A Current Bibliography on African Affairs - Baywood Publishing

VOLUME 42, NUMBER 4—2009-2010 / 421
accomplish; and, finally, how military commanders and politicians employed the WSB as a
tactical instrument in a larger map of military and political strategies.
1417. Vale, P. SOUTH AFRICAN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: EIGHT
DOODLES. Politeia. 2008, 27(2):104-119.
Using optics offered by sociology, the argument lays out eight alternative understandings
of (and explanations for) the founding and growth of the study of international
relations. It is interested in probing silences within which linear ‘Story-bound’ international
relations have developed in the country, and which have set such low horizon for the
discipline in South Africa.
1418. van Binsbergen, W. EXISTENTIAL DILEMMAS OF A NORTH ATLANTIC
ANTHROPOLOGIST IN THE PRODUCTION OF RELEVANT AFRICANIST
KNOWLEDGE. CODESRIA Bulletin. 2008, 1&2:15-20.
When, nearly half a century after the end of colonial rule, an African university grants an
honorary degree to a prominent researcher from the former colonising country, this is a
significant step in the global liberation of African difference (to paraphrase Mudimbe’s
expression). The African specialist knowledge institution declares itself to be no longer on
the receiving and subaltern side, but takes the initiative to assert its independent scholarly
authority, and thus redefines the flow of North–South intellectual dependence into one of
intercontinental equality.
1419. Van der Vlies, A. ON THE AMBIGUITIES OF NARRATIVE AND OF HIS-
TORY: WRITING (ABOUT) THE PAST IN RECENT SOUTH AFRICAN LITERARY
CRITICISM. Journal of Southern African Studies. 2008, 34(4):949-961.
As South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was in the midst of
conducting Human Rights Violation hearings across the country in 1997, leading intellectual
and writer Njabulo Ndebele suggested in an essay in Negotiating the Past—one of
the first significant collections to examine memory and trauma in the transition—that the
experiences of ordinary people, victims who had been made to feature in narratives hitherto
authored by the apartheid state, were being recuperated by the TRC in what amounted to a
‘restoration of narrative’. Ndebele had, of course, famously argued at the turn of the 1990s
that the daily experience of the majority of the country’s population—the ‘ordinary’, the
exigencies of the quotidian—should inform an aesthetics not beholden to the spectacular
narratives authored by the white government.
1420. van der Westhuizen, E. J. GAPS AND PARADOXES IN THEORY AND
PRACTICE: THE PUBLIC SECTOR HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT DIS-
COURSE IN SOUTH AFRICA. Politeia. 2008, 27(3):1-20.
There is currently a gap between the work of academics and that of human resource (HR)
practitioners. This is due to specific paradoxes inherent to the field. Within this paradoxical
context, the article reflects on a future framework for public sector human resource management
(PSHRM) thought and practice. Academics are predominantly preoccupied with
the relatively unpredictable process of exploring and questioning. One assumes that academics
seek one universal truth, namely an integrated, structured knowledge base, as
opposed to a situation where there are disconnected facts and ideas.