“The only one who was thought to know the pulse of the people”: Black women’s politics in the era of post-racial discourse

Abstract

Theorizing black women’s high level of participation in contemporary South African protests for public water, electricity, and housing requires attention to the long history of women’s rural and urban revolts against apartheid passes and Section Ten laws, which proscribed black women’s mobility and delegitimized their access to public services. Examining the role of ibandlas (women’s assemblies/prayer unions/mothers unions) in three literary works: Lauretta Ncgobo’s And They Didn’t Die, Sindiwe Magona’s For My Children’s Children, and Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela, I argue that black women mobilize against enduring conditions of particular vulnerability, as post-racial discourse suppresses the social relations of blackness in the face of the “after-life of apartheid.” Indeed, post-racial discourse misreads the “pulse of the people.”

Fighting for an intervention in history in the face of dreams deferred in the making: Twenty years of South African democracy

“…Contributors have not pivoted their research on the newness of the South African brand, the debates on memory, or the ethos of truth and reconciliation. However, these research articles do in fact raise critical questions for these debates by recentering South Africa's vibrant tradition of protest by scholars about enduring material conditions of particular disadvantage in order to motivate genuine social transformation, equity, and good governance premised on more robust accounts of history (Willoughby-Herard, 2013, 2014a, 2014b. As intellectuals positioned in multiple social locations and working across institutional frameworks these works have been curated specifically to reconsider domains q 2015 Taylor & Francis *Physical address: Program in African American Studies, Humanities Gateway Building Room 3000, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-6850, USA.…”