[DOWNLOAD] "Fossicking in the House of Love: Apartheid Masculinity in the Folly (Report)" by Gerald Gaylard # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Fossicking in the House of Love: Apartheid Masculinity in the Folly (Report)
- Author : Gerald Gaylard
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 80 KB
Description
Ivan Vladislavic has been concerned with the architectonics of power from his earliest writing. This is not surprising, given his incubation within the political pressure-cooker that was apartheid South Africa, particularly during the 1980s. As with all thinkers with integrity who have found themselves within iniquitous contexts of political hegemony and oppression, he asked how it could be that an entire population of many millions could be oppressed, either literally or imaginatively, directly or indirectly, by a flagrantly unjust system. Of course, he found part of an answer to this question in the interest that whites had in maintaining apartheid, on the one hand, and the immense power of this system backed by global imperialism and capitalism, on the other. But it seems that this in itself did not suffice as an answer for Vladislavic as he searched further and found a deeper and broader explanation in the way in which the architectonics of power relate to vision, the individual conscience and gender and sexuality. Percy Bysshe Shelley suggested the notion of the exteriorisation of conscience as far back as the early 1800s: by this he meant that the majority of humans did not have the wherewithal to develop their own ethical conscience, preferring for external persons or systems to provide it rather than do the arduous and thankless, perhaps even impossible, work on their own. Heroes, Shelley argued, are required by most people, heroes who will show us how to live, who will provide ethics and a vision. This idea of a prosthetic conscience explains why, for instance, even within a 21st-century rationalist hypermodernity, much of Britain's population remains royalist today. As Paul Foot puts it in the classic Red Shelley: