Public Lecture & Post-Graduate
Master Class with Gillian Hart
Gillian Hart, a leading
geographer on the global stage, a key protagonist in the revival of scholarship
on Antonio Gramsci and a leading political theorist of the South African crisis
will offer a public lecture and post-graduate master class next week.
Public Lecture
Title: “Political Society” & Its Discontents: South African Reflections on
Indian Debates
Date: Tuesday 7 October
Venue: Humanities Seminar
Room
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Abstract:
In writing Rethinking the South African Crisis
(2013), I was struck by the similarities and differences between India and
South Africa since the early 1990s – a moment that marked key turning points in
both countries and around the world. I
also found Indian debates over these processes incredibly stimulating and “good
to think with”. As the first step in a
new comparative project, this talk will engage by far the most influential
conceptual import from India in South Africa today – Partha Chatterjee’s
distinction between “political society” and “civil society” which, he argues, applies
not just in India but most of the rest of the postcolonial world. How adequate is this distinction, I will ask,
in confronting a key challenge: how to understand the entwining of neoliberal
capitalism, liberal and popular expressions of democracy, and amplifying
nationalisms in the two countries in relation to one another?
Post-Graduate Master Class
Title: Rethinking the South
African Crisis
Date: Wednesday 8 October
Time: 10:30 – 14:30 (lunch
will be provided)
Venue: Humanities Seminar
Room
Please note that a maximum of
twenty students can be accommodated in the Master Class. Some required reading will
be circulated beforehand. To secure a place in the Master Class please write to
uhuru@ru.ac.za
Gillian Hart is Professor of
Geography and co-chair of Development Studies at the University of California
Berkeley, and Honorary Professor at UKZN.
Her books include Disabling
Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2002); Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics
(co-edited) (2013); and Rethinking the
South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony (2013).
