White Scars

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

In the Heat of Shadows : South African Poetry 1996-2013

South African poetry today is charged with restlessness, burstng with diversity. Gone is the intense inward focus required to deal with a situation of systematic oppression, the enclosing effort of concentration on a single predicament. While politics and identity continue to be central themes, the poetry since the late 1990s reveals a richer investigation of ancestors and history, alongside more experimentation with language and translation; and enduring concern with the touchstones of love, loss, memory, and acts of witnessing. In the Heat of Shadows: South African Poetry 1996-2013 presents work by 33 poets and includes some translations from Afrikaans, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho and Xitsonga. This collection follows on from Denis Hirson's 1997 anthology The Lava of this Land: South African Poetry 1960-1996

The Everyday Politics of Being a Student in South Africa: A History

Over the past year, student protests under the banners #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall have swept South Africa, demanding the “decolonization” of curricula and greater educational access. This article contextualizes these protests, drawing on a vibrant historiography on student politics under apartheid (1948-1994). In scholarship produced during the antiapartheid movement, it often seemed that the history of student protests was the history of education. The study of resistance has remained integral to the field. Yet, over the past decade, how historians look at student politics has been changing. First, we look at the spaces of politics differently. We move beyond familiar narratives of student resistance because we look beyond the campuses that played emblematic roles in the making of African nationalism and antiapartheid struggle. New vantage points enable us to see different political actors. These youth asked diverse questions about their lives and about the purpose and form of schooling in an unequal society, and they expressed these questions through strategies that included but were not limited to school strikes. Their questions arose out of daily struggles around issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class—struggles that resonate with the concerns of student activists today