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On the poetics of death and the theory of anti-colonialism
No full textA dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Studies
of the University of the Witwatersrand
in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyTo describe this work by way of the Fanonian logic, in its materialist quest, one can say, it tries to establish the conditions necessary for a theory of anti-colonialism which finds its expression in the experience of death, the realm of nonbeing, nonmeaning, and the unnameable. It enquires into the nature of a revolutionary ‘political act’, ‘guerrilla action’, or a aesthetic struggle against settler-colonialism which is constituted in the moment or political economy of death. To put it in the words of Fanon himself, it signal a regression or recursion into the “zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an upheaval can be born” (Fanon, 1952:8). We conjure the spirits of the dead, in their materiality or as material categories in order to avoid the usual mistake of locating revolutionary and emancipatory practices within the categories of self-reflexivity or Ideality or transcendence. Hence, the thesis takes it that, through an awareness of the psychotic and deathly formations which constitute the concrete historical reality of the colonised black subject under colonial modernity, one should see that, it is only from ‘the place of that which is not’ qua the ‘not-all’ or the unnameable substances of the historical-material-past which informs our understanding of the present stratum of socio-political reality with all its antagonisms and contradictions that we can develop a comprehensive theory of a revolutionary and emancipatory liberation subjectivity. Taking into consideration the tensions, contradictions, and antagonisms manifest at the level of the material and social ‘real’ qua the present earth we habitat, the condition of the colonised black subject cannot be theorised from the domain of reflexivity or self-reflexivity, transcendence, truth, ideality, knowledge or science, gnosis or logic, because there is no unified singularity for such a subject to reflect upon or to subtract from. The material realm or ‘womb of space’, as per Wilson Harris’ notion of underground fictitious imaginations, in which the colonised black subject is forced to subsist – as a site of (deathly and non-objective) drives, energetics, desires, and anxiety – is what enables it to function as the foundation or operative medium for all forms of transgression and transformation that can help us overcome the present structures of subjugation and the phallocentric notions of human emancipation that they prescribe. Hence, as a materialist insight, the thesis, through the concept of death, tries to establish the conditions for a theory of the subject of resistance and liberation that can take up the project of anti-colonialism by considering the centrality of colonial antagonism and how its structures are still reproduced in our present situation. In its extensive form, the project draws from complementary, although at times opposing or contradictory theoretical and philosophical traditions, namely, Black Radical thought (what we can refer to as the avant-garde of social
theory today) and Continental philosophy in Western social theory, in order to re-assert the importance of the theory of colonialism and the theory of anti-colonialism in our evaluation of the present forms of coloniality. With that said, we argue that colonialism, although mediated by democratic practices and principles, it is still immediate to our present real conditions of existence. In the same manner, the historical or mythical African past, the realm in which the limits of colonialism continued and still continue to be stretched in various political and aesthetic forms is retrieved to support our call for a theory of anti-colonialism that draws its paradigms from the perspective of a materialist logic, or rather, materialist alogicity. Thus, through a reading of the black aesthetic tradition, myth, which is a property of the ‘the living-dead-unconscious’, is read as a category of materiality or the conflict-ridden ground or the historic past which is central to our understanding of the present and conceptions of strategies for a revolutionary form of ‘political action’ and ‘guerrilla action’. Hence, to qualify the grounds for a reading of the theory of anti-colonialism through the concept of death, the thesis moves through the contours of what can be identified within neuroscience, epigenetics, mathematical logic, mythical logic, or psychoanalysis as either a speculative-materialism, a dialectical-materialism, a historical-materialism, a Real-materialism, or a logical-materialism, but which ever angle it may be read from (which however should never be a positivist or reductive or deductive one), the concept of materialism as groundlessness still remains a key conceptual category. That is, the thesis takes the subject as immanent in the kinematics, drives, or energetics of the Real material conditions of its existence: which means that, and as we mentioned above, the subject it imagines is a subject who is neither of the nature of the self, nor reflection, nor consciousness (in both their scientific and transcendental terms).M T 201
The economics of the Bakgatla-ba-Kgafela Tribal Authority: changing forms of chefly appropriation on the Patinum Belt
No full textThesis (M.A.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, Political Studies, 2014The thesis seeks to explore how the flow of platinum mining capital into the Bakgatla area has created contestations over the authority and legitimacy of the chieftaincy. Its central argument is that, although is constituted primarily as a political force, the Bakgatla Tribal Authority has its economics which enable it to function as a corporate entity with the capacity to collect revenues in various forms. In order to prove that the Bakgatla Tribal Authority has its own economics, the thesis uses a three tier analysis of the various modes through which it has been able to collect revenues since its restructuring by the colonial state and settler capital. The first forms of revenue collection by the Bakgatla Tribal Authority, involved direct appropriation of revenues from the subjects in the form of taxes, levies and fines. The second form of revenue collection involves direct engagement with mining capital. The Bakgatla Tribal Authority has been able to interact with mining capital at two different levels. At the first level, it interacted with mining capital as a form of modern landed property, and was entitled to ground rent in the form of mining royalties. At the second level of interaction, which brings us to the contemporary period, the thesis will explore how the Bakgatla Tribal Authority has emerged as a shareholding partner in mining projects underway in its area. As a community share holder it now receives revenues in the form of share dividends from company profits
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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