Posted inEqualityGeneralMedia

What ‘decolonisation’ means: E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India

With all the talk about “decolonising” university curricula (see http://thoughtleader.co.za/bertolivier/2016/03/23/decolonisation-the-new-ideology/), which has again cropped up among the demands of the protesting students, I thought it might be productive to remind students and academic staff alike of one of the most eloquent – in fact, together with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, exemplary – critical literary […]

Posted inGeneralMediaTech

Idoru: Gibson’s astonishing glimpse of virtual reality’s future

William Gibson — creator of Neuromancer, among other gripping sci-fi novels — has arguably delved even further into the latent possibilities, or what Gilles Deleuze called virtualities, of the information revolution, in his quotidian dimension-surpassing novel, Idoru (Penguin 1996), one of the so-called Bridge trilogy. So much so that Peter Popham in the Independent commented […]

Posted inGeneralLifestyleTech

Emerson, a much-neglected thinker

Ralph Waldo Emerson — the leader of American “Transcendentalism” in the 19th century — has a lot to teach the self-obsessed, narcissistic, smartphone-wielding generation of today. Despite the fact that his famous essay, “Self-Reliance” (1841; available here) is written in the excessively patriarchal language of the time — one might be forgiven for thinking there […]

Posted inLifestyleNews/Politics

Ethics of poetic ethnicities

By David wa Maahlamela How I wish I could, like many, pretend that the ethics of poetry are engraved on a rock somewhere at the centre of the global village — an assumption that downplays the fact that one’s domicile, environment and experience directly informs his literary outlook. The poetry landscape in South Africa is […]

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A novel that can teach us how to rebel against the colonisation of the mind

What do you get when you project the present media-saturated and media-sustained global economic-political hegemony into the future? You get a society where the kind of colonisation of the mind, brought about mainly through mainstream media’s incessant distribution of standardised discourses affirming the nonsense, that there is “no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism, is exacerbated to […]

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Michel Houellebecq and the dialectics of nihilism

Michel Houellebecq’s monumental novel, Atomised, is one of the most honest, brutal and haunting books of the 21st century when it comes to a consideration of the destructive dialectics of society. Through the main characters, Bruno and Michel, Houellebecq makes his argument that humanity today has arrived at the edge of the abyss, that there […]

Posted inGeneralLifestyle

A sci-fi novel that shaped a generation

When William Gibson’s science-fiction, “cyberpunk” novel Neuromancer, was published in 1984, ultimately winning the three most sought-after awards in the science-fiction world (The Nebula Award, The Philip K Dick Award and the Hugo Award) few people could prognosticate that it represented an imaginative projection of such magnitude that it would shape the way an entire […]