Laura Chrisman

Rereading the imperial romance : British imperialism and South African resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje

Introduction Manufacturing mystery from mining: King Solomons Mines Trading on Africa: King Solomons Mines The British conquest of Zululand: Haggards politics and ideology The fictions of Zulu history: Nada the Lily Colonialism demystified: Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland Alternative empires? Englishness and Christianity in Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland Transforming Haggardian romance: pastoralism and sexual politics in Mhudi Complex relations: African nationalism, imperialism, and form in Mhudi

Nationalism and postcolonial studies

Postcolonial studies emerged in the 1980s. By this time, the great era of Third-World anticolonial nationalism was at an end, and violent ethnic communalism was beginning to assume global dimensions. Such political shifts fed the tendency of postcolonial studies to regard nationalism as inherently dominatory, absolutist, essentialist, and destructive. The 1980s additionally witnessed the global expansion and intensification of capitalism. This led to the popular academic view that the era of nation-states was itself nearing a close and that nationalism was therefore redundant (Hobsbawm 1993). These tendencies were further fueled by developments in critical theory. The culturalist turn of social and literary theory, poststructuralist critiques of Enlightenment rationality and modernity - these encouraged postcolonial studies to view nationalism as a primarily cultural and epistemological, rather than socio-political, formation. This accompanied the view that nationalism was, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suggested, “a reverse or displaced legitimation of colonialism,” doomed to repeat the “epistemic violence” of the colonialism it had rejected (1999: 62). Less antagonistic are the approaches associated with Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities (1991, first published 1983). In these, nationalism is construed as Janus-faced, paradoxical in its cultural, temporal modernity and simultaneous reliance on the past to define and legitimate itself.

Du Bois in transnational perspective the loud silencing of black South Africa

This article explores the 1920s thought of African‐American intellectual and activist WEB Du Bois in regard to South Africa. It focuses on an influential 1924 article by WEB Du Bois, ‘The Negro Mind Reaches Out’, reprinted in Alain Lockes New Negro 1925 anthology. Despite Du Boiss Pan‐Africanist ideology, and despite his personal friendship with Africa National Congress founder Sol Plaatje, Du Bois did not textually acknowledge black South African nationalist agency. The article considers the reasons and implications for this omission and compares it with Du Boiss textual support for West African and West Indian political struggles.

Black transnationalisms revisited

It is over a decade since Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic popularised academic studies of transnational black cultures. The intervening years have seen not only the expansion of ‘black Atlantic studies’, but also the ascent of ‘black internationalism’ studies. The latter is largely associated with US historians, such as Penny M Von Eschen, James H Meriwether and Frances Njubi Nesbitt, who explore black diaspora involvement in international solidarity movements. These contemporary studies of black internationalism differ from black Atlantic cultural studies; they have an older genealogy that derives from the disciplines of history, political and social science. And they have historical links with activist currents of black Marxism and PanAfricanism (currents that Gilroy’s book opposes). Nonetheless there are good reasons to continue analysing the two areas*/black Atlantica, black internationalism*/in tandem. And even better reasons to consider these two books together. Rice’s book belongs unambiguously (as its title suggests) in black Atlantic studies. He traces diverse expressions of black Atlantic culture, from the eighteenth century to the present, from the US and the UK. Edwards’s book is something of a hybrid between black Atlantic and black internationalist studies: while its subtitle locates the project as ‘black internationalism’, the book itself shuttles between ‘transnational’ and ‘international’ concerns. Edwards focuses on black diasporic politics and culture of the interwar years, looking in particular at black periodicals, and examining the interrelations of Francophone diasporic intellectuals with black American and black Caribbean intellectuals. Alan Rice takes up several of The Black Atlantic ’s topics: the Atlantic ocean as the primary site of black diasporic identity-formation; ships and mariners as key agents of black Atlanticism; Europe as a liberatory place for African American intellectuals. As with Gilroy’s book, slavery is seen to

From Laura Chrisman

I’m of African-American, Ashkenazy Jewish and US Anglo origins, am from a Marxist, feminist and black nationalist political background, and grew up in the Highlands of Scotland; all this has influenced my research interests. I analyze the cultures of imperialism and of anti-colonialist resistance, and have a particular interest in South Africa. I am also very interested in black Atlantic and black diaspora studies. My current interdisciplinary book project is provisionally titled Nationalism, Modernity and Transnationalism in African Intellectuals. The book focuses on black South African nationalists, and their links with African-American intellectuals of the early 20th century.

The sight, sound, and global traffic of blackness in 'Blood Diamond'

Abstract: This article explores the representation of Africa in director Edward Zwicks 2006 film Blood Diamond, examining in particular the ways in which the films liberal-humanitarian orientation works to demonize black African communities, nationalisms, and governments while constituting a white and largely American subject as the center of ethical value. The article also examines the films account of diamond consumption as a global phenomenon, and considers the ways in which sound and vision operate to devalue black diasporic as well as black continental African subjects.

Historicising African and Caribbean literatures

African literatures currently occupy a paradoxical position. Public demand, at least in the United States, appears to be strongly on the increase; an emergent generation of writers, including Chris Abani, Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ishmael Beah and Zakes Mda, enjoys ever greater media visibility, critical acclaim, and publication by mainstream publishing houses including Farrar, Knopf, Penguin and Picador. At the same time, the Heinemann African Writers series has ceased its print existence and put fifty years of African literature in English out of reach of all but those whose libraries choose to subscribe to the as yet very incomplete digital version. African literature, in other words, appears to be both flourishing and dying as a transnational commodity. It is a particularly interesting moment for Cambridge University Press to register African literary history in the form of this two-volume collection. The result is an extremely useful research and teaching resource, in which forty chapters cover a wide geographical and historical range of both African and Caribbean literatures. The goal of its two editors, Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi, is a ‘comprehensive survey’, as their preface explains. They have commissioned an outstanding set of scholars whose respective chapters accomplish the very difficult task of condensing huge topics into succinct, lucid overviews. The approaches taken by contributors vary; some of the most exciting chapters situate their primary materials in relation to critical debates and appraise the different analytic frameworks that have been deployed by scholars. In a very probing chapter on ‘popular’ African literature, for instance, Ode Ogede considers the diverse definitions of ‘the popular’ that scholars (including Karin Barber, David Kerr, Emmanuel Obiechina and Johannes Fabian) have deployed, coming to the somewhat surprising affirmation that the most useful definition and analysis are those developed by Q D Leavis in 1932, in her book Fiction and the Reading Public . Some chapters insightfully address the impact of electronic media on traditional forms. Liz Gunner, for example, usefully points to the ways in which television, radio and audiocassette have enabled new articulations of