Ancestral Voices Research Articles

“Ancestral Voices Prophesying War”: Investigating the Legacy of the 1947 Partition in the 21st-Century Indian Cultural Imagination of Nuclear War

This article investigates the emergence of the Indian Partition of 1947 as an apocalyptic referent for twenty-first-century Indian cultural imagination of nuclear war with Pakistan, because of the Partition’s traumatic, genocidal imprint on the subcontinent’s cultural memory. We will show how performances of nuclear brinkmanship and nuclear anxiety in India have historically been and continue to be symptomatic of the themes the Partition has bequeathed to Indian literature—kinship, vengeance, identity, and mutual destruction on a gigantic scale. With reference to these themes, we will critically analyze three Indian cultural texts—Vikram Chandra’s novel Sacred Games (2006), its Netflix adaptation (2018–2019), and Sami Ahmad Khan’s novel Red Jihad (2012), especially focusing on the ways in which such texts attempt to feature and resolve Indo-Pakistani nuclear crises. We will demonstrate how these texts embody a cultural shift wherein the nuclear crisis ultimately underscores the urgency of healing Partition’s historical wounds.

Ancestral Voices, Highland Homecomings and High Society: The Lochbuie Family of Mull, c. 1855–1920

No history of the Scottish diaspora in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be complete without taking account of the provenance and disposal of repatriated wealth. A case study is the family saga of the Maclaines of Lochbuie, whose estates lay on the island of Mull in the Inner Hebrides. Our account begins with Donald Maclaine (1816–1863), the twenty-second laird, who, as a partner in the Batavia (Jakarta) mercantile business of Maclaine Watson, made his fortune from the trade in sugar cultivated by forced peasant labour in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). It was the profits from this trade that he used to repurchase the family’s ancestral lands that had been forfeited to their creditors a decade earlier. Donald Maclaine’s enthusiasm for the Highlands was inherited by his Indies-born son, Murdoch Gillian Maclaine (1845–1909), the twenty-third laird, whose life and times, together with those of his wife, Marianne Schwabe-Maclaine (1850–1934), form the main focus of this paper. That enthusiasm extended to the patronage of Gaelic culture and to Highland revivalism in general, but it was also under his stewardship that his family’s cosmopolitan lifestyle revived the less welcome tradition of the ‘luxury trap’, wherein expenditures incurred in London high society also had to contend with declining rentals during a prolonged agricultural depression. Financial pressures of this kind appear to have compelled the twenty-third laird to redevelop Lochbuie in accordance with a late Victorian reimagining of the Highlands as a sporting estate. This was not a gamble that paid off, however, and a once-off infusion of colonial wealth proved inadequate to sustain Lochbuie, which was irretrievably lost to the family during the (brief) tenure of Kenneth Maclaine (1880–1935), the twenty-fourth laird, despite his somewhat unconventional efforts to bolster the family fortunes by taking to the boards in New York and the UK.

