HU Credits: 4

Degree/Cycle: 2nd degree (Master)

Responsible Department: cultural studies-individual graduate prog.

Semester: Yearly

Teaching Languages: English

Campus: Mt. Scopus

Course/Module Coordinator: Prof Louise Bethlehem

Coordinator Email: louise.bethlehem@mail.huji.ac.il

Coordinator Office Hours: Tues 16:15-17:15

Teaching Staff:
Prof Louise Bethlehem

Course/Module description:
Course Themes
Whereas the South African regime was deeply isolationist in the international arena, emergent research increasingly links the apartheid state to the Cold War and to decolonization. Yet such developments fail to give sufficient emphasis to the observation that the global contest over the meaning of apartheid and of resistance to it occurs on the terrain of culture. Drawing on methodologies anchored in cultural studies and literary history, this course challenges the restricted disciplinary commitments of current research in order to do justice to the insight that: Apartheid moves things.

The term “apartheid” itself enters the international lexicon as the occasion for fierce polemic. It rapidly acquires descriptive purchase over other political struggles: the civil rights movement in the U.S. or the occupation of Palestine, for instance. The South African government exiles political activists, intellectuals, writers, photographers and musicians. Soldiers are deployed across the South African border. Texts depicting racial oppression circulate within transnational discursive networks, under the generic contracts of poetry, fiction, drama, autobiography and journalism. Images are disseminated by the mass media. Sounds travel, whether as radio broadcasts of displaced writers or as the jazz performances of a coterie of exiled musicians.

Cultural mediation is integral to these outward itineraries. At their multiple points of diffusion, South African texts, images, and cultural agents are enfolded within situated local narratives. At determinate stops along the grid of its global contestation, the political signifier “apartheid” provides significant purchase over local conjunctures outside South Africa. In each instance, apartheid provides a novel lens to look “from the outside in”—in Ryan M. Irwin’s resonant phrase (2012: 11). Against this background, the course pivots on the claim that studying the global circulation of South African cultural formations in the apartheid era will provide strong historiographic leverage over national and transnational contexts beyond South Africa. Tracing the modes and itineraries of this circulation through a variety of contexts ranging from the US, USSR, decolonizing Africa, Britain, Israel and Cuba is one of the chief aims of the course.
Beyond these case histories, the course offers a unique opportunity to study alongside a team of researchers investigating these questions in the context of Professor Bethlehem’s European Research Council Project: “Apartheid: The Global Itinerary.” Accordingly, the course will include extensive methodological and theoretical components dealing with such themes as models of cultural circulation (The Black Atlantic, Minor Transnationalism); the historiography of the Cold War and of decolonization; how to work with non-traditional archives or archives of performance; and visual and auditory cultural circulation. It encompasses an active writing component which will strengthen participants’ abilities in academic writing through regular writing workshops and peer-review mechanisms.

Course/Module aims:
The course aims to familiarize participants with the case histories under consideration. It seeks to expand the participants’ ability to use central paradigms that attempt to account for literary and cultural transfer. It elaborates core lexical concepts central to these paradigms such as “black Atlantic,” "theory from the south" and “minor transnationalism” and aims to introduce new terms such as “restlessness.” It seeks to amplify the historical competence of participants regarding syncretic determinants of South African musical and literary culture, and their role in the global struggle against apartheid. It describes the contributions of Nelson Mandela, Miriam Makeba, Alex La Guma and other cultural figures.

Learning outcomes - On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:
Identify core concepts at the heart of models of cultural diffusion: Black Atlantic, Minor Transnationalism, theory from the south, thick convergence.
* Demonstrate familiarity with apartheid-era cultural production and its diffusion.
* Analyse new case studies or regional studies in accordance with this methodology.

