Terrific Majesty

Terrific Majesty PDF Author: Carolyn Hamilton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674038202
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Since his assassination in 1828, King Shaka Zulu--founder of the powerful Zulu kingdom and leader of the army that nearly toppled British colonial rule in South Africa--has made his empire in popular imaginations throughout Africa and the West. Shaka is today the hero of Zulu nationalism, the centerpiece of Inkatha ideology, a demon of apartheid, the namesake of a South African theme park, even the subject of a major TV film. Terrific Majesty explores the reasons for the potency of Shaka's image, examining the ways it has changed over time--from colonial legend, through Africanist idealization, to modern cultural icon. This study suggests that "tradition" cannot be freely invented, either by European observers who recorded it or by subsequent African ideologues. There are particular historical limits and constraints that operate on the activities of invention and imagination and give the various images of Shaka their power. These insights are illustrated with subtlety and authority in a series of highly original analyses. Terrific Majesty is an exceptional work whose special contribution lies in the methodological lessons it delivers; above all its sophisticated rehabilitation of colonial sources for the precolonial period, through the demonstration that colonial texts were critically shaped by indigenous African discourse. With its sensitivity to recent critical studies, the book will also have a wider resonance in the fields of history, anthropology, cultural studies, and postcolonial literature.

Terrific Majesty

Terrific Majesty PDF Author: Carolyn Hamilton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674038202
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since his assassination in 1828, King Shaka Zulu--founder of the powerful Zulu kingdom and leader of the army that nearly toppled British colonial rule in South Africa--has made his empire in popular imaginations throughout Africa and the West. Shaka is today the hero of Zulu nationalism, the centerpiece of Inkatha ideology, a demon of apartheid, the namesake of a South African theme park, even the subject of a major TV film. Terrific Majesty explores the reasons for the potency of Shaka's image, examining the ways it has changed over time--from colonial legend, through Africanist idealization, to modern cultural icon. This study suggests that "tradition" cannot be freely invented, either by European observers who recorded it or by subsequent African ideologues. There are particular historical limits and constraints that operate on the activities of invention and imagination and give the various images of Shaka their power. These insights are illustrated with subtlety and authority in a series of highly original analyses. Terrific Majesty is an exceptional work whose special contribution lies in the methodological lessons it delivers; above all its sophisticated rehabilitation of colonial sources for the precolonial period, through the demonstration that colonial texts were critically shaped by indigenous African discourse. With its sensitivity to recent critical studies, the book will also have a wider resonance in the fields of history, anthropology, cultural studies, and postcolonial literature.

Shaka the Great

Shaka the Great PDF Author: Walton Golightly
Publisher: Quercus
ISBN: 1623652723
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 674

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Book Description
1826: Shaka, king of the Zulus, has consolidated his power and is ready to move against those who continue to resist his authority. But now a new tribe has appeared, and white men from across the Great Water, claiming they wish to trade with Shaka. These white men may seem puny, and their ways strange, but Shaka believes there's more to them than meets the eye. Obsessed with divining their secrets, however, he becomes oblivious to the threat growing from within his own court. Seething with sorcery and betrayal, battles and intrigue, triumph and tragedy, Shaka the Great sees one of the greatest leaders of all time consolidate his power as the first Europeans begin to arrive on the African continent. It takes us to an empire at its zenith, in a time when the name Zulu began to echo around the world as a byword for courage and nobility.

The Politics of Evil

The Politics of Evil PDF Author: Clifton Crais
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521817219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
In The Politics of Evil, Clifton Crais provides a unique interpretation of South African history, power, culture and resistance.

American Claimants

American Claimants PDF Author: Sarah Meer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192540610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This book recovers a major nineteenth-century literary figure, the American Claimant. For over a century, claimants offered a compelling way to understand cultural difference across the Anglophone Atlantic, especially between Britain and the United States. They also formed a political talisman, invoked against slavery and segregation, or privileges of gender and class. Later, claimants were exported to South Africa, becoming the fictional form for explaining black students who acquired American degrees. American Claimants traces the figure back to lost-heir romance, and explores its uses. These encompassed real, imagined, and textual ideas of inheritance, for writers and editors, and also for missionaries, artists, and students. The claimant dramatized tensions between tradition and change, or questions of exclusion and power: it offered ways of seeing activism, education, sculpture, and dress. The premise for dozens of novels and plays, a trope, a joke, even the basis for real claims: claimants matter in theatre history and periodical studies, they touch on literary marketing and reprinting, and they illuminate some unexpected texts. These range from Our American Cousin to Bleak House, Little Lord Fauntleroy to Frederick Douglass' Paper; writers discussed include Frances Trollope, Julia Griffiths, Alexander Crummell, John Dube, James McCune Smith, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain. The focus on claimants yields remarkable finds: new faces, fresh angles, a lost column, and a forgotten theatrical genre. It reveals the pervasiveness of this form, and its centrality in imagining cultural contact and exchange.

Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives

Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives PDF Author: Jan Bender Shetler
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299303942
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
The elegists, ancient Rome's most introspective poets, filled their works with vivid, first-person accounts of dreams. Emma Scioli examines these varied and visually striking textual dreamscapes, arguing that the poets exploited dynamics of visual representation to share with readers the intensely personal experience of dreaming.

