Bulletin n. 1/2015
June 2015
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Soudien Crain
    Nelson Mandela, Robben Island and the Imagination of a New South Africa
    in Journal of Southern African Studies , Volume 41, Issue 2 ,  2015 ,  353-366
    The purpose of this article is to argue that the Robben Island prison experience between 1962 and the early 1990s makes an important contribution to the South African debate on the nature of belonging. In this article I focus on Nelson Mandela's imagination of belonging. I show how, through the process of formal study and the informal flowering of seminars, and particularly the debates and engagements that take place, Mr Mandela and his fellow prisoners work through, often with great personal difficulty and even contradiction, the questions of their individual and collective pasts and their subjectivities, and begin to delineate and even rehearse alternative visions of what a new South Africa might look like. This ‘working through’ involved, for Mandela, difficult questions of belonging – race, nation and the political economy to sustain belonging. Who and what is the nation, and what is its content?
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