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Showing papers in "Journal of Literary Studies in 2002"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe the impact of being away from the places they write about on their writing and their ability to cope with absence and longing and a need to belong.
Abstract: Writing and Living in Empire S: Modernity is intimately connected to certain notions of empire, the novel, history, truth, and race we would like to discuss. You live in Scotland, what is sometimes called the first English colony. Your writing, however, centres on another "outpost of the British empire". So, could we begin by rephrasing a rather threadbare question in more general terms: given the significance of absence, repression, and longing firstly for language as a system of reference and secondly for the creative imagination, how would you describe the impact of being away from the places you write about? Z: It's a problem--Mphahlele, I think, called it the tyranny of place. I can't write about Britain, and writing about South Africa is arguably a way of coping with absence and longing and a need to belong. (It's not possible for me to belong in Scotland: one couldn't in a place where one's difference is so salient.) In Europe, exile has always been a romantic notion, a glamorous condition we were told, sought by the greats like Joyce and Beckett to achieve that necessary distance and objectivity--those were the litcrit keywords of my undergraduate days. Of course, the fact that they were colonials was overlooked. Nowadays, in the times of "postcoloniality", we have a different take on place and displacement, and we know that objectivity is a luxury enjoyed in the northern hemisphere where sense of self or self-worth is a given. You know, I didn't choose to live in Europe, it's an accident of history, and the consequences, such as producing a family here, keep me here. Exile is after all not a state of being frozen in time, where a short thaw is all that stands between you and comfortable insertion back into the homeland. I would prefer to live in South Africa--or so I believe--and it will be possible to do so in two to three years' time. I certainly couldn't write if I did not spend extended periods there, because it's not possible to go on mining memory. I often wonder about writers like Salman Rushdie. His earlier novels, including The Satanic Verses, are absolutely stunning, but the later ones I find, well, disappointing. Is it because he's writing about a culture and a country in which he hasn't lived for some time and nevertheless feels compelled to write about? So then, even for the great writers who are accepted in the Western centres, the problem persists: the problem of writing about home that has for some time not been home. And that subject matter, which is in a crucial sense about absence, comes so often to be articulated through history. As for the stuff about absence feeding the imagination, or distance providing a better perspective, well, it may be true, it must be true for the genre of fantasy, but to me it sounds like a cliche. I couldn't have written David's Story if I hadn't lived in Cape Town between 1990 and 1994. It would have been something else, a novel about the Griquas, but being there, with the issues of the contemporary strand of David's Story all around me, the extraordinary parallels between the two periods insisted on a revision of my original idea. S: Many postcolonial authors live in the former "mother countries", close to the heart of darkness, so to speak. What is the significance then of your living and teaching in Britain for your writing? Z: Let's look on the bright side: living in Scotland is possibly what keeps me on my toes. As a black foreigner you have to work that much harder in order to prove yourself; you can't afford to slip up--even in academia. Given how hard it is to write, how little time there is to write once the business of teaching and the daily immersion in bureaucracy is over, I sometimes wonder if it's the desire to prove myself in a hostile culture that makes me write at all. But writing also is a means of saying that which you can't utter: it compensates for the fear of speaking. In Scotland I am often congratulated by strangers on my "good English". …

25 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, Coetzee identifies the grammatical error of aspect as evidence that there is no actual Afrikaans original behind the archaic sounding, ethnicised English: no one speaking his own language makes errors of aspect: the time system of the verb is too fundamental to language, and therefore to conceptualisation for that to happen.
Abstract: Summary In his account of the style in which Pauline Smith represents Afrikaners, her “faux‐naief” translation or transfer from Afrikaans to English, J.M. Coetzee identifies the grammatical error of aspect as evidence that there is no actual Afrikaans original behind the archaic‐sounding, ethnicised English: “no‐one speaking his own language makes errors of aspect: the time‐system of the verb is too fundamental to language, and therefore to conceptualisation for that to happen”. Two issues in this position relate to my argument about Disgrace as a text that struggles with translation as concept‐metaphor for the postapartheid condition: firstly, the question of an original language Coetzee expects to find behind the English “translation” that claims to retain its trace; and secondly, the grammatical aspect of the perfective that not only preoccupies Lurie, the novel's central character, but also in terms of cultural translation marks the arrival at the target language/culture. In the following examination ...

