Scielo RSS http://www.scielo.org.za/rss.php?pid=1561-401820220001&lang=en vol. 23 num. 1 lang. en http://www.scielo.org.za/img/en/fbpelogp.gif http://www.scielo.org.za http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1561-40182022000100001&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en South Africa's transition to a democratic state in 1994, with its liberalised freespeech policies and race-based reforms, had an immediate and transformative effect on comedy. There was a massive increase in the establishment of comedy clubs and festivals, the production of comic media-like sitcoms and films, and more recently, the expansion of new forms of online and digital humour (via YouTube channels and podcasts), as well as the racial diversification of comic talent. Amid this comic revolution, this article identifies the specific, distinctive character of post-apartheid comedy in South Africa, exploring the ways in which the content, style and delivery of humour produced by Black comics differ from those constructed by White comics. It contends that, while the former increasingly engage with issues of race, culture and politics with unprecedented candour, such taboo-breaking moratorium is antithetical to (most) contemporary White comics, whose performances-across various platforms-are marked by jocund humour and political (albeit not always socio-cultural) disavowal. Furthermore, it explores the extent to which these race-based comic trends are influenced by, respond to and negotiate both the vestiges of the past and current racial-social-political discourses. Albeit in a vastly distinct way, this article concludes that the humour produced by these comics- irreverent and subversive versus conservative and facetious-nevertheless allows them (and by extension society) to negotiate the vestiges of the past and the disquiets of the present in order to serve the overarching drive of promoting social cohesion and healing. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1561-40182022000100002&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en I explore the ANC government's cadre-based (BBBEE/Broad-based Black economic empowerment) narrative in restructuring the economy amidst the pandemic, as an ideological vehicle to achieve an unstated nefarious purpose. The narrative that I aim to capture through the lenses of Naomi Klein's disaster capitalism read with Reiman's "pyrrhic defeat theory," is built around the fictitious idea of Black economic empowerment. Ultimately it serves as a vehicle for fraudulent personal enrichment by politicians and well-connected tenderpreneurs. This double theoretical vision is meant to augment and explain the opportunity that the Covid-pandemic provided for its exploitation as an example of disaster capitalism. I traverse the events which led to the current global pandemic as well as the way or ways in which a faction within government and its institutions has generally colluded with Big Business to profit from it. I consider the South African government's initial response to the pandemic as well as the ways in which such a response morphed into a self-enrichment scheme under the guise of BBBEE. This remains plausible even if one concedes that this purpose was not by original design or is solely driven by a faction within the ruling party. This discussion is preceded by an overview of the VBS Mutual Bank fraud scandal, foreshadowing my demonstration of how the pandemic proffers an opportunity for the RET-group within government to transform into a criminal shadow state as a going concern. In conclusion, I draw on the Covid-19 experience to suggest lessons for the future economic management of pandemics. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1561-40182022000100003&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en We live in a time of major events in civilisational history, currently centred on the so-called Covid-19 "pandemic." In this global context, contemporary people are at the mercy, largely, of powerful media companies that disseminate officially sanctioned news and opinion pieces about all aspects pertaining to the "pandemic." The very same thing that makes this mainstream media hegemony possible, however, namely the Internet, also allows alternative news sources to circulate censored news and critical opinion so that one witnesses an information and communication-divide on a scale never seen before in history. This paper sets out to reconstruct this information and communication chasm with reference to representative instances of each of the adversarial sides in what may be called a "war of information" and attempts to make this intelligible by interpreting these mainly through the theoretical lens of Jacques Derrida, supplemented by a coda enlisting Jürgen Habermas's work on communication. While the latter does foresee the possibility of authentic communication ("communicative action") despite the constant spectre of miscommunication ("strategic action"), Derrida is less optimistic about this. Instead, taking his cue from Joyce's Ulysses, he insists that the very means of "reaching" the other in the act of communicating are also, ineluctably, the means for failing to reach them, and that "receiving" a message from someone can thus either result in a mechanical repetition of the message, or a paradoxical "repeating differently." Moreover, elsewhere he indicates the paradoxical implications of a change of "context" as far as an utterance is concerned. This difference between these two thinkers allows one to get an intellectual grip on the situation unfolding in the world in 2021-2022; a world of ubiquitous information exchanges, implicitly claiming to be communicational exchanges. More specifically, Derrida and Habermas equip one with the communication-theoretical means to ascertain what this plethora of information exchanges amounts to. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1561-40182022000100004&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en We live in a time of major events in civilisational history, currently centred on the so-called Covid-19 "pandemic." In this global context, contemporary people are at the mercy, largely, of powerful media companies that disseminate officially sanctioned news and opinion pieces about all aspects pertaining to the "pandemic." The very same thing that makes this mainstream media hegemony possible, however, namely the Internet, also allows alternative news sources to circulate censored news and critical opinion so that one witnesses an information and communication-divide on a scale never seen before in history. This paper sets out to reconstruct this information and communication chasm with reference to representative instances of each of the adversarial sides in what may be called a "war of information" and attempts to make this intelligible by interpreting these mainly through the theoretical lens of Jacques Derrida, supplemented by a coda enlisting Jürgen Habermas's work on communication. While the latter does foresee the possibility of authentic communication ("communicative action") despite the constant spectre of miscommunication ("strategic action"), Derrida is less optimistic about this. Instead, taking his cue from Joyce's Ulysses, he insists that the very means of "reaching" the other in the act of communicating are also, ineluctably, the means for failing to reach them, and that "receiving" a message from someone can thus either result in a mechanical repetition of the message, or a paradoxical "repeating differently." Moreover, elsewhere he indicates the paradoxical implications of a change of "context" as far as an utterance is concerned. This difference between these two thinkers allows one to get an intellectual grip on the situation unfolding in the world in 2021-2022; a world of ubiquitous information exchanges, implicitly claiming to be communicational exchanges. More specifically, Derrida and Habermas equip one with the communication-theoretical means to ascertain what this plethora of information exchanges amounts to. