Research Articles (English Studies)

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Browsing by Author "Krog, Antjie"

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    Last Word: What does �hospitality� really mean?
    (Duke University Press, 2018) Krog, Antjie
    115 Last year I filled out an endless number of forms on the internet and had my photo taken this way for an American visa, that way for a Schengen one, another way for Britain. I stood in queues to gather freshly stamped documents from my bank, certificates from the revenue service, municipal verification that I own property, a letter confirming my long-term employment, payment slips, certificates of health, insurance, and so on. During face-to-face interviews I felt as if every government agent wanted to tell me: We know you�you sly, diseased, and poverty-stricken person, wanting permission to come and sponge off our social security system, to abuse our precious freedoms with your fundamentalist ideas, and to infect our population with your third-world unworthiness.
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    'This thing called reconciliation�' Forgiveness as part of an interconnectedness-towards-wholeness
    (Philosophical Society of Southern Africa, 2008) Krog, Antjie
    Regular reference is made, within the discourse around the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to the fact that ubuntu, an indigenous world view, played a role in the process. This paper tries to show that despite these references, important analysts of the TRC (as well as many South Africans) had insufficiently accounted for this worldview in their critical readings of the Commission�s work and therefore found aspects of the process incoherent and/or morally and legally confused. I am not arguing that the TRC was not a deeply flawed process, but want to establish how powerfully this indigenous world view brought a coherency that not only enabled the TRC to do its work without incidences of revenge, but imbued politically and legally trapped concepts with new possibilities. The pervasiveness of this world view within eg. the second round of TRC testimonies is noticeable and show how often the critique on the TRC fails to take this dominant role into account and how many, seemingly contradictory or confusing, positions become coherent when regarded within this worldview. This view of interconnectedness, consistently expressed throughout the life of the commission, has wide implications for the interpretation of healing, the asking of amnesty, the rehabilitation of perpetrators, the interdependence of forgiveness and reconciliation in the process of achieving full personhood within a healed society. In the footsteps of Richard Bell, this paper locates this world view within a particular framework formulated as ubuntu by Desmond Tutu, as communitarianism by Kwame Gyekye, as ethnophilosophy by Paulin Hountondji etc. The paper also tries to understand how this interconnected moral self is formed and who the community could or should be that influences this moral self.
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    To Write Liberty
    (Taylor & Francis, 2018) Krog, Antjie
    The keynote for the International Conference, Writing for Liberty, held in Cape Town in 2017 is a response to the contradictory demands made on writers: to respond to the suffering in the world and to refrain from appropriating the pain of the marginalised. Taking a cue from Isaiah Berlin�s analysis of the two kinds of liberties: liberty to be free and liberty from interference with freedom, an argument is made for the freedom of a writer to write what she wants. This freedom is radically tempered in a reading of some novels by JM Coetzee. Here I explore the quality of skill, anguish and powerlessness to which a writer has to submit within the structure of her text.