22 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the failure of South Africa to function as a unitary nation through specific moments in its literary development, arguing that literature in South Africa has been held hostage by apartheid, both in the historical context of settler oppression and more recently in the Rainbow Nation.
Abstract: Summary Closely linked to the emergence of modernity, the nation has functioned for literature (and for the novel in particular) as a virtual space, a discursive formation and a mental structure in relation to individual histories and narratives. Thus the nation has served as a reservoir that writers can draw on to fashion stories of the nation. The essay examines the failure of South Africa to function as a unitary nation through specific moments in its literary development, arguing that literature in South Africa has been held hostage by apartheid ‐ both in the historical context of settler oppression and more recently in the “Rainbow Nation” (the period following the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994). It remains a presence, a shadow of unpunished wickedness and inequality ignored. The essay ends by drawing analogies to other modern “literatures of the abyss” in which the nation, inasmuch as it does emerge, is narrated with a whimper.

15 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors consider the value of literary history's retention, amid discontinuity, of an ethics of narrative in the context of post-modernist "discontinuity" in South Africa.
Abstract: The publication of Michael Chapman's Southern African Literaturesl/Ig (1996) occasioned lively debate. In South Africa responses involved matters of identity: whose language, culture, or story would retain purchase in a new South Africa? In North America and Europe related questions were cast - less emotively - as enquiries into the possibility of writing literary history at a time of postmodernist "discontinuity". Using such responses as a starting point, the paper considers the value of literary history's retention, amid discontinuity, of an ethics of narrative. 'n Lewendige debat het gevolg op die publikasie van Michael Chapman se Southern African Literaturesl/Ig (1996). In Suid-Afrika was die meeste reaksies gerig op vraagstellings oor identiteit: wie se taal, kultuur en storie sou stand hou in 'n nuwe Suid-Afrika? In Noord-Amerika en Europa is soortgelyke sake geopper - met minder emosie - as ondersoeksvrae na die moontlikheid daarvan om 'n literatuurgeskiedenis te skryf in 'n tyd van postmodernistiese "diskontinuiteit". Met soortgelyke reaksies as 'n vertrekpunt, word daar in hierdie artikel besin oor die waarde van die literatuurgeskiedenis se behoud van 'n narratiewe etiek te midde van diskontinuiteit.

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
Gugu Hlongwane1
TL;DR: The authors explored the place of alternative modernities in the tentatively post-apartheid South Africa and pointed out the limitations of Gilroy's "counterculture" of modernity.
Abstract: Summary This article explores the place of alternative modernities in the tentatively “new” South Africa. Premised upon Paul Gilroy's theoretical deconstruction of “race” and “nation” in the “black Atlantic”, the arguments presented will underscore the limitations of Gilroy's “counterculture” of modernity. Whilst the world is in need of the humanism that Gilroy advocates, “postrace” and “postnation” states are premature ideals for a newly post‐apartheid country like South Africa. Present cultural configurations in this country not only suggest the lingering quandary of racism but they make critical the questioning of Western literary prescription. The rather uncertain conclusions drawn on these issues, point to the continuing universal and local compromising of African perspectives in these so‐called modern and postmodern times. Forging alternative modernities is a complex enterprise; yet postponing necessary alternatives to modernity will only serve to detain meaningful socioeconomic change.

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Kafár's curse as mentioned in this paper cautions against a total rejection of attachment to origins, obscure, distant or elusive as those origins may be, and challenges the silence surrounding miscegenation as well as the idea that pure categories of race could even exist.
Abstract: Summary As Zoe Wicomb observes in “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa” (1998), the country's history of miscegenation has been silenced by the very people whom the practice has created: “it is after all the very nature of shame to stifle its own discourse” (Wicomb quoted by Attridge & Jolly 1998:92). In chronicling the ways in which the color bar was constantly and continually being subverted through interracial couplings, Kafka's Curse (Dangor 1997) works to challenge the silence surrounding miscegenation as well as the idea that pure categories of race could even exist. But the categories must not be ignored altogether. Kafka's Curse cautions against a total rejection of attachment to origins, obscure, distant or elusive as those origins may be. It must be the project of the new South African literature to examine the role of ethnic identification in nation‐building, and to consider how “remembrance” can be harnessed toward it.

