Description
Book SynopsisThe notion that societies mediate issues through certain kinds of engagement is at the heart of the democratic project and often centres on an imagined public sphere where this takes place. But this imagined foundation of how we live collectively appears to have suffered a dramatic collapse across the world in the digital age, with many democracies apparently unable to solve problems through talk - or even to agree on who speaks, in what ways and where. In this timely and erudite collection, writers from southern Africa combine theoretical analysis with the examination of historical cases and contemporary events to demonstrate that forms of publicness are multiple, mobile and varied. Drawing primarily on insights and materials from Africa for their capacity to speak to global developments, the authors in this volume propose new concepts and methodologies to analyse how public engagements work in society.
The contributions examine charged examples from the Global South, such as the centuries old Timbuktu archive, Nelson Mandela's powerful absent presence in 1960s public life, and the contemporary debates around the 2015/2016 student activism of #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall. These cases show how issues of public discussion circulate in unpredictable ways.
Babel Unbound will be of interest to anyone looking to find alternative ways of thinking about publicness in contemporary society in order to make better sense of the cacophony of conversations in circulation.
Trade ReviewThis fi nger-on-the-pulse collection offers a new theory of the public sphere. Through news media, photography, archives, hashtags, ‘art-rage’, Muslim manuscripts, and much more, this incisive book illuminates the underlying dynamics of public engagement. — Isabel Hofmeyr, Global Distinguished Professor, New York University, Professor of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, and author of Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (2013); …an exciting book that brings the South African experience into the centre of debate over today’s deep crisis of public life and democracy. The interest is not just local. It is deeply relevant for understanding populism and protests around the world. — Craig Calhoun, University Professor of Social Sciences, Arizona State University (USA) and Centennial Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science (UK); This is a timely, original and sophisticated collection that thinks the idea of the public sphere from a southern location. The essays attempt, in creative ways, to move out of the impasse of quibbles over how ‘public’ the public sphere is, stressing its pluralities, capillary nature and dispersed sites of discussion. — Dilip Menon, Mellon Chair in Indian Studies and Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witwatersrand, and editor of Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (2020)
Table of Contents
- Introduction - Lesley Cowling and Carolyn Hamilton
- Chapter 1 Rethinking Public Engagement - Carolyn Hamilton and Lesley Cowling
- Chapter 2 Tracing Public Engagements in Visual Forms - Carolyn Hamilton, Litheko Modisane and Rory Bester
- Chapter 3 Media Orchestration in the Production of Public Debate - Lesley Cowling and Pascal Mwale
- Chapter 4 Fluid Publics: The Public-Making Power of Hashtags in Digital Public Spaces - Indra De Lanerolle
- Chapter 5 'Now We See Him, Now We Don't': The Media and the 'Black Pimpernel' - Litheko Modisane
- Chapter 6 Archive and Public Life - Carolyn Hamilton
- Chapter 7 Iconic Archive: Timbuktu and Its Manuscripts in Public Discourse - Susana Molins Lliteras
- Chapter 8 The Politics of Representation in Marikana: A Tale Of Competing Ideologies - Camalita Naicker
- Chapter 9 Artrage and the Politics of Reconciliation - Nomusa Makhubu
- Chapter 10 Anger, Pain, and the Body in the Public Sphere - Anthea Garman
- Contributors
- Index