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

Reviewed by: Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo Michele Levy NoViolet Bulawayo Glory New York. Viking. 2022. 403 pages. BOOKER PRIZE–NOMINATED Glory traces the tragic descent into violent despotism of democratic, newly free Zimbabwe (alias Jidada). This powerful allegory embodies hybridity, braiding African and global elements to shape its timely content. Its comic anthropomorphism (e.g., four-footed creatures, “mal” and “femal,” “hinding,” strutting, orating, taking selfies, etc.) may distance us initially, but the line between species soon dissolves as we feel the pain of humans caught in a bloody historical cycle. A third-person omniscient narrator both recounts events and enters the minds of dictators, generals, police, elites (educators, spiritual leaders, businessmen), women, children, artists, and revolution-ists. These multiple perspectives guide us through Zimbabwe’s recent history, wherein rampant greed led to wide-scale corruption, ethnocide, misogyny, and weaponized Christian and indigenous beliefs that destroyed democracy and drove the masses to guilt, fear, and submission. Glory’s twenty-one sections, including “Defending the Revolution, 1983” and “Defending the Revolution, 2019,” each [End Page 68] with many subsections (among them “Defending the Revolution, 1994” and “Defending the Revolution, 2008”), signal the cyclical plot. But if past is embedded in present, future remains a dream, as the section “Past, Present, Future, Past” underscores. Amid the large cast of characters, an unexpected, aptly named protagonist, Destiny, comes to personify that canceled future. Her mother’s Ndebele family having been annihilated in the Gukurahundi (a horrific ethnic massacre), Destiny’s journey to their now-deserted homeland, Bulawayo (“place of massacre”), climaxes the novel. Various strategies satirize the cultural, political, and socioeconomic costs of colonialism and neocolonialism. So, for example, Jidadan English incorporates current American slang—for example, “She’d be first-rate . . . supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” “Ginormous” and “humongous” modify Jidadan phenomena (a python, a crocodile, their war). And the newly ousted Father of the Nation (aka Mugabe), who prides himself on speaking English “better than the English,” shocks his sycophants by yelling, “A fatherfucking coup wena nja mgodoyi msanthanyoko!” When possible, even the too-many poor Jidadans consume global capitalist culture—Coca-Cola, Princess Diana, Czech boots, Arsenal caps, and Samsung phones— enjoy “eat-all-you want Chinese buffets,” post selfies online, and eventually “seek refuge in virtual living.” Before and during the election of 2019, they tweet the hashtag #fairfreencredibleelection and upload to Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp photos of themselves sporting “I voted” stickers, while Siri becomes Tuvy’s (aka Mnangagwa’s) muse. But North Korea and China, too, make disastrous inroads here. The former nation trained Jidada’s bloodiest combat unit to conduct the Gukurahundi. Even while publicly scorning communism, Jidada’s leaders call the Chinese “comrades” and offer them rights to essential Jidadan assets. Riffs on Swift, Dickens, Conrad, and Orwell further link Africa and the West. The monster crocodile is “Brobdingnagian.” The section “Tholukuthi A Tale of Two Countries” explains why Jidadans live online: “it was the worst of times . . . the worstest of times.” Sensing Jidadans’ hate for the blood he let, the Father of the Nation dreams of “running into the very terrible heart of redness.” Contemporary Western and traditional African expressive modes likewise intertwine. Tweets from Zimbabwe and elsewhere comprise entire subsections, while whole pages reiterate “take-take-take,” “I can’t breathe,” or “and talks to the dead.” That leaders and elites call their nation “Jidada with a -da and another -da” seems innocuous at first but increasingly signs jingoism. Countering this, Tholukuthi (“as is true”), often placed first in a sentence, acquires the force of chant, while some later subsections begin, “When those who were there told it . . . what they meant was . . . ,” the “it” content repeated word for word after the second ellipsis. This imparts the reverential tone of oral epic. The ancestral voices, Destiny’s recitation of her written narrative, and the “we” evoke the griot tradition. All tell their stories so “they will be told right.” As Glory follows Jidada deeper into the darkness, horror eclipses satire. Mugabe is dead; Mnangagwa persists. Free Zimbabwe remains a dream. Pledged “to all Jidadas, everywhere,” this haunting novel recalls too many bloody national histories but cites Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera to remind us: “The dead are not dead...

Bound to Violence

Abstract This dialogue, recorded in 2021, explores the sound and feel of South-South political theory from the perspective of Southern Africa. The interlocutors discuss the question of violence and nonviolence in revolutionary change across generational divides. It centers the enduring place of spirit and ancestral voices in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Reimagining career education with the future senses

PurposeCareer education and employability have become Australian university curriculum and pedagogy priorities to meet the changing world of work and federal government parameters linking higher education funding to graduate employment outcomes. This conceptual paper aims to present the hypothesis that emphasis on integrating career education in the curriculum can provide an opportunity to embed future-thinking concepts by reframing future-focussed career education practice to futures focussed. It proposes that using a Futures Senses lens to expand current career pedagogy liberates career education from individualised cognitive decision-making and self-analysis; to include the affective, collective imagining, ancestral voices and innate gifts.Design/methodology/approachA suite of five career education pedagogical tools that have been embedded by the author in the curriculum of an enabling education course in a regional Australian university; are described, analysed and reconceptualised using the Futures Senses. A Causal Layered Analysis provides a layered comparison of future-focussed and futures focussed career education.DiscussionThe discussion reflects on current pedagogical practice by the author and indicates pragmatic implications for applying a future-focussed approach to career education practice. Implementation of these reimagined activities provides an opportunity for future qualitative research.Originality/valueOpportunity exists to leverage rising institutional demands and political agendas of integrating career education in the tertiary curriculum, as a means of embedding futures concepts, thinking and pedagogy. The reimagined activities are a pragmatic offering that can be used by educators to initiate and nurture futures thinking.

