This article aims to explore how power and being are interpreted and conceptualised in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974). In the novel, the life of a young woman, Elizabeth, is interrogated as she journeys through personal traumas of alienation, the struggle for self-autonomy, and power dynamics in her life. The novel is set in the context of apartheid rule in South Africa, which presents itself as a critical cause of Elizabeth’s existential crisis. This article examines the life of Elizabeth in conjunction with how power is exercised through what Agamben terms the “apparatus.” The concept of the apparatus is read alongside a Foucauldian lens in order to get a nuanced understanding of the elements that make up an apparatus. In addition, the manner in which Agamben conceptualises the apparatus is cross-referenced with how Foucault conceptualises the dispositif. This article explores Elizabeth’s struggle with alienation and self-autonomy and indicates how her agency is applied as a protagonist that is able to exercise power over others. In the narrative, Elizabeth is depicted as an “apparatus,” and this occurs not by intention and obvious representation but rather as a result of circumstances that surround her life. Essentially, the discussion unpacks how power becomes a commodity that is given or taken away at will and how power dynamics and relations can influence who and how we become.

Taking Maishe Maponya’s biographical play Letta as a starting point, in this article, I explore how exiled Black South African artists who moved to North America in the 1950s and 1960s mediated their yearning for home by finding solidarity with their American counterparts. In Letta, Maponya constructs a historical narrative based on the singer Letta Mbulu’s life to comment on the lives of South African exiles forced to migrate because of apartheid. Unfortunately, Mbulu has not written a biography on her experiences. Due to the nature of close relations while in South Africa and in exile, it is helpful for analysing Maponya’s play that Mbulu features in the biographies written by Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, who also narrate the experiences of a small number of South African artists who formed the core of the exiled group. Upon interacting with Maponya’s play, as well as the texts by Makeba, Masekela, and Keorapetse Kgositsile, it becomes apparent that the exile experience was multilayered (both unhomely and strengthened by solidarity in social and cultural interactions). I propose that Mphahlele’s philosophy of African humanism can explain how Black South African artists were able to navigate and ultimately harmonise their sense of rootlessness as individual immigrants by being part of a mutually supporting, if modest, community diaspora. This enabled them to create a body of work that is still relevant in South African culture.

In J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, Magda’s contention that “[l]yric is my medium, not chronicle” reflects a recurring theme in the novel—the mutability of time. Magda’s time-orientation in the novel is unconventional: She makes a sharp distinction between the chronological time of her father (which travels along “arrow-straight paths”) and her own, “mythical” time. Her narrative does not follow a linear track—forward movement is instead often disrupted by “speculative” histories, digressions, repetition, and reversals. I would like to propose in this article that Magda’s resistance to the discourses of patriarchy and colonialism is framed primarily through her temporal reconstructions, and that her lyrical mode of narration reconceives temporality in both the novel’s narrative organisation and its thematic concerns.

In his short story “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer” Franz Kafka creates a highly distinctive, Kafkaesque image of China and the Great Wall. Although Kafka never visited China, he referred to the distant country multiple times in his letters and writings, even once describing himself as “a Chinese” in a postcard. This allegorical self-identification reflects his use of the country as a cultural Other. In “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer,” Kafka deliberately constructs a fictional image of China, using the Great Wall as a means to explore themes of Zionism and Judaism. This study aims to examine how Kafka’s imagined China functions as an allegory, reflecting his complex and nuanced reflections on Jewish identity and Zionist concerns.

This study argues that female slaves’ experiences of motherhood are negatively impacted by the control exerted by social and discursive patriarchy. Focusing on the mother‒daughter relationship as a vessel of memory transmission, this paper addresses how this control complicates maternal memory narration. Utilizing a contextual approach, this study investigates the influence of patriarchal social and discursive manipulation on the system of umm al-walad or the ‘mother of the children’ in Najwa Bin Shatwan’s novel The Slave Yards (2020). Bin Shatwan’s portrayal of the deficiency of the system of umm al-walad in potentially safeguarding a mothering space for the female slaves showcases the manner in which the mother‒daughter dyad bears the brunt of both the slave owners’ and legal figures’ control. This investigation reveals that this deficiency results in complicating maternal memory narration. Owing to the fact that the author is a historian who has lamented the historical marginalization of the slave community in nineteenth-century Libya, the mother’s story is tackled in this paper as emblematic of a whole community. In short, the loss of the history of the enslaved community is deeply related to complications of the maternal transmission of memories.

In Taylor Sheridan’s television miniseries 1883, the origin story of his American neo-Western series Yellowstone, the voice-over narration is given by the central character, 18-year-old Elsa Dutton. Elsa is travelling with her family from Texas to Oregon on the wagon trail to the West along with migrants from Eastern Europe who have little idea of the country they have arrived in. Despite her death at the end of the series, the voice-over in the next edition of the Dutton family saga, 1923, is also given by Elsa. Her role and her ongoing spectral presence are the mythical centre of these stories and of the Yellowstone series. In 1883, she plays the daughter who takes advantage of the freedoms of the trail to get out from under her mother, Margaret Dutton’s, control to join the men herding the cattle, and to have two sexual liaisons, including one with a Native American, Sam. In 1923, as a voice-over only, she plays the role of the ancestor whose grave marks the place in Montana where the Dutton family are fighting for their possession of the land. Interesting directorial and narratival questions arise in relation to the role and voice of Elsa when stories are told of a past in which dispossession from land was being carried out ruthlessly and systematically. While her character exercises enviable freedom for a woman of her time, by contrast her voice-over carries warnings of danger, destruction, hell and disaster for both series, captured in the words, “freedom has fangs”. This gaining of freedom for the settlers and great loss of freedom and autonomy for the Indigenous peoples is a complicated story for the director to manage. This article looks at the storytelling tropes activated in 1883 and shows how they work against intentions to tell an old story differently.

My Silver Stripes and Other Poems by Maletema Ruth Emsley vividly embodies the expression "poetry for life."It is poetry for life because it speaks about everyday living: the pain, joy, laughter, memories, disappointments, peace of mind, excitement, sorrow, and hope that we experience every day as we navigate life and its offerings.It is poetry for life because it offers its readers suggestions for dealing with life's challenges, such as the loss of a spouse.Moreover, it challenges us to rethink our biased attitudes and prejudices that may create unhealthy relationships with those whom we love or share our spaces with.Then too it is poetry for life because it is memorable poetry; it remains etched in our minds even after we have put down the book.The language is simple but simultaneously sophisticated.Emsley's poetry transmits life lessons without being overtly didactic.It is poetry that uncovers emotions we would otherwise want concealed, and compels us to confront these emotions, with the assurance that it is okay for us to feel the way we do.

SA Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns/Naledi. pp 367. ISBN: 978-1-991256-12-6

This article explores how Naomi Wallace’s In the Heart of America demonstrates the interconnectedness of xenophobia, racism and other forms of discrimination in American life and politics. Through the critiques offered by Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, this article investigates the relationships between ideological state apparatuses, production of power and the construction of social identities. The subjugated characters in the play attempt to resist, negotiate and accommodate normative or regulative discursive processes that impose fixed identities upon them. Wallace’s play demonstrates that resistance constitutes power, which can be either weak, submissive, creative, and/or productive. Raising awareness of the possibilities of resistance to subjectifying power is what In the Heart of America yearns to do.

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