Journal articles on the topic 'Ndebele (African people) – Civilization'

The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) established nine African language radio stations ostensibly to cater for the diverse linguistic and cultural needs of the African communities in the country. In reality, however, these stations acted as a government mouthpiece and means through which a monopoly over the airwaves was asserted. Through these stations the government promoted ethnic compartmentalisation and popularised the ethnic ‘homelands’ created from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. One of these stations was Radio Ndebele, established in 1983, with a clear mandate to reinforce Ndebele ethnic nationalism. This article seeks to explore the history of this radio station, using both oral sources and documentary material, though privileging the former. The article makes a two-pronged argument: Firstly, Radio Ndebele came into existence not only because of the government’s mission but because of pressure from Ndebele-speaking people who needed radio programming in their own language. Secondly, this radio station helped turn a spoken language that was on the throes of extinction into a vibrant written language that found its way into the schooling system, particularly in areas with a large concentration of Ndebele-speaking people.

Lewis Nkosi’s novel, Mating birds (1986) offers a significant intervention in a history as dispersed and fragmented as South Africa’s, by focusing on those specific and critical episodes of South Africa’s past. This much-colonised country has had an extended history of perennial violence under colonialism and apartheid Some fiction by Black writers on this phenomenon may be seen to be reactive, what Njabulo Ndebele (South African writer) terms ‘Protest Literature’-and seeks to show black people as victims (Ndebele 1994). Nkosi’s novels, Mating birds (1986) in particular reverse this order through the narratives of different characters, illustrating that black people were not the passive victims of apartheid but played an active role towards its opposition and eradication. This is achieved through complex portrayal of the first-person narrative technique and interstices of memory and recall. This article explores how identity as a porous and fluid, and fragmented and fractured concept that could be used to describe the individual or communa traits of some characters, and space (prison) are portrayed in Lewis Nkosi’s Mating birds (1986).

The discipline of onomastics is still at its infancy yet it constitutes a very important aspect of the day to day survival of a people in the society. Naming is part of oral tradition in African societies, people were never used to write and record things but rather their names. This means that names are a historical record that would carry some aspects of a people's way of life which include their history, beliefs and customs among others. On the same note, Midlands Province constitute of people from different backgrounds mainly Shona and Ndebele. Of interest to this research is the presence of the Kalanga people through some toponyms that are found in the area. In light of this view, this study therefore seeks to identify and unlock the culture and history embedded in these names by looking at the significance of Kalanga place names in Midlands Province. The study argues that place names or toponyms of any people carry with them a history, meaning and significance to particular people that name the places, thus studying the place names in this community can be a valuable tool of unpacking the history surrounding the Kalanga people in Midlands Province in Zimbabwe. Guided by the Afrocentric paradigm, specifically nommoic creativity tenant, the study seeks to explore the cultural and historical significance of Kalanga toponyms in Midlands Province.

The pursuit of literacy is a central theme in the history of African Americans in the United States. In the Western tradition, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and others have observed, people of African descent have been written out of “culture” because they have been identified with oral traditions. In that setting, literacy signifies both reason and civilization. Performance in print earned the laurel of humanity. Consequently, for well over 200 years, the African-American literary tradition has been defined as one in which books talked and a few slave authors achieved, at once, voice and significance by making a book talk back by writing.

AbstractDuring the 1930s and 1940s, the Great Depression and the rise of communism and fascism in Europe convinced a broad spectrum of Americans that they were living through a prolonged “crisis of civilization” with real potential to destroy all they held dear. Meanwhile, they saw evidence that these global problems put young people especially at risk for immorality, loss of hope, and political subversion. Because the “youth problem” and the “world crisis” seemed to be inextricably linked, even the everyday behaviors of young people took on a heightened political significance in the eyes of many adults. Christian leaders from across the spectrum of churches—Mainline Protestant, Evangelical, Roman Catholic, and African American—did not just capitalize on this obsession with youth and the fate of civilization; they did all they could to fan those flames. They did so not cynically, but sincerely, believing that they could and should save the world by saving American youth. Yet these leaders were also making a bid for influence in American society and for control of the future of their churches. The resulting politicized views of youth and youth work would not only influence the outcomes of internal church battles, but they would also shape how various Christian groups responded to the Cold War.

Marriage is a highly celebrated phenomenon among the African people. It is one of the important institutions among the Shona and Ndebele people in Zimbabwe as expressed in the saying ‘musha mukadzi’ and ‘umuzingumama’ (home is made by a woman) respectively. However with the coming of colonialism in Zimbabwe, marriage was not given the appropriate respect it deserves. This has given impetus to this paper where the researchers in the study through drama want to bring out the depiction of marriage institution in a post -independence television drama, Wenera Diamonds (2017). This paper therefore, aims to show the impact of neo-colonialism on Shona marriage institution. The neo colonial period is characterised with the perpetuation of Western imperial interests through protocols of diplomatic relations, treaties and existing bilateral agreements which marked a new phase of relationships with former colonisers. The aim of this article therefore is to depict marriage institution in neo colonial Zimbabwe in Wenera Diamonds (2017), a Zimbabwean television drama. Using qualitative research methodology, the research employs content analysis to elucidate the depiction in the said performance. Guided by the Africana womanist perspective, the article argues that the indigenous knowledge needed for African social development is rendered irrelevant by a dysfunctional set of values of the western hegemony. Against that, the paper establishes that the depiction of marriage institution in Wenera diamonds is a reflection of imperialist colonial forces on the black person hence the need to go back to basics and resuscitate their culture.

This article deals with two texts written during the process of transition in South Africa, using them to explore the cultural and ethical complexity of that process. Both Njabulo Ndebele’s “The cry of Winnie Mandela” and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s “A human being died that night” deal with controversial public figures, Winnie Mandela and Eugene de Kock respectively, whose role in South African history has made them part of the national iconography. Ndebele and Gobodo-Madikizela employ narrative techniques that expose and exploit faultlines in the popular representations of these figures. The two texts offer radical ways of understanding the communal and individual suffering caused by apartheid, challenging readers to respond to the past in ways that will promote healing rather than perpetuate a spirit of revenge. The part played by official histories is implicitly questioned and the role of individual stories is shown to be crucial. Forgiveness and reconciliation are seen as dependent on an awareness of the complex circumstances and the humanity of those who are labelled as offenders. This requirement applies especially to the case of “A human being died that night”, a text that insists that the overt acknowledgement of the humanity of people like Eugene de Kock is an important way of healing South African society.

IntroductionHuman development, from the Islamic point of view, can be achieved onlyby following the footsteps of the Prophet (SAAS). The nearer one comes toimbibing the Message of the Quran, Sunnah, and Shari’ah in one’s life, themore humanly developed one becomes, because personal development in Islamis measured by one’s refinement in living this Message. The more refinedand developed are the persons in a community, the better will be their cultureand civilization.As long as Muslims continued moulding their life according to the Shari‘ah,their civilization in Medina, Baghdad, Andullis, Constantinople, and Delhiflourished. The decline and fall of Islamic civilization came when Muslimsstarted paying mere lip service to the formula of faith and departing fromthe spirit and purposes of the Shari‘ah. This was the unfortunate phenomenonthroughout the Muslim world. Fortunately, the rightly inspired people roseto bring back the erring Muslims to the path of the Shari’ah. This paper seeksto present an assessment of the dynamics used by a Mujaddid (a promoterof Tajdid or revival) of West Africa to re-Islamize a society that had sunkinto the abyss of confusion.Islam in West AfricaWest Africa, situated south of the Sahara desert, and which the Arabhistorians called Bilad al Sudan, has witnessed in the past, many Islamicempires, e.g., Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Bornu, the last of which was theSokoto Caliphate. It emerged from the process of Tajdid (renewal or revival inaccordance with the Quran and Sunnah)’ which was started by Shehu(Shaikh) ‘Uthman Danfodio (1754-1817) in 1774, and which culminated in ...

AbstractThis article compares Anthony Benezet's influential 1771 antislavery tract, Some Historical Account of Guinea, with the sources from which he gleaned his information about Africa and the slave trade, the narratives published by European travelers to West Africa. Benezet, a Philadelphia Quaker and humanitarian reformer, cited the travel literature in order to portray Africa as an abundant land of decent people. He thereby refuted the apology that cast the slave trade as a beneficial transfer of people from a land of barbarism and death to regions of civilization and Christianity. However, Benezet employed the travel narratives selectively, suppressing contradictory evidence as well as controversial material that could have been used to construct an alternative depiction of African humanity. Nonetheless, Benezet's research shaped the subsequent debate over the slave trade and slavery, as antislavery writers incorporated his depiction into their rhetorical arsenal and proslavery defenders searched for a rebuttal.

AbstractThe Ottoman encounter with European colonialism over their African territories during the nineteenth century contributed to a renewed interest in Africa and its inhabitants. This resulted in several official and non-official travels to this continent at the end of which the travelers published their memoirs. This article intends to analyze Ottoman perceptions of Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by drawing upon Ottoman travelogues. It concludes that the travelers established paradoxical accounts regarding the implications of European colonialism for Africa and the ethnic taxonomy of the African people. They perceived European colonialism as a civilizing mechanism on the one hand, and treated it as the most significant reason of African “backwardness” on the other. Similarly, while they criticized the European colonial discourse based on the superiority of the white race over others, they established similar ethnic taxonomies establishing hierarchies among African tribes.

Abstract Most nineteenth-century political debates over U.S. citizenship revolved around the claims of people, often African Americans or immigrants, who aspired to that status. But Native American citizenship’s genealogy began instead with the United States assertion of the right to purchase or conquer the territory of its Indigenous neighbors, to replace them as its sole or primary inhabitants, and to make policy for the people thereby dispossessed. These very different histories of citizenship collided in 1866, when the U.S. Senate considered how to codify that status in the Civil Rights Act and Fourteenth Amendment. This article interprets these debates as the collision of an array of distinct and divergent settler colonial processes and experiences. It argues that the ultimate resolution—a half-articulated commitment to let local settler communities decide—both contradicted the ostensible purposes of the Civil Rights Act and accurately reflected how the era’s settler colonial society understood the purposes and functions of Native citizenship.

People of Indian descent had long interacted with the Swahili of East Africa. This interrelationship became particularly momentous during British colonial rule that gave additional impetus to Indian migration to East Africa. In time East Africa, in general, and Mombasa, Kenya’s second largest city, in particular, became home to significant populations of Indian settler communities. Motivated by an immigrant psychology and relatively privileged status under colonial rule, Indian immigrants took full advantage of the opportunities to become remarkably successful socially and economically. Local inhabitants were fully aware of the success of Indian immigrants of East Africa, and for some of them, the Indian record became a yard stick for their own successes and failures. Among these was Sheikh Al-Amin bin Ali Mazrui (1891-1947), famed for his reformist ideas about East African Islam. Using his Swahili periodical, Swahifa, he tried to galvanize members of Swahili-Muslim community towards the goal of community uplift by drawing on the experiences of East African Indians as a way of referring them back to some of the fundamentals of a progressive Islamic civilization in matters of the economy, education, and cultural preservation. In this sense, the East African Indian “mirror” became an important means of propagating Sheikh Al-Amin’s agenda of an alternative modernity rooted in Islamic civilization.

Until recent time, African deities, positioned as viable medium of creating sanity and tranquility in the African front have been ironically neglected due to incursion of Christianization, civilization, modernization, and advanced technology. The efficacy of the African deity which is paramount insomuch that it preserves the culture, tradition, norms, values, artifacts, morals, and way of lives of the people, thus militating against evil forces whose agenda is targeted at the people, by increasing the level of death, sickness, ailment, farming, barrenness, strive, poverty, and every other forms of wickedness as portrayed in Julie Okoh’s We Are Rivers, is today, neglected and most often abolished. This has unequivocally created fear and pain of the people and underdevelopment to the nation. It has therewith created impetus for creative portraiture in dramatic and argumentative representations by dramatist and critics over the years, yet, the issue is still persisting. The study therefore aims at repositioning African Deity as viable medium of sanity and a mechanism of enhancing peace and development in the Nigerian space. Thus, with content analytical methodology, this study investigates how Julie Okoh attempts to establish the cause and effect of deity negligence and service on the Nigerian space using the instrument of drama. The effect of it will create positive change amongst Nigerians, thus, create change in their society. The study therefore recommends that maximum attention be made towards promoting African deity to the frontier of politicians as that would define the hallmark of peace and development.

Historical writing on the coloured community of South Africa has tended to accept coloured identity as given and to portray it as fixed. The failure to take cognizance of the fluidity of coloured self-definition and the ambiguities inherent to the process has resulted in South African historiography presenting an over-simplified image of the phenomenon. The problem stems partly from an almost exclusive focus on coloured protest politics which has had the effect of exaggerating the resistance of coloureds to white supremacism and largely ignoring their accommodation with the South African racial system. Furthermore, little consideration has been given to the role that coloured people themselves have played in the making of their own identity or to the manner in which this process of self-definition shaped political consciousness. This is particularly true of analyses of the period following the inauguration of the Union of South Africa in 1910, a time when the legitimacy of coloured identity was not in any way questioned within the coloured community and when coloured protest politics was dominated by one body, the African Political Organization (APO).

In 1930, the same year in which the segregationist Land Apportionment Act was passed, the governor of Rhodesia addressed a meeting of representatives from the various missionary organizations operating in the colony. He proceeded to argue against the sort of education that might create a class of African intellectuals who would eventually challenge white economic and political dominance:The nature of the intellectual advance to be aimed at should be one of which advantage can be taken in the ordinary daily lives of the people, and should be a step forward in a field already familiar to them, rather than a violent transition into fields which belong to a different type of civilization. As the life of African peoples is to a preponderating extent agricultural, education should aim at making them better agriculturalists and better able to appreciate all the natural processes with which agriculture is connected.

AbstractThe Abbasid dynasty had succeeded in placing the Islamic world at the pinnacle of world civilization. The achievements at that time were inseparable from the role of dakwah activities which were very comprehensive so that they were able to target all lines of community life. The synergy between the rulers and the people during the Abbasid government was proven to be able to give birth to many disciplines, not only religious knowledge, which in fact originated from the Al-Qur'an and hadith, but also gave birth to many general sciences such as medicine, philosophy, chemistry, economic and other science. The Khalifah as the holder of power supports a lot of preaching and scientific activities, this is evidenced by the construction of many supporting facilities and infrastructure such as mosques, madrasas, libraries and hospitals. In addition, the openness of Abbasid civilization also brought in people from various parts of the world, not only from Arab circles, people from Persians, Chinese, European, Indian and African who took part in filling in the diversity of scientific developments there. Then the economic condition of the community also has a very good record, such as in the field of Abbasid trade in its time as the center of world trade, as well as the agricultural sector, the Abbasid community is known to be prosperous, and has a very good life order. Therefore, the Abbasid dynasty could easily be applied in life in the current era, by building cooperation between the rulers and the community in developing da'wah because with the existence of a strong dakwah it was not lame in accordance with its essence and also followed the mission of da'wah so that it could be perfect, there needs to be good cooperation.

AbstractValues concerning religion, family and gender are conceptions of the desirable in these domains of life. Studies of development have shown that, instead of eagerly adopting modernity, people may resist it and adhere to traditional religious, family and gender values. Although Western societies increasingly move in the direction of modern values, the proportion of people in the world with traditional values may be increasing – given the higher fertility rates in less developed societies where traditional values are more common. This study develops a causal model of the social bases of support for traditional values: the individual's sex, age, education, occupational status and income; the level of socio-economic development of one's society; and the civilization of which one's society is a part. Multivariate regression analysis of data from representative samples of the populations of eighty societies in the 2000 (fourth) wave of the World Values Surveys confirms the hypotheses. Around the world, women are more traditional than men in religious values, but more modern in family and gender values. Traditional values are most often supported by older people, those of lower socio-economic status, living in less developed societies, in Islamic, Sub-Saharan African and Latin American civilizations.