Equal Outsiders: Woolf and Coleridge Thinking Community, Romance, and Education in the Face of War

Equal Outsiders:Woolf and Coleridge Thinking Community, Romance, and Education in the Face of War Laura Cernat In a passage from Three Guineas (1938), which rhetorically foreshadows Churchill's famous June 1940 "we shall fight on the beaches" speech, Virginia Woolf prompts women to preserve and expand their ancestresses' habit of thinking critically even while lacking some comforts. Joining the newly-available public sphere, women who had thought "while they stirred the pot" (2001a: 160) are now called to become more articulate: Let us think in offices; in omnibuses; while we are standing in the crowd watching Coronations . . . let us think as we pass the Cenotaph; and in Whitehall; in the gallery of the House of Commons; in the Law Courts; let us think at baptisms and marriages and funerals. Let us never cease from thinking—what is this "civilization" in which we find ourselves? . . . Where . . . is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men? (161) These lines echo Blake's "I will not cease from mental fight," which Woolf explicitly cites later in "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" (1942: 155). Woolf often interweaves Romantic tropes in her plea against war. Near the end of Three Guineas, for example, she alludes to Coleridge's line from "Kubla Khan," "ancestral voices prophesying war"1 (Coleridge 1954: 298), when she speaks of "some ancestral memory prophesying war" (Woolf 2001a: 218). Such resonances of Romantic affects in Modernism are both frequent and meaningful, as the work of Mary Favret (2010) and Alexandra Harris (2010) shows. While Favret emphasizes the skewed remoteness of war imagery, especially for the British imagination, and Harris sees the Modernists' return to the Romantics as a tradition-embracing homecoming, an "imaginative claiming of England" [End Page 121] (10), they both give less attention to the implications of the Romantic connection for a conception of community that truly goes beyond nationalism. Building on an understudied textual reference, this paper traces some threads that tie Woolf's attitudes towards war to her critical response to Romantic political thought, particularly Coleridge's, as she works to dissociate the representation of women from "romance" (a trivialized inheritance of Romanticism) and recover the societal ideals of Romanticism for the feminist cause. Significantly, Woolf refers to Romantic writers at a crucial point in her argument. After delving into historical and socio-economic issues, after invoking both "the white light of facts" and "the coloured light of biography" (2001a: 143), after imagining the Society of Outsiders, Woolf sounds weary, almost unsure at the end of Three Guineas. Having unveiled the connection between war, capitalist greed, and the oppression of women, having proposed indifference to honors and the refusal of excess as chief solutions, Woolf points to something not yet fully thought out: "we can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods" (241). To indicate the purpose of these new, outsider-specific methods, Woolf falls back on "the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty" (241) and, in her very last endnote, cites three sources that might reveal "the views and aims of the outsiders" (293): Romantic writers from different nations—S. T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and George Sand. Woolf's use of three examples from the 19th century suggests a renewed reliance on the Romantic paradigm. Although Favret, drawing on Woolf's notes in "The Leaning Tower" about the relatively limited effects of war on novelists such as Austen and Scott, thinks that Woolf underestimated her own remoteness from war and unfairly considered the 19th century "immune" to mass conflict in a way the 20th century was not (Favret 46), Woolf's return to the Romantics and their social models at the end of her pacifist essay suggests that her very conception of the nature of mass conflict has its roots in the 19th century. There is more at stake in Woolf's pointing towards Coleridge as a precursor of the Society of Outsiders than first meets the eye. This neglected reference reveals a deep-seated affinity between the two writers' worldviews, which functions in spite of (or perhaps...

Zones of Occult Instability: The Birth of the Novel in Africa

Zones of Occult Instability: The Birth of the Novel in Africa

UX design in online catalogs: Practical issues with implementing traditional knowledge (TK) labels

At the center of the evolving debates of open access and intellectual property in memory institutions is a long history of excluding Indigenous Peoples from conversations concerning the access and use rights to their belongings. In recent decades many memory institutions challenged prevalent historical and current classifications of Indigenous Peoples in online catalog records. Most recently the Library of Congress (LC) adopted a new cataloging practice called Traditional Knowledge (TK) labeling as a way to return control over access and use of Indigenous materials to their rightful Indigenous owners. The advent of this emergent digital rights tool disrupts previously held assumptions about the purpose of rights statements in catalog records as well as challenges the existing balance between the rights of Indigenous communities and the interests of public access. The adoption of TK Labels in the LC’s “Ancestral Voices” digital collection brings serious practical implementation issues to light that deserve further consideration before memory institutions invest in this new digital access rights metadata standard. Although TK Labels are a technological opportunity that provide more space for community-based relationships within memory institutions, this paper suggests that the practical implementation of TK Labels in Ancestral Voices falls short of its promise to return authority to the Passamaquoddy people. Rather, TK Labels raise more logistical and technical questions about the effectiveness of the TK labeling framework and purpose of re-cataloging records describing Indigenous materials.

