Toxic Belonging? Identity and Ecology in Southern Africa PDF Download
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Author: Dan Wylie
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443809268
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
Southern Africa’s literatures brim with references to the natural world, its landscapes and its animals. Both fictional and non-fictional works express ongoing debates, often highly politicised, concerning its various groups’ senses of identity and belonging in relation to the land and its denizens. This often involves a pervasive tension between ‘Western’, settler societies’ conceptions of modernity and indigenous world-views, each complicating the often simplistic binarisms drawn between them. In this selection of papers from the 2006 Literature and Ecology Colloquium, held in Grahamstown, South Africa, the complexities of forging imaginative and pragmatic senses of belonging in Southern Africa are explored from a variety of disciplinary persepectives: philosophical, historical, botanical, and anthropological as well as literary. Their subject-matter ranges widely – from Bushmen testimonies to Berlin missionaries, from prehistoric cave-dwellers to Schopenhauer, from white Batswana to lion-tamers – but find themselves echoing one another in intriguing and illuminating ways. These are highly localised meditations on age-old questions: What does it mean to be human within a natural environment? Why do we appear to be so damaging to the ecology that sustains us? Is our presence inevitably ‘toxic’ to our planetary fellow-travellers? How do we forge an ecologically sound sense of belonging in this post-colonial, post-apartheid, post-modern era? If this collection has a single most prominent question binding it together, it is this: What are the limits and potentialities of human compassion towards the natural world?
Author: Dan Wylie
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443809268
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275
Get Book
Book Description
Southern Africa’s literatures brim with references to the natural world, its landscapes and its animals. Both fictional and non-fictional works express ongoing debates, often highly politicised, concerning its various groups’ senses of identity and belonging in relation to the land and its denizens. This often involves a pervasive tension between ‘Western’, settler societies’ conceptions of modernity and indigenous world-views, each complicating the often simplistic binarisms drawn between them. In this selection of papers from the 2006 Literature and Ecology Colloquium, held in Grahamstown, South Africa, the complexities of forging imaginative and pragmatic senses of belonging in Southern Africa are explored from a variety of disciplinary persepectives: philosophical, historical, botanical, and anthropological as well as literary. Their subject-matter ranges widely – from Bushmen testimonies to Berlin missionaries, from prehistoric cave-dwellers to Schopenhauer, from white Batswana to lion-tamers – but find themselves echoing one another in intriguing and illuminating ways. These are highly localised meditations on age-old questions: What does it mean to be human within a natural environment? Why do we appear to be so damaging to the ecology that sustains us? Is our presence inevitably ‘toxic’ to our planetary fellow-travellers? How do we forge an ecologically sound sense of belonging in this post-colonial, post-apartheid, post-modern era? If this collection has a single most prominent question binding it together, it is this: What are the limits and potentialities of human compassion towards the natural world?
Author: Imraan Coovadia
Publisher: Juta and Company (Pty) Ltd
ISBN: 1775820793
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Between 2009 and 2012, the Gordon Institute for the Performing and Creative Arts in Cape Town held the Great Texts/Big Questions public lecture series which became a celebrated part of Cape Town’s cultural landscape, demonstrating current intellectual and creative thinking in South Africa. These lectures gave audiences a chance to engage with transformative texts and questions, to hear thought leaders speak on the ideas, the books, the art, and the films that matter to them and to us. Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa brings together a selection of these lectures by world-renowned artists, writers and thinkers in the form of essays, for the benefit of a wider readership, with a contemporary design which plays with words. The authors range from novelists André Brink and Imraan Coovadia (one of the collection’s editors), to poets Gabeba Baderoon and Rustum Kozain, to artist William Kentridge and social activist Zackie Achmat. The topics are as wide as Don Quixote, Marx and Lincoln, trout fishing, Hamlet, the 19th-century Russian writer Gogol and Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Today’s readers are increasingly interested in finding new ways to understand and live with great texts and the world of ideas. Books like this demonstrate that thinking about these texts does not have to be an inaccessibly academic pursuit.
