Michael Francis
Biographic Data
| ID | 3640358 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Francis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Francis |
| SIGNATURE | FRANCIS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Athabasca University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9622-9202 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Re-Claiming the Past by Re-Living in the Present: The ≠Khomani San Living Museum and the Restoration of Dignity in the Southern Kalahari
This article critiques dominant development frameworks by examining the ≠Khomani San of the Southern Kalahari, who despite winning one of South Africa's largest post-Apartheid land claims, remain marginalised and impoverished. Mainstream approaches continue to frame their future through Eurocentric binaries of “traditional” and “modern,” forcing the community to navigate imposed categories that fracture social cohesion and commodify identity. Dev…
Addressing Harms and Restoring Dignity: Reparative, Restorative and Reconciliatory Justice in the Southern Kalahari
Using the frameworks of reparative, restorative and reconciliatory justice, this article explores the impact of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Land Reform Programme on harms caused to the ≠ Khomani San of the Southern Kalahari. These harms included dehumanisation, fragmentation and genocide during the colonial and Apartheid periods. We show that, despite its objectives, the TRC failed to acknowledge the dignity and …
The edge of the periphery: Situating the ≠Khomani San of the Southern Kalahari in the political economy of Southern Africa
In this article, we situate the Southern Kalahari San within the political economy of Southern Africa and within the world system. Here we draw on and critique modernization theory as a model of explanation for the lack of development found locally. In the Southern Kalahari, the ≠Khomani San won a massive land claim that should have empowered and enabled local development. Yet they remain largely impoverished, while seeking out a meaningful life …
Attending to Ghosts: Some Reflections on the Disavowals of British Great War Historiography
In Elizabeth Bowen’s terrifying 1941 short story of the London Blitz, ‘The Demon Lover’, the ghost of a Great War soldier returns to haunt his former lover amidst the ruins of a London laid waste by another global conflict. Kathleen Drover, arriving from the country to fetch some items from her shut up family home, finds awaiting her a mysterious letter. It appears to come from the young man she had last seen on his final night of leave in 1916, …
Memories of Empire . Volume I: The White Man’s World, by Bill Schwarz
The conventional wisdom about Britain’s disengagement from empire in the decades immediately after 1945 is that decolonisation was achieved without a crisis in the domestic state equivalent to that which afflicted France during the Algerian war of independence. While historians have increasingly dismissed congenial explanations for British imperial retreat which had argued that independence was a consequence of either altruism or a sober and disp…
HIV/Aids and discourses of denial in sub-Saharan Africa: An Afro-optimist response
This article re-examines HIV/AIDs discourses within the global imagining of Africa. It focuses on official responses which, between 1999 and 2007, were characterized by denialism, when South African President Thabo Mbeki, questioned the origin of the disease. The historical factors that shaped arguments locating African AIDS discourses as a counter-ideological response to Afro-pessimism are examined. It is argued that the controversy generated by…
Representation and misrepresentation: San regional advocacy and the global imagery
The San of southern Africa are one of the most represented peoples of southern Africa. Internationally, they are most often depicted as a hunting-gathering people or as a people recently removed from that way of life. Organisations such as Survival International draw on these images for political advocacy and in campaigns for land rights for indigenous peoples. In southern Africa, San organisations fight for similar rights and, despite their memb…
British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People's War
Historians concerned with Britain during the Second World War have become increasingly comfortable with the use of feature film as an index of wartime social and cultural values; but they have remained sceptical about the value of novels, plays and verse as legitimate primary sources. In addition, recourse among literary scholars to some of the more opaque aspects of linguistic deconstruction may have strained the goodwill of even those historian…
The Crossing: The invention of tradition among San descendents of the Drakensberg, KwaZulu–Natal, South Africa
In the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa there are Zulu speakers who have begun reasserting an aboriginal or San identity. In 2003 they created a ritual to celebrate their San ancestry and to make a public statement of their San ethnicity. This article highlights an example of cultural creativity and regeneration, not to deride the invention of tradition, but to acknowledge the multiple webs of meaning used/manufactured to make sense of the w…
Silencing the past: Historical and archaeological colonisation of the Southern San in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
The San of the Drakensberg are assumed to be extinct. Yet, there are Zulu-speaking people in the Drakensberg who still identify as San. These people and their claims both challenge the preconceived notions of what it means to be San in southern Africa and show the situational nature of ethnicity. The claims revolve around mutual ties and family genealogies that do not necessarily constitute a salient or ‘complete’ identity, but a process intimate…
