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- Item‘Tools of the Employers’ Federation’: The Derry Lockout of 1924(Liverpool University Press, 2022-01-04) Dineen, LukeThis article chronicles the industrial crisis that took place in Derry in the summer of 1924, when the city was engulfed by mass strikes and a lockout in its staple industry, shirt making. The article begins by putting Derry in its socio-economic and political context, illustrating how sectarian and gender divisions determined the local employment structure. It demonstrates how the Irish revolution, the partition of Ireland, labour militancy and unionist gerrymandering of Derry Corporation laid the foundations for the intense episode of class conflict that took place in the city in the summer of 1924. It describes how the crisis emerged and how, for a six-week period, it made Derry the most strike-ridden city for its size and population in either Britain or Ireland, with tragic social consequences for its inhabitants. There is a strong emphasis on detailing the strike of the corporation employees because their wage demand became embroiled in the political conflict between nationalists and unionists for control of the city. The article concludes by analysing the lockout’s immediate outcome and long-term ramifications and scrutinizes what role sectarianism played in the labour movement in Northern Ireland before, during, and after the crisis.
- ItemForgetting responsibility : Hannah Arendt and the work of (undoing) psychic resistance post-apartheid(AfricaRhetoric Publishing, 2012-01-01) Alloggio, Sergio; Thomas, KylieThis paper engages with some of the writings of Hannah Arendt in order to draw a political parallel between the complex nexus of responsibility, judgement and sociality in post-war Germany and post-apartheid South Africa. In her writings on post-war Germany Arendt described the failure on the part of the German public to recognise and respond to what she terms "the horror" of Nazism. In her report on the aftermath of war, written on her return to Germany from the United States in 1949, Arendt recounts how she found "an inability to feel", "absence of mourning for the dead" and a "general lack of emotion" in those she encountered in Germany at that time. In this paper we connect her insights on post-war Germany to her later work on the difficulties of judging; this allows us to cast light on the problem of the evasion of responsibility in contemporary South Africa.
- ItemBitter emotion: Affective archives and transnational solidarity against apartheid(Routledge - Taylor & Francis Group, 2020-09-06) Thomas, Kylie; Horizon 2020In his book about his Irish-South African family and his childhood under apartheid, White Boy Running, Christopher Hope writes of the "bitter emotion" that infuses the politics of both Ireland and South Africa. This essay considers how the histories of political struggle in both places are intertwined through readings of photographs taken in Ireland and South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. I draw on these photographs to develop an argument about how affective archives of music, images, and poetry travel across time and space and serve as a conduit for raising awareness about injustice and for forging transnational solidarity. At the same time, these photographs provoke a consideration about how Irish identification with the struggle of black South Africans is complicated by the longer history of British colonialism and racism and how solidarity requires both remembering and forgetting. This essay also begins to trace the presence and work of South African activists in Ireland who campaigned against apartheid while they were in exile.
- ItemDigital visual activism: Photography and the re-opening of the unresolved Truth and Reconciliation Commission cases in post-apartheid South Africa(Routledge - Taylor & Francis Group, 2021-08-06) Thomas, Kylie; Horizon 2020This article explores the creation and curation of digital photographic heritage relating to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as a political project and examines the importance of the online circulation of historical photographs from private collections for public engagement with the re-opening of unresolved judicial cases concerning activists who were detained, tortured and murdered during apartheid. Focusing on the advocacy and commemoration practices relating to the re-opening of the inquest into the death of anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol, who was killed by the South African Security Police in October 1971, the article demonstrates that the curation of photographs included on the website relating to his life and murder can be understood as digital photographic heritage in formation. The article considers how the photographs constitute a form of virtual posthumous personhood and argues that Timolâ s digital afterlife moves beyond commemoration and contributes to the ongoing struggle for justice in South Africa in the aftermath of apartheid.
- ItemUnravelling anti-feminism: On the domestication of resistance(Lectito B.V., 2022-12-30) Thomas, Kylie; Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van WetenschappenThis article provides a critique of neoliberal feminism and argues for nuanced and critical approaches to the question of what constitutes feminist resistance. It focuses on visual artist Billie Zangewa's creative practice and positions it within the longer history of how women have made use of traditional crafts, such as quilting and embroidery, as a means of expression and as a form of resistance. It positions Zangewa's work alongside that of some of her feminist contemporaries who have also used thread and cloth in their work to reveal how the political is woven through the fabric of everyday life. I argue that in order to understand why Zangewa's seemingly mundane, even bourgeois practice, has been framed and taken up as a form of feminist resistance, it is necessary to read her work through a historical lens that takes colonial dispossession and the brutal history of violence in Southern Africa into account. My readings of Zangewa's work acknowledge the significance of the artist's affirmation of care and self-love as resistance, as much as they point to the limits of a politics that valorises (unpaid) domestic work and fails to address the structural violence of capitalism.