Natasha Erlank
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 158579 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Natasha Erlank |
| PRENOMES | Natasha |
| SOBRENOME | Erlank |
| ASSINATURA | ERLANK N |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Johannesburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2468-5844 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 28 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 34 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1995 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Reflections on Voice
Colonialism and a male-dominated print culture in the early twentieth century have occluded a vibrant tradition of Xhosa and Zulu women’s poetry and song. Hidden behind a focus on male practitioners of praise poetry are women’s everyday genres, like songs of marriage and initiation that are archivally present in oral recordings, interviews, and fieldwork notes. These domestic performances have a profound social weight and are a vital political ac…
Researching African Histories of Sexuality
Book Forum
Umteteli wa Bantuand the constitution of social publics in the 1920s and 1930s
Umteteli wa Bantu, launched in 1920, was much more than the moderate, black newspaper most of its contemporaries assumed it to be. Established by the Native Recruitment Corporation as an exercise in “soft power” through propaganda, the split created between its business and editorial functions facilitated editorial autonomy. Umteteli form, a term taken from Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone’s work on newspaper history, included the casual and irreg…
New Histories of Christianity in South Africa
This article charts recent developments in the history of Christianity in South Africa, while also offering a corrective to some of the orthodoxy on the history of Christianity. It begins with an account of two workshops in Cambridge and Johannesburg, where all the authors in this special issue presented. The article calls for a move away from overly rigid typologies of African Christianity, including those first developed by Bengt Sundkler in 19…
From Main Reef to Albertina Sisulu Road
Public space in South Africa often feels overwhelmingly male-focused. Nevertheless, some municipalities, in the wake of post-apartheid transformation, have consciously attempted to commemorate women in the renaming that has taken place since 1994. In this article I examine some of these impulses, and their implication for the public commemoration of women in South Africa. I am interested in two aspects of this: how ideas about gender are represen…
Brought into Manhood
This article concerns African Christians’ attempts to accommodate traditional practices – in this instance male initiation – within their evolving Christianity. It speaks to an on-going concern around the place of custom in modern Africa and the uses to which custom and its invocation are put. Contrary to the literature, which locates the adaption of custom by Christians in the independent or Zionist churches, educated African Christians in the h…
Sophiatown
Key words: South AfricaJohannesburgSophiatownurban historymemory studies
Routes to Sophiatown
What is Sophiatown? Is it a vibrant black, urbanity, or a more tragic recollection: the suburb that was destroyed by the apartheid state's forced removals of black South Africans from areas proclaimed white from the 1950s onwards. Both of these representations have considerable contemporary traction. The former lends itself to a very nostalgic view of the suburb, the South African rainbow nation transported into a multi-cultural and cooperative p…
The White Wedding
Discussions of church weddings are not standard in accounts of African marriage in South Africa in the early twentieth century. However, from the 1890s onward, church weddings were becoming more common, and by the 1930s more Africans married in church than elsewhere. Indeed, these wedding ceremonies provide insight into how black families experienced and created their own social status in a context in which white South Africans viewed black weddi…
One Hundred Years of the ANC
One Hundred Years of the Anc
Modes of (in)tolerance
In this study we interviewed members of a small, predominantly Muslim community in Johannesburg, South Africa, in order to ascertain attitudes towards people who engage in same-sex practices. We were interested in ascertaining whether community perceptions of homosexuality match the common (Western) assumption that Islam is profoundly homophobic. Our research, while preliminary, shows that although most people condemn same-sex practices on the gr…
Public Faith and the Politics of Faith
A symposium entitled In the Presence of Faith: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Southern African Studies of Religion was held in Johannesburg from 24 to 26 February 2010.1 This review essay outlines our rationale for the symposium, highlights its most pressing debates, and introduces the papers included in this special edition of the Journal for the Study of Religion, an edition entitled Public Faith and the Politics of Faith
Enhancing Participatory Governance and Fostering Active Citizenship
Active citizenship is a concept which has become increasingly topical as governments seek ways of fostering proactive participation by empowered citizens and communities. An overview of the literature reveals that, despite the breadth of research on active citizenship and substantive participation, well-documented examples of mechanisms that resulted in unmitigated success in specific communities remain rare. Yet this does not mean that there hav…
God's Family in the World’
In this article I examine two parallel and connected processes. The first process concerns the growth of local ecumenism before 1940, understood as inter-racial unity and equality in the Church. The emergence of transnational ecumenism in the twentieth century, especially its evangelical expression, had a critical impact on processes and events in South Africa. In the first place, the movement proved a spur to the growth of local ecumenism among …