Contested Histories: A Critique of Rock Art in the Drakensberg Mountains
The Drakensberg Mountains which stretch across the eastern part of South Africa offer us a legacy of beautiful rock art. These images are often used to show the disappearance and ultimate destruction of the Southern San. In this article I argue that these images also show a continuity with contemporary Zulu-speaking people of the region, and I challenge the assumed ethnic or cultural boundaries represented in the historical and archaeological rec…
Chilean socialism
Silencing the past: Historical and archaeological colonisation of the Southern San in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
The San of the Drakensberg are assumed to be extinct. Yet, there are Zulu-speaking people in the Drakensberg who still identify as San. These people and their claims both challenge the preconceived notions of what it means to be San in southern Africa and show the situational nature of ethnicity. The claims revolve around mutual ties and family genealogies that do not necessarily constitute a salient or ‘complete’ identity, but a process intimate…
Representation and misrepresentation: San regional advocacy and the global imagery
The San of southern Africa are one of the most represented peoples of southern Africa. Internationally, they are most often depicted as a hunting-gathering people or as a people recently removed from that way of life. Organisations such as Survival International draw on these images for political advocacy and in campaigns for land rights for indigenous peoples. In southern Africa, San organisations fight for similar rights and, despite their memb…
HIV/Aids and discourses of denial in sub-Saharan Africa: An Afro-optimist response
This article re-examines HIV/AIDs discourses within the global imagining of Africa. It focuses on official responses which, between 1999 and 2007, were characterized by denialism, when South African President Thabo Mbeki, questioned the origin of the disease. The historical factors that shaped arguments locating African AIDS discourses as a counter-ideological response to Afro-pessimism are examined. It is argued that the controversy generated by…
The edge of the periphery: Situating the ≠Khomani San of the Southern Kalahari in the political economy of Southern Africa
In this article, we situate the Southern Kalahari San within the political economy of Southern Africa and within the world system. Here we draw on and critique modernization theory as a model of explanation for the lack of development found locally. In the Southern Kalahari, the ≠Khomani San won a massive land claim that should have empowered and enabled local development. Yet they remain largely impoverished, while seeking out a meaningful life …
Contested Histories: A Critique of Rock Art in the Drakensberg Mountains
The Drakensberg Mountains which stretch across the eastern part of South Africa offer us a legacy of beautiful rock art. These images are often used to show the disappearance and ultimate destruction of the Southern San. In this article I argue that these images also show a continuity with contemporary Zulu-speaking people of the region, and I challenge the assumed ethnic or cultural boundaries represented in the historical and archaeological rec…
Addressing Harms and Restoring Dignity: Reparative, Restorative and Reconciliatory Justice in the Southern Kalahari
Using the frameworks of reparative, restorative and reconciliatory justice, this article explores the impact of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Land Reform Programme on harms caused to the ≠ Khomani San of the Southern Kalahari. These harms included dehumanisation, fragmentation and genocide during the colonial and Apartheid periods. We show that, despite its objectives, the TRC failed to acknowledge the dignity and …
Attending to Ghosts: Some Reflections on the Disavowals of British Great War Historiography
In Elizabeth Bowen’s terrifying 1941 short story of the London Blitz, ‘The Demon Lover’, the ghost of a Great War soldier returns to haunt his former lover amidst the ruins of a London laid waste by another global conflict. Kathleen Drover, arriving from the country to fetch some items from her shut up family home, finds awaiting her a mysterious letter. It appears to come from the young man she had last seen on his final night of leave in 1916, …
Memories of Empire . Volume I: The White Man’s World, by Bill Schwarz
The conventional wisdom about Britain’s disengagement from empire in the decades immediately after 1945 is that decolonisation was achieved without a crisis in the domestic state equivalent to that which afflicted France during the Algerian war of independence. While historians have increasingly dismissed congenial explanations for British imperial retreat which had argued that independence was a consequence of either altruism or a sober and disp…
Chilean socialism
Silencing the past: Historical and archaeological colonisation of the Southern San in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
The San of the Drakensberg are assumed to be extinct. Yet, there are Zulu-speaking people in the Drakensberg who still identify as San. These people and their claims both challenge the preconceived notions of what it means to be San in southern Africa and show the situational nature of ethnicity. The claims revolve around mutual ties and family genealogies that do not necessarily constitute a salient or ‘complete’ identity, but a process intimate…
