 2023)
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Ke mosali oa Mosotho: reflecting on indigenous conceptions of womanhood in Lesotho Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-11-12 Neo Mohlabane
This paper challenges the invisibilisation and silencing of indigenous conceptions of womanhood in feminist scholarly work. It argues that “Mosotho woman,” as we know it today, is a colonial constr...
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Decolonising the Neoliberal University. Law, psychoanalysis and the politics of student protest Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-08-08 Buhle Zuma (Khanyile)
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Vol. 49, No. 2, 2023)
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Is decolonisation Africanisation? The politics of belonging in the truly African university Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-08-07 Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh
ABSTRACT While Africanisation remains a popular idiom for intellectual decolonisation, it raises difficult issues around citizenship, identity and belonging, alongside their constitutive dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Using the “politics of belonging” as a conceptual frame, I unpack the tensions involved in grounding decolonisation in a substantive insistence on Africanness. This lens centres
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Varieties of intellectual decolonisation: an introduction Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 George Hull
ABSTRACT This special issue of Social Dynamics assembles several new articles, essays, and book reviews voicing critical perspectives on intellectual decolonisation. Theoretical approaches to intellectual decolonisation articulate different positions on what it takes for inculcation of ideas to count as colonisation. For some, it is because these ideas’ acceptance enables a harmful political or economic
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Is being itself colonial? Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-08-01 George Hull
ABSTRACT Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s coloniality of being thesis promises to add a metaphysical dimension to the decoloniality theory of Grupo Modernidad/Colonialidad. While Aníbal Quijano’s coloniality of power thesis is robustly empirical, the coloniality of being thesis postulates that “colonized Dasein” and “ordinary Dasein” differ in the fundamental structure of their being. It may have been hoped
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The politics of decolonial investigations Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-07-30 Kavish Chetty
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Vol. 49, No. 2, 2023)
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J Sai Deepak’s India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution. Bloomsbury 2021 Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-07-24 Anandaroop Sen
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Vol. 49, No. 2, 2023)
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Whither epistemic decolonisation? How to make experiences a source of moral justification Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-07-13 Filipe Campello
ABSTRACT This paper examines the narrative turn in decolonial theory, specifically regarding the use of experience as sources for normative theories. While narratives of experience can challenge claims of universality, they alone cannot provide broader normative criteria that extend beyond specific experiences, making their use as moral justification ambiguous. Before seeking criteria for moral justification
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The decolonisation of the mind and history as an academic discipline Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-07-13 Irina Filatova
ABSTRACT History as an academic discipline is going through a methodological crisis, caused by the decolonising revolution in historiography. Having emerged in the 1980s–2000s, the present-day decolonial theories have created a new dominant paradigm in the public consciousness and in a whole complex of academic disciplines. The aim of the decolonisation of the mind is to liberate these disciplines
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“That other me, down and dreaming”: an animal perspective critique of decoloniality theory Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-07-03 M.J. Glover
ABSTRACT This article critiques decoloniality theory, including its use of the notion of epistemic colonisation, from an animal perspective. It has two main parts. Part one is an internal critique of decoloniality theory. It introduces and comments on core decoloniality theory concepts and argues that, according to its assumptions, animals are illegitimately omitted from decoloniality theory. By excluding
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Decolonisation in Africa: love or litigation? Mandela as moral capital Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-06-29 Chielozona Eze
ABSTRACT The Rhodes Must Fall social movement infused new life into the decolonisation discourse in Africa. However, whereas most scholars agree on the need for decolonisation, there is little consensus or even clarity on what it actually means in our everyday encounter with others and engagement with reality. Indeed, much of the debate on the issue consists of a recycling of the arguments employed
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From “dependency” to “decoloniality”? The enduring relevance of materialist political economy and the problems of a “decolonial” alternative Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-06-07 Michael Nassen Smith, Claire-Anne Lester
ABSTRACT Traditions within development thought sceptical of market-led development and which emphasise the unevenness and instabilities of global capitalism are experiencing some renewed interest. One such tradition is dependency studies: a school of thought once prominent in the field of development. We critically review the dependency tradition alongside a more recent branch of critical inquiry into
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Housing struggles as political practice in post-apartheid Cape Town: reading Levenson’s Delivery as Dispossession Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Bernard Dubbeld