Public Intellectuals in South Africa

Public Intellectuals in South Africa PDF Author: Chris Broodryk
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1776146921
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This edited collection gives voice to neglected public intellectuals in the arts, humanities, and journalism in South Africa who gave voice and presence to those who have been marginalized and silenced in South African history Edward Said described a public intellectual as someone who uses accessible language to address a designated public on matters of social and political significance. The essays in Public Intellectuals in South Africa apply this interpretive prism and activist principle to a South African context and tell the stories of well-known figures as well as some that have been mostly forgotten. They include Magema Fuze, John Dube, Aggrey Klaaste, Mewa Ramgobin and Koos Roets, alongside marginalized figures such as Elijah Makiwane, Mandisi Sindo, William Pretorius and Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees. The essays capture the thoughts and opinions of these historical figures, who the contributors argue are public intellectuals who spoke out against the corruption of power, promoted a progressive politics that challenged the colonial project and its legacies, and encouraged a sustained dissent of the political status quo. Offering fascinating accounts of the life and work of these writers, critics and activists across a range of historical contexts and disciplines, from journalism and arts criticism to history and politics, it enriches the historical record of South African public intellectual life. This volume makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates about the value of research in the arts and humanities, and what constitutes public intellectualism in South Africa.

The Dust Rose Like Smoke

The Dust Rose Like Smoke PDF Author: James O. Gump
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803278632
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
In 1876 Lakota and Cheyenne warriors annihilated Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn. Three years later and half a world away, a British force was wiped out by Zulu warriors at Isandhlwana in South Africa. In both cases the total defeat of regular army troops by forces regarded as undisciplined barbarian tribesmen stunned an imperial nation. Although the similarities between the two frontier encounters have long been noted, James O. Gump’s book The Dust Rose Like Smoke is the first to scrutinize them in a comparative context. “This study issues a challenge to American exceptionalism,” he writes. Viewing both episodes as part of a global pattern of intensified conflict in the latter 1800s resulting from Western domination over a vast portion of the globe, Gump’s comparative study persuasively traces the origins and aftermath of both episodes. He examines the complicated ways in which Lakota and Zulu leadership sought to protect indigenous interests while Western leadership calculated their subjugation to imperial authority. The second edition includes a new preface from the author, revised and expanded chapters, and an interview with Leonard Little Finger (great-great-grandson of Ghost Dance leader Big Foot), whose story connects Wounded Knee and Nelson Mandela.

The Creation of the Zulu Kingdom, 1815–1828

The Creation of the Zulu Kingdom, 1815–1828 PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Eldredge
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316062082
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
This scholarly account traces the emergence of the Zulu Kingdom in South Africa in the early nineteenth century, under the rule of the ambitious and iconic King Shaka. In contrast to recent literary analyses of myths of Shaka, this book uses the richness of Zulu oral traditions and a comprehensive body of written sources to provide a compelling narrative and analysis of the events and people of the era of Shaka's rule. The oral traditions portray Shaka as rewarding courage and loyalty, and punishing failure; as ordering the targeted killing of his own subjects, both warriors and civilians, to ensure compliance to his rule; and as arrogant and shrewd, but kind to the poor and the mentally disabled. The rich and diverse oral traditions, transmitted from generation to generation, reveal the important roles and fates of men and women, royal and subject, from the perspectives of those who experienced Shaka's rule and the dramatic emergence of the Zulu Kingdom.

Ruling the Savage Periphery

Ruling the Savage Periphery PDF Author: Benjamin D. Hopkins
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674246144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A provocative case that “failed states” along the periphery of today’s international system are the intended result of nineteenth-century colonial design. From the Afghan frontier with British India to the pampas of Argentina to the deserts of Arizona, nineteenth-century empires drew borders with an eye toward placing indigenous people just on the edge of the interior. They were too nomadic and communal to incorporate in the state, yet their labor was too valuable to displace entirely. Benjamin Hopkins argues that empires sought to keep the “savage” just close enough to take advantage of, with lasting ramifications for the global nation-state order. Hopkins theorizes and explores frontier governmentality, a distinctive kind of administrative rule that spread from empire to empire. Colonial powers did not just create ad hoc methods or alight independently on similar techniques of domination: they learned from each other. Although the indigenous peoples inhabiting newly conquered and demarcated spaces were subjugated in a variety of ways, Ruling the Savage Periphery isolates continuities across regimes and locates the patterns of transmission that made frontier governmentality a world-spanning phenomenon. Today, the supposedly failed states along the margins of the international system—states riven by terrorism and violence—are not dysfunctional anomalies. Rather, they work as imperial statecraft intended, harboring the outsiders whom stable states simultaneously encapsulate and exploit. “Civilization” continues to deny responsibility for border dwellers while keeping them close enough to work, buy goods across state lines, and justify national-security agendas. The present global order is thus the tragic legacy of a colonial design, sustaining frontier governmentality and its objectives for a new age.

History After Apartheid

History After Apartheid PDF Author: Annie E. Coombes
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822330721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
DIVHow should post-apartheid South Africa present its history - in museums, monuments, and parks./div