‘Regardez la vie reprendre’: Futurity in Véronique Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana / The Shadow of Imana

In this essay, I review a series of binaries that are examined by Véronique Tadjo’s recent narrative about Rwanda and its 1994 genocide, L’Ombre d’Imana (Engl. trans. The Shadow of Imana, 2002), and doubly blurred. These binaries (inside/out, here/there, past/future) and envisaged from two points of view. They are situated first in the dreadful zones of biopolitical indistinction in which the law legalizes its own suspension and renders legal atrocities normally outside the realm of the permissible; and they are re-envisaged in a movement which “turns inside out” (Esposito) these indistinctions to assert an unbroken fabric of life, human or otherwise, which resists even the perversions of the extreme manifestation of biopolitics evinced by genocide. This article shifts its focus away from the customary topic of the relationship between genocide and representation, towards issue of genocide and biopolitics, and to a form of semiois that does not merely “mean”, but makes life (continue to) happen. Rwanda may stand, emblematically, for the stamping out of life on the continent, for the existential negativity that African often emblematizes in the global imaginary; by contrast, Tadjo, in her reading of Rwanda, poses to the African continent, not a rhetorical question but a fundamental ontological and existential enquiry: “Comment envisager le futur ici? Quel futur?”(Tadjo 125, “How can you envisage the future here? What future?”)

Shadows of the past, visions of the future in African literatures and cultures

In a curious paradox, one of the best-known recent statements about African futurities itself seems to vanish into a permanently receding future. Rem Koolhaas famously wrote of Lagos: "Many of the much touted values of contemporary global capital and its prophetic organizational models of dispersal and discontinuity, federalism and flexibility, have been realized perfectly in West Africa. This is to say that Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos." (qtd in Nuttal and Mbembe 4

Shakespeare among the Nyoongar: Post-colonial texts, colonial intertexts and their imbrications - Macbeth in Gail Jones's Sorry

This article reads Gail Jones’s 2007 novel Sorry as a novel of White usurpation of Indigenous country and culture. Sorry mobilizes a number of intertexts, primary among them Shakespeare. In particular Macbeth features prominently as a template for Sorry’s drama of usurpation. My analysis focuses on two extensive quotations from Macbeth, recited by one of the novel’s White protagonists as she surveys the scene of her husband’s murder, ostensibly at the hands of an Indigenous servant, one of the ‘Stolen Generations.’ This recitation, however, proves itself to be an act of usurpation, as it is Perdita, the White child protagonist of the novel, who has stabbed her father during one of his repeated rapes of the Indigenous girl. Perdita, in turn, recovers her memory of the act via the recitation of the same passages from Macbeth, thus allowing Shakespeare to emerge in the White post-colonial text as a self-critical element of White usurping culture but also, possibly, as a collaborator in a coalition against the ongoing oppression of the Indigenous population which characterizes contemporary Australia. 1 Cursedhttp://www.degruyter.com/view/j/zaa2016-12-30am2016Englis

Reading African complexities today : generic folding in Gaile Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigali

This article examines a recent, internationally acclaimed popular novel from Africa, Gaile Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigali (2009), to explore the ways the customary cultural demarcation between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” literature, between entertainment and critique, can be blurred so as to enable more efficacious interventions, whether conceptually or pedagogically, into the complexities of contemporary African societies. The article begins by interrogating the immensely suggestive paradigm of “entanglement” (Mbembe and Nuttall) with a view to proposing more adequate images of sociopolitical complexity via the notion of “folding” (Deleuze and others). It then offers examples of such modified paradigms by looking at the generic ambiguity of Parkin’s novel, matched by the complex strategies it brings to bear on such fraught and intractable issues as FGM. The article suggests that this fusion of lightweight and serious, popular and conceptually challenging, is both an index of contemporary sociopolitical complexity in Africa and the site of the text’s purchase on that very complexity.http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication/?journalCode=reseafrilite&2016-01-30hj201

Apocalypse now, never ... or forever : Venter and Medalie on the everyday politics of post-apartheid South Africa

This article undertakes an analysis of the narrative temporalities and of the narratives of temporality, specifically those of apocalypse or end-times and of living-on respectively, to be found in two recent South African novels, Eben Venter’s Trencherman (2008) and David Medalie’s The Shadow Follows (2006). Against Venter’s hyperbolic narrative of catastrophe, which also turns out to be a critique of the residual elements of the erstwhile apartheid era, I posit that Medalie’s litotic and patchwork narrative offers a more appropriate narrative of the slow transformation of the post-apartheid South African polity. I use Venter’s and Medalie’s oddly complementary novels as a template for exploring an emergent sense of a non-teleological ‘minor narrative’ of liberation in a time ‘after postcoloniality’.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/reia202016-07-31hb201