Levinas’ notion of neighbor as an approach to understand Pío Baroja, otherness and modern Spain.

The Cold War era touched Spain only subtly. Because of the geopolitical situation of Europe during the second half of the 20th century, Spain remained almost isolated from macro politics, attempting impossible alliances with Italian and German fascism. For instance, whilst the rest of the world witnesses the beginning of the Cold War in 1947 and the Space Race, Spain’s history is marked by the death of a “matador”, Manuel Laureano Rodriguez “Manolete”, who copes the newspapers’ front pages for days and is followed by popular grief and controversy. Four decades before, Miguel de Unamuno already coins this ancestral voice of the Spaniard consciousness as “casticismo” and “intrahistoria”. However, in literary terms, Iberian literature showed clear signs of modernity, and sometimes, even of hybridity. The Iron Curtain did not cover the shame of a dictatorship regime in Spain, and yet, authors like Baroja describe that atmosphere at a great extent, even, as this paper wants to show, anticipates the Cold War psycho-social atmosphere. Authors like Levinas, on the other hand, provide a philosophical and theoretical frame to understand better both the Cold War period and the literary experimentation of Iberian authors towards the concept of the Other. In this piece, I discuss the proximity of the notion of the Other in Levinas and Baroja, and contrast this approach with the canonical vision of Baroja in Iberian literature.

The evolution of the ancestral voice that always was and always will be

In our stories, we carry the concept of voice in various forms. In the context of contact the Indigenous ‘voice’ is one ever-present and evolving. It is omnipresent, laying down new foundations for the ‘voice’ through to new generations. It is the representation of an entire culture. It is not a natural language or the voice of academia. It is as ancient as its land and lies at the heart of its peoples. It is a cultural voice. It is the voice of the dreaming. It is the voice of resistance. It is the voice of self-determination.

Elementary Forms and Ancestral Voices: Status, Power, and Control Theory

Elementary Forms and Ancestral Voices: Status, Power, and Control Theory

Ancestral Voices and Family History in Frances Khirallah Noble᾽s The New Belly Dancer of the Galaxy

Ancestral Voices and Family History in Frances Khirallah Noble᾽s The New Belly Dancer of the Galaxy

The ancestors, violence and democracy in Zimbabwe

Are the departed silent in their graves or do their voices influence the way we participate in politics? While in other places their voices could be less loud, it is not so in Zimbabwe. Using Terrence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm’s theory regarding invention of traditions, this study explores the deployment of ancestral voices in Zimbabwean politics as a strategy to legitimise political power and social hierarchy. In Zimbabwe, each cycle of election is characterised by constant reminder concerning the voices of the departed, reminding the voters that their democratic exercise through elections must align with the wishes of the nation’s ancestors such as Nehanda, Kaguvi, Chamunika and Mwari – the national god. The study consists of three parts: the first part looks into the belief in ancestors, focusing on the ancestral hierarchical order; the second part explores how the spiritual world of the ancestors in terms of its hierarchy is reflected through the spatial arrangement at the village and household levels; and the last section looks into how Mugabe utilises the ideology concerning the ancestors to maintain political power.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Through use of explanatory theories in religious studies and theology, this study unpacks the complexity of theorising politics and democracy within contexts in which the spiritual (in this case, ancestors or gods) takes precedence. After dialoguing and critiquing the current and dominant theories regarding religion across the continent, the article finds Terrence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm’s theory regarding invented traditions the most plausible perspective to explain the interaction of religious canopies and political configurations in Zimbabwe.

Palimpsests of Ancestral Memories: Black Women’s Collective Identity Development in Short Stories by Edwidge Danticat and Dionne Brand

This article focuses on two short stories, Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Epilogue: Women Like Us’, the final story in Krik? Krak! (1996. New York: Vintage Books), and Dionne Brand’s ‘Blossom, Priestess of Oya, Goddess of Winds, Storms and Waterfalls’, from Sans Souci and Other Stories ([1988] 1989. Ithaca NY: Firebrand Books). In these stories, Danticat and Brand narrate the lives of Caribbean women who have journeyed abroad in search of a better future, and the protagonists also continue to develop their respective identities through the challenges of leaving their homes. Danticat follows the life of a young girl, while for Brand it is a middle-aged woman who feels old beyond her years: the authors narrate versions of (historical) events from the perspective of these women, additionally (re)writing Caribbean history in feminist terms. Furthermore, treating the actual bodies of the narrators as living texts for the embodied experiences and oral stories of their ancestors, the protagonists become palimpsests in their current lives/life stories. This, in turn, affects their futures. While at times their matrilineal, ancestral voices may be a burden, they also provide a source of empowerment for the two protagonists, enabling them to pursue their chosen careers despite the barriers they face.

