The Search for a Cultural Identity: A Personal View of South African "Indian" Theatre
Because it is a tiny community, it is often seen from without to be a homogenous group. Outsiders are often unaware of the differences between religions, languages, customs, class, and political affiliations that exacerbate internal tensions within the community. Very conscious of their minority position in the country, Indians in South Africa have also been subject to a great deal of external pressure. In the apartheid era, they were required to live in segregated areas and attend segregated schools and were also subjected to threats of repatriation to India (although these threats never materialized). At the same time, the relative affluence of some of their members and their social position caught between the haves (mostly white) and the have-nots (mostly black) made them targets of African resentment.2 As a result, there are two
Comparative Indian literature
The new novel from Jenny Pitman set in the exciting world of horseracing and following her debut, ON THE EDGE. Jan Hardy is 33, widowed and short of money, but determined to make a success of her life for her children's sake. She has managed against the odds to acquire a Jockey Club licence to train horses, and in the face of fierce competition from the traditional male, upper-class bastions of racing, she sets out to carve a career for herself. At the first big sale she attends in Ireland, her nervous uncertainty causes her to drop her guard and trust those who extend the hand of friendship when she is most vulnerable. Within the year, she has discovered who was offering her friendship and who wasn't.
ROBERT HOOKE, MONUMENTS AND MEMORY
In June 1682, when Robert Hooke (1635–1703) delivered a lecture to the Royal Society on memory – his first and only excursion into human psychology – he had just witnessed a spectacularly public failure of memory when new texts were added to the Monument (1671–76), which he had designed with Christopher Wren. In a direct civic challenge to royal authority, these explained that the ‘Papists’ had set London's Great Fire of September 1666. This paper examines the tensions and accommodations between the City of London and Charles II that accompanied the Monument's erection; the column serves to dramatize the difficulties besetting would-be memorializers in Restoration England. It is suggested that Hooke's memory lecture must be read, not only in the light of specific political anxieties then attached to memory, but against the other ways in which he grappled with forms of signification, here treated as forms of historical witness.