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’.40 He effectively performs the diversity of the nation-to-be. A particularly interesting feature of Mandela’s underground journey in its later stages is that, on a far wider scale than Kaunda’s, it expanded on to an international, specifically Pan-African, stage. In February 1962 Mandela secretly left South Africa on a ‘mission’ to establish contact with what would become the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) at their conference in Addis Ababa, and also to raise political and economic support for the ANC’s new military campaign. Following time spent in Ethiopia
In general, then, the woman – and usually the mother – figure stands for the national territory and for certain national values: symbolically she is ranged above the men; in reality she is kept below them. If male filial figures experience the gravitational pull to the national ground, women constitute part of its gravid mass. As, for example, in the iconography of Hindu nationalism, in many forms of African nationalism, as also in Pan-Africanism, the elevated woman figure takes on massive, even continent-wide proportions. She is the Great Mother, Durga, Mama Afrika
Literature: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). See Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (London: Leicester University Press, 1996). Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 16. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). See also Kadiatu Kanneh’s critical account of Gilroy in her African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures (London and New York
David Carter, ‘After Postcolonialism’, Meanjin , 66:2 (2007), 114–19. For Indigenous studies scholarship from the southern hemisphere that has decentred western literary histories, see, e.g., Alice Te Punga Somerville, Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). For the African and/or pan-African perspective, see, e.g., Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi, ‘Caribbean Regionalism, South Africa, and Mapping New World Studies’, Small Axe , 19:1 (2015), 37–54, and ‘Under the Aegis of Empire: Cape Town, Victorianism, and