Research, Repression, And Revolution

David Austin: Research, Repression, And Revolution by TigersEye99

I am a 20th Century Escaped Slave

Assata Shakur

Assata Shakur, CounterPunch

My name is Assata Shakur, and I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the US government’s policy towards people of color. I am an ex-political prisoner, and I have been living in exile in Cuba since 1984.

Locating Frantz Fanon in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Mabogo Percy More, Journal of Asian & African Studies

There is a huge re-emergence of Frantz Fanon’s ideas and an equally huge interest in his work in post-apartheid South Africa, both in the academy and social movement and organizations. Contrary to some commentators, particularly his biographers, this article aims to locate Fanon within the South African struggle for liberation. It is argued here that Fanon, throughout his life, as evidenced by his writings, was highly concerned about apartheid just as he was about French Algerian colonialism. For him, the paper claims, apartheid was synonymous with colonialism and therefore his critique of colonialism was just as much a critique of apartheid. The resurgence of his name and ideas in the country is a consequence of this critique.

Wits political studies post-graduate students: On a quest to revolutionalise the academy

Simamkele Dlakavu

Simamkele Dlakavu, The Daily Maverick

Our academic spaces in South Africa are often referred to as an 'extension of Europe': due to the settler colonialism we were not seen as an African state, but rather an extension of the European colonial project in which white supremacy still reigns supreme.

White supremacy says that African history, experiences, and thought are inferior compared to Western history, thought and experiences. Furthermore, it says, black African lecturers don’t have valuable contributions to make to the academic space, and the larger production of knowledge. One of the two important moments where this debate has formed part of mainstream public discourse in post-apartheid South Africa was with the 'Mamdani affair' at UCT and the 'Makgoba Affair' at WITS. Both these academics were challenging the post-apartheid academy and the ways it should reflect its African grounding in its curriculum.

Nomboniso Gasa Remembers Jeff Guy

In a country and a world, where rigorous and principled academics are in short supply, the passing of Jeff Guy is a major blow. Despite the often repeated description of Jeff Guy as cantankerous, I never experienced or witnessed this side of him. I had limited interactions with Jeff. The man I met and often broke bread and chewed a curd with, was generous, tender, sensitive, astute, punctilious, open minded and incredibly funny.

Jeff Guy was a historian. He was also a Marxist. He was not dogmatic. His Marxism did not interfere with his academic precision (despite what his detractors said). This ability to be ideologically positioned and still maintain academic rigour fascinated me greatly.

Farewell to Jeff Guy, an extraordinary SA historian

Colin Bundy, Mail & Guardian

OBITUARY

Jeff Guy (1940 – 2014)

The historian Jeff Guy died on December 15, at Heathrow Airport, waiting to board a flight to return to his home in Durban. It was, writes a friend, “a very Jeff way to go – struck down in the stride of life, no doubt grumbling about long queues or poor service, but distracted by a new idea or line of inquiry”.

He had been in England for a few weeks, where he gave a lecture at a conference marking the bicentenary of the birth of Bishop John Colenso.  Several who saw him during the trip have remarked on his evident zest for life and intellectual vigour.

Freedom Dreaming & Liberation: Robin D.G. Kelley

Mwelela Cele's Obituary for Jeff Guy

For Prof Jeff Guy

I received the news of Professor Jeff Guy’s passing while I was at another fountain of knowledge, the National English Literary Museum (NELM) in Grahamstown, doing work-related research about writers and poets of the Black Consciousness era, focusing specifically on those that left us this year, namely Mbulelo Mzamane, Mafika Gwala and Chris Van Wyk.

Honours Course on History of Africana Intellectualism: 2015

Honours Course on History of Africana Intellectualism: 2015

History Department, Rhodes University

Facilitated by Dr. Vashna Jagarnath, Senior Lecturer & Acting-Deputy Dean of Humanities (Research)

Summary of the course

Welcome to this short course that attempts to open up a discussion on the history of African thought. Given the vastness of the subject matter we will have to navigate through the key debates and materials rather than undertaking a comprehensive study. Think of the course as a smorgasbord picking up bits and pieces arranged under themes. This way we can sample some of the vast array of literature and you will, by the end of the course, at least be competent in the main debates dealing with African intellectual thought.

Slavery and Capitalism

Sven Beckert, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Few topics have animated today’s chattering classes more than capitalism. In the wake of the global economic crisis, the discussion has spanned political boundaries, with conservative newspapers in Britain and Germany running stories on the "future of capitalism" (as if that were in doubt) and Korean Marxists analyzing its allegedly self-destructive tendencies. Pope Francis has made capitalism a central theme of his papacy, while the French economist Thomas Piketty attained rock-star status with a 700-page book full of tables and statistics and the succinct but decisively unsexy title Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press).

Shifting the Ground of Radical Reason

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

For some time now much of the left has either been alienated from actually existing popular mobilisation or unable to make and sustain productive connections with it. But the emergence of new forces to the left of the ANC, forces with money, a national reach, easy access to the media and, in the case of NUMSA, an established and organised membership, is generating fresh optimism.

