Intellectuals and Activists: Contemporary Challenges in the Era of Globalisaiton (2006)

Document Type : Keynote Address

Author

University of Pittsburgh

Abstract

Dennis Brutus' keynote address was delivered at the Eighth International Symposium on Comparative Literature (2005), in which he reveals most of the aspects of his public personality: the writer, the activist, the educator and the dreamer for a better world. According to Brutus, the apartheid system that he got jailed and exiled for fighting against in his prime still existed in the time of writing this keynote speech but on a larger scale that involved the whole world, rather than just his native country, South Africa. Sadly, although the speech was written in 2005, it is still very relevant, if not more relevant, to our world today. Being an activist and a dreamer of a better world, Dennis Brutus reminds us in his speech of the failure of the Seattle Convention that was supposed to set the rules for this form of globalization. He also reminds us of the different World Social Forums which have created a movement of resistance to the unfair process of the new apartheid that features a small minority of the rich ruling and oppressing a majority of the poor. In her foreword to the article, Mona Ibrahim states that in spite of the recurrent failures of resistance movements in our world today, hope and the solidarity of the oppressed are our only weapons and we need to hold hard to them, as we are constantly reminded to do by such dreamers as Dennis Brutus.
Foreword by Mona Ibrahim.

Keywords

Published in the Symposium Proceedings: Power and the Role of the Intellectual, ed. Salwa Kamel and Hoda Gindi, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, (2006), 1-14.

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics