Suchergebnisse

"This book argues that South Africa is haunted by the spectre of reparation. The failure of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to secure adequate reparation for the victims of colonisation and apartheid continues to drastically undermine the commission's processes and legacy. Investigating the TRC's key processes of amnesty, archiving and forgiveness in turn, the book demonstrates that each process is fundamentally thwarted by the terminal lack of reparation. These multiple forms of the spectre of reparation haunt post-apartheid society in deeply traumatogenic ways. The book proposes a new ethic of "reparative citizenship" as a means of encountering the spectres of reparation in a productive and transformative manner, generating hope even in the face of the irreparable. This book will be an important read for South Africans interested in overcoming the impasses and injustices that haunt the country, but it will also be of interest to post-conflict transitional justice and politics researchers more broadly"--

Taking the postcolonial - or, more specifically, the post-apartheid - university as its focus, the book takes the violence and the trauma of the global neoliberal hegemony as its central point of reference. Following a primarily psychoanalytic line of enquiry, it engages a range of disciplines - law, philosophy, literature, gender studies, cultural studies and political economy - in order better to understand the conditions of possibility of an emancipatory, or decolonised, higher education. And this in the context of both the inter-generational transmission of the trauma of colonialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the trauma of neoliberal subjectivity in the postcolonial university. Oriented around an important lecture by Jacqueline Rose, the volume contains contributions from world-renowned authors, such as Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe, as well as numerous legal and other theorists who share their concern with interrogating the contemporary crisis in higher education. This truly interdisciplinary collection will appeal to a wide range of readers right across the humanities, but especially those with substantial interests in the contemporary state of the university, as well as those with theoretical interests in postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cultural studies, jurisprudence and law.

This article interrogates what it considers to be several totalitarian moments in the process that led to the legislation that authorised same-sex marriage in South Africa. The interrogation proceeds from three platforms which also form the basis of any believable theory of democratic politics, namely church / state separation, plurality and common (shared) citizenship. My argument is that Parliament - by introducing (and defending) the first draft of the Civil Union Bill (which deliberately failed to introduce a marriage regime for same-sex life partnerships) in response to the Fourie judgment - failed properly to consider all three of these fundamental aspects of democracy. This failure was complemented by more overt totalitarian moves on the part of several fundamentalist religious groups in South Africa that (ironically so) vehemently opposed the first draft of the Bill even though it did not provide for same-sex marriage. I conclude that democratic activism coupled with the strength of and commitment to the South African Constitution and to the decisions of the Constitutional Court ensured the successful evasion of these totalitarian moments while emphasising that the struggle against totalitarianism in South Africa is far from over.

This article reflects critically on the various stages in the legal recognition of same-sex marriage in South Africa. The authors devote particular attention to a connection between the apartheid order's use of the 'separate but equal' slogan and the operationalization of this slogan (and its political history) by activists to counter the legislative attempt to enact a second-class civil partnership regime for same-sex life partnerships in South Africa. The authors argue that the Constitutional Court's decision in the Fourie matter left Parliament with a carefully delineated mandate fully to recognize same-sex life partnerships by way of marriage. They critically evaluate the proceedings of the Home Affairs portfolio committee during the public participation hearings. In conclusion the authors consider the legal consequences (and paradoxes) of the enactment of the Civil Union Act 17 of 2006, which they read as a concession to colonialism in the broadest sense of that word.