"Sister outsiders" : the representation of identity and difference in selected writings by South African Indian women.

Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2000.No abstract available

The Textualities of the AutobiogrAfrical

In your mind’s eye, summon a map of the world—that famous text. There, there is Africa. The familiar, highly visible bulge of head to horn and curve, and the islands as you travel down to the continent’s southernmost point. It is likely that your imagination, like ours, has archived the inherited template of a Mercator projection, the powerful sixteenth-century cartography which remains influential offline and e-nfluential on Google Maps, even though it misleadingly distorts the size of continents. The 30.2 million square kilometers of the African continent appear much smaller than, say, the areas of the US (9.1 million square kilometers), Russia (16.4 million square kilometers), or China (9.4 million square kilometers). In comparison, the corrective cartographic morphing of the GallPeters projection revises the habituated representational geography of the world’s landmasses, showing the relational sizes of continents more accurately.1 Such tensions are not surprising, for the map, we know, is not to be equated with the territory and, in the context of our interest in this special issue in the textualities of the AutobiogrAfrical, divergent cartographies of the same space, drafted from different ideological perspectives, remind us to ask questions about how life narratives might make Africa intelligible. If, as Frances Stonor Saunders observes, “the self is an act of cartography, and every life a study of borders,” then “[e]nvisioning new acts of cartography that give substance and dynamism to the spaces between borders … produces new selves—or, at the very least, new ways of thinking about selfhood—and thus new objects of autobiographical enquiry.” 2 Any map of Africa reflects assumptions about a collective (“Africa”), as well as the political-geographical divisions of nation-states. “Africa” implies degrees of commonality among the (possibly more than) fifty-four countries that comprise the continent. Yet we know the dangers of a single story. Africa is not, after all, a country. Bear in mind, too, that our editorial team is located at the bottom end of the continent in South Afric

Remembering "Salisbury Island".

Three distinct vignettes on “Salisbury Island”, have been composed for this discussion on the tribal college for Indians inaugurated in 1961 on Salisbury Island, an old naval base at the Durban Harbour. It was prompted by the reunion that took place in 2011 at the Sibaya Complex outside Durban, as part of the 50th anniversary commemoration of its inauguration. I present diverse aspects of life on Salisbury Island, from different, shifting vantage points and perspectives - combining the banal as well as the critical, rhetorical and historical, autobiographical and discursive - in order to re-create a lost world that was experienced during apartheid, the composition “reflects the syntax of memory itself ” [Hirson 2004:134]. Remembering the past in South Africa, especially the apartheid past, re-threads both positive and negative experiences, and weaves a varied quilt of personal, institutional and historical memory. For history educators this would provide a creative and critical way of engaging with the past in order to live in the present

A fire that blazed in the ocean – Gandhi and the poems of Satyagraha in South Africa, 1909 -1911 by Surendra Bhana and Neelima Shukla-Bhatt.

Review article.No abstract available

In Memoriam Prof Brij V Lal

A tribute to the late Professor Brij V LalUn homenaje al recién fallecido Professor Brij V La