Victoria J Collis-Buthelezi
Biographic Data
| ID | 912403 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Victoria J Collis-Buthelezi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Victoria J |
| FAMILY NAME | Collis-Buthelezi |
| SIGNATURE | COLLIS-BUTHELEZI V J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6974-134X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
For a New Humanity
This interview with Makhosazana Xaba, renowned South African feminist poet and writer, centers on Izimpabanga Zomhlaba (2024), Xaba's isiZulu translation of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Excerpted from a longer conversation, Act 1 of the interview dwells on the practice and politics of translanguaging and the relationship between peace, freedom, and translation among African vernacular languages. The incomplete nature of freedo…
Race and Caste
This essay argues that a new postcolonial critique is necessary in the face of resurgent supremacist ideologies. In order to lay the grounds for such a critique, this article maps the overlapping histories of race and caste across South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. It posits that the ongoing crisis and stasis of the postcolonial contemporary calls for reckoning with the long pasts and presents of derogation that inform and precipitate quotidi…
Maureen Warner-Lewis's Work as African Recognition
This essay moves between the author's autobiographical reflections and a close reading of Maureen Warner-Lewis's Guinea's Other Suns (1991/2015) in order to unpack the ways Warner-Lewis's research on Africa in the Caribbean has challenged the split between them around questions of ethnicity and racialization. It further attends to the significance of this work on and in Trinidad, given the refusal of Africanness at the time the book first appeare…
“Does The Water Repeat?”
This essay offers a reading of Maryse Condé’s The Story of the Cannibal Woman (2003) and Yewande Omotoso’s The Woman Next Door (2016). I argue that these contemporary imaginings of Black women’s Caribbean-South Africa travel disrupt our notions of literary categorization and the nation through productions of waterborne selves and community. Ultimately, I explore the ways in which the texts themselves push against land-based notions of Black being…
Requiem
This special section of the issue offers a discussion of South African theorist Tendayi Sithole's book The Black Register (2020). The section's essays explore the stakes of Sithole's work as well as its implications. They unpack the book around questions of geography, historicity, and visual representation
Peter Abrahams's Island Fictions for Freedom
When South African-born Peter Abrahams moved to Jamaica in 1956, he thought he had found a racial paradise. Over the next six decades as a Jamaican, his understanding of race in Jamaica was complicated after independence. His last two novels-This Island Now (1966) and The View from Coyaba (1985)-fictionalize the transition to independence in the anglophone Caribbean and how that transition related to the set of concerns unfolding across the rest …
And She Didn’t Die
Introduction
Rolihlahla Mandela gained the name “Nelson” in the early twentieth century when he started school as a child in the Eastern Cape—the giving of English names being a common practice in schools at th
The Case for Black Studies in South Africa
The fire below”
This letter was first read as a seminar paper in the Institute for the Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town in which I offer a series of provocations about what our current moment asks of us. It is concerned with the future of literary and cultural studies (in English) at that university and in South Africa in the wake of the RhodesMustFall movement. I look at the formation of English literature in colonial India and the rise of bl…
Under the Aegis of Empire
Under the Aegis of EmpireCape Town, Victorianism, and Early-Twentieth-Century Black Thought Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi (bio) He was one of the old West Indian types—I don’t know if you know what I mean—a Victorian type. He was one. —C. L. R. James I begin this essay with C. L. R. James’s description of George Padmore in a 1981 televised interview with Stuart Hall in which James declared Padmore’s victorianness as he pronounced him a true marxis…
Caribbean Regionalism, South Africa, and Mapping New World Studies
Part of the larger book project “Empire, Nation, Diaspora: Cape Town and Constituting a Black Archive,” this essay explores two Caribbean intellectuals, Eric Walrond and Henry Sylvester Williams, who included the South African Cape in their mappings of the Caribbean in the short story collection Tropic Death and the pamphlet The British Negro , respectively. The essay demonstrates how and why South Africa proved significant to an emergent radical…
Caribbean Regionalism, South Africa, and Mapping New World Studies
Part of the larger book project “Empire, Nation, Diaspora: Cape Town and Constituting a Black Archive,” this essay explores two Caribbean intellectuals, Eric Walrond and Henry Sylvester Williams, who included the South African Cape in their mappings of the Caribbean in the short story collection Tropic Death and the pamphlet The British Negro , respectively. The essay demonstrates how and why South Africa proved significant to an emergent radical…
