Xenophobia in Grahamstown: 'We are not leaving!'

Kate Janse an Rensburg, Mikaela Erskog & Fezokuhle Mthonti, Daily Maverick

Picture by Kate Janse van Rensburg

At Masifunde, a local nongovernmental organisation in Bathurst Street, Grahamstown, six women are sitting on and around the staircase. Two women talk urgently on the phone as they relay information to various stakeholders. This concerns the bedlam that has descended upon the city since Wednesday 21 October. One week has passed since a xenophobic outbreak, fuelled by the rumour mill, began in the City of Saints.

Transformation in action

Mikaela Erskog, The Daily Dispatch

Events such as the student-led #RhodesMustFall campaign at UCT and the recent formation and actions of the Black Student Movement at the university currently known as Rhodes reveal the extent to which South African universities have not been central and progressive hubs of social transformation.

Concerningly, this moment also indicates a lack of critical engagement with how seriously students are invested in the transformation of historically colonial educational institutions.

Achille Mbembe Interviewed by Mikaela Erskog, 8 August 2014

Considering the political project within Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony and “African Modes of Self Writing”

[Unless quoting from a particular text, quotation marks are used to indicate air quotes. Information within square brackets provides further context, in cases where for example Prof Mbembe referred to an idea that was discussed in the Master classes on 7 and 8 August.]

Erskog: Is there a particular notion or assumption that lies at the foundation of your work/thinking? (As, from what I have read, I would consider your conception of “subjectivity as time” (Mbembe, 2002:242) as the underlying concept towards rethinking African theorization.)

Response to 'Fanon's Dialectics of Experience' by Ato Sekyi-Otu

Mikaela Erskog

In what seems to be the most extensive academic examination, interpretation and advocation of Fanon's oeuvre, Fanon's Dialectics of Experience by Ato Sekyi-Otu really works out how very original Fanon's work was in his time and is today. Sekyi-Otu encounters Fanon within and beyond Fanon's work. He negotiates how Fanon has been one of the most complex interlocutors of the colonial context. He not only by presents a nuanced reading of Fanon's texts but also outlines the relationships between Fanon and the academic subjectivities that precede and succeed Fanon and how these all came to relate to and conceive of the colonial context.

Response to From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’ by Michael Neocosmos

Mikaela Erskog

In From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’: Explaining Xenophobia in Post-apartheid South Africa - Citizenship and Nationalism, Identity and Politics, Michael Neocosmos explores the ways in which xenophobia came to be a pervasive political discourse and practice in post-apartheid South Africa. By combining “theoretical sophistication with historical sensitivity”, Neocosmos (2010: ix) proposes that there exists abounding xenophobic attitudes that can be traced to state politics and their various apparatuses.

A response to 'Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms' by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting

Mikaela Erskog

“I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own movement.” -  Hélène Cixous, (1976)

Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is a feminist critique of feminist critiques of Frantz Fanon’s corpus of work. By evaluating how various feminist critics and their theoretical frameworks interpreted Fanon’s work, Sharpley-Whiting aims to strengthen feminist thought by revealing the limits of certain arguments and the potential strength of others.

I would argue that Sharpley-Whiting’s text places itself within the lineage of critical humanism as she, much like Fanon, does the important task of “questioning of the questioning of [humankind]” (Gordon, 1995: 10). In doing so, I believe Sharpley-Whiting acts in good faith to feminist thought, as she reveals the shortcomings of certain feminist critiques that tend to conceal themselves in order to develop a critical feminist approach that can facilitate the application of feminist values of the liberation, inclusion, self-creativity of women and oppressed humanity.

Towards an authentic self-writing in Frantz Fanon’s 'Black Skin, White Masks'

by Mikaela Erskog

Black Skin, White Mask (1967) deals with the psychology of the colonial situation not only by referring to a wide range of case studies that serve to illuminate the fundamental pathology of the colonial system and the varying mental pathologies it creates, but also through its form as an encounter with a psychology of a Self as it presently exists, as it unfolds in our very presence.  Fanon facilitates a living encounter between readers and his state of being as it existed in the very moments of his particular encounters. There exists a present presence.