Sound Fragments

Sound Fragments
Author: Noel Lobley
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2022-04-19
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0819580783

Winner of IASPM Book Prize, given by IASPM, 2023 This book is an ethnographic study of sound archives and the processes of creative decolonization that form alternative modes of archiving and curating in the 21st century. It explores the histories and afterlives of sound collections and practices at the International Library of African Music. Sound Fragments follows what happens when a colonial sound archive is repurposed and reimagined by local artists in post-apartheid South Africa. The narrative speaks to larger issues in sound studies, curatorial practices, and the reciprocity and ethics of listening to and reclaiming culture. Sound Fragments interrogates how Xhosa arts activism contributes to an expanding notion of what a sound or cultural archive could be, and where it may resonate now and in future.

Refusal, Transition and Post-apartheid Law

Refusal, Transition and Post-apartheid Law
Author: Karin Van Marle
Publisher: AFRICAN SUN MeDIA
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2009-11-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 192033808X

Refusal, Transition and Post-apartheid Law under editorship of professor Karin van Marle is indeed long overdue. As some of the authors in the relevant contributions to this publication rightly point out, Van Marle?s call for a ?jurisprudence of generosity?, enabled through an ?ethics of refusal?, signals a new shift in South African jurisprudence. Through the lens of Van Marle?s ethics of refusal and her jurisprudence of generosity, the articles present fresh and meaningful interpretations in respect of a range of very relevant topics ranging from property theory and a rethinking of human rights, to the role of forgiveness and the dangers inherent in modern technology.

Dust of the Zulu

Dust of the Zulu
Author: Louise Meintjes
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2017-07-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0822373637

In Dust of the Zulu Louise Meintjes traces the political and aesthetic significance of ngoma, a competitive form of dance and music that emerged out of the legacies of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. Contextualizing ngoma within South Africa's history of violence, migrant labor, the HIV epidemic, and the world music market, Meintjes follows a community ngoma team and its professional subgroup during the twenty years after apartheid's end. She intricately ties aesthetics to politics, embodiment to the voice, and masculine anger to eloquence and virtuosity, relating the visceral experience of ngoma performances as they embody the expanse of South African history. Meintjes also shows how ngoma helps build community, cultivate responsible manhood, and provide its participants with a means to reconcile South Africa's past with its postapartheid future. Dust of the Zulu includes over one hundred photographs of ngoma performances, the majority taken by award-winning photojournalist TJ Lemon.

Spatial Justice After Apartheid

Spatial Justice After Apartheid
Author: Jaco Barnard-Naudé
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2022-08-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351363476

This book considers the question of spatial justice after apartheid from several disciplinary perspectives – jurisprudence, law, literature, architecture, photography and psychoanalysis are just some of the disciplines engaged here. However, the main theoretical device on which the authors comment is the legacy of what in Carl Schmitt’s terms is nomos as the spatialised normativity of sociality. Each author considers within the practical and theoretical constraints of their topic, the question of what nomos in its modern configuration may or may not contribute to a thinking of spatial justice after apartheid. On the whole, the collection forces a confrontation between law’s spatiality in a “postcolonial” era, on the one hand, and the traumatic legacy of what Paul Gilroy has called the “colonial nomos”, on the other hand. In the course of this confrontation, critical questions of continuation, extension, disruption and rewriting are raised and confronted in novel and innovative ways that both challenge Schmitt’s account of nomos and affirm the centrality of the constitutive relation between law and space. The book promises to resituate the trajectory of nomos, while considering critical instances through which the spatial legacy of apartheid might at last be overcome. This interdisciplinary book will appeal to scholars of critical legal theory, political philosophy, aesthetics and architecture.

The Spaces of the Modern City

The Spaces of the Modern City
Author: Gyan Prakash
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2008-02-24
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780691133430

It historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape. This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg. They explore the nature of spatial politics, examining the disparate worlds of eighteenth-century Baghdad, nineteenth-century Morelia. They also show the meaning of everyday spaces to urban life, illuminating issues such as crime in metropolitan London, youth culture in Dakar, "memory projects" in Tokyo, and Bombay cinema.