Taking as a basis Søren Kierkegaard’s narrative strategy of attack and defence, this paper will analyse the representation of western civilization in connection with the worldview of the native people living in a leper colony in Belgian Congo in Graham Greene’s novel A Burnt-Out Case. I will examine concretely the way in which Greene attacks in the novel the hegemonic structure of the European colonizers, which both ignores and imposes itself on the African native society, considering it a no-structure. Additionally, I will study the cases of the priests in the leper colony and of doctor Colin, characters that, being on the frontier between both value systems, become cultural translators and thus make communication possible. These characters acknowledge that the native way of life is as legitimate as the European and represent the possibility of an empathic side of western civilization. In contrast with the attack mentioned above, with the priests and Dr Colin Greene defends the European community living in the area. Through the use of the narrative strategy of attack and defence, therefore, contradictory messages are inserted in the text so that the readers take an active role solving the paradoxes they find in their reading. Finally, I will focus on the main protagonist, Querry, whose internal journey starts with his contact with Deo Gratias, a member of the native society, and whose spiritual evolution throughout the novel cannot be explained without his experience with the native culture.

A theology of tenderness - the counterchurch in Heinrich Böll's novel Gruppenbild mit DameHeinrich Böll's novel Gruppenbild mit Dame is a protest against a dehumanized German society - a society which, according to him, is solely committed to production and consumption. In the novel the way in which a certain group of people live is portrayed - a depiction forming a stark contrast with society and its corrupt values. In the novel this small group of people is positioned around the main character, Leni Pfeiffer. Boll could never rid himself of his Christian heritage - thus religious motifs are significant in this work, as they are in his whole oeuvre. In the novel it soon becomes evident that Leni has the qualities o f a new madonna and that the group surrounding her exhibits the characteristics o f a secret church or counterchurch. Not only does this church have its own madonna and its own messiah, it even has its own gospel - that of deliberate underachievement. This article attempts to analyse the above-mentioned aspects of the counterchurch in the novel and to examine the implications of such a subculture for Western civilization, not only in Germany, but also in our own African context.

Good Health and Well-being is one of the important goals in the current decade of twenty first century. The people of current generation prefer the consumption of plant sourced bioactive molecules over the modern medicines because the former has no side effects and residue free. In order to mitigate the food requirement of growing global population during the previous century, the green revolution technologies focused on fewer crops leading to negligence of several important crops; popularly known as underutilized or neglected crops. In the list of underutilized crops, Dioscorea spp. occupies significant niche as it is rich in several phytochemicals and could be grown under multiple stress conditions faced by the modern agricultural practices. Besides, it has been known as prominent member under age old practices of “traditional health care system” to treat several malaises of human being during the early date of civilization. The tubers and bulbils of the Dioscorea spp. are rich in saponins, tannin, flavonoids, sterols, polyphenols, and glycosides in addition to its higher contents of basic essential nutrients such as protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals etc. Further, its tubers are staple food for indigenous people of several Asian and African countries. Therefore, the Dioscorea spp. signifies as an important crop both to the next generation population as well as underprivileged class of people in the coming decade for good health wellbeing and food security.
 SAARC J. Agri., 17(2): 1-13 (2019)

Judging from the recent conference on Africa's Urban Past held at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, historians are increasingly – if somewhat belatedly – joining their colleagues in the social sciences in recognizing the continent's towns and cities as fruitful fields of research. While urban historians of North America and Europe have long regarded the built environment as a valuable source, the form of towns is only beginning to emerge as a topic of serious consideration in the African context. It is gratifying to note, therefore, that a number of contributors to the SOAS conference chose to focus on the ways in which both indigenous concepts of settlement and the physical organization of space have shaped Africa's urban centres as arenas of social, political and economic conflict. It is with these issues in mind that the reviewer approached this study of the architectural history of a people with a long tradition of urbanism and a highly nuanced terminology of settlement, the Akan of southern Ghana.

To do justice to history in the global context would require to pursue global history, which is not just a chiasmic play on words. No major country, no people, no great civilization, and no significant culture has really existed in total isolation, with just a few exceptions. But most scholars are simply not able to cover everything, and it would <?page nr="271"?>be hubris even to aim for that goal. Traditionally, medievalists have mostly focused on western, central, southern, and somewhat also northern Europe, for instance, but then this comes to a limit very quickly since linguistic barriers and also difficulties gaining access to the relevant sources and archives make this all very difficult. Recent years have also seen efforts to open the perspective toward the Arabic, Indian, and Asian world, whereas the American cultures remain mostly ignored in the medieval context. The opposite side probably faces the same difficulties, since Chinese or Japanese medievalists have to cope with a very long and expansive history as well, or the Indian or Indonesian historians, for example, which leaves no room or time to explore the connections, if there have ever been any, to other cultures.

In his book Chinua Achebe, David Caroll (1980) describes the novel Arrow of God as a fight for dominance both on the theological and political level, as well as in the framework of Igbo philosophy. In Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (1990), famous Achebe critics C. L. Innes and Berth Lindforts consider Arrow of God as a novel with conflicting ideas and voices inside each community with the tensions and rivalries that make it alive and vital. Another profound scholar on Achebe Chinwe Christiana Okechukwu (2001) in Achebe the Orator: The Art of Persuasion in Chinua Achebe's Novels assesses Arrow of God, which depicts a community under imminent danger of cultural genocide unleashed by agents of Western imperialism who have recently arrived in the indigenous society. However, the author in this study attempts to see Arrow of God as a postcolonial response to cultural diversity that upholds its uniting and cohesive force in Nigerian Igbo life. The goal is to look at how Achebe, in response to misleading western discourses, develops a simplistic image and appreciation that persists in Igbo life and culture even as colonization takes hold. This paper also exhibits how the Igbo people share their hardships, uphold their age-old ideals, celebrate festivals, and even battle on disagreements. This study employs postcolonial theory to reconsider aspects of cultural diversity among the African Igbo people, which are threatened by the intervention of European colonialism in the name of religion, progress, and civilization.

The well-known French-language writer, Assia Djebar, teaches the reader to listen intently to cultural differences, inspires tolerance towards other people and touches upon the problem of the emancipation of women in the Arab-Muslim civilization.
 In her work entitled Le Blanc de l’Algérie Djebar recalls deceased Algerian intellectuals, such as Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon or Kateb Yacine, as well as cruelly murdered writers and less known persons, who proved to be important for the author
 herself (namely her friends) and for the history of Algeria. The author bemoans those absent figures, remembering their last minutes of life, their families’ despair, and the atrocity of death.
 The article is an attempt at a reflection on the problem of absence that is in dichotomy with presence. The absence of great Algerians is unbearable; it is not silence but a cry for the memory of the tragic moments in the history of the country. Those moments, when remembered, shall help understand better the painful contemporary times. Djebar in a subtle way removes a white shroud (white is the colour of mourning in the tradition of North-African countries), thus showing the reader the moving and colourful Algerian fresco.

The importance of education had been recognized since the dawn of civilization as the most crucial element of becoming a human being. Women are a very important key factor in the development of human society. In India half of the population consists of women. The 11th five year plan (2007-2012) gave importance to women empowerment in all social, economic and political areas along with continuation of priority keeping over the issues like education, health, and income generating activities. The education and stated that there cannot be educated people without education of women. In India women have a much lower literacy rate than men. Literate women are better decision makers and they contributed more to the life of the community. An African proverb says “If a man is University Education Commission of India (1948-49), just after independence, felt the need of women’s e educated, an individual is educated. If a women is educated the entire family is educated”. Many states have large rural - urban differential in female literacy rate. Women power is crucial to the economic growth of any country. In recent times, people are realizing the value of women education. Even the low income families are willing to educate their children. Women are very important segment in development at local to global levels. Economic independence and education of women will go a long way in attaining self-reliance for women. The United Nations Development programme constituted eight Millennium Development Goals (MDG) for ensuring equity and peace across the world. The third Millennium Development Goal is directly related to the empowerment of women in India. What Indian women need therefore is not just empowerment, but a complete “Identity Revolution”.

My case study is taken from the northern Igbo of Nigeria and focuses on the village-group of Ihuwe, which name is today rendered as Ihube— thanks to its Anglicization during the period of colonial rule. This not-withstanding, the people still call themselves “Ihuwe,” the form I use in this paper. The Northern Igbo area, especially the area around Awka, Orlu, and Okigwe, is commonly regarded as the heartland of Igbo culture and civilization. Ihuwe, in that portion of old Okigwe Division known today as Okigwe Local Government Area (LGA), lies in a region of southern Nigeria that has been identified as having witnessed human activity from very early times, at least from the period of Acheulean culture. It also lies on the geographically and historically prominent Nsukka-Udi-Okigwe cuesta, which archeology tells us entered the Iron Age quite early in African history, no later than about the eighth century BCE. We are thus dealing with one of the areas of ancient human occupation, as well as an area known for its dense demographic profile. It is these features–early human settlement and occupation with its attendant consequence of severely attenuated oral history, dense demographic profile, and being the cradle land of Igbo culture—that help to define the Northern Igbo and mark them out from the Western, Eastern, Southern, and North-Eastern Igbo, believed to be relatively more recent descendants from them.Perhaps another feature that calls for mention here is their political culture. Although, like their other Igbo kinsmen, they could boast of having evolved only micro-, and therefore weak, states (what social anthropologists of the colonial period refused to refer to as states), they had their own special model of these micro-states.

Background: Health is a state of complete wellbeing free from any discomfort and pain. Despite remarkable world-wide progress in the field of diagnostic, curative and preventive medicine, still there are large populations of people living in isolation in natural and unpolluted surroundings far away from civilization, maintaining their traditional values, customs, beliefs and myths. India has the second largest tribal population of the world next to the African countries. About half of the world's autochthonous people live in India, thus making India home to many tribes which have an interesting and varied history of origins, customs and social practices. Aim: The current study was conducted to assess the tobacco use, awareness and its effect on health among Malayali tribes, Yelagiri Hills, Tamil nadu, India. Methods: The inhabitants of the 14 villages of the Yelagiri hills, who have completed 18 years and residing for more than 15 years present on the day of examination and who were willing to participate in the study were included. Data were collected from a cross-sectional survey, using a survey proforma, clinical examination and a pretested questionnaire which included demographic data, tobacco habits. An intraoral examination was carried out by a single examiner to assess the oral health status using WHO Oral Health Surveys - Basic Methods Proforma (1997). SPSS version 15 was used for statistical analysis. Results: Results showed that among 660 study population, 381 (57.7%) had no formal education. Among the study population 75% had the habit of alcohol consumption. Of those who had the habit of smoking, 26% smoked beedi, 10.9% smoked cigarette, 65% chewed raw tobacco, 18% chewed Hans and 28% had a combination of smoking and smokeless tobacco usage. The reason for practicing these habits were as a measure to combat the cold, relieving stress and body pain after work, and the lack of awareness of the hazards of the materials used. Prevalence of oral mucosal lesions in the study population was due to tobacco usage and alcohol consumption and lack of awareness regarding the deleterious effects of the products used. Conclusion: From the results of this study it may be concluded that the Malayali tribes were characterized by a lack of awareness about oral health, deep rooted dental beliefs, high prevalence of tobacco use and limited access to health services.

Tree-planting has long been an obsession of postcolonial environmental governance. Never innocent of its imperial history, the practice persists in global regimes of forestry today. For over two centuries, afforestation has been viewed as a panacea for a variety of ills including civilizational decline, diminished precipitation, warming temperatures, soil erosion, and decreasing biodiversity. As a result, tree plantations, despite their demonstrated failings in many environments, have flourished as an art of environmental governance that we term arboreal biopolitics. We trace some of the origins and importance of the taux de boisement in such plantation efforts, typically understood as a percentage of “appropriately” wooded land within a territory. Likely first developed in France by the early 19th century, this notion was operationalized in colonial territories assumed to be massively deforested. Targets of 30–33% forest cover, the minimum assumed for European civilization, were built into French forest training and policy and exported globally. Indeed, we demonstrate here that these French colonial policies and influences were as significant in many regions as those of better documented German forestry traditions, especially in African colonial territories and in British India. We further analyze the implications of these policies, and the degree to which the concept of a taux de boisement appears to have traveled to colonial forestry in India, further shaping forest policies of the postindependence era. We provide the example of the “National Mission for a Green India,” an effort by the Government of India to increase forest/tree cover by 5 million hectares and improve quality of forest cover on another 5 million hectares of forest/nonforest lands. Ostensibly aimed at improving forest-based livelihoods, the initiative has all the qualities of past forestry efforts in India, which have historically performed a reverse role: disinheriting forest-rooted populations. Colonial forestry, we therefore conclude, continues to haunt contemporary policy, contributing pathological ecologies, especially in the drylands, often with pernicious effects on local people.

