Women and Crime in Post-Transitional South African Crime Fiction

Women and Crime in Post-Transitional South African Crime Fiction
Author: Sabine Binder
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2020-11-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004437444

In this ground-breaking study, Sabine Binder analyses the complex ways in which female crime fictional victims, detectives and perpetrators in South African crime fiction resonate with widespread and persistent real crimes against women in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on a wide range of crime novels written over the last decade, Binder emphasises the genre’s feminist potential and critically maps its political work at the intersection of gender and race. Her study challenges the perception of crime fiction as a trivial genre and shows how, in South Africa at least, it provides a vibrant platform for social, cultural and ethical debates, exposing violence, misogyny and racism and shedding light on the problematics of law and justice for women faced with crime.

Towards a Theory of Whodunits

Towards a Theory of Whodunits
Author: Dana Percec
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-08-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 152757346X

Bringing together academics from Romania, the USA, Spain and Turkey, this volume follows the evolution of detective fiction, from its early forms during the late eighteenth century until its contemporary multi-media expressions. Tackling the best-known authors in the genre, as well as marginal, forgotten or eccentric names, and discussing prose which fits perfectly in the pattern of the genre or texts which have been conventionally associated with other genres, as well as films, the book explores the impact of whodunits in both highbrow and popular culture.

The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology

The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology
Author: Nathan Ashman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 642
Release: 2023-10-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000984516

The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology is the first comprehensive examination of crime fiction and ecocriticism. Across 33 innovative chapters from leading international scholars, this Handbook considers an emergent field of contemporary crime narratives that are actively responding to a diverse assemblage of global environmental concerns, whilst also opening up ‘classic’ crime fictions and writers to new ecocritical perspectives. Rigorously engaged with cutting-edge critical trends, it places the familiar staples of crime fiction scholarship – from thematic to formal approaches – in conversation with a number of urgent ecological theories and ideas, covering subjects such as environmental security, environmental justice, slow violence, ecofeminism and animal studies. The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology is an essential introduction to this new and dynamic research field for both students and scholars alike.

We Are Not Such Things

We Are Not Such Things
Author: Justine van der Leun
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2016-06-28
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0812994515

Justine van der Leun reopens the murder of a young American woman in South Africa, an iconic case that calls into question our understanding of truth and reconciliation, loyalty, justice, race, and class—a gripping investigation in the vein of the podcast Serial “Timely . . . gripping, explosive . . . the kind of obsessive forensic investigation—of the clues, and into the soul of society—that is the legacy of highbrow sleuths from Truman Capote to Janet Malcolm.”—The New York Times Book Review The story of Amy Biehl is well known in South Africa: The twenty-six-year-old white American Fulbright scholar was brutally murdered on August 25, 1993, during the final, fiery days of apartheid by a mob of young black men in a township outside Cape Town. Her parents’ forgiveness of two of her killers became a symbol of the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa. Justine van der Leun decided to introduce the story to an American audience. But as she delved into the case, the prevailing narrative started to unravel. Why didn’t the eyewitness reports agree on who killed Amy Biehl? Were the men convicted of the murder actually responsible for her death? And then van der Leun stumbled upon another brutal crime committed on the same day, in the very same area. The true story of Amy Biehl’s death, it turned out, was not only a story of forgiveness but a reflection of the complicated history of a troubled country. We Are Not Such Things is the result of van der Leun’s four-year investigation into this strange, knotted tale of injustice, violence, and compassion. The bizarre twists and turns of this case and its aftermath—and the story that emerges of what happened on that fateful day in 1993 and in the decades that followed—come together in an unsparing account of life in South Africa today. Van der Leun immerses herself in the lives of her subjects and paints a stark, moving portrait of a township and its residents. We come to understand that the issues at the heart of her investigation are universal in scope and powerful in resonance. We Are Not Such Things reveals how reconciliation is impossible without an acknowledgment of the past, a lesson as relevant to America today as to a South Africa still struggling with the long shadow of its history. “A masterpiece of reported nonfiction . . . Justine van der Leun’s account of a South African murder is destined to be a classic.”—Newsday

Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020

Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020
Author: Matthew J. Christensen
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2024-03-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1847013872

Providing a survey of Anglophone African detective fiction, from the late 1940s to the present day, this study traces its history both as a literary form and a mode of critical exploration of the fraught sovereignties of the African state and its citizens. Since the late 1940s, African writers including Cyprian Ekwensi, Arthur Maimane, Adaora Lily Ulasi, Hilary Ng'weno, Unity Dow, Parker Bilal, and Angela Makholwa have published over 200 murder mysteries, police procedurals, spy thrillers, and other fictional narratives of investigation and discovery in English-language newspapers, magazines, and novels. Distributed widely across the continent's diverse cultural and political geographies, these texts share aesthetic characteristics and thematic preoccupations that reflect transnational networks of production, circulation, and influence. Anglophone African Detective Fiction, 1940-2020 surveys this literary history and examines how African writers have repeatedly harnessed the detective story to interrogate postcolonial realities of selfhood and the state. It argues that African writers have turned the detective story into a highly productive, while at the same time suspense-filled and entertaining, mode of social and political critique, first of colonialism and the independence era and latterly of neoliberal governance. Offering an overview of paradigmatic texts, from Ghana to Kenya and Sudan to South Africa, the book traces the contours of the history of Anglophone African detective fiction that is at once a cultural history of a uniquely African assessment of the ongoing problematics of sovereignty and decolonization.

