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This essay proposes the hyper-local as a source of literary meaning that complicates recent trends in theorizing the postcolonial novel, specifically globalism and animal studies. Despite its centrality to post-apartheid narratives, Triomf has escaped the broad international notice afforded other South African texts due to the difficulty of interpreting its dog characters within a larger allegorical framework. By focusing on the radically non-instrumental relationships between a shunned Afrikaner family and their pets at the moment of South Africa’s “worlding” in 1994, Van Niekerk departs from the generalizing impulse of alterity in favor of singularity. The representational richness of this distinction, the essay demonstrates, is both the source of Triomf’s social and ethical incommensurability and the catalyst for a more nuanced, de-provincialized consideration of its literary significance.
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde
History, politics and dogs in Zimbabwean literature, c.1975–20152018 •
Zimbabwean fiction writers have engaged with dogs as objects, subjects and even actors. This essay focuses on the pivotal forty-year period between 1975 and 2015, which saw the end of white rule, the rise of an independent African state and the collapse of that state. In analysing how selected writers have variously made use of dogs, we discuss the extent to which writers deal with human-dog relations. We buttress our point by examining key pieces of fiction in which dogs appear and we unpack the extent to which fictive representations of humans and dogs approximate lived relations in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial settings. We show the enduring relevance of dogs as metaphors of power in the Zimbabwean political landscape. We contend that such canine allegories have a history and explore their usage by creative writers over the last forty years.
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde
“They’ve killed the dogs!”: Land, literature and canines in contemporary Zimbabwe2018 •
This article explores the positioning of the dog in representations of farm takeovers in Zimbabwe between 2000 and 2017. It highlights the localised embeddedness of animal lives within social processes at a specific juncture of postcolonial history. The article focuses particularly on this moment marked by abrupt reversals of power, geographical distributions of people and animals, and the erasure of many physical and psychological borderlines. It focuses particularly on two novels, Graham Lang’s Place of Birth (2006) and Ian Holding’s Unfeeling (2005). It examines ways in which dogs feature as both physical presences and as psychological refractors for human responses to the violent invasions depicted in these novels. Animals of all kinds have been largely neglected in studies of the land-appropriation process, and the article gestures towards the fruitful combination of animal studies and an historically-situated, multispecies, postcolonial ecocriticism.
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde
Wildness and colonialism in “The Story of Two Dogs” by Doris Lessing2018 •
Dogs play an important role in colonial society, especially in Africa. While the project of colonisation involves settling in a new country and confronting wild animals, the dog is one animal on which the settler can rely as an ally, protector and companion. Settler dogs whose breeds stem from Britain are in a sense the animal counterpart of the human settler. When these animals desert their owners either by cross-breeding with indigenous dogs or reverting to the wild, it can seem like a betrayal of their settler owners and of the colonial project. Doris Lessing explores this dilemma in “The Story of Two Dogs” which is a semi-autobiographical story of her family and their dogs. She grew up in the 1930s on a farm in colonial Rhodesia. Lessing creates an ironical narrative voice that undermines colonial discourse and exposes racial and class prejudice among the settler community. Through the lens of the dogs she also draws attention to gender conflict and the subjugation of women in m...
Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics
An Animal Counter-Textuality? Sounding the Dog in the Global South2021 •
The visual bias in the West has decisively shaped literary and cultural criticism in the past decades. Perpetuated by the linguistic turn, this bias has seen the written word placed firmly at the heart of (post-)humanist critique. Surveying current trends in contemporary theory, it soon becomes evident that, coinciding with the decline of the linguistic turn, Animal and Sound Studies have been on a steady rise. Increasingly shaping the global literary imagination, canine poetics, in particular, are enmeshed in a complex ideological web. Basing my investigation on literary and dramatic works from the Global South, such as Mark Fleishman et al.'s Antigone (Not Quite/Quiet) (2019), Craig Higginson's Dream of the Dog (2007), and Ari Gauthier's Carnet secret de Lakshmi (2015), I argue that, analogous to the way sound has gained increased agency in the Global South, so too canine figurations point to the way acoustic symbols can be rearticulated.
Sol Plaatje and his contemporaries described the traumatic effects of the Natives Land Act 27 of 1913: forced expulsions of Africans and their animals, followed by desperate livestock sales at slaughterhouse prices. In many places, previously secure sharecroppers on whiteowned farms became roaming exiles accompanied by their skeletal sheep and cattle, many of which starved along the road. Yet no single overarching narrative can capture the new law’s immediate effects, as the dynamics of changes were geographically idiographic. This Act is perhaps the most thoroughly studied piece of legislation in South Africa’s past, but the historical meta-narrative should be contested. The ‘land’ part of this Act has monopolised historiographical attention, while other aspects have been neglected. In this essay, I hope, therefore, to contribute another category to the analytical lens of class, race and gender through which the Act has been considered: species. Thus I focus on Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa as a key source, arguing that his repeated refrain that the Act was ‘cruel to animals’ was both a sincere response to its impact on African livestock and a deftly deployed act of political theatre scripted by Plaatje himself.