5 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
Kay Sulk1
TL;DR: In this paper, the double bind of the novel's narrator, who finds herself simultaneously subjected to and outside of historical discourse, by designating the problem of postcolonial agency in the allegorical transition from the figure of the angel to that of the witness, is discussed.
Abstract: Summary In the particular historical locale of South Africa's late apartheid, J.M. Coetzee's novel Age of Iron (1990) assumes a narrative position that, while fundamentally impeded by sociohistorical clusters, succeeds in articulating and subverting its own impediment. The essay seeks to account for the double bind of the novel's narrator, who finds herself simultaneously subjected to and outside of historical discourse, by designating the problem of postcolonial agency in the allegorical transition from the figure of the angel to that of the witness. To back up and elaborate on its claims, it reassesses modern subjectivity in light of the experience of racial and totalitarian violence. In this reassessment, it takes recourse to recent theories of cultural modernity by Homi K. Bhabha, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, which, however diverse, all rely on a concept of subjectivity based on acts of enunciation ‐ not on what is said but on language taking place. The ultimate aim of the essay is to describe...

5 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The very discourse of witchcraft, with its simultaneous resonances of atavistic witch doctors and historical witch trials, demands interrogation as mentioned in this paper, with the focus on the historical moment of the early 1990s "the last death throes of apartheid and the emotional transition into...
Abstract: Summary A decade ago, when South Africa was undergoing dramatic political, cultural, and social changes, newspapers began to print stories on a curious phenomenon ‐ the burning of so‐called witches in rural areas. Although this trend had probably been on the rise since the mid‐1980s, this particular moment was riddled with issues that found resonance in the witch‐burnings. Complex intersections of new politics, old customs, and extreme violence formed the basis for the press reports, which often attempted to draw clear lines between modern and traditional, legal and unauthorised, and secular and sacred, despite their overlaps. This paper seeks to investigate the phenomenon of witch‐burning and its representations. The very discourse of witchcraft, with its simultaneous resonances of atavistic witch doctors and historical witch trials, demands interrogation. Discussions of witch‐burning emphasise the historical moment of the early 1990s ‐ the last death throes of apartheid and the emotional transition into...

5 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
Mante Mphahlele1
TL;DR: The emergence of a tradition of autobiographical writing by Black South African women accentuates the contributions of an alternative, matrilineal line of heroes and women writers to an alternative history of the country.
Abstract: Summary The emergence of a tradition of autobiographical writing by Black South African women accentuates the contributions of an alternative, matrilineal line of heroes and women writers to an alternative history of the country. In shaping their own identities and in countering the prescriptions of the authorities with alternative scripts, these women engage in a gesture of defiance. One aspect of this defiance in texts which thematise the imperative for nation‐building within the context of political oppression is the emphasis they place on the continuity between the self and her community.

5 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper explored Breytenbach's repeated reference to mirrors and mirror images in both his verbal and visual texts and asked how they are engaged by the author to tease out the complexities informing the formation and representation of personal identity.
Abstract: Summary This paper explores Breyten Breytenbach's repeated reference to mirrors and mirror images in both his verbal and visual texts and asks how they are engaged by the author to tease out the complexities informing the formation and representation of personal identity. It argues that Breytenbach postulates the mirror as a model space where personal identity is at once instated and contested through the inevitable interplay between the real subject and its reflected other. An analysis of some of the portraits reproduced in All One Horse: Fictions and Images (1990) serves to illustrate concretely how the mirror is incorporated into Breytenbach's texts to evoke in his readers a sense of the paradoxes informing personal identity.

