Browsing by Subject "respectability"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- ItemRestrictedCirculating the African Journal: The Colonial Press and Trans-Imperial Britishness in the Mid Nineteenth-Century Cape(2010) Holdridge, ChristopherIn 1843 William Sammons founded the peculiarly named Sam Sly's African Journal (1843–1851) in Cape Town. Claiming to be a ‘register of facts, fiction, news, literature, commerce and amusement’, the African Journal was a hybrid newspaper and literary and satirical periodical aimed at an Anglophone immigrant readership. Studies of the press have emphasised its role as a discursive agent in forming imagined communities of identity, but this has tended to focus on isolating nations or localities rather than noting the global context. However, recent scholarship on the British Empire has moved beyond nationally focused histories towards examining metropole and colony within the same mutually constitutive frame. This article draws on the conception of the circulation of newspapers as a significant means for negotiating geographies of identity in the empire, but seeks to broaden the focus beyond networks of competing official, humanitarian and settler discourses. This involves examining the materiality of the colonial press – its local and global circulation and readership, and the nature of its diverse content ranging from imaginative literature, to letters and editorials – to shed light on how the African Journal's readers negotiated their identity, cultural attachment and respectability as colonists of British descent poised on the empire's periphery.
- ItemOpen AccessRaw life, new hope: decency, housing and everyday life in a post-apartheid community(UCT Press, 2010-09) Ross, Fiona CThe book has been designed to demonstrate social science concepts in action. Its narrative is lively and engaging, and materials can be adapted for any level of study. Raw Life, New Hope is the stoy of one community's efforts to secure a decent life in post-apartheid South Africa. For residents of The Park, a squalid shantytown on the outskirts of Cape Town, life was hard and they described their social world as raw. Efforts to get on with the messy business of everyday life were often underut by cruel poverty. Despite inhospitable conditions, they sought to create respectable lives. The opportunity of formal housing fired them with enthusiasm as they saw the possibilities of living respectably with stable families, decent work, enduring social relations and the trappings of consumerism. The book traces their experiences as people struggled with sense-making in a complex world. Based on nearly two decades of research, Raw Life, New Hope examines how everyday lives are fashioned through relationships, reciprocity and language. It offers a rare glimpse into the complex and contradictory ways of life of people living on the margins of society.