Sexuality in South Africa and South African academic writing
'Sexuality in South Africa and South African Academic Writing' has two goals. Its first is to examine and account for the existence of a particular discourse around black sexuality in contemporary academic writing, where that discourse is productive of a view that black sex is almost always problematic. Here I look at the emergence of writing about sexuality in South Africa, beginning with some of the work penned by European travel writers, and o…
The Current State of South African Feminist Scholarship in the Social Sciences
A Deeply Humanist View of the Continent
Extracted from text ... 140 HONOUR IN AFRICAN HISTORY A Deeply Humanist View of the Continent NATASHA ERLANK University of Johannesburg Honour in African History lays out, much as its title suggests, a consideration of how concepts of honour have structured behaviour in sub-Saharan Africa from precolonial times until the present. Like Africans: The History of a Continent (1995) and The African Poor: A History (1987), also published by Cambridge U…
ANC positions on gender, 1994–2004
In this article I focus on two central tensions around gender. In the first place there exists a tension between the broad, sometimes vague commitments to women's liberation that are rooted in the ANC's history as a national liberation movement and the specific policy directions that it adopts as a party in government. In the former strand there is an emphasis on radical structural change and an overturn of the systemic legacies of apartheid. In …
Plain Clean Facts’ and initiation schools
This focus engages with what I see broadly as two (there are more) different discourses around African sexuality in the 1920s and 1930s. In one, concern for sexuality was linked to a moral panic around the behaviour of young girls and boys who were attempting to assert their independence from what were essentially patriarchal forms of control. In contrast to this, I look at other currents around sexuality for the same period and examine how Chris…
Reports on Colloquium Sessions
Since the late 1980s the environmental trope in South African history has been gradually elevated to a field of enquiry in its own right. The impetus to this transformation has been varied, the blossoming of environmental history in the North American academy and green politics and agrarian social history in South Africa being among the more influential
Sexual Misconduct and Church Power on Scottish Mission Stations in Xhosaland, South Africa, in the 1840s
Tensions over the control of improper sexuality were a key concern of African converts and Scottish missionaries in Xhosaland, South Africa, in the first part of the nineteenth century. Missionary preoccupations with sexual behaviour meant that sexual acts became key sites for the negotiation of status and identity. Reading the case of Jan Beck, which is represented in unusually rich detail in the mission archive, allows us to see how converts us…
Gendering Commonality
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Cape Colonial government attempted to formalise African law and custom within its native territories. This process, particularly apparent in the Commission on Native Law and Custom (1878–1883), involved much discussion between colonial representatives and African men in the Eastern Cape about the origins, utility and worth of customs and practices such as initiation, lobola (bridewealth) and polygamy…
Cooking Data
Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World." Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
The White Wedding
Discussions of church weddings are not standard in accounts of African marriage in South Africa in the early twentieth century. However, from the 1890s onward, church weddings were becoming more common, and by the 1930s more Africans married in church than elsewhere. Indeed, these wedding ceremonies provide insight into how black families experienced and created their own social status in a context in which white South Africans viewed black weddi…
Enhancing Participatory Governance and Fostering Active Citizenship
Active citizenship is a concept which has become increasingly topical as governments seek ways of fostering proactive participation by empowered citizens and communities. An overview of the literature reveals that, despite the breadth of research on active citizenship and substantive participation, well-documented examples of mechanisms that resulted in unmitigated success in specific communities remain rare. Yet this does not mean that there hav…
ANC positions on gender, 1994–2004
In this article I focus on two central tensions around gender. In the first place there exists a tension between the broad, sometimes vague commitments to women's liberation that are rooted in the ANC's history as a national liberation movement and the specific policy directions that it adopts as a party in government. In the former strand there is an emphasis on radical structural change and an overturn of the systemic legacies of apartheid. In …
Umteteli wa Bantuand the constitution of social publics in the 1920s and 1930s
Umteteli wa Bantu, launched in 1920, was much more than the moderate, black newspaper most of its contemporaries assumed it to be. Established by the Native Recruitment Corporation as an exercise in “soft power” through propaganda, the split created between its business and editorial functions facilitated editorial autonomy. Umteteli form, a term taken from Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone’s work on newspaper history, included the casual and irreg…
Sophiatown
Key words: South AfricaJohannesburgSophiatownurban historymemory studies
Brought into Manhood
