Senses of Culture


Book Description

Everyday life in South Africa has been dominated by the politics of racial identities, while such identities form and re-form around a range of cultural activities and practices. This book traces the important dimensions of cultural activity in late twentieth-century South Africa, offering a multidisciplinary assessment between culture and politics. It also explores the ways in which the place of culture is being rethought since South Africa's transition to democracy.




Wines of the New South Africa


Book Description

Sought after by European aristocrats and a favorite of Napoleon Bonaparte, the sweet wines of Constantia in the Cape Colony were considered to be among the worldÕs best during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During the first democratic elections in 1994, South Africa began to re-emerge onto the international wine scene. Tim James, an expert on South African wines, takes the reader on an information-packed tour of the region, showing us how and why the unique combination of terroir and climate, together with dramatic improvements in winemaking techniques, result in wines that are once again winning accolades. James describes important grape varieties and wine stylesÑfrom delicate sparkling, to rich fortified, and everything in betweenÑincluding the varietal blends that produce some of the finest Cape wines. Anchoring his narrative in a rich historical context, James discusses all the major wine regions, from Cederberg to Walker Bay, complete with profiles of more than 150 of the countryÕs finest producers.




Cultural Traditions in South Africa


Book Description

Look at religious, historical, and cultural traditions that occur in South Africa.




Healing Traditions


Book Description

Healing Traditions offers a historical perspective to the interactions between South Africa's traditional healers and biomedical practitioners. It provides an understanding that is vital for the development of medical strategies to effectively deal with South Africa's healthcare challenges.




Black Cultural Life in South Africa


Book Description

Under apartheid, black South Africans experienced severe material and social disadvantages occasioned by the government’s policies, and they had limited time for entertainment. Still, they closely engaged with an array of textual and visual cultures in ways that shaped their responses to this period of ethical crisis. Marshaling forms of historical evidence that include passbooks, memoirs, American “B” movies, literary and genre fiction, magazines, and photocomics, Black Cultural Life in South Africa considers the importance of popular genres and audiences in the relationship between ethical consciousness and aesthetic engagement. This study provocatively posits that states of oppression, including colonial and postcolonial rule, can elicit ethical responses to imaginative identification through encounters with popular culture, and it asks whether and how they carry over into ethical action. Its consideration of how globalized popular culture “travels” not just in material form, but also through the circuits of the imaginary, opens a new window for exploring the ethical and liberatory stakes of popular culture. Each chapter focuses on a separate genre, yet the overall interdisciplinary approach to the study of genre and argument for an expansion of ethical theory that draws on texts beyond the Western canon speak to growing concerns about studying genres and disciplines in isolation. Freed from oversimplified treatments of popular forms—common to cultural studies and ethical theory alike—this book demonstrates that people can do things with mass culture that reinvigorate ethical life. Lily Saint’s new volume will interest Africanists across the humanities and the social sciences, and scholars of Anglophone literary, globalization, and cultural studies; race; ethical theories and philosophies; film studies; book history and material cultures; and the burgeoning field of comics and graphic novels.




Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood


Book Description

Originally published in 1994, Homelands, Harlem & Hollywood examines the anti-colonialist struggle against apartheid, and the ways in which American and South African culture have been fascinated with and influenced by one another. Rob Nixon’s wide-ranging analysis looks at Hollywood representations of the struggle for liberation, the impact of the Harlem Renaissance on the Sophiatown writers, the banning and censorship of television under apartheid, Mandela and messianic politics, the sports and cultural boycotts, ethnic nationalism, and the culture of violence. Nixon concludes with an investigation of how the collapse of communism and anti-communism and the rise of ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union had powerful implications for the shape of post-apartheid South Africa.




Traditional South African Cooking


Book Description

Anyone who longs for a beloved grandmother’s famous milk tart or melkkos, or a great aunt’s delicious bobotie or vetkoek, should have this book in his or her kitchen! Traditional South African Cooking is a collection of well-known South African recipes that will enable the modern cook to continue the tradition and produce the same delicious meals that our ancestors used to enjoy. South African cuisine is a unique blend of the culinary art of many different cultures. Dutch, French, German and British settlers, as well as the Malays who came from the East, all brought their own recipes to this country. The subtle adaptation of these ‘imported’ recipes by the addition of local ingredients and the introduction of innovative (at the time) cooking methods resulted in an original and much-loved cuisine. This book also features interesting snippets about our forebears’ way of life.




The South Africa Reader


Book Description

The South Africa Reader is an extraordinarily rich guide to the history, culture, and politics of South Africa. With more than eighty absorbing selections, the Reader provides many perspectives on the country's diverse peoples, its first two decades as a democracy, and the forces that have shaped its history and continue to pose challenges to its future, particularly violence, inequality, and racial discrimination. Among the selections are folktales passed down through the centuries, statements by seventeenth-century Dutch colonists, the songs of mine workers, a widow's testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a photo essay featuring the acclaimed work of Santu Mofokeng. Cartoons, songs, and fiction are juxtaposed with iconic documents, such as "The Freedom Charter" adopted in 1955 by the African National Congress and its allies and Nelson Mandela's "Statement from the Dock" in 1964. Cacophonous voices—those of slaves and indentured workers, African chiefs and kings, presidents and revolutionaries—invite readers into ongoing debates about South Africa's past and present and what exactly it means to be South African.




The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism


Book Description

This book documents the emergence and development of the theory of racial capitalism in apartheid South Africa. It interrogates the specificity of this theory in the South African context and draws lessons for its global applicability. Racism and capitalism have a long history of entanglement. Nowhere is this more evident than in South Africa, where colonial and apartheid regimes used explicit systems of racial hierarchy to shore up profit. It is therefore no surprise that South Africa has represented a key site for thinking about the role that racism plays in shaping state policy, labor markets, patterns of capital accumulation, and working-class struggle. Illuminating these dynamics, this volume develops a distinctive South African tradition of thought about the relationship between racism and capitalism. The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism contributes to a burgeoning literature on the concept of “racial capitalism,” the origins of which many commentators trace back to apartheid South Africa. It pays particular attention to the crucial role of anti-apartheid activists as theorists, whose important insights remain relevant for scholars and activists around the globe. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.




The Dialectical Tradition in South Africa


Book Description

This book brings into view the most enduring and distinctive philosophical current in South African history—one often obscured or patronized as Afrikaner liberalism. It traces this current of thought from nineteenth-century disputes over Dutch liberal theology through Stellenbosch existentialism to the prison writings of Breyten Breytenbach, and examines related themes in the work of Olive Schreiner, M. K. Gandhi, and Richard Turner. At the core of this tradition is a defence of free speech in its classical sense, as a virtue necessary for a good society, rather than in its modern liberal sense as an individual right. Out of this defence of free speech, conducted in the face of charges of heresy, treason, and immorality, a range of philosophical conceptions developed—of the self constituted in dialogue with others, of freedom as transcendence of the given, and of a dialectical movement of consciousness as it is educated through debate and action. This study shows the Socratic commitment to "following the argument where it leads," sustained and developed in the storm and stress of a peculiar modernity.