Browsing by Author "Haarhoff, Mandisa"

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    Blackness as a question of freedom: racial blackness in South African emancipatory thought
    (2023) Nkopo, Athinangamso; Haarhoff, Mandisa
    This dissertation, using the theoretical framework of Afropessimism, discusses how Blackness is an ethico-political structure, in which the slave's natal alienation and social death establishes the resilient forms of Black (non)being. This project centrally argues against locating a theory of the production of Blackness in the socio-political relations of colonial subjugation, and instead proposes that Blackness is a structure, an ‘abstract code', that must be understood as deriving from racial slavery. This thought enterprise is explored in relation to South African histories of slavery to re-claim the concept of “social death” as inaugurating the structure of Blackness in Southern Africa. By suggesting how it is the absolute negation of the Black slave that creates the conditions for the possibility of the political, ethical, and civil subject – indeed, the very possibility of the Human, this study presents a discussion on how Black studies requires both a temporal and geographical reconstruction in understanding – firstly by extending much further ‘back' than the moment of South African colonialism, and secondly, by expanding the geographies of Blackness beyond European colonial rule. Furthermore, this study explores and exposes the limits of several major South African forms of political and philosophical thought and campaigns for Black emancipation: feminism, liberalism, Marxism, and Black Consciousness. An exploration which serves to highlight how the existing historiography of South Africa has disarticulated the conceptual significance of racial slavery to the making of Blackness in a way that locates it specifically in social death, with all its implications for Black (non)being. While recognizing that the political structure of Blackness precedes or cannot be located in the mechanics of South African colonial settlements, this dissertation exposes the limits and failures of a civil politics of Blackness in both national liberation and ‘progressive' struggles.
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    The unsettled settler: personal and discursive tragedy in Alexandra Fuller's memoirs
    (2022) Scott, Skye; Boswell, Barbara; Haarhoff, Mandisa
    Alexandra Fuller's memoirs detail the lives of white settlers in Southern Africa (specifically Zimbabwe) from white-rule to post-independence. Her memoirs illustrate how the settler colonial dream of the promised land in Africa would ultimately fail to be fully realised and maintainable. Yet, through the portrayal of unexamined colonial discourse, Fuller continues to perpetuate a constructed notion of Africa. The publication of her first memoir, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, coincided with international media coverage of President Robert Mugabe's contested land redistribution programme and told a similar story of the loss of their family farm. Written from her home in Wyoming in the United States, Fuller's work forms part of a white expatriate culture that writes home to Africa from a different continent. Previous works have failed to address the theme of settler colonialism in literature specifically pertaining to the field of Southern African literature. This dissertation makes use of a postcolonial framework to examine Alexandra Fuller's work; Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier and Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Fuller's memoirs are used to explore the function of innocence, nostalgia and memory in postcolonial white writing, the construction of whiteness and masculinity in Africa and the tragedy of discourse that is still pervasive in the portrayal of colonial notions of Africa as a playground for disaffected Westerners. Fuller's writing forms part of a Zimbabwean post-independence body of work that absolves whiteness of complicity and a history of colonial violence. Fuller's memoirs ultimately do not settle on a definitive point about Zimbabwe and its history of colonial dispossession or herself and settler colonial family.