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Papers by Rajendra Chetty

Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice

Doctoral students represent the fresh and creative intellectuals needed to address the many socia... more Doctoral students represent the fresh and creative intellectuals needed to address the many social, economic, political, health care, and education disparities that have been highlighted by the 2020 pandemic. Our work as doctoral student supervisors could not be more central nor vital than it was at the beginning of, during, and following the pandemic. Written during the pandemic of 2020, the purpose of this paper was to describe how four faculty from three continents navigated their relationships with doctoral students in the research and dissertation phase of their doctoral programs. Using a common set of prompts, four faculty members each wrote an autoethnography of our experience as doctoral student supervisors. Even though our basic advising philosophies and contexts were quite different, we learned about the possibility and power of resilience, empathy, and mentoring online. Our findings imply that new online practices could be closely examined and retained after the pandemic ...

Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa

The major aim of the study was to examine teacher educator perspectives about the relationship be... more The major aim of the study was to examine teacher educator perspectives about the relationship between research and teaching in South African universities. The research question that guided the study was how teacher educators viewed the relationship between research and teaching in South African universities.Consistent with the chosen postmodern qualitative paradigm we used phenomenology as the strategy of research. The main epistemological assumption was that the way of knowing reality was through interacting with teacher educators in order to understand their point of view regarding the relationship between research and teaching in South African universities. Twenty six lecturers purposively sampled participated in the study. An interview was the main tool for data collection and Holliday's (2007) thematic approach was used for data analysis. Data revealed that there were two main points of view that emerged. On the one hand was the view that there was a relationship between research and teaching while on the other hand was the view that research should be separated from teaching. Despite the conflicting debates it was suggested that teacher educators as the generators of knowledge should be on the cutting edge.Research provides an added dimension to teaching and allows the development of a collaborative relationship between lecturer and students within a learning community.

Africa Education Review, Mar 4, 2021

Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 2004

... Agnes Chigona, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa Rajendra Chetty, Cape Pe... more ... Agnes Chigona, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa Rajendra Chetty, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa ... Rajendra Chetty is Head of Research in the Faculty of Education, Cape Peninsula University of Technology. ...

Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, May 15, 2023

The Heart of Redness (2000) by Zakes Mda deals with an epistemological conflict and exposes the h... more The Heart of Redness (2000) by Zakes Mda deals with an epistemological conflict and exposes the hideousness of colonial epistemology in dismantling indigenous belief systems and commodifying South African land and ecology. The novel revisits the decisive event of cattle killing in 1856-57, following Nongqawuse's prophecy, and juxtaposes it with the cultural and epistemic clash of two factions, Believers and Unbelievers, in the postapartheid era. The present article analyses the unresolved breach between the Believers and the Unbelievers and notes how the latter's appropriation of Western modernity's notion of progress and civilization perpetuates the interventions of capitalist forces, aggravating serious threats to land protection and indigenous ecology. The article focuses on Mda's critique of the South Africans' compliance with the colonial models of civilization and probes how the novel emphasizes delinking and repudiating the patterns and perceptions of development normalized by Western modernity. In so doing, Mda's novel foregrounds the necessity of indulging in what Mignolo (2009) terms "epistemic disobedience" and endorses critical decolonial thinking and praxis to counter covert forms of colonial oppression and capitalist objectification. The article extends the notion of "decolonial turn" (Maldonado-Torres, 2008; Grosfoguel, 2007) by arguing that the novel elucidates a "decolonial ecological turn" to combat extractivist agendas and exploitative policies, preserve indigenous ecology, and foster alternative ways of sustainable collective living.

Journal of Human Values, Jul 28, 2023

Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) is an insightful deliberation on the layered inequities ... more Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) is an insightful deliberation on the layered inequities and asymmetries created by the intersection of colonialism and anthropogenic activities. In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh conceives the present-day climate and ecological crisis as fallouts of colonial thinking and its manifestations in dominant epistemic and ethical constructions. This article underscores Ghosh’s critique of the Eurocentric discourses for their instrumentality in producing the totalitarian binaries of human and non-human, in which the ‘human’ was always the whites and the ‘non-human’ comprised all ‘others’—the non-whites, indigenous people, nature and ecology. In attributing agency and signifying authority to the white capitalist, this dualistic thinking has always conceived of the ‘others’ as non-humans—those who could be objectified, commodified and tampered with. This article explores how Ghosh repudiates this colonialist monolithic demarcation, which, in compliance with the discourse of the Anthropocene, had annihilated non-Western forms of signification, knowledge and ethics. The article focuses on how the systemic othering of Western modernity’s episteme had been incremental, leading to occurrences of ‘testimonial injustices’ and ‘hermeneutical injustices’—which had culminated in severe forms of epistemicide and unleashed, what Boaventura de Sousa Santos terms ‘cognitive injustice’—relegating indigeneity and ecology to precarious conditions. In accordance with this, this article argues that Ghosh envisages a critical necessity to dismantle the matrix of Western capitalist modernity and its associated narrative of the Anthropocene and claims for a conceptualization of decolonial ecological ethics that would prioritize an encompassing of the episteme produced by the ‘other’. An engagement with the indigenous voices and a restoration of non-Western modes of knowledge production are crucial, as they can offer new ethical dimensions to envision ecology and life with its multiplicities and facilitate ‘cognitive justice’ for the oppressed and unrepresented ‘other’.

eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics, Jul 23, 2023

Environmental degradation, climate crises, and ecological catastrophes effect the countries of th... more Environmental degradation, climate crises, and ecological catastrophes effect the countries of the tropics distinctly from those of the Global North, reflecting the ramifications of colonial capitalist epistemes and practices that sanction extraction, commodification, and control of tropical lands and peoples. Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were (2021), set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, bears witness to the history and presence of ecological disaster in the African tropics through issues related to extractivism, environmental injustices, and structural racism that are ongoing under the mask of capitalist progress and development. Mbue, a Cameroonian-American novelist, recounts Kosawa's decades-long struggle against the American oil company Pexton. This article focuses on the critical aspect that Mbue's discourse reveals-that there is a need to map environmental injustices with other forms of structural injustices and the prevalence of neocolonialism and its manifestations through racial, economic, and epistemic practices. The article further explicates how the ordinary people of Kosawa become subjected to "slow violence" and "testimonial injustice" and foregrounds the necessity of "epistemic disobedience" demonstrated in the novel through the madman's intervention and Thula's sustained resistance to the exploitative agendas.

Peter Lang eBooks, Jul 11, 2016

$Research paper thumbnail of Anfractuous Narratives, Human Rights and Precarity in Fatima Meer’s Prison Diary$

Imbizo

This article offers an analysis of South African writer and political activist Fatima Meer’s Pris... more This article offers an analysis of South African writer and political activist Fatima Meer’s Prison Diary: One Hundred and Thirteen Days and addresses the ways in which her creative imagination has been triggered by feelings of vulnerability and precarity within the context of racism and injustice. The analysis leans on Bryan Turner’s notion of vulnerability and human rights and Judith Butler’s thoughts on precarious lives. Meer’s narrative is anfractuous given the many roles she played in society, resulting in a memoir that is replete with windings and intricate turnings. Her plots and paths as an academic, artist, sociologist, writer, prisoner, Mandela’s biographer, political activist and human rights campaigner are anfractuous—they twist and turn but do not break. Turner notes that without an ethical commitment realistically to follow one’s vocation or one’s fate, a human being cannot achieve “personality.” In Weber’s ethical system, being a “personality” means having devotion to...