5 citations


Journal Article
TL;DR: The first volume of this double issue on Alternative Modernities in African Literatures and Cultures has explored theoretical aspects of modernity and its discontents in a range of cultural and literary manifestations as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The first volume of this double issue on Alternative Modernities in African Literatures and Cultures has explored theoretical aspects of modernity and its discontents in a range of cultural and literary manifestations. The second volume presents various examples of the ways in which modernity, and alternatives to and within modernity have been configured in literary historiography and in specific textual situations. The bias is towards literary production in South Africa against the background of the modernity predicated in the ideology of apartheid, and the essays are joined in their investigation of the possibility of transcending this latter-day turn of imperial domination. It is the very rigidity of apartheid's laws and social organisation that seems to preclude, on the one hand, the possibility of emancipatory production, while at the same time serving as a constant imperative to engage with and find ways of dissolving the frozen identity that racism seeks to enforce--thereby fashioning previsions of alternative modernities. In the first essay, Zoe Wicomb examines J.M. Coetzee's most recent novel. The essay's concern goes beyond the immediate textual surface presented in Disgrace, and looks instead at the broader moment of transition in post-apartheid South Africa through the concept of translation. Wicomb's essay traces the notion of translation (or translatability) in the racialised modernity of South Africa back to the historical moment when Europeans first arrived to settle at the Cape and cultural "translator" Eva-Krotoa moved between the newcomers at the Castle and the Khoi-Khoi people. The use of the perfective in Coetzee's text is shown to be evidence of the foregrounding of translation, but, as Wicomb concludes in her detailed textual reading, the work of translation always retains a residue, an echo of the original. In "The Politics of Identity: South Africa, Story-telling, and Literary History", Michael Chapman returns to considerations raised in his 1996 book-length study of Southern African Literatures. This seminal, even foundational work has been the subject of heated debate, and the essay considers some of the issues raised in this dispute against the broader background of literature in post-apartheid South Africa. It outlines the modern manifestation of identity as being one of the "summarising tropes" of literary history, and proceeds to examine this in the context of the "South African story". The expansive inclusiveness of this story in the light of the nonapocalyptic transition that took place in the South Africa of the 1990s is reflected in the programmatic range of the original Southern African Literatures itself. In "The Republic of Letters after the Mandela Republic", Lewis Nkosi too questions the possibility of a "founding historical narrative in the literature of South Africa". His view that in South Africa "the state is not commensurate with the nation" underlines one of the central concerns of this special issue--the predestined inability of modern statehood, thrust onto Africa by its colonial masters, to translate into "nationhood". Nkosi's perspective in this essay is one of a lifetime of engagement with the struggle against apartheid--both in his activism and through his writing. His intimate knowledge of the "War Room" writing that arises from the apartheid-driven conflict in South Africa translates into a personal "unpacking of his library" as he traces the Beckett-like murmurings of a range of South African narratives that lay claim to the dubious status of national literature. His conclusion is that the jury is still out, both on the matter of postapartheid literary expression and on the broader fruits of liberation. Devi Sarinjeive's "Transgressions/Transitions in Three Post-1994 South African Texts" brings the focus to bear on narrative expressions of the 1990s transitional period in South Africa. The essay's examination of Pamela Jooste's Dance with a Poor Man's Daughter, Bridget Pitt's Unbroken Wing and Achmat Dangor's Kafka's Curse is predicated on an interrogation of modern definitions of identity as "a certain fixed reality systematically categorised or displaced within de/mite, unchanging boundaries". …

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The role of modernism in literature is recognised as simultaneously an exposure of territorial and racial power factors at work in the European modernisation project, and as (to some extent) complicit in them.
Abstract: Summary This discussion begins by setting up a critique of the modernisation project of the West as closely entwined with territorial expansionism and the development of racial arrogance ‐ with reference to a range of theorists. The role of modernism (in literature) is recognised as simultaneously an exposure of territorial and racial power factors at work in the European modernisation project, and as (to some extent) complicit in them. The text used here to exemplify the paradoxical role of European modernism is Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Since Marechera in carnivalesque fashion parodies Conrad's novella in the opening pages of his novel Black Sunlight, discussing this text introduces the topic of Marechera's particular kind of postmodernism with its focus on the modernisation project, in the African context, as a form of betrayal. The rest of the essay examines The Black Insider ‐ a novel of debate in which the displacement of African intellectuals is addressed in a similar style of grotesque mockery b...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a rereading of two texts that had been written at the very beginning of the twentieth century in the western part of the former Gold Coast colony, today's Ghana Guided by the concept of hybridity, is presented.
Abstract: Summary This article undertakes the rereading of two texts that had been written at the very beginning of the twentieth century in the western part of the former Gold‐Coast colony, today's Ghana Guided by the concept of “hybridity”, this reading tries to show that a close look at the construction of identity ‐ in this case the identity of a missionary and a native pastor ‐ can open up ways for new textual interpretations Thus, the two authors who are located in the power struggle between the local politics, the colonial government and the Basel Mission seem to contest the official interpretation of a political deed in their reports and thereby negotiate its meaning