Author: Ian Douglas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113688341X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 689
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Book Description
The birds, animals, insects, trees and plants encountered by the majority of the world’s people are those that survive in, adapt to, or are introduced to, urban areas. Some of these organisms give great pleasure; others invade, colonise and occupy neglected and hidden areas such as derelict land and sewers. Urban areas have a high biodiversity and nature within cities provides many ecosystem services including cooling the urban area, reducing urban flood risk, filtering pollutants, supplying food, and providing accessible recreation. Yet, protecting urban nature faces competition from other urban land uses. The Handbook of Urban Ecology analyses this biodiversity and complexity and provides the science to guide policy and management to make cities more attractive, more enjoyable, and better for our own health and that of the planet. This Handbook contains 50 interdisciplinary contributions from leading academics and practitioners from across the world to provide an in-depth coverage of the main elements of practical urban ecology. It is divided into six parts, dealing with the philosophies, concepts and history of urban ecology; followed by consideration of the biophysical character of the urban environment and the diverse habitats found within it. It then examines human relationships with urban nature, the health, economic and environmental benefits of urban ecology before discussing the methods used in urban ecology and ways of putting the science into practice. The Handbook offers a state-of the art guide to the science, practice and value of urban ecology. The engaging contributions provide students and practitioners with the wealth of interdisciplinary information needed to manage the biota and green landscapes in urban areas.
Author: Ian Douglas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136883401
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1382
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Book Description
The birds, animals, insects, trees and plants encountered by the majority of the world’s people are those that survive in, adapt to, or are introduced to, urban areas. Some of these organisms give great pleasure; others invade, colonise and occupy neglected and hidden areas such as derelict land and sewers. Urban areas have a high biodiversity and nature within cities provides many ecosystem services including cooling the urban area, reducing urban flood risk, filtering pollutants, supplying food, and providing accessible recreation. Yet, protecting urban nature faces competition from other urban land uses. The Handbook of Urban Ecology analyses this biodiversity and complexity and provides the science to guide policy and management to make cities more attractive, more enjoyable, and better for our own health and that of the planet. This Handbook contains 50 interdisciplinary contributions from leading academics and practitioners from across the world to provide an in-depth coverage of the main elements of practical urban ecology. It is divided into six parts, dealing with the philosophies, concepts and history of urban ecology; followed by consideration of the biophysical character of the urban environment and the diverse habitats found within it. It then examines human relationships with urban nature, the health, economic and environmental benefits of urban ecology before discussing the methods used in urban ecology and ways of putting the science into practice. The Handbook offers a state-of the art guide to the science, practice and value of urban ecology. The engaging contributions provide students and practitioners with the wealth of interdisciplinary information needed to manage the biota and green landscapes in urban areas.
Author: David Harvey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317530136
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Climate change is a critical issue for heritage studies. Sites, objects and ways of life all are coming under threat, requiring alternative management, or requiring specific climate change adaptation. Heritage is key to interpreting the societal significance of climate change; notions (and images) of the past are crucial to our understanding of the present, and are used to prompt actions that help society define and achieve a specific and desired future. Relatively little attention has been paid to the critical intersections between heritage and climate change. The Future of Heritage as Climates Change frames the intellectual context within which heritage and climate change can be examined, presenting cases and sub-fields in which the heritage-climate change nexus is being examined and provides synthetic analyses through five overarching themes: The heritage of change among coastal communities: liminality and the politics of engagement Dwelling materials: processes and possibilities; Environmental heritage: meanings of the past – prospects for the future; Blurring the boundaries of nature and culture: the politics of anticipation; Climate change and heritage practice: adaptation and resilience. The Future of Heritage as Climates Change provides scholars, managers, policy makers and students with a much needed examination of heritage and climate change to help make critical decisions in the next several decades.
Author: F. Fiona Moolla
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1868149145
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
One of the first edited volumes to encompass transdisciplinary approaches to a number of cultural forms, including fiction, non-fiction, oral expression and digital media. Environmental and animal studies are rapidly growing areas of interest across a number of disciplines. Natures of Africa is one of the first edited volumes which encompasses transdisciplinary approaches to a number of cultural forms, including fiction, non-fiction, oral expression and digital media. The volume features new research from East Africa and Zimbabwe, as well as the ecocritical and eco-activist 'powerhouses' of Nigeria and South Africa. The chapters engage one another conceptually and epistemologically without an enforced consensus of approach. In their conversation with dominant ideas about nature and animals, they reveal unexpected insights into forms of cultural expression of local communities in Africa. The analyses explore different apprehensions of the connections between humans, animals and the environment, and suggest alternative ways of addressing the challenges facing the continent. These include the problems of global warming, desertification, floods, animal extinctions and environmental destruction attendant upon fossil fuel extraction. There are few books that show how nature in Africa is represented, celebrated, mourned or commoditised. Natures of Africa weaves together studies of narratives - from folklore, travel writing, novels and popular songs - with the insights of poetry and contemporary reflections of Africa on the worldwide web. The chapters test disciplinary and conceptual boundaries, highlighting the ways in which the environmental concerns of African communities cannot be disentangled from social, cultural and political questions. This volume draws on and will appeal to scholars and teachers of oral tradition and indigenous cultures, literature, religion, sociology and anthropology, environmental and animal studies, as well as media and digital cultures in an African context.
