This essay discusses the question of whether describing people in essentialist terms violates the people being object to the description. The discussion is based on Kimberley Brownlee’s argumentation which states that there exists a right against social deprivation. To speak of people in crime-related, stigmatising and negatively charged terms – such as the term “criminal” – risks reducing the individual’s identity to solely the criminal aspect, and deprive them the opportunity of creating and sustaining other identities. A person’s role as a social contributor to family members and other close relatives is made more difficult, and the creation of social bonds outside the criminal sphere diminishes. This essay also brings up the critique put forward by Laura Valentini, who states that the lack in social needs is unsatisfiable in reality, and therefore it cannot be said to be a fundamental right, as Brownlee argues. The essay develops the thesis that, even though it is impossible to guarantee everyone meaningful social relationships, it is the duty of public institutions to facilitate and support the creation of these relationships. Furthermore, the use of essentialist terms – by both journalists, as well as politicians and other people in power – inhibit individuals the opportunity to create meaningful relational bonds, which could be paramount for their development and well-being. / essentiella termer. Diskussionen baseras på Kimberley Brownlees argumentation som menar att det finns en rättighet mot socialt berövande. Att tala om människor i brottsrelaterade, stigmatiserande och negativt laddade termer – såsom termen ”kriminell” – riskerar att reducera individens identitet till endast den kriminella aspekten, och fråntar dem möjligheten att skapa och bibehålla andra identiteter. Personens roll som socialt bidragande för familjemedlemmar och andra närstående försvåras, och skapandet av sociala band utanför ett kriminellt umgänge riskerar att minskas. Uppsatsen tar också upp kritik framfört av Laura Valentini, som menar att bristandet av sociala behov inte går att tillfredsställa i praktiken och att det därför inte kan påstås vara en fundamental rättighet, såsom Brownlee hävdar. Uppsatsen driver tesen att, även om det inte går att garantera en människa betydelsefulla sociala relationer, så är det de samhälleliga institutionernas uppgift att underlätta och stödja skapandet av dessa relationer. Och användandet av essentiella termer – av såväl journalister som politiker och andra makthavare – hämmar människors möjlighet till meningsfulla relationella band, vilka är viktiga för personens utveckling och välmående.

James Brownlee was born in April 1824. He was the second of three sons (and five daughters) born to the missionary John Brownlee, and his colonial born wife Catharine. The importance of James as an historical character is obscured by that of his father and elder brother Charles. James had a varied career which was cut short by his untimely death in March 1851 at the youthful age of twenty-six years and eleven months. We are fortunate that he has left a vivid account of several aspects of the seventh Frontier War in a diary which he kept from April to September 1846. The diary also points to the significance of his family in the history of the Eastern Cape. Thesis, p. 1.

This thesis investigates if Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks constitute a valid form ofcivil disobedience online. For this purpose a multi-dimensional framework is established,drawing on Brownlee’s paradigm case and classical theory of civil disobedience. Threedifferent examples of DDoS attacks are then examined using this framework - the attacksfrom the Electronic Disturbance Theater in support of the Zapatista movement;Anonymous’ Operation Payback; Electrohippies’ attack against the World TradeOrganization. Following the framework, none of these DDoS attacks are able to constitute acivilly disobedient act online. The thesis then goes on and identifies four key issues, drawingon the results from the examples: The loss of 'individual presence', no inimitable feature ofDDoS attacks, impeding free speech and the danger of western imperialism. It concludes thatDDoS attacks cannot and should not be seen as a form of civil disobedience online. Thethesis further proposes that online actions, in order to be seen as civilly disobedient actsonline, need two additional features: An 'individual presence' of the protesters online tocompensate for the remoteness of cyberspace and an inimitable feature in order to berecognizable by society. Further research should investigate with this extended framework ifthere are valid forms of civil disobedience online.

Both historiographical and literary practices have undergone revision in recent years in attempting to address the inheritance of nineteenth-century realism. Since the object of realist stylistics, employed in both the writing of fiction and history, is to render authorship authoritative or even invisible, the ideological import of these narratives is often such that the constructedness of the historical record and its absences are veiled. In developments beginning in the 1980s with the advent of ‘New Historicism’ and with the emergence of postmodern literary techniques, the interface of literature and history became of seminal importance, since both were now credited as being products of narrative and discourse, and hence, to varying degrees, of the literary imagination. This movement intersects interestingly with developments in postcolonial studies, since it is the voices of the marginalized and disempowered colonized peoples that are routinely co-opted and excised from nineteenth-century realist histories. These concerns are now being fully explored in the literature of the contemporary post-transitional South African moment, since authors in this country seemingly now feel freed up to look back to histories that precede the immediate traumas of apartheid. The concern, in relation to apartheid developments but also on a broader universal scale, is this: if history is viewed as perpetual emergences of modernities, then one of the great absences in the record is the historical determinants of any given epistemology. The attempt to recreate such an epistemological genealogy is thus simultaneously postcolonial, historiographical, and literary. Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues (2005), Ingrid Winterbach’s To Hell with Cronjé (2010), and Etienne van Heerden’s The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (2002) attempt to bridge this gap in the recorded sensibilities of any historical moment by representing a ‘lived experience’ of the past, and in the process imaginatively recreating the cultural, historical and psychological locations of the proponents of an emerging modernity. This study concerns itself with the ways in which these authors address the influence of realist historiography through the use of literary innovations that allow for the departure from realist stylistics. Most commonly, all three authors draw on forms of magic realism, but multiple refigurings and recombinations of notions of temporality, narrative, and characterization likewise work to defamiliarize the once stable discourse of history.

The evidence of these diaries, all written in the nineteenth century, reveals the heterogeneous nature of early settler society in the Eastern Cape. Generalizations can only be of the most tenuous kind in such a small sample; but women tend to dwell on the domestic, the men on their public lives, the most reticent about their private lives are the soldiers. There is one diary which can be described as personal; the diarists did not regard their diaries as appropriate repositories of their personal triumphs and failures. The perceptions formed in Britain about the land and people of Africa are not drastically modified upon arrival unless the diarist experiences a prolongued contact with either.