Browsing by Subject "Indigeneity"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Texturing difference: indigeneity, tactility, and the text of "black consciousness philosophy"
    (2013-02) van Bever Donker, Maurits M.
    Texturing Difference: Indigeneity, Tactility, and the Text of "black consciousness philosophy" intervenes into contemporary debates around the postcolonial critique of apartheid through offering a new sense of an `undisclosed event' in the broader text of black consciousness philosophy. In approaching this broader text, I stitch together works that are considered to be more overtly political, such as the Freedom Charter and the interventions of Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon, with a number of more literary interventions by Mongane Wally Serote, Jeremy Cronin, Aimé Césaire, J.M. Coetzee, and Ousmane Sembène, and read this weave into the problem of what comes after apartheid. The literary as it emerges in this project offers a sense of reading that tracks well with Deleuze and Guattari's sense of the rhizomatic, and that is brought to bear on the more overtly political works that are generally taken as constituting its measure. It is precisely this act of reading that stages what is at stake in literature and its pedagogy as I inscribe it here: the literary emerges as essential to the attempt to not merely transcribe the lived experience of the black man but to think what it would be to inscribe such experience into the realm of community as such - what I have termed the community of the touch. Unfolding through four key moves that deal with the concepts of community, indigeneity, tactility, and life, as these are reworked and opened up in the touches that take place at the edge of the text of black consciousness philosophy, I argue that it calls for the practice of singularity as the living of a life--a life that does not expel, or vomit, the lived experience of the black man.
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    Tracking Wildlife Conservation in Southern Africa: Histories of Protected Areas in Gorongosa and Maputaland
    (2015-10) McKeown, Kathleen
    In this dissertation, I argue that the development and demarcation of protected areas in southern Africa has not only been a process of defining boundaries but also of defining belonging. I focus specifically on how wildlife has been determined to belong in particular areas and how these animals have been claimed as belonging to individuals, communities, provinces, nations, and regions. I focus on the histories of wildlife conservation in Mozambique and the northern part of KwaZulu Natal, with particular emphasis on Gorongosa and Maputaland during the period from the early 1960s to the late 1990s, a time of great social and political change in both South Africa and Mozambique. I have selected these areas not to propose points of comparison between conservation practices in these neighboring countries, but rather to demonstrate complex continuities, exchanges, and cross-fertilizations. Ideas about wildlife conservation crossed national borders, as did animals, their advocates, and, eventually, protected area boundaries. By employing a transnational perspective on protected area histories, I illustrate and analyze this movement of personnel, non-human animals, and conservation practices between nation-states. By interrogating the scientific knowledge production and policy-making of protected area development, my narrative foregrounds the ways that wildlife has been implicated in and impacted by ideas about where these animals belong and to whom. Conceptions of indigeneity and nativeness, which tie belonging to place, have impacted the territories and scales of protected areas, as well as what (or who) has the right to dwell within their borders. However, these categories of belonging are not inherent to the wildlife species they have been attributed to. Instead, “belonging” is a condition that is made through a complex network of biocultural interactions. It is produced through dynamic constellations of political conditions, cultural values, economic interests, scientific ways of knowing, and animal behavior.