Genres of Critique

Genres of Critique
Author: Karin van Marle
Publisher: AFRICAN SUN MeDIA
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2013-12-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1920689028

The book seeks to open and explore the liminal space of critique at the intersection of law, aesthetics and politics. The essays in this volume elaborate and expand the meaning and significance of critique through an engagement with aesthetic forms. Although this endeavour has wider significance, the focus is primarily on South Africa. The various contributions arose out of a process of reading, writing and discussion among visiting scholars at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), Stellenbosch University, South Africa, in 2010. The project responds to the limits of the transplantation of critical legal studies into different jurisdictions, especially South Africa. The essays develop an approach to critical legal thinking that is conscious of critique as a problem of genre and seek to open up this problem of genre in the context of critical legal studies.

The D-Word: Perspectives on Democracy in Tumultuous Times

The D-Word: Perspectives on Democracy in Tumultuous Times
Author: Christi van der Westhuizen
Publisher: Mandela University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2024-03-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1998959058

This curated collection engages international debates about the current challenges facing democracy. Given the proliferation of “crisis” literature on democracy, this volume finds its distinctive niche in presenting perspectives from the global margins that bridge disciplinary, sectoral, national and conceptual divides. South Africans enter into conversation with scholars and activists from elsewhere in the Global South, including the Arab world and the rest of Africa, and from the European periphery. Insights on democracy are offered from a diversity of perspectives and voices, spanning philosophy, socio-legal and political studies, sociology, public administration, and queer and gender studies and activism. The book will be of interest to academics, activists, policymakers, development planners, and the general public. The D-Word is a timely contribution addressing burning questions: are current contestations about the relevance of democracy due to systemic flaws in how it is constituted, received, practised and even imagined, and can the democratic “project” be salvaged? The book’s unique approach brings a variety of lenses to bear on the prospects for democracy. The critical reflections it contains make for an enriching, broad canvas of ideas. - Professor Sandy Africa, University of Pretoria

Bodies of Truth

Bodies of Truth
Author: Rita Kesselring
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2016-10-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804799830

Bodies of Truth offers an intimate account of how apartheid victims deal with the long-term effects of violence, focusing on the intertwined themes of embodiment, injury, victimhood, and memory. In 2002, victims of apartheid-era violence filed suit against multinational corporations, accusing them of aiding and abetting the security forces of the apartheid regime. While the litigation made its way through the U.S. courts, thousands of victims of gross human rights violations have had to cope with painful memories of violence. They have also confronted an official discourse claiming that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the 1990s sufficiently addressed past injuries. This book shows victims' attempts to emancipate from their experiences by participating in legal actions, but also by creating new forms of sociality among themselves and in relation to broader South African society. Rita Kesselring's ethnography draws on long-term research with members of the victim support group Khulumani and critical analysis of legal proceedings related to apartheid-era injury. Using juridical intervention as an entry point into the question of subjectivity, Kesselring asks how victimhood is experienced in the everyday for the women and men living on the periphery of Cape Town and in other parts of the country. She argues that the everyday practices of the survivors must be taken up by the state and broader society to allow for inclusive social change in a post-conflict setting.

The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies

The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies
Author: Karen Crawley
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 562
Release: 2024-05-20
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1040013287

This handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the cutting-edge field of cultural legal studies. Cultural legal studies is at the forefront of the legal discipline, questioning not only doctrine or social context, but how the concerns of legality are distributed and encountered through a range of material forms. Growing out of the interdisciplinary turn in critical legal studies and jurisprudence that took place in the latter quarter of the 20th century, cultural legal studies exists at the intersection of a range of traditional disciplinary areas: legal studies, cultural studies, literary studies, jurisprudence, media studies, critical theory, history, and philosophy. It is an area of study that is characterised by an expanded or open-ended conception of what ‘counts’ as a legal source, and that is concerned with questions of authority, legitimacy, and interpretation across a wide range of cultural artefacts. Including a mixture of established and new authors in the area, this handbook brings together a complex set of perspectives that are representative of the current field, but which also address its methods, assumptions, limitations, and possible futures. Establishing the significance of the cultural for understanding law, as well as its importance as a potential site for justice, community, and sociality in the world today, this handbook is a key reference point both for those working in the cultural legal context – in legal theory, law and literature, law and film/television, law and aesthetics, cultural studies, and the humanities generally – as well as others interested in the interactions between authority, culture, and meaning.