The ghost of Afrikaner identity in Ancestral voices, Leap year and The long silence of Mario Salviati (Etienne van Heerden)

Ghost characters are a characteristic of the novels of Etienne van Heerden, but little research has been done concerning the nature and function of these ghost characters. In this article I discuss Van Heerden’s use of ghost characters diachronically with reference to the novels Ancestral voices (1986), Leap year (1993) and The long silence of Mario Salviati (2000). In order to clarify the nature of these ghosts, I use the so-called science of the paranormal as a framework. The ghosts in the three novels will be classified accordingly, and then discussed within the context of the novels in which they appear. In this way, I shall show how the ghost characters in these novels can be read as a constantly changing embodiment of Afrikaner identity (a central theme in Van Heerden’s oeuvre). Van Heerden’s Afrikaner changes with the times: in Ancestral voices the ghost characters form a collective that represents a fragmented image of the stereotypical, archaic male Afrikaner identity; in Leap year a liminal character is written in a liminal time to embody a liminal Afrikaner identity; and in The long silence of Mario Salviati Van Heerden moves away from the exclusive Afrikaner identity to a broader South African identity by using ghost characters from very different backgrounds and origins. In conclusion I shall compare these identities and the historical contexts of these novels in order to show the function of Van Heerden’s ghost characters as constant rewritings of South African identities.

Ancestral Voices: Vitality and Volatility of Native America

Ancestral Voices: Vitality and Volatility of Native America

The Ward of 1812: Major John Richardson—Child Soldier, War Historian, and the Father of Canadian Literature

Now that the dust is settling after the anniversary of one of the key game-changers in Canada's history, the legendary War of 1812, it has become even clearer that this conflict has been best chronicled perhaps by an actual Canadian combatant in a historical text published in 1842, which is certainly one of the first such publications, and first memorialized in fiction in Canada's first national epic completed two years earlier at the beginning of our literary tradition—both written by the same person, Major John Richardson. Dubbed the “father of Canadian literature,” Richardson, a favourite of both General Brock and Tecumseh, is both a remarkable early war historian and one of the ancestral voices of the Canadian imagination.

Book Review: Britain and Ireland: Parliament: The Biography, Volume I: Ancestral Voices

Book Review: Britain and Ireland: Parliament: The Biography, Volume I: Ancestral Voices

Imagining the Body in Pacific Francophone Literature

This article deals with the central position of the body in Polynesian and Kanak imaginary, ancestral myths, and language. In the collective imagination, the body is akin to a particle of the cosmos. The author probes into major primordial images in order to understand the peculiar role of the body in the Oceanic “anthropological structures of the imaginary” (Gilbert Durand’s term) and asks whether the vision proposed by archaic myths finds its way into modern autochthonous Polynesian and Kanak indigenous literature, especially in the writings of Déwé Gorodé, Chantal Spitz, Flora Devatine, and Moetai Brotherson. Indeed, in keeping with the theories of Michel Foucault, the Oceanic body as it appears in modern poetic or novelistic narrations bears witness in its maimed flesh to a collective history and bears the scars of colonialism. Through its transhistorical dimension as well, this brand of francophone literature constitutes an original way to introduce some sort of counter-discourse into narrative strategies shaped by Western colonial history. In reclaiming the body, these writers are also reviving an ancestral voice.

‘Inhuman voices’: reflections on the place of ancestors in the work of Frantz Fanon

At first sight, Fanon seems entirely to reject the idea that ancestors have a determining effect on individual and collective identities. This is particularly obvious in the conclusion of Black Skin, White Masks, where he describes ancestral voices as ‘inhuman’. However, this article will argue that Fanon's discussion of the ancestral should be read as part of his wider analysis of the colonial world, where the colonizer plays the role of ancestor. In The Wretched of the Earth, which I characterize as a rewriting of Freud's myth of the origin of man, Fanon seeks to avoid reproducing this colonizing ancestor in the new, postcolonial nation. In the process, he offers us a description of the ancestral which is radically different from that of Freud, and of the colonizer. It is therefore on the basis of a reconceptualization, rather than a straightforward rejection, of the figure of the ancestor that Fanon aims to found a new kind of community, and a ‘new man’. This has important and wide ranging implications for how we think about genealogy, origination and creativity, the nation state, psychology, and our relationship to the past and to tradition.