This paper aims to portray the overall picture of poverty in the world and mentions the key solution to overcome poverty from a critical perspective. The data and figures were quoted from a number of researchers and organizations in the field of poverty around the world. Simultaneously, the information strengthens the correlations among poverty and lack of education. Only appropriate philosophies of education can improve the country’s socio-economic conditions and contribute to effective solutions to worldwide poverty. In the 21st century, despite the rapid development of science and technology with a series of inventions brought into the world to make life more comfortable, human poverty remains a global problem, especially in developing countries. Poverty, according to Lister (2004), is reflected by the state of “low living standards and/or inability to participate fully in society because of lack of material resources” (p.7). The impact and serious consequences of poverty on multiple aspects of human life have been realized by different organizations and researchers from different contexts (Fraser, 2000; Lister, 2004; Lipman, 2004; Lister, 2008). This paper will indicate some of the concepts and research results on poverty. Figures and causes of poverty, and some solutions from education as a key breaker to poverty will also be discussed. Creating a universal definition of poverty is not simple (Nyasulu, 2010). There are conflicts among different groups of people defining poverty, based on different views and fields. Some writers, according to Nyasulu, tend to connect poverty with social problems, while others focus on political or other causes. However, the reality of poverty needs to be considered from different sides and ways; for that reason, the diversity of definitions assigned to poverty can help form the basis on which interventions are drawn (Ife and Tesoriero, 2006). For instance, in dealing with poverty issues, it is essential to intervene politically; economic intervention is very necessary to any definition of this matter. A political definition necessitates political interventions in dealing with poverty, and economic definitions inevitably lead to economic interventions. Similarly, Księżopolski (1999) uses several models to show the perspectives on poverty as marginal, motivation and socialist. These models look at poverty and solutions from different angles. Socialists, for example, emphasize the responsibilities of social organization. The state manages the micro levels and distributes the shares of national gross resources, at the same time fighting to maintain the narrow gap among classes. In his book, Księżopolski (1999) also emphasizes the changes and new values of charity funds or financial aid from churches or organizations recognized by the Poor Law. Speaking specifically, in the new stages poverty has been recognized differently, and support is also delivered in limited categories related to more specific and visible objectives, with the aim of helping the poor change their own status for sustainable improvement. Three ways of categorizing the poor and locating them in the appropriate places are (1) the powerless, (2) who is willing to work and (3) who is dodging work. Basically, poverty is determined not to belong to any specific cultures or politics; otherwise, it refers to the situation in which people’s earnings cannot support their minimum living standard (Rowntree, 1910). Human living standard is defined in Alfredsson & Eide’s work (1999) as follows: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” (p. 524). In addition, poverty is measured by Global Hunger Index (GHI), which is calculated by the International Food Policy Institute (IFPRI) every year. The GHI measures hunger not only globally, but also by country and region. To have the figures multi-dimensionally, the GHI is based on three indicators: 1. Undernourishment: the proportion of the undernourished as a percentage of the population (reflecting the share of the population with insufficient calorie intake). 2. Child underweight: the proportion of children under age 5 who are underweight (low weight for their age, reflecting wasting, stunted growth or both), which is one indicator of child under-nutrition. 3. Child mortality: the mortality rate of children under 5 (partially reflecting the fatal synergy of inadequate dietary intake and unhealthy environments). Apart from the individual aspects and the above measurement based on nutrition, which help partly imagine poverty, poverty is more complicated, not just being closely related to human physical life but badly affecting spiritual life. According to Jones and Novak (1999 cited in Lister, 2008), poverty not only characterizes the precarious financial situation but also makes people self-deprecating. Poverty turns itself into the roots of shame, guilt, humiliation and resistance. It leads the poor to the end of the road, and they will never call for help except in the worst situations. Education can help people escape poverty or make it worse. In fact, inequality in education has stolen opportunity for fighting poverty from people in many places around the world, in both developed and developing countries (Lipman, 2004). Lipman confirms: “Students need an education that instills a sense of hope and possibility that they can make a difference in their own family, school, and community and in the broader national and global community while it prepare them for multiple life choices.” (p.181) Bradshaw (2005) synthesizes five main causes of poverty: (1) individual deficiencies, (2) cultural belief systems that support subcultures of poverty, (3) economic, political and social distortions or discrimination, (4) geographical disparities and (5) cumulative and cyclical interdependencies. The researcher suggests the most appropriate solution corresponding with each cause. This reflects the diverse causes of poverty; otherwise, poverty easily happens because of social and political issues. From the literature review, it can be said that poverty comes from complex causes and reasons, and is not a problem of any single individual or country. Poverty has brought about serious consequences and needs to be dealt with by many methods and collective effort of many countries and organizations. This paper will focus on representing some alarming figures on poverty, problems of poverty and then the education as a key breaker to poverty. According to a statistics in 2012 on poverty from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), nearly half the world's population lives below the poverty line, of which is less than $1.25 a day . In a statistics in 2015, of every 1,000 children, 93 do not live to age 5 , and about 448 million babies are stillborn each year . Poverty in the world is happening alarmingly. According to a World Bank study, the risk of poverty continues to increase on a global scale and, of the 2009 slowdown in economic growth, which led to higher prices for fuel and food, further pushed 53 million people into poverty in addition to almost 155 million in 2008. From 1990 to 2009, the average GHI in the world decreased by nearly one-fifth. Many countries had success in solving the problem of child nutrition; however, the mortality rate of children under 5 and the proportion of undernourished people are still high. From 2011 to 2013, the number of hungry people in the world was estimated at 842 million, down 17 percent compared with the period 1990 to 1992, according to a report released by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) titled “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013” . Although poverty in some African countries had been improved in this stage, sub-Saharan Africa still maintained an area with high the highest percentage of hungry people in the world. The consequences and big problems resulting from poverty are terrible in the extreme. The following will illustrate the overall picture under the issues of health, unemployment, education and society and politics ➢ Health issues: According a report by Manos Unidas, a non- government organization (NGO) in Spain , poverty kills more than 30,000 children under age 5 worldwide every day, and 11 million children die each year because of poverty. Currently, 42 million people are living with HIV, 39 million of them in developing countries. The Manos Unidas report also shows that 15 million children globally have been orphaned because of AIDS. Scientists predict that by 2020 a number of African countries will have lost a quarter of their population to this disease. Simultaneously, chronic drought and lack of clean water have not only hindered economic development but also caused disastrous consequences of serious diseases across Africa. In fact, only 58 percent of Africans have access to clean water; as a result, the average life expectancy in Africa is the lowest in the world, just 45 years old (Bui, 2010). ➢ Unemployment issues: According to the United Nations, the youth unemployment rate in Africa is the highest in the world: 25.6 percent in the Middle East and North Africa. Unemployment with growth rates of 10 percent a year is one of the key issues causing poverty in African and negatively affecting programs and development plans. Total African debt amounts to $425 billion (Bui, 2010). In addition, joblessness caused by the global economic downturn pushed more than 140 million people in Asia into extreme poverty in 2009, the International Labor Organization (ILO) warned in a report titled The Fallout in Asia, prepared for the High-Level Regional Forum on Responding to the Economic Crisis in Asia and the Pacific, in Manila from Feb. 18 to 20, 2009 . Surprisingly, this situation also happens in developed countries. About 12.5 million people in the United Kingdom (accounting for 20 percent of the population) are living below the poverty line, and in 2005, 35 million people in the United States could not live without charity. At present, 620 million people in Asia are living on less than $1 per day; half of them are in India and China, two countries whose economies are considered to be growing. ➢ Education issues: Going to school is one of the basic needs of human beings, but poor people cannot achieve it. Globally, 130 million children do not attend school, 55 percent of them girls, and 82 million children have lost their childhoods by marrying too soon (Bui, 2010). Similarly, two-thirds of the 759 million illiterate people in total are women. Specifically, the illiteracy rate in Africa keeps increasing, accounting for about 40 percent of the African population at age 15 and over 50 percent of women at age 25. The number of illiterate people in the six countries with the highest number of illiterate people in the world - China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Bangladesh and Egypt - reached 510 million, accounting for 70 percent of total global illiteracy. ➢ Social and political issues: Poverty leads to a number of social problems and instability in political systems of countries around the world. Actually, 246 million children are underage labors, including 72 million under age 10. Simultaneously, according to an estimate by the United Nations (UN), about 100 million children worldwide are living on the streets. For years, Africa has suffered a chronic refugee problem, with more than 7 million refugees currently and over 200 million people without homes because of a series of internal conflicts and civil wars. Poverty threatens stability and development; it also directly influences human development. Solving the problems caused by poverty takes a lot of time and resources, but afterward they can focus on developing their societies. Poverty has become a global issue with political significance of particular importance. It is a potential cause of political and social instability, even leading to violence and war not only within a country, but also in the whole world. Poverty and injustice together have raised fierce conflicts in international relations; if these conflicts are not satisfactorily resolved by peaceful means, war will inevitably break out. Obviously, poverty plus lack of understanding lead to disastrous consequences such as population growth, depletion of water resources, energy scarcity, pollution, food shortages and serious diseases (especially HIV/AIDS), which are not easy to control; simultaneously, poverty plus injustice will cause international crimes such as terrorism, drug and human trafficking, and money laundering. Among recognizable four issues above which reflected the serious consequences of poverty, the third ones, education, if being prioritized in intervention over other issues in the fighting against poverty is believed to bring more effectiveness in resolving the problems from the roots. In fact, human being with the possibility of being educated resulted from their distinctive linguistic ability makes them differential from other beings species on the earth (Barrow and Woods 2006, p.22). With education, human can be aware and more critical with their situations, they are aimed with abilities to deal with social problems as well as adversity for a better life; however, inequality in education has stolen opportunity for fighting poverty from unprivileged people (Lipman, 2004). An appropriate education can help increase chances for human to deal with all of the issues related to poverty; simultaneously it can narrow the unexpected side-effect of making poverty worse. A number of philosophies from ancient Greek to contemporary era focus on the aspect of education with their own epistemology, for example, idealism of Plato encouraged students to be truth seekers and pragmatism of Dewey enhanced the individual needs of students (Gutex, 1997). Education, more later on, especially critical pedagogy focuses on developing people independently and critically which is essential for poor people to have ability of being aware of what they are facing and then to have equivalent solutions for their problems. In other words, critical pedagogy helps people emancipate themselves and from that they can contribute to transform the situations or society they live in. In this sense, in his most influential work titled “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (1972), Paulo Freire carried out his critical pedagogy by building up a community network of peasants- the marginalized and unprivileged party in his context, aiming at awakening their awareness about who they are and their roles in society at that time. To do so, he involved the peasants into a problem-posing education which was different from the traditional model of banking education with the technique of dialogue. Dialogue wasn’t just simply for people to learn about each other; but it was for figuring out the same voice; more importantly, for cooperation to build a social network for changing society. The peasants in such an educational community would be relieved from stressfulness and the feeling of being outsiders when all of them could discuss and exchange ideas with each other about the issues from their “praxis”. Praxis which was derived from what people act and linked to some values in their social lives, was defined by Freire as “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (p.50). Critical pedagogy dialogical approach in Pedagogy of the Oppressed of Freire seems to be one of the helpful ways for solving poverty for its close connection to the nature of equality. It doesn’t require any highly intellectual teachers who lead the process; instead, everything happens naturally and the answers are identified by the emancipation of the learners themselves. It can be said that the effectiveness of this pedagogy for people to escape poverty comes from its direct impact on human critical consciousness; from that, learners would be fully aware of their current situations and self- figure out the appropriate solutions for their own. In addition, equality which was one of the essences making learners in critical pedagogy intellectually emancipate was reflected via the work titled “The Ignorant Schoolmaster” by Jacques Rancière (1991). In this work, the teacher and students seemed to be equal in terms of the knowledge. The explicator- teacher Joseph Jacotot employed the interrogative approach which was discovered to be universal because “he taught what he didn’t know”. Obviously, this teacher taught French to Flemish students while he couldn’t speak his students’ language. The ignorance which was not used in the literal sense but a metaphor showed that learners can absolutely realize their capacity for self-emancipation without the traditional teaching of transmission of knowledge from teachers. Regarding this, Rancière (1991, p.17) stated “that every common person might conceive his human dignity, take the measure of his intellectual capacity, and decide how to use it”. This education is so meaningful for poor people by being able to evoking their courageousness to develop themselves when they always try to stay away from the community due the fact that poverty is the roots of shame, guilt, humiliation and resistance (Novak, 1999). The contribution of critical pedagogy to solving poverty by changing the consciousness of people from their immanence is summarized by Freire’s argument in his “Pedagogy of Indignation” as follows: “It is certain that men and women can change the world for the better, can make it less unjust, but they can do so from starting point of concrete reality they “come upon” in their generation. They cannot do it on the basis of reveries, false dreams, or pure illusion”. (p.31) To sum up, education could be an extremely helpful way of solving poverty regarding the possibilities from the applications of studies in critical pedagogy for educational and social issues. Therefore, among the world issues, poverty could be possibly resolved in accordance with the indigenous people’s understanding of their praxis, their actions, cognitive transformation, and the solutions with emancipation in terms of the following keynotes: First, because the poor are powerless, they usually fall into the states of self-deprecation, shame, guilt and humiliation, as previously mentioned. In other words, they usually build a barrier between themselves and society, or they resist changing their status. Therefore, approaching them is not a simple matter; it requires much time and the contributions of psychologists and sociologists in learning about their aspirations, as well as evoking and nurturing the will and capacities of individuals, then providing people with chances to carry out their own potential for overcoming obstacles in life. Second, poverty happens easily in remote areas not endowed with favorable conditions for development. People there haven’t had a lot of access to modern civilization; nor do they earn a lot of money for a better life. Low literacy, together with the lack of healthy forms of entertainment and despair about life without exit, easily lead people into drug addiction, gambling and alcoholism. In other words, the vicious circle of poverty and powerlessness usually leads the poor to a dead end. Above all, they are lonely and need to be listened to, shared with and led to escape from their states. Community meetings for exchanging ideas, communicating and immediate intervening, along with appropriate forms of entertainment, should be held frequently to meet the expectations of the poor, direct them to appropriate jobs and, step by step, change their favorite habits of entertainment. Last but not least, poor people should be encouraged to participate in social forums where they can both raise their voices about their situations and make valuable suggestions for dealing with their poverty. Children from poor families should be completely exempted from school fees to encourage them to go to school, and curriculum should also focus on raising community awareness of poverty issues through extracurricular and volunteer activities, such as meeting and talking with the community, helping poor people with odd jobs, or simply spending time listening to them. Not a matter of any individual country, poverty has become a major problem, a threat to the survival, stability and development of the world and humanity. Globalization has become a bridge linking countries; for that reason, instability in any country can directly and deeply affect the stability of others. The international community has been joining hands to solve poverty; many anti-poverty organizations, including FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), BecA (the Biosciences eastern and central Africa), UN-REDD (the United Nations Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), BRAC (Building Resources Across Communities), UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), WHO (World Health Organization) and Manos Unidas, operate both regionally and internationally, making some achievements by reducing the number of hungry people, estimated 842 million in the period 1990 to 1992, by 17 percent in 2011- to 2013 . The diverse methods used to deal with poverty have invested billions of dollars in education, health and healing. The Millennium Development Goals set by UNDP put forward eight solutions for addressing issues related to poverty holistically: 1) Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. 2) Achieve universal primary education. 3) Promote gender equality and empower women. 4) Reduce child mortality. 5) Improve maternal health. 6) Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. 7) Ensure environmental sustainability. 8) Develop a global partnership for development. Although all of the mentioned solutions carried out directly by countries and organizations not only focus on the roots of poverty but break its circle, it is recognized that the solutions do not emphasize the role of the poor themselves which a critical pedagogy does. More than anyone, the poor should have a sense of their poverty so that they can become responsible for their own fate and actively fight poverty instead of waiting for help. It is not different from the cores of critical theory in solving educational and political issues that the poor should be aware and conscious about their situation and reflected context. It is required a critical transformation from their own praxis which would allow them to go through a process of learning, sharing, solving problems, and leading to social movements. This is similar to the method of giving poor people fish hooks rather than giving them fish. The government and people of any country understand better than anyone else clearly the strengths and characteristics of their homelands. It follows that they can efficiently contribute to causing poverty, preventing the return of poverty, and solving consequences of the poverty in their countries by many ways, especially a critical pedagogy; and indirectly narrow the scale of poverty in the world. In a word, the wars against poverty take time, money, energy and human resources, and they are absolutely not simple to end. Again, the poor and the challenged should be educated to be fully aware of their situation to that they can overcome poverty themselves. They need to be respected and receive sharing from the community. All forms of discrimination should be condemned and excluded from human society. When whole communities join hands in solving this universal problem, the endless circle of poverty can be addressed definitely someday. More importantly, every country should be responsible for finding appropriate ways to overcome poverty before receiving supports from other countries as well as the poor self-conscious responsibilities about themselves before receiving supports from the others, but the methods leading them to emancipation for their own transformation and later the social change.

he continued existence of indigenous knowledge is one mystery which boggles the mind, as for years, most communities in Africa had no means of documenting indigenous knowledge. However, indigenous knowledge has not faded or been extinct­—regardless of the absence of strategies and means to document it. Yesteryear African communities may not have had records or paper and ink to document indigenous knowledge, but they have, for a long time had the means to document, disseminate, and preserve their indigenous knowledge. The Ndebele community in Zimbabwe is one such community, which has had indigenous knowledge passed down from one generation to another without modern technology. This article seeks to establish how the Ndebele people in Zimbabwe have been able to pass down indigenous knowledge from one generation to another, and how specific indigenous knowledge, which was meant for a certain group of people within the community was kept as a secret within that specific group. Face-to-face interviews were held with Ndebele elders and custodians of culture. A purposive sample was used to select research participants.

Whereas African ways of knowing have previously been ‘misunderstood, misinterpreted, ridiculed and ignored’ in colonial discourses, this paper situates debate on their relevance in defining the African personhood and pedagogy of liberation and progress in Africa. The paper is designed to inform educators of African students on the nature of the African paradigm of knowing to understand the African psyche. Although modern people (especially the African elite) tend to invest little faith in developing indigenous knowledges, this paper amply demonstrates that traditional ways of knowing (spirituality centered wisdom) continue to be relevant in modern life even beyond the African boundaries. The insights informing the paper were gleaned from several studies conducted by this researcher (and others) exploring the African paradigm from Shona and Ndebele cultures’ conceptions of giftedness. The paper recommends revisiting African traditional ways of knowing to harmonize the past with the present and establish the true basis for pedagogy of liberation and progress in Africa.

In this article, I attempt to determine the position and value of ubuntu in the law of post-apartheid South Africa as well as to determine how ubuntu compares to humanitarianism. To achieve this goal, I examine both ubuntu and humanitarianism but I go further than merely an examination of the two concepts in isolation; a determination of the similarities and differences also takes place. The terms to be used in this study will be ‘traditional ubuntu’, which refers to ubuntu as known and understood by the indigenous people of South Africa, and humanitarianism, as known in the Western civilization.

