Showing papers in "Journal of Literary Studies in 2014"

Ways of Telling: (Re)Writing the Nation in the Novels and Memoir of Chinua Achebe

Abstract: SummaryPerhaps the most recognisable thematic feature of Chinua Achebe's celebrated fictional and critical praxis is his keen interest in the social and political transformation of African societies following colonisation and independence. This article focuses on his engagement with African/Nigerian nationhood in his five novels and memoir, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012). The objective is to make evident significant trajectories and changes in Achebe's portrayal of political leadership and history in his thematisation of postcolonial and post-independence nationalism. While using the older novels as a form of background, I concentrate on Anthills of the Savannah and There Was a Country, and argue that these two works demonstrate a significant – even if not total – narrowing of interest from Nigeria/Africa, to his ethnic group, the Igbo, in a way that radicalises some of his previously well-known positions on postcolonial nationhood. The article demonstrates how changes in Achebe'...

Beyond the Canon: Whither Beyond?

Abstract: SummaryWithin a history of the deployment of the term “canon”, the author of this article investigates the possibility of an extra-canonical literature and the role of heritage and the futuristic in literature through reweaving by appropriation. The history of English as an academic discipline, the roots and consequences of essentialism and nihilism, and the problems in approaching a work of literature by means of a “What is x?” question are also considered.

“Opening up to the Rest of Africa”?: Continental Connections and Literary (Dis) Continuities in Simão Kikamba’s Going Home and Jonathan Nkala’s The Crossing

Abstract: SummaryThis article focuses on Simao Kikamba’s semi-autobiographical novel Going Home (2005) and Jonathan Khumbulani Nkala’s one-man drama The Crossing (2009). Both texts chronicle the odyssey of the refugee author or narrator – in Kikamba’s text from Angola and in Nkala’s drama from Zimbabwe – to South Africa. I argue that although these works picture the growing transnational texture of the South African national space, this apparent continental connectivity is fraught with new intolerances like xenophobia. Far from displaying a definite break from the hallmarks of South African writing during apartheid, such as a preoccupation with the national and a focus on social commitment, the texts stress a continuation of these characteristics while at the same time re-examining them from a new, Afropolitan angle.

“The Devil Slapped on the Genitals”: Religion and Spirituality in Queer South Africans’ Lives

Abstract: SummaryUniquely among African countries, South Africa's Bill of Rights offers civil protection to individuals on the basis of vectors of identity including sexuality, gender and religion. Public opinion, however, lags behind the ideals of the Constitution. Against this historical background, a range of books has recently appeared, giving expression to the interface between sexuality, culture and religion from the viewpoint of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. These texts include autobiographical accounts in three books: Reclaiming the L-Word: Sappho's Daughters out in Africa (Diesel 2011a); Yes I Am!: Writing by South African Gay Men (Malan & Johaardien 2010); and Trans: Transgender Life Stories from South Africa (Morgan, Marais & Wellbeloved 2009). In this article I analyse the effects of autobiographical representations of spirituality and sexuality within different cultural contexts as represented in these books. I show the ways in which religions, including Christianity, Judaism, I...

Frankenzebra: Dangerous Knowledge and the Narrative Construction of Monsters

Abstract: SummaryThis article explores the enduring fear of “dangerous knowledge”. It argues that the “de-extinction movement” towards reviving long-disappeared species has been understood largely through recourse to one key “story” – the Frankenstein Myth. It looks at three de-extinction projects – the mammoth, quagga, and thylacine – using the way these projects have been couched to analyse anxieties over the hubristic abuse of technology. The article focuses on the power of mythic narratives to not only explain but shape understandings of science in society, concealing more nuanced understandings. Indeed, deeply entrenched narratives can actually influence scientific endeavour.

Playing the Politics of Erasure: (Post)Colonial Film Images and Cultural Genocide in Zimbabwe

Abstract: SummaryCultural genocide is much maligned and often simply ignored. Yet it is an epistemic condition powerful enough to cause a physical elimination of a targeted “tribe” or group of people. The aim of this article is to highlight cultural genocide and explore how this type of genocide was used in images in European colonial films to destroy or “erase” some important cultural and traditional activities of black people in Africa. It also critically examines how images in some postcolonial films, directed and produced by white film-makers, are used to perpetuate cultural genocide. Special reference will be made to the film Strike Back Zimbabwe (2010), produced by white film-makers, which insinuates the possible assassination of Zimbabwe's president. This article will argue that it is critical to study the nature and manifestations of cultural genocide, which is often relegated to the margins, as a way of understanding the genesis of this condition.