ABSTRACT Levenson's new book Delivery as Dispossession offers a careful reading of land occupations in Cape Town that takes us from landless communities in the city to courtrooms. His study focuses on two occupations in the Mitchell's Plain area with contrasting fates, which his empirically rich analysis explains in relation to the occupiers’ strategies and self-representation to the state. It is an
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Condemned by desire: miscegenation, gender, and eroticism in South Africa’s Immorality Act Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-03-28 Laura Moutinho
ABSTRACT The Mixed Marriage Act of 1949 is regarded as the first law of South Africa’s apartheid regime. This criminalised interracial marriages, regulating intimacy under the amended Immorality Act (1950) with the aim of organising the public sphere and preventing miscegenation. In the present article, I analyse two cases involving interracial couples and alleged lovers. I argue that this system of
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Apartheid and the unconscious: an introduction Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-03-01 Ross Truscott, Maurits van Bever Donker, Derek Hook
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Vol. 49, No. 1, 2023)
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The afterlife of apartheid: a triadic temporality of trauma Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-02-23 Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
ABSTRACT This article explores transgenerational dynamics of memory in the individual and collective contexts in contemporary South Africa. By engaging in a conversation informed by psychoanalytic theory between the archive of the public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and narratives of the younger generation of black South Africans, the article offers a conceptual framework for
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Ausi told me: why cape herstoriographies matter Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Rafael Verbuyst
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Vol. 49, No. 1, 2023)
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Frank-talking: a reading of Biko’s statement “On Death” with Foucault’s concept of parrhesia Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-02-05 Ahmed Veriava
ABSTRACT This article is about a practice of “frank-talking” associated with Steve Biko and the BC movement of the 1970s. It sets out a reading of a short fragment titled “On Death” (found at the end of I Write What I Like) through the lens of the (coincidental) connection between Biko’s Frank-talk and Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia. Through an intentional mispronunciation of the concept of parrhesia
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“You don’t say” Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-02-05 John Mowitt
ABSTRACT This essay sets out to read an earlier moment in the history of the encounter between Social Dynamics and apartheid in South Africa. Specifically, it attends to the publication in 1991 on the pages of this journal of J.M. Coetzee’s “The Mind of Apartheid,” a reading of the work of Gregory Cronjé that seeks to tease out distinctly psychoanalytical motifs in an account of apartheid intimately
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The desire of apartheid Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-02-05 Derek Hook
ABSTRACT This paper has two objectives. It aims, firstly, to provide an overview of the explanatory dilemmas that J.M. Coetzee highlights in his acclaimed essay “The mind of apartheid” in respect of existing theories of apartheid ideology. It then makes recourse, secondly, to a series of concepts in Lacanian psychoanalysis so as to shed light on these dilemmas. Two questions seem to particularly vex
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Auditing and the unconscious: managerialism’s memory traces Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-01-22 Ross Truscott
ABSTRACT This paper takes J.M. Coetzee’s “The Mind of Apartheid” as a point of departure in thinking about audits in universities. Using the psychoanalytic framing of apartheid that Coetzee puts in place, audit is likened here to a form of obsessional neurosis. If this is indeed a plausible diagnosis of audits – and this should remain a question for deliberation – then a set of questions emerges for
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The ears of apartheid Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-01-19 Willemien Froneman
ABSTRACT This article considers white popular music of the 1950s and 1960s as a zone of what J.M. Coetzee has termed apartheid’s confessional “heart-speech” – a zone that explicates a sonospheric understanding of apartheid and its pathologies of racial disavowal. Drawing on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, I show how white popular music written for background entertainment cultivated in white ears a warped
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Between racial madness and neoliberal reason: metonymic contagion in apartheid biopower Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-01-11 Kiasha Naidoo
ABSTRACT I will seek to consider the simultaneous workings of race and capital in apartheid biopower. J.M. Coetzee offers a reading of apartheid racism as racial madness which is imbricated with economic reason. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed instances of the biopolitical making live and letting die. The Strandfontein homeless camp set up just outside Cape Town in 2020 is an
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Burying the superego? Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2023-01-01 Jaco Barnard-Naudé
ABSTRACT This essay unfolds in four parts. In the first part I argue that the struggle against apartheid must be understood as a war against war, namely a war that is waged with the superego of apartheid as war itself. In the second part, I consider J.M. Coetzee’s essay on The Mind of Apartheid in the context of the hypothesis put forth by Jacques-Alain Miller and others that racism is the theft of
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On Race and Religion in African Political Communities: An Interview with David Theo Goldberg Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2022-12-28 Nyanchama Okemwa, Anya Topolski
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Vol. 48, No. 3, 2022)
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Exploring the entanglement of race and religion in Africa Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2022-12-28 Josias Tembo, Anya Topolski