Indigenous African societies have, for a long time, been using their knowledge for the betterment of their lives. They have also demonstrated an ability to manipulate their immediate or remote surroundings to live sustainably. Those who claim to fight for equal and human rights in Africa do so under the misconception that they, and the developing world, have historically and inherently violated, and continue to violate, human rights in numerous ways. While this might not be completely dismissed, there is a plethora of evidence from African folktales to demonstrate that Africans have not only respected human rights, but have also encouraged equal opportunities for every member of their society. This article cross-examines Ndebele folktales with the intention of demonstrating that African indigenous knowledge exhibited through folktales was a well-organised system, which ensured respect for human rights for all members, regardless of their physical or social stature. Central to this discussion are the folktales which focus on the role played by the vulnerable members of the animal community, who replicate their human counterparts. Folktales are unarguably a creation by the indigenes and emanate from their socio-political experiences, as well as their observations of the surroundings. This suggests that indigenous people already had an idea about human rights as well as the need for equal opportunities since time immemorial.

Van der Wiel, Renée. The Swazi People. Gallo Manor, South Africa: Awareness Publishing Group, 2012. Print.South Africa describes itself as “one rainbow nation going forward”, but within that rainbow there are eleven indigenous South African peoples. The Swazi People is one of eleven volumes in the African Cultures of South Africa series, which presents the cultures for readers at the upper elementary level. The other volumes include the cultures of The Khoikhoi, The Ndebele, The North Sotho, The San, The South Sotho, The Tsonga-Shangaan, The Tswana, The Venda, The Xhosa, and The Zulu.In The Swazi People, Renée Van der Wiel describes their arts and crafts, beliefs, clothes, history, houses, language, leaders, marriage, music and dance, recipes, and way of life. The book incorporates many Swazi words, which are listed in the glossary at the back of the book. For example, mahiya (cotton cloth), gogo (grandmother) and lobola (marriage gift, usually cattle) are all listed in the glossary.This volume is attractively produced and brightly coloured. It opens with a full-page map of South Africa that shows the historical movements of the Swazi people and highlights their homelands. Text and images are presented on alternate pages. The professional quality images are usually full-page and are either historical black and white photos or modern colour photos of Swazi people engaged in traditional activities. There is also an index, which improves the book's usefulness as an elementary research text.The text is written in age-appropriate language and deals with the subjects in sufficient detail that as an adult, I was able to learn from it. In general, the tone is objective and non-judgemental. For example, "[i]n 1973, King Sobhuzall and the Imbokoduo National Movement stopped all other political parties from taking part in elections in Swaziland. (…) After only five years of being a democracy, Swaziland became a country ruled by a king." Where there is bias present, it is more in the form of presenting the Swazi point of view: "But the Boers did not care about looking after the Swazi people – all they wanted was to get through to the sea without having to travel through British territory.".This sturdily bound volume is an excellent work and is highly recommended for public and elementary school libraries. Highly recommended: 4 stars out of 4Reviewer: Sandy CampbellSandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines. Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.

AbstractThe presence of genomic signatures of Eurasian origin in contemporary Ethiopians has been reported by several authors and estimated to have arrived in the area from 3000 years ago. Several studies reported plausible source populations for such a signature, using haplotype based methods on modern data or single-site methods on modern or ancient data. These studies did not reach a consensus and suggested an Anatolian or Sardinia-like proxy, broadly Levantine or Neolithic Levantine as possible sources. We demonstrate, however, that the deeply divergent, autochthonous African component which accounts for ~50% of most contemporary Ethiopian genomes, affects the overall allele frequency spectrum to an extent that makes it hard to control for it and, at once, to discern between subtly different, yet important, Eurasian sources (such as Anatolian or Levant Neolithic ones). Here we re-assess pattern of allele sharing between the Eurasian component of Ethiopians (here called “NAF” for Non African) and ancient and modern proxies. Our results unveil a genomic legacy that may connect the Eurasian genetic component of contemporary Ethiopians with Sea People and with population movements that affected the Mediterranean area and the Levant after the fall of the Minoan civilization.

IntroductionThere are two types of Africa. The first is a place where people and cultures live. The second is the image of Africa that has been invented through colonial knowledge and power. The colonial image of Africa, as the Other of Europe, a land “enveloped in the dark mantle of night” was supported by western states as it justified their colonial practices (Hegel 91). Any evidence that challenged the myth of the Dark Continent was destroyed, removed or ignored. While the looting of African natural resources has been studied, the looting of African knowledges hasn’t received as much attention, partly based on the assumption that Africans did not produce knowledge that could be stolen. This article invalidates this myth by examining the legacy of Ethiopia’s indigenous Ge’ez literature, and its looting and abduction by powerful western agents. The article argues that this has resulted in epistemic violence, where students of the Ethiopian indigenous education system do not have access to their books, while European orientalists use them to interpret Ethiopian history and philosophy using a foreign lens. The analysis is based on interviews with teachers and students of ten Ge’ez schools in Ethiopia, and trips to the Ethiopian manuscript collections in The British Library, The Princeton Library, the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and The National Archives in Addis Ababa.The Context of Ethiopian Indigenous KnowledgesGe’ez is one of the ancient languages of Africa. According to Professor Ephraim Isaac, “about 10,000 years ago, one single nation or community of a single linguistic group existed in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Horn of Africa” (The Habesha). The language of this group is known as Proto-Afroasiatic or Afrasian languages. It is the ancestor of the Semitic, Cushitic, Nilotic, Omotic and other languages that are currently spoken in Ethiopia by its 80 ethnic groups, and the neighbouring countries (Diakonoff). Ethiopians developed the Ge’ez language as their lingua franca with its own writing system some 2000 years ago. Currently, Ge’ez is the language of academic scholarship, studied through the traditional education system (Isaac, The Ethiopian). Since the fourth century, an estimated 1 million Ge’ez manuscripts have been written, covering religious, historical, mathematical, medicinal, and philosophical texts.One of the most famous Ge’ez manuscripts is the Kebra Nagast, a foundational text that embodied the indigenous conception of nationhood in Ethiopia. The philosophical, political and religious themes in this book, which craft Ethiopia as God’s country and the home of the Ark of the Covenant, contributed to the country’s success in defending itself from European colonialism. The production of books like the Kebra Nagast went hand in hand with a robust indigenous education system that trained poets, scribes, judges, artists, administrators and priests. Achieving the highest stages of learning requires about 30 years after which the scholar would be given the rare title Arat-Ayina, which means “four eyed”, a person with the ability to see the past as well as the future. Today, there are around 50,000 Ge’ez schools across the country, most of which are in rural villages and churches.Ge’ez manuscripts are important textbooks and reference materials for students. They are carefully prepared from vellum “to make them last forever” (interview, 3 Oct. 2019). Some of the religious books are regarded as “holy persons who breathe wisdom that gives light and food to the human soul”. Other manuscripts, often prepared as scrolls are used for medicinal purposes. Each manuscript is uniquely prepared reflecting inherited wisdom on contemporary lives using the method called Tirguamme, the act of giving meaning to sacred texts. Preparation of books is costly. Smaller manuscript require the skins of 50-70 goats/sheep and large manuscript needed 100-120 goats/sheep (Tefera).The Loss of Ethiopian ManuscriptsSince the 18th century, a large quantity of these manuscripts have been stolen, looted, or smuggled out of the country by travellers who came to the country as explorers, diplomats and scientists. The total number of Ethiopian manuscripts taken is still unknown. Amsalu Tefera counted 6928 Ethiopian manuscripts currently held in foreign libraries and museums. This figure does not include privately held or unofficial collections (41).Looting and smuggling were sponsored by western governments, institutions, and notable individuals. For example, in 1868, The British Museum Acting Director Richard Holms joined the British army which was sent to ‘rescue’ British hostages at Maqdala, the capital of Emperor Tewodros. Holms’ mission was to bring treasures for the Museum. Before the battle, Tewodros had established the Medhanialem library with more than 1000 manuscripts as part of Ethiopia’s “industrial revolution”. When Tewodros lost the war and committed suicide, British soldiers looted the capital, including the treasury and the library. They needed 200 mules and 15 elephants to transport the loot and “set fire to all buildings so that no trace was left of the edifices which once housed the manuscripts” (Rita Pankhurst 224). Richard Holmes collected 356 manuscripts for the Museum. A wealthy British woman called Lady Meux acquired some of the most illuminated manuscripts. In her will, she bequeathed them to be returned to Ethiopia. However, her will was reversed by court due to a campaign from the British press (Richard Pankhurst). In 2018, the V&A Museum in London displayed some of the treasures by incorporating Maqdala into the imperial narrative of Britain (Woldeyes, Reflections).Britain is by no means the only country to seek Ethiopian manuscripts for their collections. Smuggling occurred in the name of science, an act of collecting manuscripts for study. Looting involved local collaborators and powerful foreign sponsors from places like France, Germany and the Vatican. Like Maqdala, this was often sponsored by governments or powerful financers. For example, the French government sponsored the Dakar-Djibouti Mission led by Marcel Griaule, which “brought back about 350 manuscripts and scrolls from Gondar” (Wion 2). It was often claimed that these manuscripts were purchased, rather than looted. Johannes Flemming of Germany was said to have purchased 70 manuscripts and ten scrolls for the Royal Library of Berlin in 1905. However, there was no local market for buying manuscripts. Ge’ez manuscripts were, and still are, written to serve spiritual and secular life in Ethiopia, not for buying and selling. There are countless other examples, but space limits how many can be provided in this article. What is important to note is that museums and libraries have accrued impressive collections without emphasising how those collections were first obtained. The loss of the intellectual heritage of Ethiopians to western collectors has had an enormous impact on the country.Knowledge Grabbing: The Denial of Access to KnowledgeWith so many manuscripts lost, European collectors became the narrators of Ethiopian knowledge and history. Edward Ullendorff, a known orientalist in Ethiopian studies, refers to James Bruce as “the explorer of Abyssinia” (114). Ullendorff commented on the significance of Bruce’s travel to Ethiopia asperhaps the most important aspect of Bruce’s travels was the collection of Ethiopic manuscripts… . They opened up entirely new vistas for the study of Ethiopian languages and placed this branch of Oriental scholarship on a much more secure basis. It is not known how many MSS. reached Europe through his endeavours, but the present writer is aware of at least twenty-seven, all of which are exquisite examples of Ethiopian manuscript art. (133)This quote encompasses three major ways in which epistemic violence occurs: denial of access to knowledge, Eurocentric interpretation of Ethiopian manuscripts, and the handling of Ge’ez manuscripts as artefacts from the past. These will be discussed below.Western ‘travellers’, such as Bruce, did not fully disclose how many manuscripts they took or how they acquired them. The abundance of Ethiopian manuscripts in western institutions can be compared to the scarcity of such materials among traditional schools in Ethiopia. In this research, I have visited ten indigenous schools in Wollo (Lalibela, Neakutoleab, Asheten, Wadla), in Gondar (Bahita, Kuskwam, Menbere Mengist), and Gojam (Bahirdar, Selam Argiew Maryam, Giorgis). In all of the schools, there is lack of Ge’ez manuscripts. Students often come from rural villages and do not receive any government support. The scarcity of Ge’ez manuscripts, and the lack of funding which might allow for the purchasing of books, means the students depend mainly on memorising Ge’ez texts told to them from the mouth of their teacher. Although this method of learning is not new, it currently is the only way for passing indigenous knowledges across generations.The absence of manuscripts is most strongly felt in the advanced schools. For instance, in the school of Qene, poetic literature is created through an in-depth study of the vocabulary and grammar of Ge’ez. A Qene student is required to develop a deep knowledge of Ge’ez in order to understand ancient and medieval Ge’ez texts which are used to produce poetry with multiple meanings. Without Ge’ez manuscripts, students cannot draw their creative works from the broad intellectual tradition of their ancestors. When asked how students gain access to textbooks, one student commented:we don’t have access to Birana books (Ge’ez manuscripts written on vellum). We cannot learn the ancient wisdom of painting, writing, and computing developed by our ancestors. We simply buy paper books such as Dawit (Psalms), Sewasew (grammar) or Degwa (book of songs with notations) and depend on our teachers to teach us the rest. We also lend these books to each other as many students cannot afford to buy them. Without textbooks, we expect to spend double the amount of time it would take if we had textbooks. (Interview, 3 Sep. 2019)Many students interrupt their studies and work as labourers to save up and buy paper textbooks, but they still don’t have access to the finest works taken to Europe. Most Ge’ez manuscripts remaining in Ethiopia are locked away in monasteries, church stores or other places to prevent further looting. The manuscripts in Addis Ababa University and the National Archives are available for researchers but not to the students of the indigenous system, creating a condition of internal knowledge grabbing.While the absence of Ge’ez manuscripts denied, and continues to deny, Ethiopians the chance to enrich their indigenous education, it benefited western orientalists to garner intellectual authority on the field of Ethiopian studies. In 1981, British Museum Director John Wilson said, “our Abyssinian holdings are more important than our Indian collection” (Bell 231). In reaction, Richard Pankhurst, the Director of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, responded that the collection was acquired through plunder. Defending the retaining of Maqdala manuscripts in Europe, Ullendorff wrote:neither Dr. Pankhurst nor the Ethiopian and western scholars who have worked on this collection (and indeed on others in Europe) could have contributed so significantly to the elucidation of Ethiopian history without the rich resources available in this country. Had they remained insitu, none of this would have been possible. (Qtd. in Bell 234)The manuscripts are therefore valued based on their contribution to western scholarship only. This is a continuation of epistemic violence whereby local knowledges are used as raw materials to produce Eurocentric knowledge, which in turn is used to teach Africans as though they had no prior knowledge. Scholars are defined as those western educated persons who can speak European languages and can travel to modern institutions to access the manuscripts. Knowledge grabbing regards previous owners as inexistent or irrelevant for the use of the grabbed knowledges.Knowledge grabbing also means indigenous scholars are deprived of critical resources to produce new knowledge based on their intellectual heritage. A Qene teacher commented: our students could not devote their time and energy to produce new knowledges in the same way our ancestors did. We have the tradition of Madeladel, Kimera, Kuteta, Mielad, Qene and tirguamme where students develop their own system of remembering, reinterpreting, practicing, and rewriting previous manuscripts and current ones. Without access to older manuscripts, we increasingly depend on preserving what is being taught orally by elders. (Interview, 4 Sep. 2019)This point is important as it relates to the common myth that indigenous knowledges are artefacts belonging to the past, not the present. There are millions of people who still use these knowledges, but the conditions necessary for their reproduction and improvement is denied through knowledge grabbing. The view of Ge’ez manuscripts as artefacts dismisses the Ethiopian view that Birana manuscripts are living persons. As a scholar told me in Gondar, “they are creations of Egziabher (God), like all of us. Keeping them in institutions is like keeping living bodies in graveyards” (interview, 5 Oct. 2019).Recently, the collection of Ethiopian manuscripts by western institutions has also been conducted digitally. Thousands of manuscripts have been microfilmed or digitised. For example, the EU funded Ethio-SPaRe project resulted in the digital collection of 2000 Ethiopian manuscripts (Nosnitsin). While digitisation promises better access for people who may not be able to visit institutions to see physical copies, online manuscripts are not accessible to indigenous school students in Ethiopia. They simply do not have computer or internet access and the manuscripts are catalogued in European languages. Both physical and digital knowledge grabbing results in the robbing of Ethiopian intellectual heritage, and denies the possibility of such manuscripts being used to inform local scholarship. Epistemic Violence: The European as ExpertWhen considered in relation to stolen or appropriated manuscripts, epistemic violence is the way in which local knowledge is interpreted using a foreign epistemology and gained dominance over indigenous worldviews. European scholars have monopolised the field of Ethiopian Studies by producing books, encyclopaedias and digital archives based on Ethiopian manuscripts, almost exclusively in European languages. The contributions of their work for western scholarship is undeniable. However, Kebede argues that one of the detrimental effects of this orientalist literature is the thesis of Semiticisation, the designation of the origin of Ethiopian civilisation to the arrival of Middle Eastern colonisers rather than indigenous sources.The thesis is invented to make the history of Ethiopia consistent with the Hegelian western view that Africa is a Dark Continent devoid of a civilisation of its own. “In light of the dominant belief that black peoples are incapable of great achievements, the existence of an early and highly advanced civilization constitutes a serious anomaly in the Eurocentric construction of the world” (Kebede 4). To address this anomaly, orientalists like Ludolph attributed the origin of Ethiopia’s writing system, agriculture, literature, and civilisation to the arrival of South Arabian settlers. For example, in his translation of the Kebra Nagast, Budge wrote: “the SEMITES found them [indigenous Ethiopians] negro savages, and taught them civilization and culture and the whole scriptures on which their whole literature is based” (x).In line with the above thesis, Dillman wrote that “the Abyssinians borrowed their Numerical Signs from the Greeks” (33). The views of these orientalist scholars have been challenged. For instance, leading scholar of Semitic languages Professor Ephraim Isaac considers the thesis of the Arabian origin of Ethiopian civilization “a Hegelian Eurocentric philosophical perspective of history” (2). Isaac shows that there is historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence that suggest Ethiopia to be more advanced than South Arabia from pre-historic times. Various Ethiopian sources including the Kebra Nagast, the works of historian Asres Yenesew, and Ethiopian linguist Girma Demeke provide evidence for the indigenous origin of Ethiopian civilisation and languages.The epistemic violence of the Semeticisation thesis lies in how this Eurocentric ideological construction is the dominant narrative in the field of Ethiopian history and the education system. Unlike the indigenous view, the orientalist view is backed by strong institutional power both in Ethiopia and abroad. The orientalists control the field of Ethiopian studies and have access to Ge’ez manuscripts. Their publications are the only references for Ethiopian students. Due to Native Colonialism, a system of power run by native elites through the use of colonial ideas and practices (Woldeyes), the education system is the imitation of western curricula, including English as a medium of instruction from high school onwards. Students study the west more than Ethiopia. Indigenous sources are generally excluded as unscientific. Only the Eurocentric interpretation of Ethiopian manuscripts is regarded as scientific and objective.ConclusionEthiopia is the only African country never to be colonised. In its history it produced a large quantity of manuscripts in the Ge’ez language through an indigenous education system that involves the study of these manuscripts. Since the 19th century, there has been an ongoing loss of these manuscripts. European travellers who came to Ethiopia as discoverers, missionaries and scholars took a large number of manuscripts. The Battle of Maqdala involved the looting of the intellectual products of Ethiopia that were collected at the capital. With the introduction of western education and use of English as a medium of instruction, the state disregarded indigenous schools whose students have little access to the manuscripts. This article brings the issue of knowledge grapping, a situation whereby European institutions and scholars accumulate Ethiopia manuscripts without providing the students in Ethiopia to have access to those collections.Items such as manuscripts that are held in western institutions are not dead artefacts of the past to be preserved for prosperity. They are living sources of knowledge that should be put to use in their intended contexts. Local Ethiopian scholars cannot study ancient and medieval Ethiopia without travelling and gaining access to western institutions. This lack of access and resources has made European Ethiopianists almost the sole producers of knowledge about Ethiopian history and culture. For example, indigenous sources and critical research that challenge the Semeticisation thesis are rarely available to Ethiopian students. Here we see epistemic violence in action. Western control over knowledge production has the detrimental effect of inventing new identities, subjectivities and histories that translate into material effects in the lives of African people. In this way, Ethiopians and people all over Africa internalise western understandings of themselves and their history as primitive and in need of development or outside intervention. African’s intellectual and cultural heritage, these living bodies locked away in graveyards, must be put back into the hands of Africans.AcknowledgementThe author acknowledges the support of the Australian Academy of the Humanities' 2019 Humanities Travelling Fellowship Award in conducting this research.ReferencesBell, Stephen. “Cultural Treasures Looted from Maqdala: A Summary of Correspondence in British National Newspapers since 1981.” Kasa and Kasa. Eds. Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, and Shifereraw Bekele. Addis Ababa: Ababa University Book Centre, 1990. 231-246.Budge, Wallis. A History of Ethiopia, Nubia and Abyssinia. London: Methuen and Co, 1982.Demeke, Girma Awgichew. The Origin of Amharic. Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2013.Diakonoff, Igor M. Afrasian Languages. Moscow: Nauka, 1988.Dillmann, August. Ethiopic Grammar. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2005.Hegel, Georg W.F. The Philosophy of History. New York: Dover, 1956.Isaac, Ephraim. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church. New Jersey: Red Sea Press, 2013.———. “An Open Letter to an Inquisitive Ethiopian Sister.” The Habesha, 2013. 1 Feb. 2020 <http://www.zehabesha.com/an-open-letter-to-an-inquisitive-young-ethiopian-sister-ethiopian-history-is-not-three-thousand-years/>.Kebra Nagast. "The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelik I." Trans. Wallis Budge. London: Oxford UP, 1932.Pankhurst, Richard. "The Napier Expedition and the Loot Form Maqdala." Presence Africaine 133-4 (1985): 233-40.Pankhurst, Rita. "The Maqdala Library of Tewodros." Kasa and Kasa. Eds. Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, and Shifereraw Bekele. Addis Ababa: Ababa University Book Centre, 1990. 223-230.Tefera, Amsalu. ነቅዐ መጻህፍት ከ መቶ በላይ በግዕዝ የተጻፉ የእኢትዮጵያ መጻህፍት ዝርዝር ከማብራሪያ ጋር።. Addis Ababa: Jajaw, 2019.Nosnitsin, Denis. "Ethio-Spare Cultural Heritage of Christian Ethiopia: Salvation, Preservation and Research." 2010. 5 Jan. 2019 <https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/ethiostudies/research/ethiospare/missions/pdf/report2010-1.pdf>. Ullendorff, Edward. "James Bruce of Kinnaird." The Scottish Historical Review 32.114, part 2 (1953): 128-43.Wion, Anaïs. "Collecting Manuscripts and Scrolls in Ethiopia: The Missions of Johannes Flemming (1905) and Enno Littmann (1906)." 2012. 5 Jan. 2019 <https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00524382/document>. Woldeyes, Yirga Gelaw. Native Colonialism: Education and the Economy of Violence against Traditions in Ethiopia. Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2017.———. “Reflections on Ethiopia’s Stolen Treasures on Display in a London Museum.” The Conversation. 2018. 5 June 2018 <https://theconversation.com/reflections-on-ethiopias-stolen-treasures-on-display-in-a-london-museum-97346>.Yenesew, Asres. ትቤ፡አክሱም፡መኑ፡ አንተ? Addis Ababa: Nigid Printing House, 1959 [1951 EC].

