Kelwyn Sole describes some of the issues and trends in contemporary English-language poetry in South Africa. Focusing on the current fashionability of poetry and the aura that surrounds the figure of the poet in the media and public sphere, he summarizes some of the uses being made of poetry at the moment. On the one hand, it is being utilized as a tool of nation-building and an advertising medium for big business. On the other it is being mobilized by poets (...) as a means of social critique and an expression of anger vis-à-vis current structures of power. Questions are asked of the susceptibility of lyric poetry in particular to usage by political and business elites as a means to assist the construction, in its audiences, of a consumerist sense of self; as well as to provide models of citizenship in tune with the discursive priorities of the South African state in its current, capitalist form. (shrink)

Imre Szeman reviews Göran Therborn’s From Marxism to Post-Marxism? The title is posed as a question, but the book leaves little doubt about the necessity of such a move. But would “post-Marxism” involve the abandonment of the insights of Marx and of the dialectic, or would it be better thought of as the refocusing of these very traditions on our own “bad new days”?

On the basis of a recent in-depth case study of the severe conflicts that arose in relation to the process of forming a spin-off biotech company at Helsinki University, Juha Tuunainen argued that "the traditional university is not being transformed into an entrepreneurial one as straightforwardly as claimed by Henry Etzkowitz" and that it remains an open question whether "hybrid entities" combining academic work and corporate activity can "ever survive as stable organizations within a university" (2005, 202, 203). The present (...) paper offers a reinterpretation of Tuunainen's study, identifying the inadequate separation of researcher and entrepreneur roles as the crux of the conflicts. Most importantly, however, this reinterpretation enables the conceptualisation of a model for university governance that maintains role separation while at the same time promoting an acceleration of university entrepreneurship and commercialisation by integrating it in the very core of the university institution. (shrink)

My experience with the California Department of Motor Vehicles offers a case to explore how bureaucratic institutions monitor, classify, and control individuals. By examining artifacts created for and used by the DMV through the lens of literacy studies, I discuss the variety of rhetorical strategies used in each document and the effects and implications of those strategies, for example on subjectivity or identity, and move beyond the language of the artifacts themselves to attend to how they are invested with power (...) in the management and control of populations. (shrink)

The current rhetoric of “Africanization” ostensibly refers back to pan-African or national-liberationist ideals. However, the “transformation agendas” of South African higher education institutions, of which “Africanization” forms an integral part, have been shown to be closely linked with the commercialization and corporatization of the university, and with elite nationalism. Many African academics across the continent have articulated this development in terms of a sense of loss. This article investigates that sense of loss. To the extent that African intellectuals expected their (...) visions for political and social transformation to be taken over by the postcolonial developmentalist state, their hopes were dashed by national chauvinism, by the recession of the state and the tightening grip of repression. Rather than revisiting nationalism and “indigeneity” as potentially critical forces, this article cautions against such reclamations, proposing a renewal of the emancipatory aims of higher education focused on the teaching-learning relationship. (shrink)