Siphiwe Dube - MIASA - Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa

Siphiwe Dube is a Senior Lecturer and former Head in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is an author of numerous interdisciplinary articles and chapters (and also supervises) on a range of topics covering African politics and religion, decoloniality, feminisms, post-colonial literature, race, religion and masculinities, religion and identity politics, religion and popular culture, and transitional justice. His current two projects focus on African Political Theology and the Religious New Right in post-apartheid South Africa. He is a United World College (Atlantic College) alumnus, a former NRF-DST Scarce Skills Development Postdoctoral Research Fellow, a former Africa Fellow at IASH, University of Edinburgh and currently a Pan-African Scientific Research Council Fellow, NRF-rated scholar, and Senior Fellow at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana.

MIASA Project: Economic Ascendance is/as Moral Rightness: The New Religious Political Right in Post-apartheid South Africa

The project’s main focus is an examination of what I regard as a different type of New Right emerging in current day South Africa. I am interested in how this New Right is not simply the purview of white nationalism, but has main appeal within both the black and white middleclass and aspiring middle-class. In particular, the project seeks to elucidate how this New Right is economically neoliberal, politically conservative, and religiously Neo/Pentecostal in character. The project’s methodology is critical discourse analysis using the literature on the New Right of the 1980s and 1990s as a starting point, in order to highlight persistent themes of the New Right that continue today.

Selected publications

1. Dube, Siphiwe Ignatius, “A Foray into (Study of?) African Political Theology.” Political Theology 21:7, 650-666 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1462317X.2020.1807700?needAccess=true

2. Dube, Siphiwe Ignatius, “Praying for Change in the Nations: Prayer, Politics, and Power in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Journal of Church and State, vol. 0 no. 0, pages 1–24; https://academic.oup.com/jcs/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jcs/csaa059/5879196

Institute:
University of the Witwatersrand

Year:
2021/2022