Kronos, 35 (2009)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/98

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Browsing by Subject "Liberation struggle"

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    Contestations over knowledge production or ideological bullying? A response to Legassick on the workers' movement
    (Published by History Dept, University of the Western Cape, 2009) Sithole, Jabulani (Univ. of KwaZulu-Natal)
    The key characteristic of the vast amount of literature on the South African workers ? movement in the post-1973 period is the denial that the class and national struggles were closely intertwined. This denial is underpinned by a strong ?antinationalist current? which dismisses the national liberation struggle as ?populist and nationalist? and therefore antithetical to socialism. This article cautions against uncritical endorsement of these views. It argues that they are the work of partisan and intolerant commentators who have dominated the South African academy since the 1970s and who have a tendency to suppress all versions of labour history which highlight these linkages in favour of those which portray national liberation and socialism as antinomies. The article also points out that these commentators use history to mobilise support for their rigidly held ideological positions and to wage current political struggles under the pretext of advancing objective academic arguments.
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    Utopia Live: Singing the Mozambican struggle for national liberation
    (History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2009) Israel, Paolo
    This article engages a historical reconstruction of the formation of Makonde revolutionary singing in the process of the Mozambican liberation struggle. The history of ?Utopia live? is here entrusted to wartime genres, marked by heteroglossia and the use of metaphor, and referring to moments when the ?space of experience? and the ?horizon of expectation? of the Struggle were still filled with uncertainty and the sense of possibility. Progressively, however, singing expressions were reorganised around socialism?s nodes of meaning. Ideological tropes, elaborated by Frelimo?s ?courtly? composers, were appropriated in popular singing. The relations between the ?people? and their leaders were made apparent through the organization of the performance space. The main contention of the article is that unofficiality, heteroglossia, metaphor and poetic license, although they feature in genres that have been marked out as ?popular? in academic discourse, are by no means intrinsically ?popular?. Much on the contrary, they are the first victims of populist modes of political actions, that is, of a politics grounded on a concept of ?people?.