3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item African progress and colonial modernity as seen through the Zulu pages of the Bantu world, 1932-1952(2018) Sifelani, PortiaThis study explores the Zulu pages of the Bantu World from 1932 to 1952. It focuses on how the Zulu-language contributors, in their letters and articles, engaged with the idea of the role that people of European descent had to play in the achievement of progress by Africans. This was mainly inspired by the fact that many Zulu articles that commented on the need for Africans to progress from a state of poverty and oppression, made constant comparisons between Africans and Europeans. There was a tendency to refer to the qualities of white people which had ensured that they achieved economic and political dominance, a feat which black people were yet to realise. An analysis of the discussions around this question reveals that the Zulu pages were a platform used by the Zulu-language writers to express ideas which were otherwise not expressed fully in English due to censorship and their preference of the Zulu language. I begin in chapter one by providing a historical background to the Bantu World by showing how the African languages press emerged from the late nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. This chapter also discusses the origins of the Bantu World and its intended purpose. Chapter two focuses on the ideological context which influenced the editors and the contributors of the Bantu World. I argue that it was the influence of Booker. T Washington on Selope Thema which predominantly became manifest in the paper and determined the themes that were discussed. In chapters three and four I then analyse some of the issues that were discussed in the Zulu pages of the Bantu World and these included the problem of disunity, perceptions about white people in relation to progress, self-help and entrepreneurship as well as the brief removal and return of the Zulu pages. The debates regarding these issues were to a large extent rooted in efforts to map a way forward as far as achieving progress was concerned. They also reflect a constant ambivalence with regards to the perceptions of the Zulu-language writers on the role that white people had to play in the achievement of this progress.Item Pigs,plants and parallel processing: an exploration of the tensions between Western liberal humanism and critical post humanism in dub steps(2018) Worster, Amy LourethThis research report presents a critical thematic analysis of Andrew Miller’s science fiction (SF) novel Dub Steps with the intention of demonstrating that the book’s central themes are interrelated and evoke various tensions between the ideological projects of western liberal humanism and critical posthumanism. Furthermore, this study examines how the novel’s setting of Johannesburg articulates with its themes and complicates the unfolding drama of the liberal humanist subject in crisis, especially in connection to South Africa’s troubled history of colonialism and apartheid. Representations of race – specifically blackness and whiteness – are at stake in the interactions between Johannesburg and the central themes of Dub Steps, and the historical and material politics of race in South Africa are brought to bear upon the novel’s depiction of a posthuman future. This study finds that Dub Steps may be read as a posthuman SF fantasy in which the vestiges of colonialism and apartheid are finally undone and socio-economic inequalities persisting in the post-apartheid sphere are finally rebalanced. However, it is also the view of this research report that the progressive potential of the novel is undermined by its technophobic ethos and a reversion to harmful stereotypes about black people in its vision of a new world order