Suchergebnisse

Can a colonial archive render up form-of-life? To what ends? This essay explores these questions through a methodological exercise that casts a specific historical subject in the role of Giorgio Agamben's 'unspeakable girl'. The subject is a woman identified in a 1910 Cape Town police report as a habitual opium smoker. The unspeakable girl is a philosophical construction through which Agamben develops a concept of initiated (or initiating) knowledge. At stake in my forensic re/deconstruction of this case is how a concept of the 'unspeakable' may help to unsettle the figure of the 'addict' as a stigmatised object of knowledge and paternalism, in service of more humane policy and treatment regimes in the present. The transformative potential of initiating knowledge supports current practice as the 'come as you are' motto of harm reduction, and as a bridge between academic analysis and the more intimate concerns of the heart.

Summary
Controls over trade and consumption of narcotic medicines emerged as both a concern and emblem of progressive governance around the turn of the twentieth century. This article traces political struggles over drugs regulation in the case of colonial South Africa. It focuses on two parallel streams of law-making by the British occupation regime in the Transvaal, following the Anglo-Boer war. Controversies over the availability of traditional 'Dutch medicines' to Boer farmers and prohibitions of certain patent medicines to African consumers were elements of, and contradictions within, the process of building a modern pharmaceutical economy. An influx to the region of new curatives coincided with the growth of vernacular newspapers as well as temperance campaigns. Working to nurture white national cohesion and support a mining industry premised on unskilled black labour, the South African state created race-based drugs controls. These developments proved significant to regulatory statecraft later in the century.

This article describes arguments around and pertinent to a year-long foundation course presently taught at the University of Kwa Zulu-Natal in South Africa. The course, 'Africa in the World' (AITW), is first discussed in terms of objective and structure, followed by a critical evaluation of the circumstances of its development and coordination. A number of obstacles and challenges are examined, along with a contextualization of some of the more problematic aspects for the course's students.