2012 •
The central theoretical concept underpinning this article is Lyman Tower Sargent's notion of the ‘critical dystopian’ novel, which is not nihilistic, but which disrupts easy binarist classifications, and incorporates elements of opposition to oppression, as well as hope for a more egalitarian future. I examine critical dystopian dreaming as portrayed in two novels by Lauren Beukes, Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010), both set in South Africa, and I connect the concerns explored within these novels to the current mood of the South African nation. Moxyland, which employs techniques of the dystopian, cyberpunk and slipstream, delineates a technological, materialistic alternative society which mirrors and intensifies the structural violence of the present. Zoo City was the recipient of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award, a British award presented to the best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom in the previous year. In this dystopian text, billed as a ‘muti (or indigenous medicine) noir’ novel, Beukes interestingly indigenises the concept of the animal daemon which she adapts from Philip Pullman.
Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question is an engaging and broad introduction to historical and philosophical concerns regarding the human/ animal divide and racist accusations of prejudicial blackness. The introduction of the synthetic Afro-Dog focuses on Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (1988) and Claire Jean Kim’s recent Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (2015) to offer academic dialogue on how the activist use of animal oppression and/or the history of slavery often privileges one oppressed group through possibly trivializing categories of human or animal oppression. To further illustrate these concerns, Afro-Dog portrays recent propaganda from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that compares enslaved bodies and modern animals in chains.
Anthropology Southern Africa
Beastly Whiteness: Animal Kinds and the Social Imagination in South Africa2011 •
How do animals enter into the constitution of differences in human affairs? I address the question by showing how, in Zulu households, animals themselves are marked as beings with ethnic properties. If animals can be understood as being ethnically distinguishable, this forces us to reconsider what we take to be the implicit imagination of difference that is at stake in commonplace ethnic categorizations. Ethnic categories do not point to differences between separate human kinds. Instead they nominate differences between co-existing kinds of social ties. Most saliently, in the case at hand, ‘Zuluness’ and ‘Whiteness’ name two different ways of metabolizing money into topologies of connection and distinction in households.
This paper explores new ways to write history that engages with the lives of animals. It offers a sample card of how social history can be enriched by focusing on history from an animal perspective – and equally, how the tools provided by social history reveals the historicity of animals. The case study is drawn from South African history and the focus is on horses. The paper firstly proposes that horses changed human history not only on the macro-level, but in the small, intimate arena of the bodily, following Febvre’s call for a sensory history. Secondly, this paper explores social history’s long-time concern with agency and with understanding socio-cultural experiences from the perspective of those who actually lived them – in this case, from an equine perspective. Thirdly, the paper asks how social history that takes animals seriously might be written and might offer a fresh dimension to our understanding, with examples from the most analysed event in southern African historiography, the South African War (1899–1902).
Conference proceedings, EuroSPI
ManagEUrSuccess Criteria for EU Project Management2004 •
2012 •
Global Journal of Otolaryngology
Is Tracheostomy A Risk for Foreign Bodies Aspiration? -Case Report2017 •
2020 •
Neotropical Entomology
Moscas-das-frutas (Diptera: Tephritidae) e seus parasitoides (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) associados às plantas hospedeiras no sul da Bahia2011 •
International Journal of Refugee Law
Decision Making Conditioned by Radical Uncertainty: Credibility Assessment at the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal2013 •
Procedia Engineering
On the Effect of Defect Thickness of ERW Pipe on the Acceptability for Piling Structure2017 •
Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change
Paddy farmers’ adaptation practices to climatic vulnerabilities in Malaysia2011 •
International Journal of Industrial Optimization
Marketing strategy planning at alfamart lodadi stores using the clustering, ahp, and ar-mba method2021 •
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Development of a Mobile Rhythm Learning System Based on Digital Game-Based Learning Companion2011 •
Proceedings. Fourth IEEE Symposium on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering
Automatically predicting possible loci of variable number of tandem repeatsARTWORK SUBMISSION 17A Misty Blue Multi-Portraiture in Light' Fog &Dust, Royal Ulster Academy Submission 142nd Annual Open Exhibition. Jul'2023 close @ Belfast Museum. Triple entry (3 Portraits) for Projection. ABMS Dublin D06.
ARTWORK SUBMISSION 17A RUA OPEN SUBMISSION 142nd Annual Open Exhibition Jul'2023, Single-Canvas screen display (choice of 2 screen options). RUA Open Exhibition @ Belfast Museum. Triple-Entry Portraits via OESS O'List system. RUA Seen & Un-called Jul'20232023 •
American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology
Risk perception, worry, and test acceptance in average-risk women who undergo ovarian cancer screening2014 •
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications
WINDOW DETECTION FROM TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNER DATA - A Statistical Approach2009 •
SSRN Electronic Journal
Generation of Post-Meal Insulin Correction Boluses in Type 1 Diabetes Simulation Models for In-Silico Clinical Trials: More Realistic Scenarios Obtained Using a Decision Tree Approach2022 •
Genetics and Molecular Research
Expression of IL-1, IL-6, TNF-α, and iNOS in pregnant women with periodontal disease2012 •
Journal of Cancer Research and Clinical Oncology
The use of mutation-specific antibodies in predicting the effect of EGFR-TKIs in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer2014 •
Jeanne-Marie Jackson