1,720,957 research outputs found
“Confessional spaces and criminality”: Incest in Alice Walker and Yvonne Vera’s works
No full textThe paper explores incest in Alice Walker and Yvonne Vera’s works as site for contestation of larger forces in society. The portrayal of incest comes at a time where certain “truisms” known to be in Black men in the stereotypification lore are overly dramatised and this tend to submerge genuine and well meaning struggles for racial emancipation and self determination to the periphery. That black men are portrayed as people with unrestricted libido is neither fortuitous nor an incidental project in the aforementioned writers’ works, rather, as a matter of priority it is often easy to take the lesser path by further complicating and bashing the generic punch bag of the Caucasian world. Thus, l argue that the said incestuous relationships are meant to vulgarise in a parallel form the ongoing struggles in America and in Colonial Zimbabwe respectively in the manner of Thomas Rice’s staged minstrels in Antebellum America. The emphasis by Walker and Vera is on the defective forms of lifestyles by people who declare alibis from the struggles and many critics have tended to applaud such projections as characterising a quest for inclusivity of the formerly muffled voices. This article contextualises the crime of incest, in its socio-political realm and refutes the overblown criminality of the black men as a political invention. Cases of incest abound in society and may persist in the unforeseeable future but these are not a preserve of black men
The nation thing? ‘Enjoyment and well-being’ in the production of cultural spaces in Zimbabwean literature
Get PDFA thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in English Studies
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 2018My thesis develops a frame of understanding of the aesthetic, cultural well-being and enjoyment spaces in Zimbabwean literature through a close reading of selected texts (both fiction and autobiographical narratives). I argue that Zimbabwean literature demonstrates the expanse of ‘enjoyment’ beyond the material. Findings from my analysis establish the position that people create and flourish in enjoyable identity conferring spaces of their own choice, and generate an intercultural mosaic in the process. Unlike the standard criticism of Zimbabwean literature which focuses on wars, trauma, memory, interminable gender struggles, binaries of the city and country, dispossessions and repossessions, the “Zimbabwean crisis” and the diaspora, I explore enjoyment and well-being. I establish that the intercultural nature of “enjoyment and well-being” spaces designates a fractured cosmopolitanism in which classificatory variables like gender, race and ethnicity are problematised. I interrogate enjoyment and well-being that is predicated on the pain and suffering of a scripted and choked “Other”, whichever name that individual may be called: stranger, alien, refugee, migrant and settler among some “Othering” concepts. The subject that Zimbabwean literature establishes has the capacity to enjoy in multifarious ways that which fosters intersubjectivity. People from diverse backgrounds, sexes, and ethnicities find joy, happiness and pleasure in various spaces of interaction or “contact zones” which are identity conferring.
The research foregrounds cultural sites in four parts: the land, the body, city spaces and diaspora spaces. Part one considers land as the locus of analysis in the explication of Zimbabwean subjectivities, since land is often deployed as the “discursive threshold” after the Post-2000 land invasions/reforms. I establish the paucity and inadequacy of a conceptualisation of land that derives identities from binaries that designate the Self and Other. I proceed to explore rhythms and textures in nature to demonstrate the richness and inter-subjectivity in the way land, animals, the cosmos and human life are intertwined.
Part two demonstrates that the individual body is at the centre of generating its own data and negotiating meanings as physical sensations are expanded to inter-human sensation, contrary to the nation-state’s concept of fashioning subjects.
Part three considers city spaces as rendering the atmosphere and environment for subject enjoyment, well-being and authenticity. Beyond and above the sites that are bound by territorial borders, I argue that Zimbabwean subjects enjoy transcendental and diaspora spaces.
Part four explores transcendental spaces of enjoyment and well-being at the level of both the individual human mind and nation-spaces. The rise of cellphones, the Ipad, computers and the semiotics of the big and small screens introduce a mind that is able to transcend the exigencies of place through memorialisation, imagi(ni)ng, pictures, ritual and religion. Texts explored in part four demonstrate that people are able to negotiate spaces and places through remediation and travel, both physically and metaphorically, thus breaching the territorial borders of the nation-state.