Attendance requirements(%):
100

Teaching arrangement and method of instruction: Seminar

Course/Module Content:
First Semester

1. Introduction and Rationale

Week 1 Tuesday 1/11/2016
Bethlehem, Louise. 2013. “Apartheid—The Global Itinerary: South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation 1948-1990,” Confidential European Research Council Proposal.

Irwin, Ryan M. 2012. Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Extracts]

2. What was Apartheid?

Week 2 Tuesday 8/11/206
Dubow, Saul. 2014. “The Apartheid Election, 1948” in Apartheid: 1948-1994, 1-31 and “Conclusion” 267-301 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Coetzee, J. M. 1992. “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech” in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, edited by David Attwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Coetzee, J. M. 1996. “Apartheid Thinking,” in Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, 163-84 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press).

Sanders, Mark. “Remembering Apartheid.” Diacritics 32, no. 3/4: 60-80. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566445 [Extract: pages 60-65]

Optional

McDonald, Peter. 2009. “Introduction.” The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences, 1-20. Ebsco catalogue online through Mount Scopus library.


Week 3 Tuesday 15/11/2016
Mbembe, Achille. 2004. “Aesthetics of Superfluity.” Public Culture 16 no.3: 373-405.

Wolpe, Harold. 1972. “Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid.” Economy and Society 1 no. 4: 425-56.Reprinted in William Beinart and Saul Dubow. 1995. Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa. (London and New York: Routledge). http://english.360elib.com/datu/D/EM032155.pdf

Optional
Alexander, Peter. 2007. “History, Internationalism and Intellectuals: The Case of Harold Wolpe.” Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa 63: 109-126. DOI: 10.1353/trn.2007.0014.

Screening: William Kentridge “Mine”

Week 4 Tuesday 22/11/2016
Derrida, Jacques. “Racism's Last Word” trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry 12, no.1: 290-99. http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jacques_derrida_dossier/

McClintock, Anne and Rob Nixon. 1986. “ No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in Derrida's ‘Le Dernier Mot du Racisme’" Critical Inquiry 13 no.1: 140-154. http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jacques_derrida_dossier/

Derrida, Jacques and Peggy Kamuf. 1986. “But, beyond... (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon).” Critical Inquiry Vol. 13, no. 1: 155-170. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343560

3. Imaginaries of Resistance: Nelson Mandela, Political Prisoners and The Law

Week 5 Tuesday 29/11/2016

Mandela, Nelson. 1986. “’Black Man in a White Court’: First Court Statement, 1962” and “Second Court Statement, 1964” in Nelson Mandela: The Struggle is My Life, 133-181. (London: International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa).

Sitze, Adam. 2014. “Nelson Mandela and the Law,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela, edited by Rita Barnard, 134-61. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Optional
Boehmer, Elleke. 2008. Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press).


Week 6 Tuesday 6/12/2016
Bogues, Anthony. 2014. “Nelson Mandela: Decolonization, Apartheid, and the Politics of Moral Force.” Boundary 2. Vol. 41, no.: 34-36.

Derrida, Jacques. 1987. “The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration.” Trans. Mary Ann Caws and Isabelle Lorenz. For Nelson Mandela, edited by Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili, 13–42. (New York: Henry Holt).

Presentation: Daniel Salem, Liberalism and Lawlessness in the Armed Resistance Movement


Week 7 Tuesday 13/12/2016
Bethlehem, Louise. 2016. “Courting the Future: On the Anticipation of Justice in Anti-Apartheid Expressive Culture,” The Fried-Gal Colloquium: Transitional Justice: International, Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 16 May 2016. (Moodle: NOT FOR CIRCULATION).

Klein, Genevieve. 2009. “The British Anti-Apartheid Movement and Political Prisoner Campaigns, 1973-1970.” Journal of Southern African Studies 35(2): 455-470.

Optional:
Crain, Soudien. “Nelson Mandela, Robben Island and the Imagination of a New South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 41 (2): 353-66.