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the epistemological and broader political implications of the employment of psychoanalytic theories in literary studies in South Africa are discussed, and a kind of theorising which involves a dialogue with alternative models, models such as traditional Zulu thought and its attendant literary forms is proposed.
Abstract: Summary This paper asks: what are the epistemological and broader political implications of the employment of psychoanalytic theories in literary studies in South Africa? In the implicit endorsement of psychoanalytic theories of the subject in much poststructuralist and some postcolonial theory, academics subscribe to a value‐laden conception of the self. Psychoanalysis rejects as “primitive” notions of self such as those circulating amongst indigenous South African cultures while it privileges the individualised psychological person who emerges in the early modern period in the West. Thus, however fruitful psychoanalytic theories may be, if they are not made accountable to local thought systems then their complicity with intellectual imperialism may render them at best suspect, at worst incapacitating to South African students. What is needed is a kind of theorising which involves a dialogue with alternative models, models such as traditional Zulu thought and its attendant literary forms. If students are...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a critical analysis of two discourses on postcolonial Africa is conducted to address this dilemma: a political and urbanistic discourse, that of the South African president, Thabo Mbeki's briefing on the implementation of the Millennium Africa Renaissance Programme (MAP) at the World Economic Forum held on 28 January 2001.
Abstract: Summary Contemporary French philosophers typically characterise modern Western thought as an egocentric assimilation of the Other by the Self. Similar to Western thought's reductive relationship towards alterity, the relationship between Europe and Africa is, more often than not, seen as an asymmetric one of Europeanisation. The ethical dilemma being addressed in this essay concerns a possible way of interacting with the Other without necessarily violating or reducing its alterity. An ethical appeal demands a response, for ignoring the appeal and remaining silent amounts to “murdering” the Other. However, a response necessarily amounts to a violation. A critical analysis of two discourses on postcolonial Africa is conducted to address this dilemma: a political and urbanistic discourse. The first is that of the South African president, Thabo Mbeki's briefing on the implementation of the Millennium Africa Renaissance Programme (MAP) at the World Economic Forum held on 28 January 2001. The urbanistic discour...

Journal ArticleDOI
Devi Sarinjeive1
TL;DR: The authors explored the representations and the writing self of three South African writers, two white women and one male of Malay descent, against apartheid identity paradigms and the postmodernist revisioning of the Enlightenment notion of the self as complex and constantly shifting.
Abstract: Summary The representations and the writing self of three South African writers, two white women and one male of Malay descent, are explored against apartheid identity paradigms and the postmodernist revisioning of the Enlightenment notion of the self as complex and constantly shifting. The focus in the article is on the reformulations of the self by the crossing of actual and conceptual boundaries to show dominating patterns as well as failures, silences, displacements and transformations.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A Question of Power (1974) is often thought to be Bessie Head's most personal and least political novel as discussed by the authors, and it is read through the lens of Fredric Jameson's concept of national allegory, which takes a whole new shape.
Abstract: Summary Bessie Head's A Question of Power (1974), is often thought to be her most personal and least political novel. Read through the lens of Fredric Jameson's concept of “national allegory”, though, the novel takes a whole new shape. In Jameson's formulation of “national allegory”, he urges readers to think about the equivalences of allegory as shifting through time, not the fixed one‐to‐one of traditional allegory. He insists that reading “third‐world” texts through the concept of “national allegory” allows readers to see the connection of individual to nation. Through the nonlinear narrative of Elizabeth's mental breakdown, Bessie Head takes us on an allegorical tour through South African history. While Elizabeth literally struggles to save herself from the demons of her madness, Head allegorically works through a diagnosis of apartheid era political problems. Through the figures of Dan and Sello, Head explicates oppressive and liberatory political ideologies. Reading A Question of Power as a national...