ABSTRACT
The first issue, ‘Boundaries and Race’, displays a wide-ranging engagement with diverse positions in critical theory. Three of the articles focus on the questions of race and colonialism. In his essay, ‘Race as science, race as language’, Gareth Cornwell examines the genealogy of race in the manner of Michel Foucault’s critique in The Birth of the Clinic. He argues that the so-called science of race, with its roots in the nineteenth century, is far from being the kind of objective science that it purports to be: it is a language and as such it partakes of the metaphoricity and arbitrariness characteristic of all languages. Cornwell offers a helpful summary of the current state of the debate on the subject and also demonstrates the value of Foucauldian epistemological strategies in the study of race and colonialism. John Noyes’s essay, ‘The capture of space’ uses aspects of the theoretical framework developed by Deleuze and Guattari in order to interrogate the ideological implications of an episode in a short story by the colonial German writer, Hans Grimm. He shows how, by employing the devices of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, the colonist ensures that the ‘native’ is transformed into and inscribed in Western writing. Taking the theme further, Njabulo Ndebele’s essay, ‘Redefining relevance’, presents us with a science of resistance based on the strategic use of the norms of literary production. He argues that hitherto Black South African literature has been dominated by a paradigm of protest which is no longer supported by the objective conditions of the struggle in the country. He calls for a literature which probes beneath the surface of oppression and represents the invisible and perhaps more insidious forms of ideological interpellation.