The study suggests the creation and sustenance of climates for various orders of joy, enjoyment and pleasure by nation-states which should desist from dictating the way people enjoy for them to maintain legitimacy. The research underscores the importance of enjoyment and well-being in the configuration of nation-spaces at any given time. This research foregrounds an African response to the global scholarship on the constitution of nation-spaces through the tropes of enjoyment and well-being.XL201
“Confessional spaces and criminality”: Incest in Alice Walker and Yvonne Vera’s works
No full textThe paper explores incest in Alice Walker and Yvonne Vera’s works as site for contestation of larger forces in society. The portrayal of incest comes at a time where certain “truisms” known to be in Black men in the stereotypification lore are overly dramatised and this tend to submerge genuine and well meaning struggles for racial emancipation and self determination to the periphery. That black men are portrayed as people with unrestricted libido is neither fortuitous nor an incidental project in the aforementioned writers’ works, rather, as a matter of priority it is often easy to take the lesser path by further complicating and bashing the generic punch bag of the Caucasian world. Thus, l argue that the said incestuous relationships are meant to vulgarise in a parallel form the ongoing struggles in America and in Colonial Zimbabwe respectively in the manner of Thomas Rice’s staged minstrels in Antebellum America. The emphasis by Walker and Vera is on the defective
forms of lifestyles by people who declare alibis from the struggles and many critics have tended to applaud such projections as characterising a quest for inclusivity of the formerly muffled voices. This article contextualises the crime of incest, in its socio-political realm and refutes the overblown criminality of the black men as a political invention. Cases of incest abound in society and may persist in the unforeseeable future but these are not a preserve of black men
Hair-stylisation and the “Art-ofliving”: the case of Tendai Huchu’s The hairdresser of Harare
Get PDFIn this article, I consider the portrayal of hair and hair-stylisation in Tendai Huchu’s novel, The hairdresser of Harare (2010) as powerful tropes that communicate the ‘the Art-of-living’ (Veenhoven 2003) and human flourishing. I take a different route from the conventional tradition in which hair-stylisation is seen as site of struggle and contestation, and, by extension, is laden with insinuations of race (Tate 2009; Erasmus 2000). Rather, I argue that hair-stylisation is an expressive genre that conveys meaning to and of the self, the immediate community and the global world. As a form of an extension of clothing, hair styles have the capacity to carry messages that enrich the self in various spaces of dialogue, be they religious, social or political. Conversely, hair styles can also signal the forbearance of sturdy individualism. I explore the centrality of the self, the image, and the body’s articulation in various modes. Drawing on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s (1998) theory of ‘cosmopolitan patriots’, I argue that through hair-stylisation processes, black and white women presented in The hairdresser of Harare demonstrate the individual capacity to introspect, relate and share “the good life” and versions of human flourishing in a multi-ethnic environment. They extend Ruut Veenhoven’s (2003) concept of the “Art-of-living”, or ‘the capabilities of leading a good life’ (Veenhoven 2003:373) to embrace the global visual and aesthetic images typified by black American actresses and singer-songwriters such as Halle Berry and Toni Braxton. Hair-stylisation enables the female characters in Huchu’s text to defeat and rezone time-space distantiation, and transfigure themselves into what I interpret as ‘citizens of the world’ (Appiah 1998). However, in the process, female characters do not necessarily forgo cultural particularities, and this motivates for local cosmopolitanism – a state in which they celebrate the presence of people different to them, and enjoy the pleasures of hybridity as they relate to the global world
“Confessional spaces and criminality”: Incest in Alice Walker and Yvonne Vera’s works
No full textThe paper explores incest in Alice Walker and Yvonne Vera’s works as site for contestation of larger forces in society. The portrayal of incest comes at a time where certain “truisms” known to be in Black men in the stereotypification lore are overly dramatised and this tend to submerge genuine and well meaning struggles for racial emancipation and self determination to the periphery. That black men are portrayed as people with unrestricted libido is neither fortuitous nor an incidental project in the aforementioned writers’ works, rather, as a matter of priority it is often easy to take the lesser path by further complicating and bashing the generic punch bag of the Caucasian world. Thus, l argue that the said incestuous relationships are meant to vulgarise in a parallel form the ongoing struggles in America and in Colonial Zimbabwe respectively in the manner of Thomas Rice’s staged minstrels in Antebellum America. The emphasis by Walker and Vera is on the defective forms of lifestyles by people who declare alibis from the struggles and many critics have tended to applaud such projections as characterising a quest for inclusivity of the formerly muffled voices. This article contextualises the crime of incest, in its socio-political realm and refutes the overblown criminality of the black men as a political invention. Cases of incest abound in society and may persist in the unforeseeable future but these are not a preserve of black men
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
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