Schalkwyk, David. Mandela, the Emotions, and the Lessons of Prison” in The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela, edited by Rita Barnard, 50-69. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Presentation: Roni Mikel Arieli


4. Models of Cultural Circulation: The Black Atlantic

Week 8 Tuesday 20/12/2016
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. “The black Atlantic as counterculture of modernity,” in: The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. London: Verso.
http://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/attachments/gilroy-black_atlantic.pdf
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/south_atlantic_quarterly/v100/100.1piot.html

Optional
Chrisman, Laura. 2003. “Journeying to Death: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic,” in Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism, 73-88 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Week 9 Tuesday 27/12/2016
Masilela, Ntongela .1996. “The ‘Black Atlantic’ and African Modernity in South Africa.” Research in African Literatures, 27 (4):88-96.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3819986 .

Piot, Charles. 2001. “Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy's Black Atlantic.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 100(1): 155-70.


Week 10 Tuesday 03/01/2016
Edwards, Brent Hayes. “The Uses of Diaspora” Social Text 66, 19 (1): 45-74.

Presentation: Yair Hashachar

5. Spaces of Cultural Circulation: Sophiatown

Week 11 Tuesday 10/01/2017
Ballantine, Christopher. 2000. “Gender, Migrancy, and South African Popular Music in the Late 1940s and the 1950s,” Ethnomusicology 44(3): 376-407.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/852491

Coplan, David. 2008 (1985). In Township Tonight: South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Extracts].

Week 12 Tuesday 17/01/2017
Themba, Can. 1972. “The Suit,” “Crepuscule,” “Requiem for Sophiatown,” “The Dube Train” in The Will to Die (Johannesburg: Ravan).

Graham, Shane. 2014. “ Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Négritude,” Twentieth Century Literature, 60(4), 481-512,555.


Week 13 Tuesday 24/01/2016
Screening: Lionel Rogosin Come Back Africa and Jürgen Schadeburg (1989) Have You Seen Drum Recently.

Felstein, Ruth. 2013. “Screening Antiapartheid: Miriam Makeba, ‘Come Back Africa,’ and the Transnational Circulation of Black Culture and Politics,” Feminist Studies 39(1): 12-39.

Sizemore-Barber, April. 2012. “The Voice of (Which?) Africa: Miriam Makeba in America,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 13:3-4, 251-276, DOI:10.1080/17533171.2012.715416


Second Semester
6. Pan-Africanism, Decolonization and Cultures of Resistance
Week 14 Tuesday 28/02/2016
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2010. “The Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture,” in Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives, 45-68. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Wenzel, Jennifer. Decolonization. Book chapter, forthcoming in A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory. Eds. Imre Szeman, Sarah Blacker, and Justin Sully. NOT FOR CITATION https://columbia.academia.edu/JenniferWenzel

Week 15 Tuesday 07/03/2016
Primary Sources
Angelou, Maya. 1981. The Heart of a Woman (New York: Random House). [Extracts]
Angelou, Maya. 1986. All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes (New York: Random House). [Extracts]
Makeba, Miriam and James Hall. 1988. Miriam Makeba, My Story. (London: Bloomsbury).
Carmichael, Stokely. 2012. “Black Power,” in The Will of a People : A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches, edited by Bernard K. Duffy and Richard W. Leemon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press). (Online: Ebsco books).
Secondary Sources
Hayes, Robin J.2006. “’I Used the Term Negro and I was Firmly Corrected’: African Independence, Black Power and Channels of Diasporic Resistance” PhD. Dissertation, Yale. [Extracts]
von Eschen, Penny. 1997. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press). [Extracts]