Borderlines...living on : the market and the post-apartheid polity in Mpe's Vladislavic's and Dangor's Johannesburg geographies

OK Bazaars, Clicks, Spar, CNA and Checkers are the gaudy names of South African supermarkets which, in Phaswane Mpe’s classic ‘mapping’ of crime-­‐ridden Johannesburg in Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), mark the protagonist’s walk through inner-­‐city (WH 7-­‐8).1 The names of these supermarkets in Mpe’s text resonate evocatively with allusions to the putatively liberal spaces of the post-­‐segregation city of the early 1990s: ‘OK’ with a new but shortlived optimism, ‘Clicks’ with the African languages now to be heard on the streets of once-­‐whites-­‐only Hillbrow, ‘Bazaar’ with the influx of informal street economies into the once regimented grid of the CBD, or ‘Spar’ with the real austerities and exacerbated inequalities of the neoliberal regime which rapidly supplanted the ANC’s erstwhile imaginations of socialist egalitarianism.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tpar202016-08-31hb2016Englis

Blackboard as separation wall : classrooms, race and the contemporary crisis in Germany

This article suggests that racism, construed as a reified and artificial dichotomization of social bodies into acutely hypostatized and opposed identities, can best be understood by placing it within a larger global context of exploitative hierarchies which racism retrospectively legitimizes. The loss of the global perspective and the obscured knowledge of global networks of toxic causalities allow the broader context of racism to remain invisible, thus condemning local anti-racist activism to mitigated success. The article suggests that the classroom as a vital site of education of citizens tends to be isolated from the world; racism can be combatted in the classroom by opening its walls up to the larger global context in which education is a significant factor. A pedagogical practice of interrogative critical assemblages may facilitate the reconstruction of invisible global networks, which in turn may enable us to better understand the workings of micro-racisms within a larger context of global macro-racism.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers202019-12-15hj2018Englis

Contextures : inscriptions of urban space in inner-city Berlin

This article sets up a dialogue between photographs of urban art, artifacts, and architecture in the Prenzlauer Berg district of former East Berlin with a meditation on the ways in which urban subjects interact with their environment so as to transform both themselves and their city. The article works with notions of fluid “folded” relationships between city space and denizens, suggesting that these are not discrete entities interacting with each other according to the Euclidean paradigm of container and inhabitants, respectively. Rather, urban subjects are manifestations and products of the space that brings them forth. Any aesthetic practices on the part of urban subjects are recursive actions that modify the urban fabric continuum of which those subjects are a part, thus initiating complex environmental, political, and subjective changes, which can be understood under the rubrics of Lefebvre’s “right to the city” as well as the work of more recent theorists.Co-funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Australian Research Council (DFG Project ID : 447 AUS-113/25/0-1; ARC Project ID : LX0668626).http://www.sagepublications.comhb201

Little perpetrators, witness-bearers and the young and the brave: towards a post-transitional aesthetics

The aesthetic choices characterizing work produced during the transition to democracy have been well documented. We are currently well into the second decade after the 1994 election - what then of the period referred to as the 'second transition'? Have trends consolidated, hardened, shifted, or have new 'post-transitional' trends emerged? What can be expected of the future 'born free' generation of writers and readers, since terms such as restlessness, dissonance and disjuncture are frequently used to describe the experience of constitutional democracy as it co-exists with the emerging new apartheid of poverty? Furthermore, what value is there in identifying post-transitional aesthetic trends?DHE

Pedagogical memory and the space of the postcolonial classroom : reading Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions

This article addresses issues of the mnemonic space of the literature classroom by interrogating a classic text of African women’s writing, Tsitsi Dangaremnga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) for the ways it speaks about education in 1960s and 1970s late-colonial Rhodesia. The article suggests that the novel reviews and critiques a number of memorial strategies that were crucial to the colonial educational system, thereby facilitating a reflexive application of the novel’s concerns to the contexts in which it is often taught, that of today’s postcolonial classrooms. The article seeks to place Dangarembga’s novel in the context of its present moment, contemporary South Africa – that of the present critic’s site of practice, both pedagogical and scholarly, and that of many of this article’s readers. This present moment, in turn, is made up the many sites, successive and simultaneous, in which the novel’s work of memory is being re-activated in the minds of students as readers and writers. Via a dialogue between the textual past and the pedagogical present, one which is often subject to critical amnesia, the article seeks to inaugurate a debate on the nature of pedagogical memory in the space of the postcolonial university or high school literature classroom.http://www.informaworld.com/RSCRhb2013gv201