Connecting With South Africa

Available electronically in an open-access, full-text edition from the Texas A&M University Libraries' Digital Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/146845. Child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Astrid Berg states in her introduction that “South Africa is a microcosm.” It is a modern nation, yet many of its inhabitants follow ancient traditions. It is a nation with a colonial past marked by periods of violence, yet it has managed to make a largely peaceful transition to majority rule. It is a nation with eleven official languages embracing a great diversity of cultures and customs, and yet it is also a land where public debate is vigorous, free, and ongoing. In short, South Africa is a place where connections are being built and maintained—both those among people with long kinship and common culture, and those that reach across historical, racial, and class divides. “The western world is undeniably more advanced in certain areas of science and economic development,” Berg states, “but in other areas it seems to lag behind and could learn from” places like South Africa. In her work with children and infants, Berg has become instrumental in building connections with and among her fellow South Africans of all ethnicities. Based upon Berg’s 2010 Fay Lectures in Analytical Psychology at Texas A&M University, Connecting with South Africa: Cultural Communication and Understanding is both a self-reflective, subjective account and a scientific discourse on human development and intercultural communication. This volume will be warmly welcomed not only by psychoanalysts and those interested in Jungian thought and practice but also by anyone seeking more effective ways to learn from other cultures. Connecting with South Africa provides sensitive direction for those wishing to find healing and connection in a fractured society.

Literary Connections between South Africa and the Lusophone World connects literatures and cultures of South Africa and the Portuguese-speaking nations of Africa and beyond, and is set within literary and cultural studies. The chapters gathered in this volume reinforce the critical and ongoing conversations in comparative and world literature from perspectives of the South. It outlines some possible theoretical and methodological starting points for a comparative framework that targets, transnationally, literatures from the South. This volume is an additional step to renew the critical potentialities of comparative literary studies (Spivak 2009) as well as of humanistic criticism itself (Said 2004) as South Africa and the Lusophone world (except its former colonizer, Portugal) are outside the spatial and cultural dimension usually defined as European and/or North American. In this sense and due to the evident geographical and socio-historical links between these regions, critical scholarship on their literary connections can contribute to unprecedented perspectives of representational practices within a broader contextual dimension, and in so doing, provides the emergence of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos called “epistemologies of the South” (Santos 2016), as it considers cultural exchanges in the space of so-called “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories” (Said 1993).

This volume collects some of the best lectures at the African Literature Association's 25th annual conference held in 1999. The conference brought together for the first time a large number of scholars, creative writers and artists from Northern Africa and their counterparts from Sub- Saharan Africa. The conference and this collection highlight the inspiring and stimulating dialogue between two literary and cultural areas that have often been artificially compartmentalised. The essays draw suprising connections and illustrate the breadth and dynamism of African literature.

"What impact do economic, demographic, and social change have on the everyday health and well being of families and households in contemporary South Africa? The authors explore this question in twenty-nine case studies of people with diverse backgrounds in terms of ethnicity, class, sex and gender, age, and location, considering the influence of these factors across the life course."--Amazon.com viewed Aug. 6, 2021

Has the new South Africa – once an inspiring “rainbow nation” – failed the expectations it had generated? Is the country now in a crisis? Two decades after the end of the apartheid regime, Africa’s southernmost state faces multiple political, economic and social challenges. A lackluster growth performance is compounded by mounting corruption and political turbulence, as well as by the frustration of many ordinary citizens who expected much more rapid social and economic improvement. Labour strikes, student protests and anti-immigrant riots have all been on the rise. As a clear sign of increasing dissatisfaction, uncertainty and decline, the ruling African National Congress recently ran into its worst electoral result ever – if still only at local levels. Meanwhile, Jacob Zuma’s embattled presidency, marred by allegations of corruption and political cronyism, sent South Africa’s international image plummeting alongside the Rand, the national currency. This volume sheds light on the current difficulties and discusses future prospects. The “new” South Africa is a country in dire need for change.

This book is an original study on the development of media technologies, communications and social networks in South Africa. It is for those researching the growth of communication technology and new media in Africa, as well as those more widely involved in development studies and economics.