Research Articles (English Studies)

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Browsing by Author "Graham, Lucy Valerie"

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    The importance of confronting a colonial, patriarchal and racist past in addressing post-apartheid sexual violence
    (UNISA, 2013) Graham, Lucy Valerie
    This commentary uses Judge Willem van der Merwe�s rescripting of Rudyard Kipling�s �If� poem during the Jacob Zuma rape trial as a starting point to argue for the importance of understanding the ways in which spectres of a colonial, masculinist and racist past continue to haunt the present in South Africa. While Zuma invoked Zulu culture and his duties as a Zulu patriarch in his defence in the trial, this very idea of �Zuluness� is a product of the same patriarchal racialism disseminated by Kipling and British colonialism. In order to address high levels of sexual violence in contemporary South Africa, the state needs to acknowledge the ways in which a colonial, white supremacist and patriarchal past has shaped responses to sexual violence. It also needs to redress problems of social and economic inequality that exist in South Africa as hangovers from this country�s colonial and apartheid-era past.
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    �Then You Are a Man, My Son�: Kipling and the Zuma rape trial
    (Duke University Press, 2016) Graham, Lucy Valerie
    It is now a decade since Jacob Zuma, current president of South Africa, stood trial for rape, and while much writing has been generated about this trial, Judge Willem J. van der Merwe�s hypothetical supplement to Kipling�s famous poem �If�,� which appears in his verdict as a means of bringing the trial to a close, has been passed over by other commentators. The extent to which the trial divided South African society on issues of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity and showed the riven politics of the ruling party suggested that South Africa was not the harmonious �rainbow nation� that had seemed so attainable in the Mandela years. As Pumla Gqola notes in her book Rape: A South African Nightmare, the trial �was a difficult moment in South Africa�s posttransition period and one that questioned many assumptions about the place of power, gender and sexuality in our society.�
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    �Utterly Divided�? The feminist perspectives of Lauretta Ngcobo and Olive Schreiner
    (Taylor & Francis, 2017) Graham, Lucy Valerie
    This article compares the feminist views of Olive Schreiner with those of Lauretta Ngcobo, raising questions about race, gender, intersectionality, decolonisation and the curriculum in South Africa.