Helene Strauss - Contemporary African Mediations of Affect and Access

Contemporary African Mediations of Affect and Access

Across Africa, new collectivities are shifting the terms within which access to economic opportunity, social belonging, and political agency have historically been understood. Recent years have seen powerful waves of civic mobilization sweep across the continent. Less prominent articulations of contemporary political desire have also been percolating through the diffuse experiences of the African everyday. As differential access to global capitalism and its promises fold into modes of subjectionand escapethat are hard to predict, those who exercise power find ever more elastic and resourceful ways of guarding the borders and memberships of privileged groups. This book turns to the critically entangled terms of affect and access as a basis for exploring emergent orientations in the field of African cultural theorizing. It pays especial attention to scholarship engaging with the multifaceted coordinates of political and social participation, where complex assemblages of affective attachment, exchange, and realignment work in concert with demands for sociopolitical and economic forms of access. This book was originally published as a special issue of Safundi.

Jessie Forsyth earned her PhD in English and Cultural Studies with a graduate diploma in Gender Studies and Feminist Research from McMaster University, Canada. Her research draws variously situated African and indigenous cultural texts into conversation to imagine critically transformative modes of working across epistemological, embodied, and sociopolitical productions of difference.

Sarah Olutola is a PhD graduate of the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. Her current research and publications concern representations of race in popular media culture, globalization, and Western humanitarianism with respect to Africa.

Helene Strauss is the Chair of the Department of English at the University of the Free State, South Africa. She has published widely on South African literature and culture and currently serves on the editorial boards of ARIEL, English in Africa, and Acta Academica. She was the local director of the 2015 Association for Cultural Studies Institute.

Contemporary African Mediations of Affect and Access

First published 2017
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ISBN 13: 978-1-138-63639-2

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Publishers Note
The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may have arisen during the conversion of this book from journal articles to book chapters, namely the possible inclusion of journal terminology.

Disclaimer
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.

Jessie Forsyth, Sarah Olutola and Helene Strauss

The chapters in this book were originally published in the Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, volume 17, issue 2 (April 2016). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:

Contemporary African mediations of affect and access
Jessie Forsyth, Sarah Olutola and Helene Strauss
Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, volume 17, issue 2 (April 2016) pp. 107118

A peculiar place for a feminist? The New South African woman, True Love magazine and Lebo(gang) Mashile
Pumla Dineo Gqola
Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, volume 17, issue 2 (April 2016) pp. 119136

The girls who dont die: subversions of gender and genre in recent fiction by Lauren Beukes
Jennifer M. Schmidt
Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, volume 17, issue 2 (April 2016) pp. 137155

Sticky e/motional connections: young people, social media, and the re-orientation of affect
Allison Mackey
Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, volume 17, issue 2 (April 2016) pp. 156173

Mediating womens globalized existence through social media in the work of Adichie and Bulawayo
Camille Isaacs
Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, volume 17, issue 2 (April 2016) pp. 174188

A threatening personification of freedom or: Sobukwe and repression
Derek Hook
Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, volume 17, issue 2 (April 2016) pp. 189212

Only words can bury us, not silence: reading Yvonne Veras difficult silences
Sarah Kastner
Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, volume 17, issue 2 (April 2016) pp. 213230

Fostering receptivity: cultural translation, ethical solicitation, and the navigation of distance in J.T. Rogers The Overwhelming
Susan Spearey
Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, volume 17, issue 2 (April 2016) pp. 231248

Empathys echo: post-apartheid fellow feeling
Ross Truscott
Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, volume 17, issue 2 (April 2016) pp. 249269

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Jessie Forsyth earned her PhD in English and Cultural Studies with a graduate diploma in Gender Studies and Feminist Research from McMaster University, Canada. Her research draws variously situated African and indigenous cultural texts into conversation to imagine critically transformative modes of working across epistemological, embodied, and sociopolitical productions of difference.

Pumla Dineo Gqola is a Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She is the author of Rape: A South African Nightmare (2015), A Renegade Called Simphiwe (2013), and What is Slavery to me? Postcolonial/Slave memory in Post-apartheid South Africa (2010).