I. First Brexit, then Trump: Has the past year or so ushered in a “wave” (Weisberg), a “barrage” (Desmond-Harris) or a “deluge” (Sidahmed) of that notoriously noxious affect, hate? It certainly feels that way to those of us identified with progressive social and political causes—those of us troubled, not just by Trump’s recent electoral victory, but by the far-right forces to which that victory has given voice. And yet the questions still hanging over efforts to quantify emotional or affective states leaves the claim that there has been a clear spike in hate moot (Ngai 26; Massumi 136-7; Ahmed, Promise 3-8). So let’s try asking a different question. Has this same period seen a rise, across liberal media platforms, in the rhetorical work of “hate-attribution”? Here, at least, an answer seems in readier reach. For no one given to scrolling distractedly through liberal Anglophone media outlets, from The New York Times, to The Guardian, to Slate, will be unfamiliar with a species of journalism that, in reporting the appalling activities associated with what has become known as the “alt-right” (Main; Wallace-Wells; Gourarie), articulates those activities in the rubric of a calculable uptick in hate itself.Before the U.S. Presidential election, this fledgling journalistic genre was already testing its wings, its first shudderings felt everywhere from Univision anchor Jorge Ramos’s widely publicized documentary, Hate Rising (2016), which explores the rise of white supremacist movements across the South-West U.S, to an edition of Slate’s Trumpcast entitled “The Alt-Right and a Deluge of Hate,” which broached the torment-by-Twitter of left-wing journalist David French. In the wake of the election, and the appalling acts of harassment and intimidation it seemed to authorize, the genre gained further momentum—leading to the New Yorker’s “Hate Is on the Rise After Trump’s Election,” to The Guardian’s “Trump’s Election led to Barrage of Hate,” and to Vox’s “The Wave of Post-Election Hate Reportedly Sweeping the Nation, Explained.” And it still has traction today, judging not just by James King’s recent year-in-review column, “The Year in Hate: From Donald Trump to the Rise of the Alt-Right,” but by Salon’s “A Short History of Hate” which tracks the alt-right’s meteoric 2016 rise to prominence, and the New York Times’ recently launched hate-speech aggregator, “This Week in Hate.”As should already be clear from these brisk, thumbnail accounts of the texts in question, the phenomena alluded to by the titular term “hate” are not instances of hate per se, but rather instances of “hate-speech.” The word “hate,” in other words, is being deployed here not literally, to refer to an emotional state, but metonymically, as a shorthand for “hate-speech”—a by-now widely conventionalized and legally codified parlance originating with the U.N. Declaration to describe “violent or violence-inciting speech or acts that “aim or intend to inflict injury, or incite prejudice or hatred, against persons of groups” because of their ethnic, religious, sexual or social affiliation. And there is no doubt that, beyond the headlines, these articles do incredibly important work, drawing connections between, and drawing attention to, a host of harmful activities associated with the so-called “alt-right”—from a pair of mangled, pretzel-shaped swastikas graffiti-ed in a children’s playground, to acts of harassment, intimidation and violence against women, African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, and LGBTQ people, to Trump’s own racist, xenophobic and misogynistic tweets. Yet the fact that an emotion-term like hate is being mobilized across these texts as a metonym for the “alt-right” is no oratorical curio. Rather, it perpetuates a pervasive way of thinking about the relationship between the alt-right (a political phenomenon) and hate (an emotional phenomenon) that should give pause to those of us committed to mining that vein of cultural symptomatology now consigned, across the social sciences and critical humanities, to affect theory. Specifically, these headlines inscribe, in miniature, a kind of micro-assessment, a micro-geography and micro-theory of hate. First, they suggest that, even prior to its incarnation in specific, and dangerous, forms of speech or action, hate is in and of itself anathema, a phenomenon so unquestioningly dangerous that a putative “rise” or “spike” in its net presence provides ample pretext for a news headline. Second, they propose that hate may be localized to a particular social or political group—a group subsisting, unsurprisingly, on that peculiarly contested frontier between the ideological alt-right and the American Midwest. And third, they imply that hate is so indubitably the single most significant source of the xenophobic, racist and sexist activities they go on to describe that it may be casually used as these activities’ lexical proxy. What is crystallizing here, I suggest, is what scholars of rhetoric dub a rhetorical “constellation” (Campbell and Jamieson 332)—a constellation from which hate emerges as, a) inherently problematic, b) localizable to the “alt-right,” and, c) the primary engine of the various activities and expressions we associate with them. This constellation of conventions for thinking about hate and its relationship to the activities of right-wing extremist movement has coalesced into a “genre” we might dub the genre of “hate-attribution.” Yet while it’s far from clear that the genre is an effective one in a political landscape that’s fast becoming a political battleground, it hasn’t appeared by chance. Treating “hate,” then, less as a descriptive “grid of analysis” (Sedgwick 152), than as a rhetorical projectile, this essay opens by interrogating the “hate-attribution” genre’s logic and querying its efficacy. Having done so, it approaches the concept of “alternatives” by asking: how might calling time on the genre help us think differently about both hate itself and about the forces catalyzing, and catalyzed by, Trump’s presidential campaign? II.The rhetorical power of the genre of hate-attribution, of course, isn’t too difficult to pin down. An emotion so thoroughly discredited that its assignment is now in and of itself a term of abuse (see, for example, the O.E.D’s freshly-expanded definition of the noun “hater”), hate is an emotion the Judeo-Christian tradition deems not just responsible for but practically akin to murder (John 3:1). In part as a result of this tradition, hate has proven thoroughly resistant to efforts to elevate it from the status of an expression of a subject’s pestiferous inner life to the status of a polemical response to an object in the world. Indeed, while a great deal of the critical energy amassing under the rubric of “affect theory” has recently been put into recuperating the strategic or diagnostic value of emotions long scorned as irrelevant to oppositional struggle—from irritation and envy, to depression, anger and shame (Ngai; Cvetkovich; Gould; Love)—hate has notably not been among them. In fact, those rare scholarly accounts of affect that do address “hate,” notably Ahmed’s excellent work on right-wing extremist groups in the United Kingdom, display an understandable reluctance to rehabilitate it for progressive thought (Cultural Politics). It should come as no surprise, then, that the genre of “hate-attribution” has a rare rhetorical power. In identifying “hate” as the source of a particular position, gesture or speech-act, we effectively drain said position, gesture or speech-act of political agency or representational power—reducing it from an at-least-potentially polemical action in or response to the world, to the histrionic expression of a reprehensible personhood. Yet because hate’s near-taboo status holds across the ideological and political spectrum, what is less clear is why the genre of hate-attribution has achieved such cachet in the liberal media in particular. The answer, I would argue, lies in the fact that the work of hate-attribution dovetails all too neatly with liberal political theory’s longstanding tendency to laminate its social and civic ideals to affective ideals like “love,” “sympathy,” “compassion,” and, when in a less demonstrative humor, “tolerance”. As Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions has recently shown, this tradition has an impressive philosophical pedigree, running from Aristotle’s philia (16), John Locke’s “toleration” and David Hume’s “sympathy” (69-75), to the twentieth century’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its promotion of “tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups.” And while the labour of what Lauren Berlant calls “liberal sentimentality” (“Poor Eliza”, 636) has never quite died away, it does seem to have found new strength with the emergence of the “intimate public sphere” (Berlant, Queen)—from its recent popular apotheosis in the Clinton campaign’s notorious “Love Trumps Hate” (a slogan in which “love,” unfortunately, came to look a lot like resigned technocratic quietism in the face of ongoing economic and environmental crisis [Zizek]), to its revival as a philosophical project among progressive scholars, many of them under the sway of the so-called “affective turn” (Nussbaum; Hardt; Sandoval; hooks). No surprise, then, that liberalism’s struggle to yoke itself to “love” should have as its eerie double a struggle to locate among its ideological and political enemies an increasingly reified “hate”. And while the examples of this project we’ve touched on so far have hailed from popular media, this set of protocols for thinking about hate and its relationship to the activities of right-wing extremist movements is not unique to media circles. It’s there in political discourse, as in ex-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s announcement, on MSNBC, that “Americans will unite against [Trump’s] hatred.” And it’s there, too, in academic media studies, from FLOW journal’s November 2016 call for papers inviting respondents to comment, among other things, on “the violence and hatred epitomized by Trump and his supporters,” to the SCMS conference’s invitation to members to participate in a pop-up panel entitled “Responding to Hate, Disenfranchisement and the Loss of the Commons.” Yet while the labor of hate-attribution to which many progressive forces have become attached carries an indisputable rhetorical force, it also has some profound rhetorical flaws. The very same stigma, after all, that makes “hate” such a powerful explanatory grenade to throw also makes it an incredibly tough one to land. As Ahmed’s analysis of the online rhetoric of white supremacist organizations should remind us (Cultural Politics), most groups structured around inciting and promoting violence against women and minorities identify, perversely, not as hate groups, but as movements propelled by the love of race and nation. And while left-wing pundits pronounce “hate” the signature emotion of a racist, misogynist Trump-voting right, supporters of Trump ascribe it, just as routinely, to the so-called “liberal elite,” a group whose mythical avatars—from the so-called “Social Justice Warrior” or “SJW,” to the supercilious Washington politico—are said to brand “ordinary [white, male] Americans” indiscriminately as racist, misogynistic, homophobic buffoons. Thus, for example, The Washington Post’s uncanny, far-right journalistic alter-ego, The Washington Times, dubs the SPLC a “liberal hate group”; the Wikipedia mirror-site, Conservapedia, recasts liberal objections to gun violence as “liberal hate speech” driven by an “irrational aversion to weapons”; while one blood-curdling sub-genre of reportage on Steve Bannon’s crypto-fascist soapbox, Breitbart News, is devoted to denouncing what it calls “ ‘anti-White Racism.’” It’s easy enough, of course, to defend the hate-attribution genre’s liberal incarnations while dismissing its right-wing variants as cynical, opportunistic shams, as Ahmed does (Cultural Politics)—thereby re-establishing the wellspring of hate where we are most comfortable locating it: among our political others. Yet to do so seems, in some sense, to perpetuate a familiar volley of hate-attribution. And to the extent that, as many media scholars have shown (Philips; Reed; Tett; Turow), our digital, networked political landscape is in danger of being reduced to a silo-ed discursive battleground, the ritual exchange of terminological grenades that everyone seems eager to propel across ideological lines, but that no one, understandably, seems willing to pick up, seems counter-productive to say the least.Even beyond the genre’s ultimate ineffectiveness, what should strike anyone used to reflecting on affect is how little justice it does to the ubiquity and intricacy of “hate” as an affective phenomenon. Hate is not and cannot be the exclusive property or preserve of one side of the political spectrum. One doesn’t have to stretch one’s critical faculties too far to see the extent to which the genre of hate-attribution participates in the emotional ballistics it condemns or seeks to redress. While trafficking in a relatively simple hate-paradigm (as a subjective emotional state that may be isolated to a particular person or group), the genre itself incarnates a more complex, socially dynamic model of hate in which the emotion operates through logics of projection perhaps best outlined by Freud. In the “hate-attribution” genre, that is, hate—like those equally abjected categories “sentimentality,” “worldliness” or “knowingness” broached by Sedgwick in her bravura analyses of “scapegoating attribution” (150-158)—finds its clearest expression in and through the labor of its own adscription. And it should come as no surprise that an emotion so widely devalued, where it is not openly prohibited, might also find expression in less overt form.Yet to say as much is by no means to discredit the genre. As legal scholar Jeremy Waldron has recently pointed out, there’s no particular reason why “the passions and emotions that lie behind a particular speech act” (34)—even up to and including hate—should devalue the speech acts they rouse. On the contrary, to pin the despicable and damaging activities of the so-called “alt right” on “hate” is, if anything, to do an injustice to a rich and complex emotion that can be as generative as it can be destructive. As Freud suggests in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” for example, hate may be the very seed of love, since the forms of “social feeling” (121) celebrated under the liberal rubric of “tolerance,” “love,” and “compassion,” are grounded in “the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identification” (121; italics mine). Indeed, Freud projects this same argument across a larger, historical canvas in Civilization and its Discontents, which contends that it is in our very struggle to combat our “aggressive instincts” that human communities have developed “methods intended to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of love” (31). For Freud, that is, the practice of love is a function of ongoing efforts to see hate harnessed, commuted and transformed. III.What might it mean, then, to call time on this round of hate-attribution? What sort of “alternatives” might emerge when we abandon the assumption that political engagement entails a “struggle over who has the right to declare themselves as acting out of love” (Ahmed, Cultural Politics 131), and thus, by that same token, a struggle over the exact location and source of hate? One boon, I suggest, is the license it gives those of us on the progressive left to simply own our own hate. There’s little doubt that reframing the dangerous and destructive forms of speech fomented by Trump’s campaign, not as eruptions of hate, or even as “hate-speech,” but as speech we hate would be more consistent with what once seemed affect theory’s first commandment: to take our own affective temperature before launching headlong into critical analysis. After all, when Lauren Berlant (“Trump”) takes a stab at economist Paul Krugman’s cautions against “the Danger of Political Emotions” with the timely reminder that “all the messages are emotional,” the “messages” she’s pointing to aren’t just those of our political others, they’re ours; and the “emotions” she’s pointing to aren’t just the evacuated, insouciant versions of love championed by the Clinton campaign, they’re of the messier, or as Ngai might put it, “uglier” (2) variety—from shame, depression and anger, to, yes, I want to insist, hate.By way of jump-starting this program of hate-avowal, then, let me just say it: this essay was animated, in part, by a certain kind of hate. The social critic in me hates the breathtaking simplification of the complex social, economic and emotional forces animating Trump voters that seem to actuate some liberal commentary; the psychologist in me hates the self-mystification palpable in the left’s insistence on projecting and thus disowning its own (often very well justified) aggressions; and the human being in me, hating the kind of toxic speech to which Trump’s campaign has given rise, wishes to be able to openly declare that hatred. Among its other effects, hate is characterized by hypervigilance for lapses or failings in an object it deems problematic, a hypervigilance that—sometimes—animates analysis (Zeki and Romoya). In this sense, “hate” seems entitled to a comfortable place in the ranks of what Nick Salvato has recently dubbed criticism’s creative “obstructions”—phenomena that, while “routinely identified as detriments” to critical inquiry, may also “form the basis for … critical thinking” (1).Yet while one boon associated with this disclosure might be a welcome intellectual honesty, a more significant boon, I’d argue, is what getting this disclosure out of the way might leave room for. Opting out of the game of hurling “hate” back and forth across a super-charged political arena, that is, we might devote our column inches and Facebook posts to the less sensational but more productive task of systematically challenging the specious claims, and documenting the damaging effects, of a species of utterance (Butler; Matsuda; Waldron) we’ve grown used to simply descrying as pure, distilled “hate”. And we also might do something else. Relieved of the confident conviction that we can track “Trumpism” to a spontaneous outbreak of a single, localizable emotion, we might be able to offer a fuller account of the economic, social, political and affective forces that energize it. Certainly, hate plays a part here—although the process by which, as Isabelle Stengers puts it, affect “make[s] present, vivid and mattering … a worldly world” (371) demands that we scrutinize that hate as a syndrome, rather than simply moralize it as a sin, addressing its mainsprings in a moment marked by the nerve-fraying and life-fraying effects of what has become known across the social sciences and critical humanities as conditions of social and economic “precarity” (Muehlebach; Neil and Rossiter; Stewart).But perhaps hate’s not the only emotion tucked away under the hood. Here’s something affect theory knows today: affect moves not, as more traditional theorists of political emotion have it, “unambiguously and predictably from one’s cognitive processing,” but in ways that are messy, muddled and indirect (Gould 24). That form of speech is speech we hate. But it may not be “hate speech.” That crime is a crime we hate. But it may not be a “hate-crime.” One of the critical tactics we might crib from Berlant’s work in Cruel Optimism is that of decoding and decrypting, in even the most hateful acts, an instance of what Berlant, herself optimistically, calls “optimism.” For Berlant, after all, optimism is very often cruel, attaching itself, as it seems to have done in 2016, to scenes, objects and people that, while ultimately destined to “imped[e] the aim that brought [it to them] initially,” nevertheless came to seem, to a good portion of the electorate, the only available exponent of that classic good-life genre, “the change that’s gonna come” (“Trump” 1-2) at a moment when the Democratic party’s primary campaign promise was more of the free-market same. 