Masks of conquest: Literary study and British rule in India

The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism

Women in German Yearbook I. Feminist Studies and German Culture@@@The New Feminist Criticism. Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory

Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850–1950

Considere comme le chef de file des neo conservateurs americains, Irving Kristol meurt en septembre 2009 a l’âge de 89 ans. Il est assez representatif de cette generation, passee du trotskysme au liberalisme. Ne en 1920 a Brooklyn (New York) dans une famille pauvre d’ouvriers du textile venue d’Europe de l’Est, il frequente le City College de New York, une des rares universites gratuites et qui n’imposait pas de quota a l’encontre des Juifs, « un Harvard juif proletarien », ainsi la denommerent ses etudiants. La deuxieme figure des neo conservateurs, Norman Podhoretz, dirigeant du prestigieux Commentary Magazine de 1960 a 1995, est lui aussi issu du trotskysme. Ce livre d’Alan Wald, tire d’une these, qui essaie de comprendre pourquoi et comment ces communistes anti-staliniens sont devenus des liberaux anti-communistes est donc precieux, bien qu'il ne soit malheureusement pas encore traduit en francais 1 . La quasi totalite des ces hommes sont des Juifs de New York, issus de familles recemment immigrees d’Europe de l’Est ou de Russie. Alan Wald rappelle le role fondateur de la Menorah Society 2 , creee en 1906, qui permet a ces jeunes gens de s’arracher au ghetto religieux-culturel et d’adherer dans un premier temps a une philosophie humaniste, non sectaire et de tonalite anti-sioniste. Pour beaucoup, Felix Morrow par exemple (ne Mayorwitz en 1906 dans une famille hassidique 3 ), c’est la crise de 1929

The New York Intellectuals. The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s. to the 1980s., Chapel Hill and London, University of North Carolina Press, 1987, 440 pages. Par Jean-Paul Salles.

This paper explores the diversity of cultural debates which constellated around the Communist Party in South Africa in the late segregationist and early apartheid periods. It traces the textual remains of an itinerant public debate––dispersed in periodical reviews, magazine articles, journalistic tit-bits and other ephemeral public sphere activities such as debating societies, theater groups and discussion clubs––with a view to complicating and expanding the South African literary-cultural archive. Of particular importance are the practices and protocols of reading, cultural critique and interpretation that characterized the intellectual-political field––or public sphere––which we name the Communist Party. In this way, a fragmented cultural discussion is provisionally reconstituted or “invented” as an important South African tradition and reclaimed as a significant intellectual inheritance. The project thus bears on broader question of reading the past and attempts to negotiate an historical split between...

“Yours for Socialism”: Communist Cultural Discourse in Early Apartheid South Africa

This editorial offers critical reflections on short story writing in South Africa post-2000. Against the background of critical scholarship on the short story form and thematic trends of short stor...

The short story in South Africa post-2000: Critical reflections on a genre in transition:

In this article, I offer a reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003) through the lens of the body. References to the body in Purple Hibiscus are frequent, even excessive. In its insistent emphasis on the body, I suggest, the novel establishes affiliations with an emergent tradition of African writing in which various forms of “body writing” are deployed as part of a destabilizing aesthetic. These aesthetico-political concerns are developed in a number of ways—in the inscriptions of the body as a site of physical and discursive violence, in the positive reimagining of the black body against a history of shame, and in the novel’s refracted critique of the postcolonial potentate whose body becomes the object of a destabilizing and satirical gaze. By means of the trope of the bodily grotesque—along with a repeated gesture of ironic unmasking—the novel asserts the reciprocal connections between the private violence of the domestic sphere and the public violence of the postcolonial state. Also important is a pervasive structure of reciprocity or mirroring in which several unexpected connections between conventionally bounded conditions are disclosed. Not least of these, I suggest, are the links between Western enlightenment-democracy and the violence of the postcolonial state.

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Frailties of the flesh : observing the body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies Purple hibiscus

The violent attacks on immigrants in May and June 2008 laid bare some of the contradictions of the South African postcolony. Focusing on the vigorous public debate which arose in the aftermath of violence, this essay explores a moment of interpretive crisis in which the privileged stories of the nation were unexpectedly unravelled. From there, it moves to a discussion of the political investments at stake in the government's choice of the crime story as dominant interpretive scheme, giving particular emphasis to what this revealed about national myth‐making, the production of consensus and modalities of power in the postcolonial state.

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Postcolonial violence: Narrating South Africa, May 2008

In this article, I examine the popular satirical column “R. Roamer Esq.” written by R.R.R. Dhlomo which appeared in The Bantu World newspaper. The study seeks to reassemble the archive of African intellectual and political life by foregrounding a hidden history of print culture practices and traditions. I assert the historical importance of the newspaper column and the satirical gesture in South African letters and emphasise the significance of the modes of humour and irony as forms of political resistance. In directing attention to the rhetorical and performative aspects of South Africa’s protest history, the article expands on the political role of the African press in the aftermaths of colonialism in articulating new modes of agency, resistance and critique. In particular, Dhlomo’s satirical column is approached as a space of literary expression in which opposition to various aspects of 1930s South African society is articulated in elusive, indirect and coded ways. As such, I advocate a reading...

Corinne Sandwith

Papers

“Yours for Socialism”: Communist Cultural Discourse in Early Apartheid South Africa

The short story in South Africa post-2000: Critical reflections on a genre in transition:

Frailties of the flesh : observing the body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies Purple hibiscus

Postcolonial violence: Narrating South Africa, May 2008

Well-seasoned talks : the newspaper column and the satirical mode in South African letters