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1561-40182022000100005&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en In this article, we indicate some examples of the possible contemporary return of the mind-body dualism. Aspects of contemporary culture, like the influence of brain-computer interface (BCI) or brain-machine interface (BMI), neuroscience projects, and the popularity of sci-fi series and movies that visualise the separation of consciousness from our bodies, are discussed. Only a few of these examples are indicated as introductory to emphasise the need to think again about the importance of some of the strongest philosophical arguments against this dualism. It is in this regard that we will focus on the philosophies of Gabriel Marcel and Paul Ricoeur. Of specific concern for us in this article is Marcel's influence on Ricoeur in his fundamental rejection of the mind-body dualism. This article's unique contribution lies, then, in the fact that it analyses and reveals this influence of Marcel on Ricoeur, especially with regards to their shared understanding of embodied being, or incarnate existence, as opposed to a body-mind dualism. This investigation of how Marcel influenced Ricoeur provides a better understanding of: i) Ricoeur's account of embodied being; ii) Marcel's philosophy and concept of incarnate existence as being; and finally, iii) the importance of rejecting a mind-body dualism for our contemporary thought and living. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1561-40182022000100006&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en The discipline of Information Systems is often viewed as a social science. Information Systems research and teaching pertain to the management and sociological issues of the computing field. It also includes programming and systems analysis, design and development. It is, therefore, challenging to plot Information Systems on a continuum of disciplinary clusters. Depending on the viewpoint held on the scientific world, the groups of disciplines take on different forms. Although metaphors are often used in Information Systems to portray complex ideas in understandable ways, only a few papers could be found that explain the interdisciplinary nature of the discipline metaphorically. To fill this gap, this article uses the astronomical concepts of galaxy, constellation and asterism to explain the place of Information Systems within the scientific domain. An asterism is a grouping of stars which may be part of various constellations. Six different Information Systems asterisms are proposed. The conceptual reflection in the article offers a fresh perspective on the interdisciplinary nature of Information Systems to the philosophy of science. The article illustrates the proposed metaphors with some existing examples to validate the concept. Suggestions for future research are also provided. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1561-40182022000100007&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en In view of China's deepening engagement in Africa, I consider progress with regard to gender roles as a valuable measure by which to comparatively gauge the emancipatory feminist potential of Chinese and South African marriage practices. By way of cross-cultural feminist analysis, I thereby attempt to evaluate the institutionalised master discourse on gender dynamics within marriage in the People' s Republic of China (PRC). In particular, this ideological critique will employ second-wave feminism's "personal as political" theoretical lens, as well as both Jacques Lacan's theory of discourse and Pierre Bourdieu's distinction between orthodox and heterodox discourses. Additionally, the dominant discourse on marriage in the post-Maoist PRC is argued to be both oppressive (same-sex marriage remains illegal) and progressive (divorce by agreement is an administrative act). If therefore, the twenty-first century is indeed to be a time of Chinese global dominance, such investigations are pertinent to questions of global gender equality, as well as to cross-cultural social justice discourse in general. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1561-40182022000100008&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en This paper explores discernible resonances of West-African thought traditions in the philosophical writings of Amo. We highlight a combination of religio-theological and philosophical motifs that point in the direction of an impregnation of Amo's thinking by the encyclopaedia of his place of birth. Amo was neither decidedly a European nor an African philosopher, as controversies had it in the past. To a certain degree, he was both. From traces of this awareness of his origin in the coastal area of today's Ghana, we argue for his place in African philosophy by pursuing the thesis that he should be appropriately appreciated as a self-confident West-African, educated in German philosophical traditions and critically engaged in enlightenment philosophy. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1561-40182022000100009&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en This article identifies the agenda of decoloniality as a call to seek solutions to Africa's problems from within herself (Africa). This call has its hold in colonial and post-independent attempts by African Nationalists, writers, freedom fighters and philosophers to defend Africa's cultural heritages, even against its underestimation by scholars of other climes of the world. It further argues that, though justice done to this quest would afford Africa to regain her existential humanism in a global setting, the defence of African cultural heritages has not yielded much-desired efforts due largely to methodological error. This article observed that African scholars often, in the attempt to free their intellectual outputs from European ethnocentric postulations, overbears the indigenous idea in the decolonial projects. This error is noted to be a consequence of the tendency to deify African worldviews and thought processes. Employing the conversational method of philosophising Chimakonam (2015, 2017a, 2017b, and 2018), this article attempts to interrogate the agenda for decolonisation and re-Africanisation. It argues for the idea of conversational decolonisation. This article concludes that a conversational decolonised process would, among other things, be appropriate for a scholarly response to colonial denigrations and underestimations of African cultures and traditions. It would also be a framework for achieving African self-definition in the modern world without compromising African identity.