Contested Histories: A Critique of Rock Art in the Drakensberg Mountains
The Drakensberg Mountains which stretch across the eastern part of South Africa offer us a legacy of beautiful rock art. These images are often used to show the disappearance and ultimate destruction of the Southern San. In this article I argue that these images also show a continuity with contemporary Zulu-speaking people of the region, and I challenge the assumed ethnic or cultural boundaries represented in the historical and archaeological rec…
Representation and misrepresentation: San regional advocacy and the global imagery
The San of southern Africa are one of the most represented peoples of southern Africa. Internationally, they are most often depicted as a hunting-gathering people or as a people recently removed from that way of life. Organisations such as Survival International draw on these images for political advocacy and in campaigns for land rights for indigenous peoples. In southern Africa, San organisations fight for similar rights and, despite their memb…
British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People's War
Historians concerned with Britain during the Second World War have become increasingly comfortable with the use of feature film as an index of wartime social and cultural values; but they have remained sceptical about the value of novels, plays and verse as legitimate primary sources. In addition, recourse among literary scholars to some of the more opaque aspects of linguistic deconstruction may have strained the goodwill of even those historian…
The Crossing: The invention of tradition among San descendents of the Drakensberg, KwaZulu–Natal, South Africa
In the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa there are Zulu speakers who have begun reasserting an aboriginal or San identity. In 2003 they created a ritual to celebrate their San ancestry and to make a public statement of their San ethnicity. This article highlights an example of cultural creativity and regeneration, not to deride the invention of tradition, but to acknowledge the multiple webs of meaning used/manufactured to make sense of the w…
HIV/Aids and discourses of denial in sub-Saharan Africa: An Afro-optimist response
This article re-examines HIV/AIDs discourses within the global imagining of Africa. It focuses on official responses which, between 1999 and 2007, were characterized by denialism, when South African President Thabo Mbeki, questioned the origin of the disease. The historical factors that shaped arguments locating African AIDS discourses as a counter-ideological response to Afro-pessimism are examined. It is argued that the controversy generated by…
Memories of Empire . Volume I: The White Man’s World, by Bill Schwarz
The conventional wisdom about Britain’s disengagement from empire in the decades immediately after 1945 is that decolonisation was achieved without a crisis in the domestic state equivalent to that which afflicted France during the Algerian war of independence. While historians have increasingly dismissed congenial explanations for British imperial retreat which had argued that independence was a consequence of either altruism or a sober and disp…
Attending to Ghosts: Some Reflections on the Disavowals of British Great War Historiography
In Elizabeth Bowen’s terrifying 1941 short story of the London Blitz, ‘The Demon Lover’, the ghost of a Great War soldier returns to haunt his former lover amidst the ruins of a London laid waste by another global conflict. Kathleen Drover, arriving from the country to fetch some items from her shut up family home, finds awaiting her a mysterious letter. It appears to come from the young man she had last seen on his final night of leave in 1916, …
The edge of the periphery: Situating the ≠Khomani San of the Southern Kalahari in the political economy of Southern Africa
In this article, we situate the Southern Kalahari San within the political economy of Southern Africa and within the world system. Here we draw on and critique modernization theory as a model of explanation for the lack of development found locally. In the Southern Kalahari, the ≠Khomani San won a massive land claim that should have empowered and enabled local development. Yet they remain largely impoverished, while seeking out a meaningful life …
Addressing Harms and Restoring Dignity: Reparative, Restorative and Reconciliatory Justice in the Southern Kalahari
Using the frameworks of reparative, restorative and reconciliatory justice, this article explores the impact of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Land Reform Programme on harms caused to the ≠ Khomani San of the Southern Kalahari. These harms included dehumanisation, fragmentation and genocide during the colonial and Apartheid periods. We show that, despite its objectives, the TRC failed to acknowledge the dignity and …
Re-Claiming the Past by Re-Living in the Present: The ≠Khomani San Living Museum and the Restoration of Dignity in the Southern Kalahari
This article critiques dominant development frameworks by examining the ≠Khomani San of the Southern Kalahari, who despite winning one of South Africa's largest post-Apartheid land claims, remain marginalised and impoverished. Mainstream approaches continue to frame their future through Eurocentric binaries of “traditional” and “modern,” forcing the community to navigate imposed categories that fracture social cohesion and commodify identity. Dev…
Sociology (11 works) · Political science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · South African History and Culture (7 works) · History (6 works) · History (6 works) · Archaeology (5 works)