Week 16 Tuesday 14/03/2016
Marof, Achkar with George M. Houser. 1965. “Racism in South Africa: A Call for International Action.” ora.matrix.msu.edu/files/50/304/32-130-105C-84-GMH%20ACOA%20Marof%20Reduced%20v9.pdf
Schmidt, Elizabeth. 2009. “Anticolonial Nationalism in in French West Africa: What Made Guinea Unique?” African Studies Review 52 no 2: 1-34.
The Sixth-Pan African conference: compilation of archival material (to be provided on Moodle).
Presentations: Yair Hashachar and Daniel Salem
7. Peer-Writing Workshop
Week 17 Tuesday 21/03/2016
Writing and the Archive: Tutorial session in academic writing led by Professor Bethlehem as preparation for peer-writing activity.
Week 18 Tuesday 28/03/2016
Peer-writing sessions (group activity)
Passover Break
Week 19 Tuesday 25/04/2016
Roundtable: Presentations of Peer Writing
Israel Independence Day

8. Communism and Cultures of Resistance
Week 20 Tuesday 09/05/2016
Field, Roger. 2010. Alex La Guma: A Literary and Critical Biography (Suffolk: James Currey).
Lee, Christopher J. 2014. “Decoloniality of a Special Type: Solidarity and Its Potential Meanings in South African Literature, During and After the Cold War.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50, no. 4: 466-477.
Popescu, Monica. 2010. “Revolution and Transformation: Alex La Guma’s Models of Transformation,” South African Literature beyond the Cold War, 2-54 (New York: Palgrace Macmillan).

Week 21 Tuesday 16/05/2016
Halim, Hala. 2012. “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 32(3).
Presentation: Tiferet Bassel
Week 22 Tuesday 23/05/2016
Mignolo, Walter D. 2009. “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom,” Theory, Culture and Society 26, no. 7-8: 159-181. 10.1177/0263276409349275
Tricontinental anthology: selected articles on and by Alex La Guma in Cuba. (Moodle)
Presentation: Dr. Cynthia Gabbay
9. Civil Society and Cultures of Resistance
Week 23 Tuesday 30/05/2016
Gurney, Christabel. 2000. “'A Great Cause': The Origins of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, June 1959-March 1960.” Journal of Southern African Studies 26, no.1: 123-44.
Williams, Elizabeth. 2012. “Anti-Apartheid: The Black British Response,” South African Historical Journal 64, no. 3, September 2012, 685-706.
Presentation: Dr. Tal Zalmanovich

Week 24 Tuesday 06/06/2016
Thörn, Håkan. 2006. “Solidarity Across Borders: The Transnational Anti-Apartheid Movement.” Voluntas 17:285–301 DOI 10.1007/s11266-006-9023-3.
Optional Reading
Thörn, Håkan Anti-Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Week 25 Tuesday 13/06/2016
Feldman, Keith P. 2015. “Black Power’s Palestine,” in A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, 59-101 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Soske, Jon and Sean Jacobs. 2015. Apartheid/Hafrada: South Africa, Israel, and the Politics of Historical Comparison,” in Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy, 1-12 (Chicago: Haymarket Books).
Jayawardane , M. Neelika. 2015. “Cultural Weapons against Apartheid: Art, Artists, Cultural Boycotts,” in Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy, 111-124 (Chicago: Haymarket Books).

10. Restlessness as Theory from the South?
Week 26 Tuesday 20/06/2016
Jean Comaroff & John L. Comaroff. 2012. “Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa,” Anthropological Forum: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Comparative Sociology, 22(2): 113-131.

Week 27 Tuesday 27/06/2016
Restlessness as Paradigm?
Bethlehem, Louise. Submitted. “The Restlessness of Apartheid: Miriam Makeba and Transnational Historiography”

Required Reading:
Required reading listed in weekly schedule above

Additional Reading Material:
Optional readings listed in the weekly schedule above.

Course/Module evaluation:
End of year written/oral examination 50 %
Presentation 0 %
Participation in Tutorials 20 %
Project work 30 %
Assignments 0 %
Reports 0 %
Research project 0 %
Quizzes 0 %
Other 0 %

Additional information:
Participation depends on a prior interview with Professor Bethlehem.