'We can no longer breathe'

Lacksley Castell - Government Man (12 inch) [1981]

From New York to Greece, we revolt ‘cus we can’t breathe

Jerome Roos, ROAR Magazine

“I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” Those were Eric Garner’s last words. He repeated them at least 11 times, clearly audible to the camera that recorded it all, as one cop sat on his chest and another suffocated him in choke-hold. And then he stopped moving. For six minutes they just left him lying there on the sidewalk — they didn’t do a goddamn thing to save his life. The coroner ruled it a homicide; another black man murdered by a white cop. Yet a white-majority grand jury chose not to indict him. Now we can’t breathe.

Constituent Power in the Modern World: A Brief Introduction

Department of Politics & International Relations, Rhodes University

Constituent Power in the Modern World: A Brief Introduction

A post-graduate course to be taught by Richard Pithouse in the first semester, 2015

Throughout the modern era … constituent power has been in conflict with constituted power, the fixed power of formal constitutions and central authority. Whereas constituent power opens each revolutionary process, throwing open the doors to the forces of change and the myriad desires of the multitude, constituted power closes down the revolution and brings it back to order. In each of the modern revolutions, the State rose up in opposition to the democratic and revolutionary forces and imposes a return to a constituted order, a new Thermidor, which either recuperated or repressed the constituent impulses. The conflict between active constituent power and reactive constituted power is what characterizes these revolutionary experiences.

-         From the introduction to Antonio Negri’s Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (1999)

'Choosing to be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner' - A review

Keniston, B., 2013, Choosing to be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner. Johannesburg. Jacana (276pp.; R220)

Reviewed by Richard Pithouse, Interface

Rick Turner, a philosopher and a committed and effective radical, was assassinated in Durban, South Africa, in January 1978. Turner had, along with Steve Biko who was murdered in police custody in September 1977, been a leading figure in what came to be known as ‘the Durban Moment’. The phrase, which was first coined by Tony Morphet (1990), refers to a period in the early 1970s in which Durban became a site of significant political innovation in the struggle against apartheid, innovation that was conceptualised and organised outside of the strictures of the exiled African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP). Morphet argued that ‘the Durban Moment’ enabled a “structural shift in the received intellectual patterns of the social world” (1990, pp. 92-3). It also had enduring political consequences of real significance (Macqueen, 2014; Webster, 1993).

Remembering Slavery in South Africa

Gabeda Baderoon, Africa is a Country

“I recognized Cape Town the first time I saw it,” Deborah Thomas revealed at a lecture she gave in the city in July 2014. A sociologist who works in Jamaica, she knew instantly that she was looking at a place shaped by slavery.

What do you see when you recognize slavery?

Dinga Sikwebu on Numsa's Expulsion from Cosatu and Reasons for the Launch of the United Front

The Castaway (Albert Camus)

Jeremy Harding, London Review of Books

Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan, translated by Arthur Goldhammer Harvard, 224 pp, £11.95, November 2014, ISBN 978 0 674 41675 8

Camus brûlant by Benjamin Stora and Jean-Baptiste Péretié Stock, 109 pp, €12.50, September 2013, ISBN 978 2 234 07482 8

Meursault, contre-enquête by Kamel Daoud Actes Sud, 155 pp, €19.00, May 2014, ISBN 978 2 330 03372 9

Sean Jacobs on racist police violence in the United States and South Africa

A Closer Look at the American Flag

'The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s' - A review

Glen Moss, The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s, Jacana, Johannesburg, 2014

Reviewed by: Benjamin Fogel, Journal of Asian & African Studies

The New Radicals is a generational memoir, or rather a political memoir of a generation of white South African student radicals that came of age in the early 1970s through the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). This generation formed a key part of the emerging movements that awakened South Africa from the political slumber of the 1960s. As Glenn Moss puts it, his book “records how they (a group of students) moved from the relatively liberal protest and symbolic politics of an elite university to help in creating the preconditions for a radical challenge to the society that had formed them” (p.vii).

Reality in Colour

Danielle Bowler, Eyewitness News

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it… How does it feel to be a problem?

The St Louis County grand jury’s decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, did not come as a surprise. While it registers as unthinkable, it simultaneously fits within a paradigm that continually devalues black lives.

SA must see its talents in midst of its dysfunction

Nomalanga Mkhize, Business Day

ABOUT a decade ago, one of my childhood friends, Michael, called me to tell me he had made it into the SA-Cuba medical training programme. Finally he could ditch his job at a Nelspruit mall, where he worked as a low-paid casual behind a shop counter.

He should never have been behind that counter in the first place. Michael was smart, gifted but had no money to get to university and, in the adverse conditions of his rural high school, produced competent but not outstanding matric results. When he left for Cuba, it felt like he had escaped the social dead-end that was our Mpumalanga village by the skin of his teeth.

'So Much the Worse for the Whites': Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution

by George Ciccariello-Maher

This article sets out from an analysis of the pioneering work of Susan Buck-Morss to rethink, not only Hegel and Haiti, but broader questions surrounding dialectics and the universal brought to light by the Haitian Revolution. Reading through the lens of C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, I seek to correct a series of ironic silences in her account, re-centering the importance of Toussaint’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and underlining the dialectical importance of identitarian struggles in forging the universal. Finally, I offer Frantz Fanon’s reformulation of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic—overlooked in Buck-Morss’ account—as a corrective that allows us to truly rethink progress toward the universal in decolonized dialectical terms.

Feminist Africa: Feminism & Pan-Africanism