The fire below”
This letter was first read as a seminar paper in the Institute for the Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town in which I offer a series of provocations about what our current moment asks of us. It is concerned with the future of literary and cultural studies (in English) at that university and in South Africa in the wake of the RhodesMustFall movement. I look at the formation of English literature in colonial India and the rise of bl…
And She Didn’t Die
The Case for Black Studies in South Africa
Caribbean Regionalism, South Africa, and Mapping New World Studies
Part of the larger book project “Empire, Nation, Diaspora: Cape Town and Constituting a Black Archive,” this essay explores two Caribbean intellectuals, Eric Walrond and Henry Sylvester Williams, who included the South African Cape in their mappings of the Caribbean in the short story collection Tropic Death and the pamphlet The British Negro , respectively. The essay demonstrates how and why South Africa proved significant to an emergent radical…
The fire below”
This letter was first read as a seminar paper in the Institute for the Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town in which I offer a series of provocations about what our current moment asks of us. It is concerned with the future of literary and cultural studies (in English) at that university and in South Africa in the wake of the RhodesMustFall movement. I look at the formation of English literature in colonial India and the rise of bl…
Under the Aegis of Empire
Under the Aegis of EmpireCape Town, Victorianism, and Early-Twentieth-Century Black Thought Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi (bio) He was one of the old West Indian types—I don’t know if you know what I mean—a Victorian type. He was one. —C. L. R. James I begin this essay with C. L. R. James’s description of George Padmore in a 1981 televised interview with Stuart Hall in which James declared Padmore’s victorianness as he pronounced him a true marxis…
And She Didn’t Die
Introduction
Rolihlahla Mandela gained the name “Nelson” in the early twentieth century when he started school as a child in the Eastern Cape—the giving of English names being a common practice in schools at th
The Case for Black Studies in South Africa
Requiem
This special section of the issue offers a discussion of South African theorist Tendayi Sithole's book The Black Register (2020). The section's essays explore the stakes of Sithole's work as well as its implications. They unpack the book around questions of geography, historicity, and visual representation
Peter Abrahams's Island Fictions for Freedom
When South African-born Peter Abrahams moved to Jamaica in 1956, he thought he had found a racial paradise. Over the next six decades as a Jamaican, his understanding of race in Jamaica was complicated after independence. His last two novels-This Island Now (1966) and The View from Coyaba (1985)-fictionalize the transition to independence in the anglophone Caribbean and how that transition related to the set of concerns unfolding across the rest …
“Does The Water Repeat?”
This essay offers a reading of Maryse Condé’s The Story of the Cannibal Woman (2003) and Yewande Omotoso’s The Woman Next Door (2016). I argue that these contemporary imaginings of Black women’s Caribbean-South Africa travel disrupt our notions of literary categorization and the nation through productions of waterborne selves and community. Ultimately, I explore the ways in which the texts themselves push against land-based notions of Black being…
Maureen Warner-Lewis's Work as African Recognition
This essay moves between the author's autobiographical reflections and a close reading of Maureen Warner-Lewis's Guinea's Other Suns (1991/2015) in order to unpack the ways Warner-Lewis's research on Africa in the Caribbean has challenged the split between them around questions of ethnicity and racialization. It further attends to the significance of this work on and in Trinidad, given the refusal of Africanness at the time the book first appeare…
For a New Humanity
This interview with Makhosazana Xaba, renowned South African feminist poet and writer, centers on Izimpabanga Zomhlaba (2024), Xaba's isiZulu translation of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Excerpted from a longer conversation, Act 1 of the interview dwells on the practice and politics of translanguaging and the relationship between peace, freedom, and translation among African vernacular languages. The incomplete nature of freedo…
Race and Caste
This essay argues that a new postcolonial critique is necessary in the face of resurgent supremacist ideologies. In order to lay the grounds for such a critique, this article maps the overlapping histories of race and caste across South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. It posits that the ongoing crisis and stasis of the postcolonial contemporary calls for reckoning with the long pasts and presents of derogation that inform and precipitate quotidi…
History (9 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (8 works) · South African History and Culture (8 works) · History (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Archaeology (5 works) · Art (5 works) · Caribbean history, culture, and politics (5 works) · Law (5 works)