The Truth about Crime

The Truth about Crime
Author: Jean Comaroff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 022642491X

This new book by the well-known anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff explores the global preoccupation with criminality in the early twenty-first century, a preoccupation strikingly disproportionate, in most places and for most people, to the risks posed by lawlessness to the conduct of everyday life. Ours in an epoch in which law-making, law-breaking, and law-enforcement are ever more critical registers in which societies construct, contest, and confront truths about themselves, an epoch in which criminology, broadly defined, has displaced sociology as the privileged means by which the social world knows itself. They also argue that as the result of a tectonic shift in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance, the meanings attached to crime and, with it, the nature of policing, have undergone significant change; also, that there has been a palpable muddying of the lines between legality and illegality, between corruption and conventional business; even between crime-and-policing, which exist, nowadays, in ever greater, hyphenated complicity. Thinking through Crime and Policing is, therefore, an excursion into the contemporary Order of Things; or, rather, into the metaphysic of disorder that saturates the late modern world, indeed, has become its leitmotif. It is also a meditation on sovereignty and citizenship, on civility, class, and race, on the law and its transgression, on the political economy of representation.

Police Work and Identity

Police Work and Identity
Author: Andrew Faull
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2017-09-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315309831

This is a book about the men and women who police contemporary South Africa. Drawing on rich, original ethnographical data, it considers how officers make sense of their jobs and how they find meaning in their duties. It demonstrates that the dynamics that lead to police abuses and scandals in transitional and neo-liberalising regimes such as South Africa can be traced to the day-to-day experiences and ambitions of the average police officer. It is about the stories they tell themselves about themselves and their social worlds, and how these shape the order they produce through their work. By focusing on police officers, this book positions the individual in primacy over the organisation, asking what policing looks like when motivated by the pursuit of ontological security in precarious contexts. It acknowledges but downplays the importance of police culture in determining officers’ attitudes and behaviour, and reminds readers that most officers’ lives are entangled in, and shaped by a range of social, political and cultural forces. It suggests that a job in the South African Police Service (SAPS) is primarily just that: a job. Most officers join the organisation after other dreams have slipped beyond reach, their presence in the Service being almost accidental. But once employed, they re-write their self-narratives and enact carefully choreographed performances to ease managerial and public pressure, and to rationalize their coercive practices. In an era where ‘evidence’ and ‘what works’ reigns supreme, and where ‘cop culture’ is often deemed a primary socializing force, this book emphasises how officers’ personal histories, ambitions, and vulnerabilities remain central to how policing unfolds on the street.

Feminist Methodologies

Feminist Methodologies
Author: Wendy Harcourt
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022
Genre: Feminism
ISBN: 3030826546

This open access book gives insights into feminist methodologies in theory and practice. By foregrounding the experiential and embodied nature of doing feminist research, this book offers valuable tools for feminist research as a continuous praxis. Emerging from a rich collective learning process, the collection offers in-depth reflections on how feminists shape research questions, understand positionality, share research results beyond academe and produce feminist intersectional knowledges. This book reveals how the authors navigate theory and practice, candidly exploring the difficulty of producing knowledge on the edge of academia and activism. From different points of view, places and disciplinary positions, artistic and creative experiments and collaborations, the book provides a multi-layered analysis. This book will be a valuable resource and asset to early career researchers and interdisciplinary feminist students who can learn more about the doing of feminist research from realistic, accessible, and practical methodological tools and knowledge. Wendy Harcourt is Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is Coordinator of the WEGO-ITN "Well-being, Ecology, Gender and Community" Innovation Training Network and Series Editor of the Palgrave series on Gender, Development and Social Change. She has written widely on gender and development, post-development, body politics and feminist political ecology. Karijn van den Berg is an independent feminist researcher who brings together environmental politics, feminism, activism and relations of power in her academic and political work, and strives to connect theory, practice and political organising. Constance Dupuis is a researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, funded by the WEGO-ITN "Well-being, Ecology, Gender and Community" Innovation Training Network. Her work focuses on ageing and intergenerational wellbeing from decolonial and feminist political ecology perspectives. Jacqueline Gaybor is a Senior Technical Advisor at Rutgers - a Dutch centre of expertise on sexual reproductive health and rights and she is a Lecturer at the Erasmus University College, of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. .

A Companion to African Literatures

A Companion to African Literatures
Author: Olakunle George
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2021-03-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1119058171

Rediscover the diversity of modern African literatures with this authoritative resource edited by a leader in the field How have African literatures unfolded in their rich diversity in our modern era of decolonization, nationalisms, and extensive transnational movement of peoples? How have African writers engaged urgent questions regarding race, nation, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality? And how do African literary genres interrelate with traditional oral forms or audio-visual and digital media? A Companion to African Literatures addresses these issues and many more. Consisting of essays by distinguished scholars and emerging leaders in the field, this book offers rigorous, deeply engaging discussions of African literatures on the continent and in diaspora. It covers the four main geographical regions (East and Central Africa, North Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa), presenting ample material to learn from and think with. A Companion To African Literatures is divided into five parts. The first four cover different regions of the continent, while the fifth part considers conceptual issues and newer directions of inquiry. Chapters focus on literatures in European languages officially used in Africa -- English, French, and Portuguese -- as well as homegrown African languages: Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Swahili, and Yoruba. With its lineup of lucid and authoritative analyses, readers will find in A Companion to African Literatures a distinctive, rewarding academic resource. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students in literary studies programs with an African focus, A Companion to African Literatures will also earn a place in the libraries of teachers, researchers, and professors who wish to strengthen their background in the study of African literatures.