Health and disease

A brief sociological sketch of our current understanding of the social structure among Blacks is presented, with a decided emphasis on its historical link with pre-industrial Black ontology, a concept to be explained later in this discussion. A serious attempt is made through phenomenological analysis to deal with the now well-known resilience of traditional ideas in the areas of health and disease.S. Afr. Med. J., 48, 922 (1974)

A critical psychology of the postcolonial

Of the theoretical resources typically taken as the underlying foundations of critical social psychology, elements, typically, each of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and Post-Structuralism, one particular mode of critique remains notably absent: postcolonial theory. What might be the most crucial contributions that postcolonial critique can make to the project of critical psychology? One answer is that of a reciprocal forms of critique, the retrieval of a ‘psychopolitics’ in which we not only place the psychological within the register of the political, but - perhaps more challengingly - in which the political is also, strategically, approached through the register of the psychological. What the writings of Fanon and Biko make plain in this connection is the degree to which the narratives and concepts of the social psychological may be reformulated so as to fashion a novel discourse of resistance, one that opens up new avenues for critique for critical psychology, on one hand, and that affords an innovative set of opportunities for the psychological investigation of the vicissitudes of the postcolonial, on the othe

Retrieving Biko: a black consciousness critique of whiteness

There is an important history often neglected by genealogies of ‘critical whiteness studies’: Steve Biko's Black Consciousness critique of white liberalism. What would it mean to retrieve this criticism in the context of white anti-racism in the post-apartheid era? Said's (2003) contrapuntal method proves useful here as a juxtaposing device whereby the writings of a past figure can be critically harnessed, travelling across temporal and ideological boundaries to interrogate the present. Four interlinked modes of disingenuous white anti-racism can thus be identified: (1) a fetishistic preoccupation with disproving one's racism; (2) ostentatious forms of anti-racism that function as means of self-promotion, as paradoxical means of white self-love; (3) the consolidation and extension of agency through redemptive gestures of ‘heroic white anti-racism’; (4) ‘charitable anti-racism’ which fixes tolerance within a model of charity, as an act of generosity and that reiterates the status and role of an anti-racist benefactor

Reflections on the mission(s) to capture the ‘reader’ and ‘book’ in southern African art

This article presents some early reflections from a cultural historical project on the visualisation of reading practices. The focus is limited to images of people reading. The pervasiveness of such images in popular visual culture is illustrated, and how this relates to the established tradition amongst Western artists to paint the image of the reader. A number of scholars have contributed to the image of the reader in art as a field of study, all confirming the particular significance of depicting woman readers in Western art. The current investigation asks how, from our vantage point in the South, the representation, or non-representation, of readers in Africa, specifically southern Africa, stands within, or in opposition to, or in conversation with, the canonised tradition in Western art. The appropriation and negation of Western artistic conventions in the popular proliferation of visual images are also being considered. For the South African discussion, the artist Gerhard Sekoto is highlighted, and some of the contexts which helped shape his visualisations of people reading are being traced.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcrc202016-04-30hb201