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In its preamble, The Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism (WA) commits the state to becoming: “A society in which respect for mutual difference is accompanied by equality of opportunity within a framework of democratic citizenship”. One of the principles of multiculturalism, as enunciated in the Charter, is “equality of opportunity for all members of society to achieve their full potential in a free and democratic society where every individual is equal before and under the law”. An important element of this principle is the “equality of opportunity … to achieve … full potential”. The implication here is that those who start from a position of disadvantage when it comes to achieving that potential deserve more than ‘equal’ treatment. Implicitly, equality can be achieved only through the recognition of and response to differential needs and according to the likelihood of achieving full potential. This is encapsulated in Kymlicka’s argument that neutrality is “hopelessly inadequate once we look at the diversity of cultural membership which exists in contemporary liberal democracies” (903). Yet such a potential commitment to differential support might seem unequal to some, where equality is constructed as the same or equal treatment regardless of differing circumstances. Until the past half-century or more, this problematic has been a hotly-contested element of the struggle for Civil Rights for African-Americans in the United States, especially as these rights related to educational opportunity during the years of racial segregation. For some, providing resources to achieve equal outcomes (rather than be committed to equal inputs) may appear to undermine the very ethos of liberal democracy. In Australia, this perspective has been the central argument of Pauline Hanson and her supporters who denounce programs designed as measures to achieve equality for specific disadvantaged groups; including Indigenous Australians and humanitarian refugees. Nevertheless, equality for all on all grounds of legally-accepted difference: gender, race, age, family status, sexual orientation, political conviction, to name a few; is often held as the hallmark of progressive liberal societies such as Australia. In the matter of religious freedoms the situation seems much less complex. All that is required for religious equality, it seems, is to define religion as a private matter – carried out, as it were, between consenting parties away from the public sphere. This necessitates, effectively, the separation of state and religion. This separation of religious belief from the apparatus of the state is referred to as ‘secularism’ and it tends to be regarded as a cornerstone of a liberal democracy, given the general assumption that secularism is a necessary precursor to equal treatment of and respect for different religious beliefs, and the association of secularism with the Western project of the Enlightenment when liberty, equality and science replaced religion and superstition. By this token, western nations committed to equality are also committed to being liberal, democratic and secular in nature; and it is a matter of state indifference as to which religious faith a citizen embraces – Wiccan, Christian, Judaism, etc – if any. Historically, and arguably more so in the past decade, the terms ‘democratic’, ‘secular’, ‘liberal’ and ‘equal’ have all been used to inscribe characteristics of the collective ‘West’. Individuals and states whom the West ascribe as ‘other’ are therefore either or all of: not democratic; not liberal; or not secular – and failing any one of these characteristics (for any country other than Britain, with its parliamentary-established Church of England, headed by the Queen as Supreme Governor) means that that country certainly does not espouse equality. The West and the ‘Other’ in Popular Discourse The constructed polarisation between the free, secular and democratic West that values equality; and the oppressive ‘other’ that perpetuates theocracies, religious discrimination and – at the ultimate – human rights abuses, is a common theme in much of the West’s media and popular discourse on Islam. The same themes are also applied in some measure to Muslims in Australia, in particular to constructions of the rights of Muslim women in Australia. Typically, Muslim women’s dress is deemed by some secular Australians to be a symbol of religious subjugation, rather than of free choice. Arguably, this polemic has come to the fore since the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. However, as Aly and Walker note, the comparisons between the West and the ‘other’ are historically constructed and inherited (Said) and have tended latterly to focus western attention on the role and status of Muslim women as evidence of the West’s progression comparative to its antithesis, Eastern oppression. An examination of studies of the United States media coverage of the September 11 attacks, and the ensuing ‘war on terror’, reveals some common media constructions around good versus evil. There is no equal status between these. Good must necessarily triumph. In the media coverage, the evil ‘other’ is Islamic terrorism, personified by Osama bin Laden. Part of the justification for the war on terror is a perception that the West, as a force for good in this world, must battle evil and protect freedom and democracy (Erjavec and Volcic): to do otherwise is to allow the terror of the ‘other’ to seep into western lives. The war on terror becomes the defence of the west, and hence the defence of equality and freedom. A commitment to equality entails a defeat of all things constructed as denying the rights of people to be equal. Hutcheson, Domke, Billeaudeaux and Garland analysed the range of discourses evident in Time and Newsweek magazines in the five weeks following September 11 and found that journalists replicated themes of national identity present in the communication strategies of US leaders and elites. The political and media response to the threat of the evil ‘other’ is to create a monolithic appeal to liberal values which are constructed as being a monopoly of the ‘free’ West. A brief look at just a few instances of public communication by US political leaders confirms Hutcheson et al.’s contention that the official construction of the 2001 attacks invoked discourses of good and evil reminiscent of the Cold War. In reference to the actions of the four teams of plane hijackers, US president George W Bush opened his Address to the Nation on the evening of September 11: “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). After enjoining Americans to recite Psalm 23 in prayer for the victims and their families, President Bush ended his address with a clear message of national unity and a further reference to the battle between good and evil: “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). In his address to the joint houses of Congress shortly after September 11, President Bush implicated not just the United States in this fight against evil, but the entire international community stating: “This is the world’s fight. This is civilisation’s fight” (cited by Brown 295). Addressing the California Business Association a month later, in October 2001, Bush reiterated the notion of the United States as the leading nation in the moral fight against evil, and identified this as a possible reason for the attack: “This great state is known for its diversity – people of all races, all religions, and all nationalities. They’ve come here to live a better life, to find freedom, to live in peace and security, with tolerance and with justice. When the terrorists attacked America, this is what they attacked”. While the US media framed the events of September 11 as an attack on the values of democracy and liberalism as these are embodied in US democratic traditions, work by scholars analysing the Australian media’s representation of the attacks suggested that this perspective was echoed and internationalised for an Australian audience. Green asserts that global media coverage of the attacks positioned the global audience, including Australians, as ‘American’. The localisation of the discourses of patriotism and national identity for Australian audiences has mainly been attributed to the media’s use of the good versus evil frame that constructed the West as good, virtuous and moral and invited Australian audiences to subscribe to this argument as members of a shared Western democratic identity (Osuri and Banerjee). Further, where the ‘we’ are defenders of justice, equality and the rule of law; the opposing ‘others’ are necessarily barbaric. Secularism and the Muslim Diaspora Secularism is a historically laden term that has been harnessed to symbolise the emancipation of social life from the forced imposition of religious doctrine. The struggle between the essentially voluntary and private demands of religion, and the enjoyment of a public social life distinct from religious obligations, is historically entrenched in the cultural identities of many modern Western societies (Dallmayr). The concept of religious freedom in the West has evolved into a principle based on the bifurcation of life into the objective public sphere and the subjective private sphere within which individuals are free to practice their religion of choice (Yousif), or no religion at all. Secularism, then, is contingent on the maintenance of a separation between the public (religion-free) and the private or non- public (which may include religion). The debate regarding the feasibility or lack thereof of maintaining this separation has been a matter of concern for democratic theorists for some time, and has been made somewhat more complicated with the growing presence of religious diasporas in liberal democratic states (Charney). In fact, secularism is often cited as a precondition for the existence of religious pluralism. By removing religion from the public domain of the state, religious freedom, in so far as it constitutes the ability of an individual to freely choose which religion, if any, to practice, is deemed to be ensured. However, as Yousif notes, the Western conception of religious freedom is based on a narrow notion of religion as a personal matter, possibly a private emotional response to the idea of God, separate from the rational aspects of life which reside in the public domain. Arguably, religion is conceived of as recognising (or creating) a supernatural dimension to life that involves faith and belief, and the suspension of rational thought. This Western notion of religion as separate from the state, dividing the private from the public sphere, is constructed as a necessary basis for the liberal democratic commitment to secularism, and the notional equality of all religions, or none. Rawls questioned how people with conflicting political views and ideologies can freely endorse a common political regime in secular nations. The answer, he posits, lies in the conception of justice as a mechanism to regulate society independently of plural (and often opposing) religious or political conceptions. Thus, secularism can be constructed as an indicator of pluralism and justice; and political reason becomes the “common currency of debate in a pluralist society” (Charney 7). A corollary of this is that religious minorities must learn to use the language of political reason to represent and articulate their views and opinions in the public context, especially when talking with non-religious others. This imposes a need for religious minorities to support their views and opinions with political reason that appeals to the community at large as citizens, and not just to members of the minority religion concerned. The common ground becomes one of secularism, in which all speakers are deemed to be indifferent as to the (private) claims of religion upon believers. Minority religious groups, such as fundamentalist Mormons, invoke secular language of moral tolerance and civil rights to be acknowledged by the state, and to carry out their door-to-door ‘information’ evangelisation/campaigns. Right wing fundamentalist Christian groups and Catholics opposed to abortion couch their views in terms of an extension of the secular right to life, and in terms of the human rights and civil liberties of the yet-to-be-born. In doing this, these religious groups express an acceptance of the plurality of the liberal state and engage in debates in the public sphere through the language of political values and political principles of the liberal democratic state. The same principles do not apply within their own associations and communities where the language of the private religious realm prevails, and indeed is expected. This embracing of a political rhetoric for discussions of religion in the public sphere presents a dilemma for the Muslim diaspora in liberal democratic states. For many Muslims, religion is a complete way of life, incapable of compartmentalisation. The narrow Western concept of religious expression as a private matter is somewhat alien to Muslims who are either unable or unwilling to separate their religious needs from their needs as citizens of the nation state. Problems become apparent when religious needs challenge what seems to be publicly acceptable, and conflicts occur between what the state perceives to be matters of rational state interest and what Muslims perceive to be matters of religious identity. Muslim women’s groups in Western Australia for example have for some years discussed the desirability of a Sharia divorce court which would enable Muslims to obtain divorces according to Islamic law. It should be noted here that not all Muslims agree with the need for such a court and many – probably a majority – are satisfied with the existing processes that allow Muslim men and women to obtain a divorce through the Australian family court. For some Muslims however, this secular process does not satisfy their religious needs and it is perceived as having an adverse impact on their ability to adhere to their faith. A similar situation pertains to divorced Catholics who, according to a strict interpretation of their doctrine, are unable to take the Eucharist if they form a subsequent relationship (even if married according to the state), unless their prior marriage has been annulled by the Catholic Church or their previous partner has died. Whereas divorce is considered by the state as a public and legal concern, for some Muslims and others it is undeniably a religious matter. The suggestion by the Anglican Communion’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law regarding marital disputes or financial matters is ultimately unavoidable, sparked controversy in Britain and in Australia. Attempts by some Australian Muslim scholars to elaborate on Dr Williams’s suggestions, such as an article by Anisa Buckley in The Herald Sun (Buckley), drew responses that, typically, called for Muslims to ‘go home’. A common theme in these responses is that proponents of Sharia law (and Islam in general) do not share a commitment to the Australian values of freedom and equality. The following excerpts from the online pages of Herald Sun Readers’ Comments (Herald Sun) demonstrate this perception: “These people come to Australia for freedoms they have never experienced before and to escape repression which is generally brought about by such ‘laws’ as Sharia! How very dare they even think that this would be an option. Go home if you want such a regime. Such an insult to want to come over to this country on our very goodwill and our humanity and want to change our systems and ways. Simply, No!” Posted 1:58am February 12, 2008 “Under our English derived common law statutes, the law is supposed to protect an individual’s rights to life, liberty and property. That is the basis of democracy in Australia and most other western nations. Sharia law does not adequately share these philosophies and principles, thus it is incompatible with our system of law.” Posted 12:55am February 11, 2008 “Incorporating religious laws in the secular legal system is just plain wrong. No fundamentalist religion (Islam in particular) is compatible with a liberal-democracy.” Posted 2:23pm February 10, 2008 “It should not be allowed in Australia the Muslims come her for a better life and we give them that opportunity but they still believe in covering them selfs why do they even come to Australia for when they don’t follow owe [our] rules but if we went to there [their] country we have to cover owe selfs [sic]” Posted 11:28am February 10, 2008 