This article concerns African Christians’ attempts to accommodate traditional practices – in this instance male initiation – within their evolving Christianity. It speaks to an on-going concern around the place of custom in modern Africa and the uses to which custom and its invocation are put. Contrary to the literature, which locates the adaption of custom by Christians in the independent or Zionist churches, educated African Christians in the h…
God's Family in the World’
In this article I examine two parallel and connected processes. The first process concerns the growth of local ecumenism before 1940, understood as inter-racial unity and equality in the Church. The emergence of transnational ecumenism in the twentieth century, especially its evangelical expression, had a critical impact on processes and events in South Africa. In the first place, the movement proved a spur to the growth of local ecumenism among …
Cooking Data
Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World." Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
New Histories of Christianity in South Africa
This article charts recent developments in the history of Christianity in South Africa, while also offering a corrective to some of the orthodoxy on the history of Christianity. It begins with an account of two workshops in Cambridge and Johannesburg, where all the authors in this special issue presented. The article calls for a move away from overly rigid typologies of African Christianity, including those first developed by Bengt Sundkler in 19…
From Main Reef to Albertina Sisulu Road
Public space in South Africa often feels overwhelmingly male-focused. Nevertheless, some municipalities, in the wake of post-apartheid transformation, have consciously attempted to commemorate women in the renaming that has taken place since 1994. In this article I examine some of these impulses, and their implication for the public commemoration of women in South Africa. I am interested in two aspects of this: how ideas about gender are represen…
The Current State of South African Feminist Scholarship in the Social Sciences
Plain Clean Facts’ and initiation schools
This focus engages with what I see broadly as two (there are more) different discourses around African sexuality in the 1920s and 1930s. In one, concern for sexuality was linked to a moral panic around the behaviour of young girls and boys who were attempting to assert their independence from what were essentially patriarchal forms of control. In contrast to this, I look at other currents around sexuality for the same period and examine how Chris…
Sexual Misconduct and Church Power on Scottish Mission Stations in Xhosaland, South Africa, in the 1840s
Tensions over the control of improper sexuality were a key concern of African converts and Scottish missionaries in Xhosaland, South Africa, in the first part of the nineteenth century. Missionary preoccupations with sexual behaviour meant that sexual acts became key sites for the negotiation of status and identity. Reading the case of Jan Beck, which is represented in unusually rich detail in the mission archive, allows us to see how converts us…
Raising Up the Degraded Daughters of Africa’
Thinking it Wrong to Remain Unemployed in the Pressing Times’
Thinking it Wrong to Remain Unemployed in the Pressing Times’
Raising Up the Degraded Daughters of Africa’
Gendered Reactions to Social Dislocation and Missionary Activity in Xhosaland 1836-1847
Sexual Misconduct and Church Power on Scottish Mission Stations in Xhosaland, South Africa, in the 1840s
Tensions over the control of improper sexuality were a key concern of African converts and Scottish missionaries in Xhosaland, South Africa, in the first part of the nineteenth century. Missionary preoccupations with sexual behaviour meant that sexual acts became key sites for the negotiation of status and identity. Reading the case of Jan Beck, which is represented in unusually rich detail in the mission archive, allows us to see how converts us…
Gendering Commonality
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Cape Colonial government attempted to formalise African law and custom within its native territories. This process, particularly apparent in the Commission on Native Law and Custom (1878–1883), involved much discussion between colonial representatives and African men in the Eastern Cape about the origins, utility and worth of customs and practices such as initiation, lobola (bridewealth) and polygamy…
Plain Clean Facts’ and initiation schools
This focus engages with what I see broadly as two (there are more) different discourses around African sexuality in the 1920s and 1930s. In one, concern for sexuality was linked to a moral panic around the behaviour of young girls and boys who were attempting to assert their independence from what were essentially patriarchal forms of control. In contrast to this, I look at other currents around sexuality for the same period and examine how Chris…
Reports on Colloquium Sessions
Since the late 1980s the environmental trope in South African history has been gradually elevated to a field of enquiry in its own right. The impetus to this transformation has been varied, the blossoming of environmental history in the North American academy and green politics and agrarian social history in South Africa being among the more influential
A Deeply Humanist View of the Continent
Extracted from text ... 140 HONOUR IN AFRICAN HISTORY A Deeply Humanist View of the Continent NATASHA ERLANK University of Johannesburg Honour in African History lays out, much as its title suggests, a consideration of how concepts of honour have structured behaviour in sub-Saharan Africa from precolonial times until the present. Like Africans: The History of a Continent (1995) and The African Poor: A History (1987), also published by Cambridge U…
ANC positions on gender, 1994–2004
In this article I focus on two central tensions around gender. In the first place there exists a tension between the broad, sometimes vague commitments to women's liberation that are rooted in the ANC's history as a national liberation movement and the specific policy directions that it adopts as a party in government. In the former strand there is an emphasis on radical structural change and an overturn of the systemic legacies of apartheid. In …