ABSTRACT This special issue is meant to begin to address the lacuna in research on the entanglements of race and religion by focusing on one specific geographical region – Africa. The reality of political communities in Africa cannot be understood properly independently of colonial racialisation. The formation of colonial political communities on the African continent was based on racial exclusion
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Thanks to Reviewers Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2022-12-25
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Vol. 48, No. 3, 2022)
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On the political theology of apartheid: a philosophical investigation Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2022-12-15 Schalk Gerber
ABSTRACT This article aims to discuss the relation between political theology and apartheid critically. The relation is traced by reconsidering Carl Schmitt’s notion of political theology and the accompanying friend-enemy distinction within the South African context in dialogue with Achille Mbembe. The political theology of apartheid is accordingly analysed as the creation of a racial figure of enmity
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Our gods are as powerful as the God of Abraham: analysing the impetus-agitat on the rise of ézéńwànyì in Ǹsúkkà-Ìgbò, Southeastern Nigeria Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2022-12-08 Paulinus Okechukwu Agbo, J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi, Malachy Ike Okwueze
ABSTRACT This study investigates the resurgence of ézèńwànyì (defined broadly as traditional female healer/diviner/priestess) in the patriarchal Ìgbò society of Nigeria. We employ ethnographic methods of observation and interview to study two communities in Ǹsúkká-Ìgbò, Southeastern Nigeria. The study finds that there has been a continuing increase in the number of ézèńwànyì, those who make use of
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Unveiling the entanglements of Western Christianity and racialisation in Africa Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2022-12-07 Josias Tembo
ABSTRACT In this essay, I critically engage with scholarship on race and racism on Africa, which closely connects race and Western Christianity, to argue that modern race and Christianity in Africa are essentially entangled. I will show that race and racism in modernity emerged as the name for religious difference, and racialisation became the process by which human beings were inserted into the Christian
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Edward W. Blyden’s intellectual tradition: the place of ‘race’ and religion Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Mano Delea
ABSTRACT This article reflects on the place of religion and “race” in Edward W. Blyden’s thought and praxis. It is discussed and analysed against the background of an Africana intellectual tradition and aspects regarding sovereignty and resistance. On the one hand, it examines the views of Blyden concerning the place of “race” and religion in relation to recurrent elements within the Africana intellectual
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The voice of reason: a thematic appraisal of editorial coverage of Nigeria’s 2015 elections Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Ogemdi Uchenna Eze
ABSTRACT This study is an analysis of four Nigerian newspaper editorials’ (the Guardian, Vanguard, Independent and Leadership) coverage of the 2015 general elections in Nigeria. Peace and solution journalism perspectives provided the theoretical insights through which the examination is made. This qualitative study, located within an interpretivist tradition, identified 101 election-related editorials
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Gender and the spatiality of blackness in contemporary AfroFrench narratives Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Nhlanhla Dube
Published in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies (Vol. 48, No. 3, 2022)
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‘The mother of all nations’: gendered discourses in Ghana’s 2020 elections Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2022-08-30 Grace Diabah, Dorothy Pokua Agyepong
ABSTRACT Gendered discourses in Ghana’s politics are not new. Unlike previous years, however, the gendered discourse in the 2020 election was different because the leading opposition party (NDC) selected a female running mate. Considering that the seat has been rotating between the NDC and NPP since 1992, Ghanaians foresaw a “real” possibility of having a female vice president. With data from online
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Examining the meanings of ‘restitution’ for beneficiaries of the Macleantown and Salem restitution cases in the Eastern Cape, South Africa Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2022-08-11 Mzingaye Brilliant Xaba
ABSTRACT Through land restitution, a component of land reform, the state seeks to restore the dignity of black communities who lost their land during colonial and apartheid times. Land restitution seeks to return the land that was unfairly grabbed from black people or to offer alternative land or cash compensation. Much public discourse and research on South African land reform has been on the failure
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Laughter in the face of police brutality: an analysis of satirical memes on police brutality in Zimbabwe on August 16, 2019 Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2022-08-07 Doreen Rumbidzai Tivenga
ABSTRACT Zimbabwean state leaders have resorted to violent repression of mass protests to secure power. Mass protests, peaceful or not, have turned out to be too risky and impermissible despite the Zimbabwean constitution legalising peaceful protests. This article focuses on the Zimbabwean experience of violent repression and draws on the brutal experiences of protesters at the hands of the police
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Post-apartheid melancholia: negotiating loss and (be)longing in South Africa Social Dynamics (IF 0.483) Pub Date : 2022-08-05 Sakiru Adebayo
ABSTRACT This paper reads contemporary South Africa through the lens of melancholia and situates the experience of loss at the heart of social entanglements in the country. It argues that the purchase of melancholia lies partly in the fact that the problem of disarticulated and disenfranchised loss is common to post-apartheid modernity in general. It suggests that post-apartheid melancholia is a resultant