Conflicts similar to this one – over any overt or non-private religious practice in Australia – may also be observed in public debates concerning the wearing of traditional Islamic dress; the slaughter of animals for consumption; Islamic burial rites, and other religious practices which cannot be confined to the private realm. Such conflicts highlight the inability of the rational liberal approach to solve all controversies arising from religious traditions that enjoin a broader world view than merely private spirituality. In order to adhere to the liberal reduction of religion to the private sphere, Muslims in the West must negotiate some religious practices that are constructed as being at odds with the rational state and practice a form of Islam that is consistent with secularism. At the extreme, this Western-acceptable form is what the Australian government has termed ‘moderate Islam’. The implication here is that, for the state, ‘non-moderate Islam’ – Islam that pervades the public realm – is just a descriptor away from ‘extreme’. The divide between Christianity and Islam has been historically played out in European Christendom as a refusal to recognise Islam as a world religion, preferring instead to classify it according to race or ethnicity: a Moorish tendency, perhaps. The secular state prefers to engage with Muslims as an ethnic, linguistic or cultural group or groups (Yousif). Thus, in order to engage with the state as political citizens, Muslims must find ways to present their needs that meet the expectations of the state – ways that do not use their religious identity as a frame of reference. They can do this by utilizing the language of political reason in the public domain or by framing their needs, views and opinions exclusively in terms of their ethnic or cultural identity with no reference to their shared faith. Neither option is ideal, or indeed even viable. This is partly because many Muslims find it difficult if not impossible to separate their religious needs from their needs as political citizens; and also because the prevailing perception of Muslims in the media and public arena is constructed on the basis of an understanding of Islam as a religion that conflicts with the values of liberal democracy. In the media and public arena, little consideration is given to the vast differences that exist among Muslims in Australia, not only in terms of ethnicity and culture, but also in terms of practice and doctrine (Shia or Sunni). The dominant construction of Muslims in the Australian popular media is of religious purists committed to annihilating liberal, secular governments and replacing them with anti-modernist theocratic regimes (Brasted). It becomes a talking point for some, for example, to realise that there are international campaigns to recognise Gay Muslims’ rights within their faith (ABC) (in the same way that there are campaigns to recognise Gay Christians as full members of their churches and denominations and equally able to hold high office, as followers of the Anglican Communion will appreciate). Secularism, Preference and Equality Modood asserts that the extent to which a minority religious community can fully participate in the public and political life of the secular nation state is contingent on the extent to which religion is the primary marker of identity. “It may well be the case therefore that if a faith is the primary identity of any community then that community cannot fully identify with and participate in a polity to the extent that it privileges a rival faith. Or privileges secularism” (60). Modood is not saying here that Islam has to be privileged in order for Muslims to participate fully in the polity; but that no other religion, nor secularism, should be so privileged. None should be first, or last, among equals. For such a situation to occur, Islam would have to be equally acceptable both with other religions and with secularism. Following a 2006 address by the former treasurer (and self-avowed Christian) Peter Costello to the Sydney Institute, in which Costello suggested that people who feel a dual claim from both Islamic law and Australian law should be stripped of their citizenship (Costello), the former Prime Minister, John Howard, affirmed what he considers to be Australia’s primary identity when he stated that ‘Australia’s core set of values flowed from its Anglo Saxon identity’ and that any one who did not embrace those values should not be allowed into the country (Humphries). The (then) Prime Minister’s statement is an unequivocal assertion of the privileged position of the Anglo Saxon tradition in Australia, a tradition with which many Muslims and others in Australia find it difficult to identify. Conclusion Religious identity is increasingly becoming the identity of choice for Muslims in Australia, partly because it is perceived that their faith is under attack and that it needs defending (Aly). They construct the defence of their faith as a choice and an obligation; but also as a right that they have under Australian law as equal citizens in a secular state (Aly and Green). Australian Muslims who have no difficulty in reconciling their core Australianness with their deep faith take it as a responsibility to live their lives in ways that model the reconciliation of each identity – civil and religious – with the other. In this respect, the political call to Australian Muslims to embrace a ‘moderate Islam’, where this is seen as an Islam without a public or political dimension, is constructed as treating their faith as less than equal. Religious identity is generally deemed to have no place in the liberal democratic model, particularly where that religion is constructed to be at odds with the principles and values of liberal democracy, namely tolerance and adherence to the rule of law. Indeed, it is as if the national commitment to secularism rules as out-of-bounds any identity that is grounded in religion, giving precedence instead to accepting and negotiating cultural and ethnic differences. Religion becomes a taboo topic in these terms, an affront against secularism and the values of the Enlightenment that include liberty and equality. In these circumstances, it is not the case that all religions are equally ignored in a secular framework. What is the case is that the secular framework has been constructed as a way of ‘privatising’ one religion, Christianity; leaving others – including Islam – as having nowhere to go. Islam thus becomes constructed as less than equal since it appears that, unlike Christians, Muslims are not willing to play the secular game. In fact, Muslims are puzzling over how they can play the secular game, and why they should play the secular game, given that – as is the case with Christians – they see no contradiction in performing ‘good Muslim’ and ‘good Australian’, if given an equal chance to embrace both. Acknowledgements This paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2005-7, involving 10 focus groups and 60 in-depth interviews. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members. 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Literature—at least serious literature—is something that we work at. This is especially true within the academy. Literature departments are places where workers labour over texts carefully extracting and sharing meanings, for which they receive monetary reward. Specialised languages are developed to describe professional concerns. Over the last thirty years, the productions of mass culture, once regarded as too slight to warrant laborious explication, have been admitted to the academic workroom. Gothic studies—the specialist area that treats fearful and horrifying texts —has embraced the growing acceptability of devoting academic effort to texts that would once have fallen outside of the remit of “serious” study. In the seventies, when Gothic studies was just beginning to establish itself, there was a perception that the Gothic was “merely a literature of surfaces and sensations”, and that any Gothic of substantial literary worth had transcended the genre (Thompson 1). Early specialists in the field noted this prejudice; David Punter wrote of the genre’s “difficulty in establishing respectable credentials” (403), while Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick hoped her work would “make it easier for the reader of ‘respectable’ nineteenth-century novels to write ‘Gothic’ in the margin” (4). Gothic studies has gathered a modicum of this longed-for respectability for the texts it treats by deploying the methodologies used within literature departments. This has yielded readings that are largely congruous with readings of other sorts of literature; the Gothic text tells us things about ourselves and the world we inhabit, about power, culture and history. Yet the Gothic remains a production of popular culture as much as it is of the valorised literary field. I do not wish to argue for a reintroduction of the great divide described by Andreas Huyssen, but instead to suggest that we have missed something important about the ways in which popular Gothics—and perhaps other sorts of popular text—function. What if the popular Gothic were not a type of work, but a kind of play? How might this change the way we read these texts? Johan Huizinga noted that “play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own. Every child knows perfectly well he is ‘only pretending’, or that it was ‘only for fun’” (8). If the Gothic sometimes offers playful texts, then those texts might direct readers not primarily towards the real, but away from it, at least for a limited time. This might help to account for the wicked spectacle offered by Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, and in particular, its presentation of the black mass. The black mass is the parody of the Christian mass thought to be performed by witches and diabolists. Although it has doubtless been performed on rare occasions since the Middle Ages, the first black mass for which we have substantial documentary evidence was celebrated in Hampstead on Boxing Day 1918, by Montague Summers; it is a satisfying coincidence that Summers was one of the Gothic’s earliest scholars. We have record of Summer’s mass because it was watched by a non-participant, Anatole James, who was “bored to tears” as Summers recited tracts of Latin and practiced homosexual acts with a youth named Sullivan while James looked on (Medway 382-3). Summers claimed to be a Catholic priest, although there is some doubt as to the legitimacy of his ordination. The black mass ought to be officiated by a Catholic clergyman so the host may be transubstantiated before it is blasphemed. In doing so, the mass de-emphasises interpretive meaning and is an assault on the body of Christ rather than a mutilation of the symbol of Christ’s love and sacrifice. Thus, it is not conceived of primarily as a representational act but as actual violence. Nevertheless, Summers’ black mass seems like an elaborate form of sexual play more than spiritual warfare; by asking an acquaintance to observe the mass, Summers formulated the ritual as an erotic performance. The black mass was a favourite trope of the English Gothic of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out features an extended presentation of the mass; it was first published in 1934, but had achieved a kind of genre-specific canonicity by the nineteen-sixties, so that many Gothics produced and consumed in the sixties and seventies featured depictions of the black mass that drew from Wheatley’s original. Like Summers, Wheatley’s mass emphasised licentious sexual practice and, significantly, featured a voyeur or voyeurs watching the performance. Where James only wished Summers’ mass would end, Wheatley and his followers presented the mass as requiring interruption before it reaches a climax. This version of the mass recurs in most of Wheatley’s black magic novels, but it also appears in paperback romances, such as Susan Howatch’s 1973 The Devil on Lammas Night; it is reimagined in the literate and genuinely eerie short stories of Robert Aickman, which are just now thankfully coming back into print; it appears twice in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books. Nor was the black mass confined to the written Gothic, appearing in films of the period too; The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), The Witches (1966), Satan’s Skin, aka Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), The Wicker Man (1973), and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974) all feature celebrations of the Sabbat, as, of course do the filmed adaptations of Wheatley’s novels, The Devil Rides Out (1967) and To the Devil a Daughter (1975). More than just a key trope, the black mass was a procedure characteristic of the English Gothic of the sixties; narratives were structured so as to lead towards its performance. All of the texts mentioned above repeat narrative and trope, but more importantly, they loosely repeat experience, both for readers and the characters depicted. While Summers’ black mass apparently made for tiresome viewing, textual representations of the black mass typically embrace the pageant and sensuality of the Catholic mass it perverts, involving music, incense and spectacle. Often animalistic sex, bestiality, infanticide or human sacrifice are staged, and are intended to fascinate rather than bore. Although far from canonical in a literary sense, by 1969 Wheatley was an institution. He had sold 27 million books worldwide and around 70 percent of those had been within the British market. All of his 55 books were in print. A new Wheatley in hardcover would typically sell 30,000 copies, and paperback sales of his back catalogue stood at more than a million books a year. While Wheatley wrote thrillers in a range of different subgenres, at the end of the sixties it was his ‘black magic’ stories that were far and away the most popular. While moderately successful when first published, they developed their most substantial audience in the sixties. When The Satanist was published in paperback in 1966, it sold more than 100,000 copies in the first ten days. By 1973, five of these eight black magic titles had sold more than a million copies. The first of these was The Devil Rides Out which, although originally published in 1934, by 1973, helped by the Hammer film of 1967, had sold more than one and a half million copies, making it the most successful of the group (“Pooter”; Hedman and Alexandersson 20, 73). Wheatley’s black magic stories provide a good example of the way that texts persist and accumulate influence in a genre field, gaining genre-specific canonicity. Wheatley’s apparent influence on Gothic texts and films that followed, coupled with the sheer number of his books sold, indicate that he occupied a central position in the field, and that his approach to the genre became, for a time, a defining one. Wheatley’s black magic stories apparently developed a new readership in the sixties. The black mass perhaps became legible as a salacious, nightmarish version of some imaginary hippy gathering. While Wheatley’s Satanists are villainous, there is a vaguely progressive air about them; they listen to unconventional music, dance in the nude, participate in unconventional sexual practice, and glut themselves on various intoxicants. This, after all, was the age of Hair, Oh! Calcutta! and Oz magazine, “an era of personal liberation, in the view of some critics, one of moral anarchy” (Morgan 149). Without suggesting that the Satanists represent hippies there is a contextual relevancy available to later readers that would have been missing in the thirties. The sexual zeitgeist would have allowed later readers to pornographically and pleasurably imagine the liberated sexuality of the era without having to approve of it. Wheatley’s work has since become deeply, embarrassingly unfashionable. The books are racist, sexist, homophobic and committed to a basically fascistic vision of an imperial England, all of which will repel most casual readers. Nor do his works provide an especially good venue for academic criticism; all surface, they do not reward the labour of careful, deep reading. The Devil Rides Out narrates the story of a group of friends locked in a battle with the wicked Satanist Mocata, “a pot-bellied, bald headed person of about sixty, with large, protuberant, fishy eyes, limp hands, and a most unattractive lisp” (11), based, apparently, on the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley (Ellis 145-6). Mocata hopes to start a conflict on the scale of the Great War by performing the appropriate devilish rituals. Led by the aged yet spry Duke de Richleau and garrulous American Rex van Ryn, the friends combat Mocata in three substantial set pieces, including their attempt to disrupt the black mass as it is performed in a secluded field in Wiltshire. The Devil Rides Out is a ripping story. Wheatley’s narrative is urgent, and his simple prose suggests that the book is meant to be read quickly. Likewise, Wheatley’s protagonists do not experience in any real way the crises and collapses that so frequently trouble characters who struggle against the forces of darkness in Gothic narratives. Even when de Richlieu’s courage fails as he observes the Wiltshire Sabbat, this failure is temporary; Rex simply treats him as if he has been physically wounded, and the Duke soon rallies. The Devil Rides Out is remarkably free of trauma and its sequelæ. The morbid psychological states which often interest the twentieth century Gothic are excluded here in favour of the kind of emotional fortitude found in adventure stories. The effect is remarkable. Wheatley retains a cheerful tone even as he depicts the appalling, and potentially repellent representations become entertainments. Wheatley describes in remarkable detail the actions that his protagonists witness from their hidden vantage point. If the Gothic reader looks forward to gleeful blasphemy, then this is amply provided, in the sort of sardonic style that Lewis’ The Monk manages so well. A cross is half stomped into matchwood and inverted in the ground, the Christian host is profaned in a way too dreadful to be narrated, and the Duke informs us that the satanic priests are eating “a stillborn baby or perhaps some unfortunate child that they have stolen and murdered”. Rex is chilled by the sound of a