1,720,955 research outputs found
Re-reading Matsemela Manaka’s eGoli, Domba, and Goree: Foregrounding Black Womanhood and Feminism in Black Consciousness Theatre Discourse
No full textThe influence of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) was profound in politics and cultural expression in South Africa during apartheid. Although there were only a handful of playwrights aligned to the Black Consciousness (BC) ideology, including Matsemela Manaka, Maishe Maponya, and Zakes Mda, their plays have become part of the South African canon. Ever since he wrote eGoli in 1978, Manaka’s plays have received much scholarly attention for embodying the ideas of BCM to resist apartheid. However, the way in which his plays dealt with issues of gender has not received much attention, which presents an opportunity for re-reading a selection of his plays. The focus of this article is to explore how aspects of womanism and Black feminism influenced Manaka as a playwright and, specifically, how these were a feature in his plays. Considering the critique of sexist practices within organisations aligned to BC ideology (for example, the South African Students’ Organisation), the article reflects on Manaka’s plays from the perspective of womanism, Black feminism, and Bosadi theoretical approaches, to discuss whether BC sexist tendencies permeated his plays or whether these plays represent an emerging discourse on Black women’s contribution to BC
Maishe Maponya’s Letta: Exploring Es’kia Mphahlele’s African Humanism as a Mediation of the South African Exile Experience
No full textTaking Maishe Maponya’s biographical play Letta as a starting point, in this article, I explore how exiled Black South African artists who moved to North America in the 1950s and 1960s mediated their yearning for home by finding solidarity with their American counterparts. In Letta, Maponya constructs a historical narrative based on the singer Letta Mbulu’s life to comment on the lives of South African exiles forced to migrate because of apartheid. Unfortunately, Mbulu has not written a biography on her experiences. Due to the nature of close relations while in South Africa and in exile, it is helpful for analysing Maponya’s play that Mbulu features in the biographies written by Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, who also narrate the experiences of a small number of South African artists who formed the core of the exiled group. Upon interacting with Maponya’s play, as well as the texts by Makeba, Masekela, and Keorapetse Kgositsile, it becomes apparent that the exile experience was multilayered (both unhomely and strengthened by solidarity in social and cultural interactions). I propose that Mphahlele’s philosophy of African humanism can explain how Black South African artists were able to navigate and ultimately harmonise their sense of rootlessness as individual immigrants by being part of a mutually supporting, if modest, community diaspora. This enabled them to create a body of work that is still relevant in South African culture
Writing the Elusive Narrative of Soweto-Based Community Theatre, 1984–1994
No full textThe focus of the article is on writing the history of community theatre, which was a popular avenue for artistic expression for a number of township playwrights. During the period 1984–1994, there was a flowering of the arts in Soweto. Numerous popular community plays were staged, but this has not been documented due to a lack of record-keeping by the playwrights and the absence of formal theatre structures for township-based playwrights. In contemporary writing, theatre received attention from newspapers, with Gibson Kente, Matsemela Manaka and Maishe Maponya being the most prominent playwrights. Because of their popularity in South Africa and esteem with international audiences, the stature of the three playwrights presents an opportunity to see how a history of Soweto community theatre may be written. This article proposes that memory studies facilitates the writing of a more comprehensive narrative because it enables the melding of various sources: newspaper articles, theatre programmes, private archives, and information and insights from interviewees. Halbwachs’s methodology allows for a discussion in which theory (memory studies) and practice (writing the narrative) present evidence that community theatre has contributed to the development of theatre in South Africa. Without discounting the significance of (written) history, Halbwachs foregrounds the importance of memory, which resides with “people still living,” as key to formulating a narrative of the past. This is pertinent to Soweto community theatre, since the insights from interviewees and various sources also help to re-examine the perceived limitations attached to the label “community theatre.”
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
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