How do we square the earth scientist's view (a ‘planetary’ view of the species) with the ‘old story of colonialism’: that it is not all of humanity which has trod too heavily on the Earth, but the beneficiaries of an exploitative, extractive, and consumer-induced capitalism? In the opening article, Das, Pratihar and Sarkhel tackle the issue with more nuanced consideration that is usually encountered in literary-critical studies of today. Shaping their argument around Amitav Ghosh's influential books, particularly the fictionalised non-fiction The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planetary Age, the authors enter Ghosh's own difficulty of relationship between the planetary perspective and a history of vulnerable human beings.
The second article also acknowledges Ghosh's ‘literary’ contribution to the Anthropocene (the climate derangement) debate. Karmakar and Chetty lend vividness to the dramatic interchange of Ghosh's verse-narrative, Jungle Nama, in which the avaricious merchant Dhoma and the benevolent goddess Bon Bibi of the mangrove Delta transport a folk tale to the question of the future sustainability of the planet.
From the planetary to the ongoing issue of gender-empowerment, as this applies to African women in a patriarchal Africa. Returning to Mariama Bâ's award-winning epistolary So Long a Letter, Zulfiqar opens a fresh perspective by bringing to her interpretation Salini's recent study, Sensuous Knowledge. Instead of proceeding by the Western ‘binary’ categories of emotion versus reason, Zulfiqar – through Salini – seeks to embody spirituality and reason in a combined force of the African woman's empowerment.
Women's empowerment, according to Akingbe, takes the form of a poetics of ‘radical rudeness’ in the poetry of Stella Nyanzi. Even in political detention, Nyanzi insulted the Big Man of Ugandan politics. Hers is a voice that refuses to be silenced. Silence in speech might be the paradox that Coullie pursues in her interpretation of Albert Luthuli's Let My People Go. A reluctant president of the African National Congress of the 1950s, Luthuli was also a reluctant recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, an achievement given its significance in the title of Coullie's article, which explores the ‘impersonal’ in autobiography.
Like Luthuli a figure of the 1950s, Can Themba, Drum writer and journalist, provokes Chapman's response to a current ‘presentism’ in which Themba has been revived as a single-story writer: the writer of the story ‘The Suit’, a story of domestic gender-based abuse. Was Themba himself misogynistic, a man of the Sophiatown shebeens? Chapman invites us to return Themba to his own episteme; to permit his stories to continue to speak to us today within the temper of their original context.
Reviews are not easily forthcoming in South Africa. The Department of Higher Education and Training rejects the review as a subsidy-earning contribution to knowledge. In consequence, few academics are willing to pursue the review. It just does not bring them any reward whether financial or in annual performance management or promotion. David Mann, fortunately, is independent of the university system and has provided a review of Caitlin Stobie's impressive first collection of poetry. It is a collection in which Stobie draws on her own ‘scientific’ study as she cites the South African poet and marine biologist Douglas Livingstone as an inspiration to her work. I am sure that the late Douglas Livingstone – a poet of world standing – would have been impressed by Stobie's amalgamations of the scientific and the poetic.
The Editor