Author: Michael Titlestad
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000631842
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
The Plague Years collects scholarly and essayistic reflections on literary, visual, and sonic representations of the COVID-19 and other pandemics. These are placed alongside poetry and short fiction written in the first two years of quarantine or isolation. This range expresses the intellectual and imaginative struggle and ingenuity entailed in coming to terms with the rampant spread of disease and its emotional, cultural, and political consequences. The contributions are from diverse contexts: Africa (from Egypt to South Africa), China, Japan, the US, and Scandinavia. They consider some of the array of contemporary engagements: poems translated from Mandarin about the traumas of the frontline, Chinese calligraphic poetry printed on cartons of PPE, comments on the literary history of representing epidemics and pandemics, political analyses of the post-truth present, and the role of life-writing and gaming in an interrupted world. Given the generative and creative obliquity of many of its parts, this collection shifts how one thinks about the diseased present and the archival pasts on which it draws. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of English Studies in Africa.
Author: Ian D. Rotherham
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319497979
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 85
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Book Description
This is a challenging new approach to understanding ecological systems especially in urban and urbanised areas. Synthesising current ideas and approaches the book develops an historic context to ecological fusion and recombinant or hybrid ecosystems. With massive climate change and other environmental fluxes, this volume provides insight into consequences for future ecologies. Invasive and non-native or alien species are spreading, often aggressively around the globe. However, much current thinking in ecology and nature conservation fails to accommodate the consequences of changing environmental conditions and fusion of both species and ecological communities. Whether or not conservationists accept ecological change, factors such as urbanisation and globalisation combine with climate and other changes to trigger new hybrid communities and ecologies. Embedding this approach into current ecological thinking this book presents an overview of ideas set in the exemplar case study area of the British Isles. However, the approaches, ideas and conclusions presented here will find application in ecosystem studies and in nature conservation around the world.
Author: Suzanne Crosta
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253066557
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers is groundbreaking edited collection which explores the contributions of Francophone African women to the field of documentary filmmaking. Rich in its scope and critical vision it constitutes a timely contribution to cutting-edge scholarly debates on African cinemas. Featuring 10 chapters from prominent film scholars, it explores the distinctive documentary work and contributions of Francophone African women filmmakers since the 1960s. It focuses documentaries by North African and Sub-Saharan women filmmakers, including the pioneering work of Safi Faye in Kaddu Beykat, Rama Thiaw's The Revolution Will Not be Televised, Katy Lena Ndiaye's Le Cercle des noyes and En attendant les hommes, Dalila Ennadre's Fama: Heroism Without Glory and Leila Kitani's Nos lieux interdits. Shunned from costly fictional- 35mm-filmmaking, Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers examines how these women engaged and experimented with documentary filmmaking in personal, evocative ways that countered the officially sanctioned, nationalist practice of show and teach/promote.
Author: Gail Fincham
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 082144414X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
In recent years, the work of Zakes Mda—novelist, painter, composer, theater director and filmmaker—has attracted worldwide critical attention. Gail Fincham’s book examines the five novels Mda has written since South Africa’s transition to democracy: Ways of Dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), The Whale Caller (2005), and Cion (2007). Dance of Life explores how refigured identity is rooted in Mda’s strongly painterly imagination that creates changed spaces in memory and culture. Through a combination of magic realism, African orature, and intertextuality with the Western canon, Mda rejects dualistic thinking of the past and the present, the human and the nonhuman, the living and the dead, the rural and the urban. He imbues his fictional characters with the power to orchestrate a reconfigured subjectivity that is simultaneously political, social, and aesthetic.
