The Idea of a Good and Bad Gemeinschaft in William Bloke Modisane’s Autobiography, Blame Me on History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12916756 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lucky Mathebe (University of South Africa, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 46-67 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | African Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1753-2523 • E-ISSN: 1753-2531 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17532523.2017.1341466 |
| OpenAlex | W2766012531 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
William Bloke Modisane, the African writer and journalist, attracted wide notice with his autobiography, Blame Me on History, which was banned in South Africa in 1963, the year in which it received its first publication. The sociologist's interest in Modisane's autobiography can be located in several basic themes (among these can be counted the problem of his cultural dilemma as a member of the African middle class), but for present purposes, we need to note only one aspect of the book which I think has been constantly ignored, namely the sociological tradition that informs the meaning of his concept of the community— Sophiatown. The name “Sophiatown” carries a profoundly important meaning in Modisane's autobiography. I will argue that in the sociological sense in which the Drum writer uses the name, he articulates the central notions of what the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies regards as a Gemeinschaft social order. There is a different, though related, point that needs to be made about Modisane's use of the term “community”: if we read his book carefully, we can see that it contains two different narratives about Sophiatown, a positive one which appears to have been slightly romanticised, and a negative one, which focuses on the community's darker side, showing it up to have been a Gemeinschaft in an unusual way. It is through this binary opposition that Modisane creates in his autobiography that he shows his ambiguity with regard to his Gemeinschaft community
Art · Art history · Biography · Blame · Epistemology · German · Literature · Meaning (existential · Narrative · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · African studies and sociopolitical issues · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · South African History and Culture
Blame me on history.
The structure of sociological theory
The Making of Apartheid 1948–1961
Telling Our Stories
Of Masks, Mimicry, Misogyny, and Miscegenation
Contrasting relevance in poetry translation
Transition and Transformation
The rediscovery of the ordinary
The Division of Labour in Society
Fundamental Concepts of Sociology
Gone with the Twilight
The Sophiatown writers of the fifties
Sophiatown
The Destruction of Sophiatown
Soga and Dukwana
Gemeinschaft Revisited
The Present Problems of Social Structure
| Highly cited | No |
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