Sexuality in South Africa and South African academic writing
'Sexuality in South Africa and South African Academic Writing' has two goals. Its first is to examine and account for the existence of a particular discourse around black sexuality in contemporary academic writing, where that discourse is productive of a view that black sex is almost always problematic. Here I look at the emergence of writing about sexuality in South Africa, beginning with some of the work penned by European travel writers, and o…
The Current State of South African Feminist Scholarship in the Social Sciences
God's Family in the World’
In this article I examine two parallel and connected processes. The first process concerns the growth of local ecumenism before 1940, understood as inter-racial unity and equality in the Church. The emergence of transnational ecumenism in the twentieth century, especially its evangelical expression, had a critical impact on processes and events in South Africa. In the first place, the movement proved a spur to the growth of local ecumenism among …
Enhancing Participatory Governance and Fostering Active Citizenship
Active citizenship is a concept which has become increasingly topical as governments seek ways of fostering proactive participation by empowered citizens and communities. An overview of the literature reveals that, despite the breadth of research on active citizenship and substantive participation, well-documented examples of mechanisms that resulted in unmitigated success in specific communities remain rare. Yet this does not mean that there hav…
Public Faith and the Politics of Faith
A symposium entitled In the Presence of Faith: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Southern African Studies of Religion was held in Johannesburg from 24 to 26 February 2010.1 This review essay outlines our rationale for the symposium, highlights its most pressing debates, and introduces the papers included in this special edition of the Journal for the Study of Religion, an edition entitled Public Faith and the Politics of Faith
One Hundred Years of the ANC
One Hundred Years of the Anc
Modes of (in)tolerance
In this study we interviewed members of a small, predominantly Muslim community in Johannesburg, South Africa, in order to ascertain attitudes towards people who engage in same-sex practices. We were interested in ascertaining whether community perceptions of homosexuality match the common (Western) assumption that Islam is profoundly homophobic. Our research, while preliminary, shows that although most people condemn same-sex practices on the gr…
The White Wedding
Discussions of church weddings are not standard in accounts of African marriage in South Africa in the early twentieth century. However, from the 1890s onward, church weddings were becoming more common, and by the 1930s more Africans married in church than elsewhere. Indeed, these wedding ceremonies provide insight into how black families experienced and created their own social status in a context in which white South Africans viewed black weddi…
Sophiatown
Key words: South AfricaJohannesburgSophiatownurban historymemory studies
Routes to Sophiatown
What is Sophiatown? Is it a vibrant black, urbanity, or a more tragic recollection: the suburb that was destroyed by the apartheid state's forced removals of black South Africans from areas proclaimed white from the 1950s onwards. Both of these representations have considerable contemporary traction. The former lends itself to a very nostalgic view of the suburb, the South African rainbow nation transported into a multi-cultural and cooperative p…
From Main Reef to Albertina Sisulu Road
Public space in South Africa often feels overwhelmingly male-focused. Nevertheless, some municipalities, in the wake of post-apartheid transformation, have consciously attempted to commemorate women in the renaming that has taken place since 1994. In this article I examine some of these impulses, and their implication for the public commemoration of women in South Africa. I am interested in two aspects of this: how ideas about gender are represen…
Brought into Manhood
This article concerns African Christians’ attempts to accommodate traditional practices – in this instance male initiation – within their evolving Christianity. It speaks to an on-going concern around the place of custom in modern Africa and the uses to which custom and its invocation are put. Contrary to the literature, which locates the adaption of custom by Christians in the independent or Zionist churches, educated African Christians in the h…
New Histories of Christianity in South Africa
This article charts recent developments in the history of Christianity in South Africa, while also offering a corrective to some of the orthodoxy on the history of Christianity. It begins with an account of two workshops in Cambridge and Johannesburg, where all the authors in this special issue presented. The article calls for a move away from overly rigid typologies of African Christianity, including those first developed by Bengt Sundkler in 19…
Umteteli wa Bantuand the constitution of social publics in the 1920s and 1930s
Umteteli wa Bantu, launched in 1920, was much more than the moderate, black newspaper most of its contemporaries assumed it to be. Established by the Native Recruitment Corporation as an exercise in “soft power” through propaganda, the split created between its business and editorial functions facilitated editorial autonomy. Umteteli form, a term taken from Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone’s work on newspaper history, included the casual and irreg…
Book Forum
Sociology (24 obras) · Gender Studies (17 obras) · History (16 obras) · Political science (16 obras) · South African History and Culture (16 obras) · Gender Studies (14 obras) · History (13 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Law (9 obras) · African history and culture studies (8 obras)