human skull rattling around in their cauldron (117-20). The mass offers a special quality of experience, distinct from the everyday texture of life represented in the text. Ostensibly waiting for their chance to liberate their friend Simon from the action, the Duke and Rex are voyeurs, and readers participate in this voyeurism too. The narrative focus shifts from Rex and de Richlieu’s observation of the mass, to the wayward medium Tanith’s independent, bespelled arrival at the ritual site, before returning to the two men. This arrangement allows Wheatley to extend his description of the gathering, reiterating the same events from different characters’ perspectives. This would be unusual if the text were simply a thriller, and relied on the ongoing release of new information to maintain narrative interest. Instead, readers have the opportunity to “view” the salacious activity of the Satanists a second time. This repetition delays the climactic action of the scene, where the Duke and Rex rescue Simon by driving a car into the midst of the ritual. Moreover, the repetition suggests that the “thrill” on offer is not necessarily related to plot —it offers us nothing new —but instead to simply seeing the rite performed. Tanith, although conveyed to the mass by some dark power, is delayed and she too becomes a part of the mass’ audience. She saw the Satanists… tumbling upon each other in the disgusting nudity of their ritual dance. Old Madame D’Urfé, huge-buttocked and swollen, prancing by some satanic power with all the vigour of a young girl who had only just reached maturity; the Babu, dark-skinned, fleshy, hideous; the American woman, scraggy, lean-flanked and hag-like with empty, hanging breasts; the Eurasian, waving the severed stump of his arm in the air as he gavotted beside the unwieldy figure of the Irish bard, whose paunch stood out like the grotesque belly of a Chinese god. (132) The reader will remember that Madame D’Urfé is French, and that the cultists are dancing before the Goat of Mendes, who masquerades as Malagasy, earlier described by de Richlieu as “a ‘bad black’ if ever I saw one” (11). The human body is obsessively and grotesquely racialized; Wheatley is simultaneously at his most politically vile and aesthetically Goya-like. The physically grotesque meshes with the crudely sexual and racist. The Irishman is typed as a “bard” and somehow acquires a second racial classification, the Indian is horrible seemingly because of his race, and Madame D’Urfé is repulsive because her sexuality is framed as inappropriate to her age. The dancing crone is defined in terms of a younger, presumably sexually appealing, woman; even as she is denigrated, the reader is presented with a contrary image. As the sexuality of the Satanists is excoriated, titillation is offered. Readers may take whatever pleasure they like from the representations while simultaneously condemning them, or even affecting revulsion. A binary opposition is set up between de Richlieu’s company, who are cultured and moneyed, and the Satanists, who might masquerade as civilised, but reveal their savagery at the Sabbat. Their race becomes a further symptom of their lack of civilised qualities. The Duke complains to Rex that “there is little difference between this modern Satanism and Voodoo… We might almost be witnessing some heathen ceremony in an African jungle!” (115). The Satanists become “a trampling mass of bestial animal figures” dancing to music where, “Instead of melody, it was a harsh, discordant jumble of notes and broken chords which beat into the head with a horrible nerve-racking intensity and set the teeth continually on edge” (121). Music and melody are cultural constructions as much as they are mathematical ones. The breakdown of music suggests a breakdown of culture, more specifically, of Western cultural norms. The Satanists feast, with no “knives, forks, spoons or glasses”, but instead drink straight from bottles and eat using their hands (118). This is hardly transgression on the scale of devouring an infant, but emphasises that Satanism is understood to represent the antithesis of civilization, specifically, of a conservative Englishness. Bad table manners are always a sign of wickedness. This sort of reading is useful in that it describes the prejudices and politics of the text. It allows us to see the black mass as meaningful and places it within a wider discursive tradition making sense of a grotesque dance that combines a variety of almost arbitrary transgressive actions, staged in a Wiltshire field. This style of reading seems to confirm the approach to genre text that Fredric Jameson has espoused (117-9), which understands the text as reinforcing a hegemonic worldview within its readership. This is the kind of reading the academy often works to produce; it recognises the mass as standing for something more than the simple fact of its performance, and develops a coherent account of what the mass represents. The labour of reading discerns the work the text does out in the world. Yet despite the good sense and political necessity of this approach, my suggestion is that these observations are secondary to the primary function of the text because they cannot account for the reading experience offered by the Sabbat and the rest of the text. Regardless of text’s prejudices, The Devil Rides Out is not a book about race. It is a book about Satanists. As Jo Walton has observed, competent genre readers effortlessly grasp this kind of distinction, prioritising certain readings and elements of the text over others (33-5). Failing to account for the reading strategy presumed by author and audience risks overemphasising what is less significant in a text while missing more important elements. Crucially, a reading that emphasises the political implications of the Sabbat attributes meaning to the ritual; yet the ritual’s ability to hold meaning is not what is most important about it. By attributing meaning to the Sabbat, we miss the fact of the Sabbat itself; it has become a metaphor rather than a thing unto itself, a demonstration of racist politics rather than one of the central necessities of a black magic story. Seligman, Weller, Puett and Simon claim that ritual is usually read as having a social purpose or a cultural meaning, but that these readings presume that ritual is interested in presenting the world truthfully, as it is. Seligman and his co-authors take exception to this, arguing that ritual does not represent society or culture as they are and that ritual is “a subjunctive—the creation of an order as if it were truly the case” (20). Rather than simply reflecting history, society and culture, ritual responds to the disappointment of the real; the farmer performs a rite to “ensure” the bounty of the harvest not because the rite symbolises the true order of things, but as a consolation because sometimes the harvest fails. Interestingly, the Duke’s analysis of the Satanists’ motivations closely accords with Seligman et al.’s understanding of the need for ritual to console our anxieties and disappointments. For the cultists, the mass is “a release of all their pent-up emotions, and suppressed complexes, engendered by brooding over imagined injustice, lust for power, bitter hatred of rivals in love or some other type of success or good fortune” (121). The Satanists perform the mass as a response to the disappointment of the participant’s lives; they are ugly, uncivil outsiders and according to the Duke, “probably epileptics… nearly all… abnormal” (121). The mass allows them to feel, at least for a limited time, as if they are genuinely powerful, people who ought to be feared rather than despised, able to command the interest and favour of their infernal lord, to receive sexual attention despite their uncomeliness. Seligman et al. go on to argue ritual “must be understood as inherently nondiscursive—semantic content is far secondary to subjunctive creation.” Ritual “cannot be analysed as a coherent system of beliefs” (26). If this is so, we cannot expect the black mass to necessarily say anything coherent about Satanism, let alone racism. In fact, The Devil Rides Out tends not to focus on the meaning of the black mass, but on its performance. The perceivable facts of the mass are given, often in instructional detail, but any sense of what they might stand for remains unexplicated in the text. Indeed, taken individually, it is hard to make sense or meaning out of each of the Sabbat’s components. Why must a skull rattle around a cauldron? Why must a child be killed and eaten? If communion forms the most significant part of the Christian mass, we could presume that the desecration of the host might be the most meaningful part of the rite, but given the extensive description accorded the mass as a whole, the parody of communion is dealt with surprisingly quickly, receiving only three sentences. The Duke describes the act as “the most appalling sacrilege”, but it is left at that as the celebrants stomp the host into the ground (120). The action itself is emphasised over anything it might mean. Most of Wheatley’s readers will, I think, be untroubled by this. As Pierre Bourdieu noted, “the regularities inherent in an arbitrary condition… tend to appear as necessary, even natural, since they are the basis of the schemes of perception and appreciation through which they are apprehended” (53-4). Rather than stretching towards an interpretation of the Sabbat, readers simply accept it a necessary condition of a “black magic story”. While the genre and its tropes are constructed, they tend to appear as “natural” to readers. The Satanists perform the black mass because that is what Satanists do. The representation does not even have to be compelling in literary terms; it simply has to be a “proper” black mass. Richard Schechner argues that, when we are concerned with ritual, “Propriety”, that is, seeing the ritual properly executed, “is more important than artistry in the Euro-American sense” (178). Rather than describing the meaning of the ritual, Wheatley prefers to linger over the Satanist’s actions, their gluttonous feasting and dancing, their nudity. Again, these are actions that hold sensual qualities for their performers that exceed the simply discursive. Through their ritual behaviour they enter into atavistic and ecstatic states beyond everyday human consciousness. They are “hardly human… Their brains are diseased and their mentality is that of the hags and the warlocks of the middle ages…” and are “governed apparently by a desire to throw themselves back into a state of bestiality…” (117-8). They finally reach a state of “maniacal exaltation” and participate in an “intoxicated nightmare” (135). While the mass is being celebrated, the Satanists become an undifferentiated mass, their everyday identities and individuality subsumed into the subjunctive world created by the ritual. Simon, a willing participant, becomes lost amongst them, his individual identity given over to the collective, subjunctive state created by the group. Rex and the Duke are outside of this subjunctive world, expressing revulsion, but voyeuristically looking on; they retain their individual identities. Tanith is caught between the role played by Simon, and the one played by the Duke and Rex, as she risks shifting from observer to participant, her journey to the Sabbat being driven on by “evil powers” (135). These three relationships to the Sabbat suggest some of the strategies available to its readers. Like Rex and the Duke, we seem to observe the black mass as voyeurs, and still have the option of disapproving of it, but like Simon, the act of continuing to read means that we are participating in the representation of this perversity. Having committed to reading a “black magic story”, the reader’s procession towards the black mass is inevitable, as with Tanith’s procession towards it. Yet, just as Tanith is compelled towards it, readers are allowed to experience the Sabbat without necessarily having to see themselves as wanting to experience it. This facilitates a ludic, undiscursive reading experience; readers are not encouraged to seriously reflect on what the Sabbat means or why it might be a source of vicarious pleasure. They do not have to take responsibility for it. As much as the Satanists create a subjunctive world for their own ends, readers are creating a similar world for themselves to participate in. The mass—an incoherent jumble of sex and violence—becomes an imaginative refuge from the everyday world which is too regulated, chaste and well-behaved. Despite having substantial precedent in folklore and Gothic literature (see Medway), the black mass as it is represented in The Devil Rides Out is largely an invention. The rituals performed by occultists like Crowley were never understood by their participants as being black masses, and it was not until the foundation of the Church of Satan in San Francisco in the later nineteen-sixties that it seems the black mass was performed with the regularity or uniformity characteristic of ritual. Instead, its celebration was limited to eccentrics and dabblers like Summers. Thus, as an imaginary ritual, the black mass can be whatever its writers and readers need it to be, providing the opportunity to stage those actions and experiences required by the kind of text in which it appears. Because it is the product of the requirements of the text, it becomes a venue in which those things crucial to the text are staged; forbidden sexual congress, macabre ceremony, violence, the appearance of intoxicating and noisome scents, weird violet lights, blue candle flames and the goat itself. As we observe the Sabbat, the subjunctive of the ritual aligns with the subjunctive of the text itself; the same ‘as if’ is experienced by both the represented worshippers and the readers. The black mass offers an analogue for the black magic story, providing, almost in digest form, the images and experiences associated with the genre at the time. Seligman et al. distinguish between modes that they term the sincere and the ritualistic. Sincerity describes an approach to reading the world that emphasises the individual subject, authenticity, and the need to get at “real” thought and feeling. Ritual, on the other hand, prefers community, convention and performance. The “sincere mode of behavior seeks to replace the ‘mere convention’ of ritual with a genuine and thoughtful state of internal conviction” (103). Where the sincere is meaningful, the ritualistic is practically oriented. In The Devil Rides Out, the black mass, a largely unreal practice, must be regarded as insincere. More important than any “meaning” we might extract from the rite is the simple fact of participation. The individuality and agency of the participants is apparently diminished in the mass, and their regular sense of themselves is recovered only as the Duke and Rex desperately drive the Duke’s Hispano into the ritual so as to halt it. The car’s lights dispel the subjunctive darkness and reduce the unified group to a gathering of confused individuals, breaking the spell of naughtily enabling darkness. Just as the meaningful aspect of the mass is de-emphasised for ritual participants, for readers, self and discursive ability are de-emphasised in favour of an immersive, involving reading experience; we keep reading the mass without pausing to really consider the mass itself. It would reduce our pleasure in and engagement with the text to do so; the mass would be revealed as obnoxious, unpleasant and nonsensical. When we read the black mass we tend to put our day-to-day values, both moral and aesthetic, to one side, bracketing our sincere individuality in favour of participation in the text. If there is little point in trying to interpret Wheatley’s black mass due to its weakly discursive nature, then this raises questions of how to approach the text. Simply, the “work” of interpretation seems unnecessary; Wheatley’s black mass asks to be regarded as a form of play. Simply, The Devil Rides Out is a venue for a particular kind of readerly play, apart from the more substantial, sincere concerns that occupy most literary criticism. As Huizinga argued that, “Play is distinct from ‘ordinary’ life both as to locality and duration… [A significant] characteristic of play [is] its secludedness, its limitedness” (9). Likewise, by seeing the mass as a kind of play, we can understand why, despite the provocative and transgressive acts it represents, it is not especially harrowing as a reading experience. Play “lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil…. The valuations of vice and virtue do not apply...” (Huizinga 6). The mass might well offer barbarism and infanticide, but it does not offer these to its readers “seriously”. The subjunctive created by the black mass for its participants on the page is approximately equivalent to the subjunctive Wheatley’s text proposes to his readers. The Sabbat offers a tawdry, intoxicated vision, full of strange performances, weird lights, queer music and druggy incenses, a darkened carnival apart from the real that is, despite its apparent transgressive qualities and wretchedness, “only playing”. References Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Ellis, Bill. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 2000. Hedman, Iwan, and Jan Alexandersson. Four Decades with Dennis Wheatley. DAST Dossier 1. Köping 1973. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge, 1989. Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. International Library of Sociology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949. Medway, Gareth J. The Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism. New York: New York UP, 2001. “Pooter.” The Times 19 August 1969: 19. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman, 1980. Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Revised and Expanded ed. New York: Routledge, 1988. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. 1980. New York: Methuen, 1986. Seligman, Adam B, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett and Bennett Simon. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Thompson, G.R. Introduction. “Romanticism and the Gothic Imagination.” The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Ed. G.R. Thompson. Pullman: Washington State UP, 1974. 1-10. Wheatley, Dennis. The Devil Rides Out. 1934. London: Mandarin, 1996.