Institutionalising the right to self-determination as a human right solution to problems of ethnic conflict in Africa: the case of Ethiopia and South Africa
Written under the supervision of Prof. Michelo Hansungule at the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, Centre for Human Rights
Ethiopia's “Leap in the Dark”: Federalism and Self-Determination in the New constitution
Benjamin Disraeli took a calculated “leap in the dark” in 1867, when he extended the right to vote to almost all British men. With hindsight, his leap can be seen to have been a necessary (but not sufficient) means of defusing discontent and promoting democratization. Ethiopia seems poised for an even bigger constitutional leap into a murkier realm, into an ethnicized attempt at democratization. To gain acceptance, a new constitution like Ethiopia's must seem to be all things to all people and, in Ethiopia and elsewhere, the end of the Cold War has seen an explosion of ethnic nationalisms similar to the one occurring in Europe late in the 19th century. Without benefit of hindsight one can only make informed guesses about the effects of a new Ethiopian “constitutionalism” on events which are largely beyond the drafters’ control. I will argue that there are grounds for a guarded optimism over Ethiopia's leap.
Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery
As ancient as Homer's lines on the shield of Achilles and as recent as John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," ekphrasis is the art of describing works of art. Over the ages its practitioners have created a museum of words about real and imaginary paintings and sculptures - a museum that James Heffernan explores in this book. Profoundly ambivalent, ekphrastic poetry celebrates the power of the image even as it tries to circumscribe that power with the authority of the word. This contest is typically gendered: the voice of male speech striving to control a female image that is both alluring and threatening, male narrative seeking to overcome the fixating impact of beauty poised in space. Moving from the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante to contemporary American poetry, this book presents a history of struggle between rival systems of representation. Heffernan also shows how this struggle changes. Poets ranging from Ovid to Shakespeare use verbalized depictions of rape to show the violence men do under the "colour" of their words; romantic poetry at once salutes and questions the transcendent beauty of visual art preserved in the newly born public museum. In the modern and postmodern eras, poets contend with all the words generated by museums themselves to regulate our experience of visual art.