The Post-humanist Gaze: Reading Fanie Jason's Photo Essay on Carting Lives

Abstract: SummaryThis article proposes a post-humanist reading of Fanie Jason's photo essay on carthorses in Greater Cape Town. When social realist photography includes non-human animals, they tend to be relegated to the margins of representation: sentimentalised, sensationalised, denigrated or ignored, both metaphorically and literally, they all but disappear. Jason's photographs, however, pose provocative questions about the carthorse body and its intersomatic connections with the human body. The horses demand attention, often looking back at the camera lens and the viewer. Conventional anthropocentric theories of photography offer nothing to a methodology which seeks to engage with the visual non-human animal, but theories of animals in art and in film contribute valuably to such a methodology. A post-humanist gaze not only subverts the human and non-human as necessarily inimical realms, but analyses how the photographs themselves extend the purview of social realist images. Post-humanism – in its denial of the ...

Figuring the Animal in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract: This special issue, which constitutes the first Human-Animal Studies edited collection in southern Africa, includes vibrant, creative and theoretically far-ranging articles. Even as these attest to the transdisciplinary nature of Human-Animal Studies (HAS), the influence of such core narratives as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland resonate, with literature anchoring not only the historical research by Sandra Swart included here but also the article and artwork by Wilma Cruise on the figural animal. All the articles in this edition have been gleaned from the HAS colloquia which have their own narrative. Held at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, the first colloquium, "Figuring the Animal in Post-Apartheid South Africa" in 2011 was followed by "Animal Vulnerabilities" (2012) before reprising "Figuring the Animal in Post-Apartheid South Africa II" (2013). This year the theme was "Animal Absence/Animal Presence". The articles included in this special issue constitute a representative glimpse of the literary, historical and figural debates at these events, but other non-represented discussions also contributed substantially to making the colloquia vibrantly transdisciplinary. Don Pinnock and Adam Cruise delivered papers on effective strategies for elephant activism. Duncan Brown discussed the indigeneity of trout in the postcolony. Sharyn Spicer asked: "What's Race Got to Do with It?" in her investigation into the pet-keeping practices of a sample of township residents. Shirley Brooks and Dayne Botha presented research on a project to locate owls in a number of townships, and critiqued the discrepancy between "discursive constructions and practical consequences". Brooks also co-presented a paper with Mahlatse Moeng on the social-nature divide in relation to flamingos at Kamfers Dam, Kimberley. The terms Animal Studies (AS) and Human-Animal Studies (HAS) have been used almost interchangeably in this fairly recent, burgeoning field. Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely entitle their edited collection Animals and the Human Imagination: A Companion to Animal Studies (2012), whereas Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh call their collection the Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies (2014). Either way, AS or/and HAS challenge accepted beliefs as their basic theories, and subsequent research undermines the dualism of anthropocentric thought underpinning the humanities. HAS as a term has the edge for us, as it suggests the intertwining of human and non-human animal and the belief that animals cannot exist in isolation in our research or imaginations. Critical Animal Studies, which has become more visible locally in recent years, has its provenance in social justice concerns. (1) Since roughly 2000, the "animal turn" in the humanities has drawn heavily from Ur theorists Jacques Derrida via The Animal That Therefore I am and J.M. Coetzee via The Lives of Animals both of whom connect animals and humans. Both texts insist on the presence of the live, embodied non-human animal. While Derrida opens a philosophical space for the animal to be empowered to respond (rather than merely reacting), Coetzee has Elizabeth Costello focus on representations of animals through philosophers and poets and maintain that poets are more primed and equipped to imagine and represent animals. If the essays in this special issue engage with international theorists and philosophers, all evince a deep sense of the embodied animal in southern Africa (and within a broader political context). In "The Post-humanist Gaze: Reading Fanie Jason's Photo Essay on Carting Lives", Woodward discusses Fanie Jason's photographs of carthorses and humans on the Cape Flats in the class-based carting industry. In his article "Touching Trunks: Elephants, Ecology and Compassion in Three Southern African Teen Novels", Wylie stresses the pedagogic urgency of teaching children about the future of elephants within the environment of southern Africa. …

Violence: The (Un)real, Power and Excess in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow

Abstract: SummaryIn this article, the nature, form and content of violence are traced through the engagement of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow, situating it in the context of the postcolony. In this context, the conception of the real and unreal qua violence is interchangeable and also entangled. Thus, performativity of power depicts how violence becomes ritualised and institutionalised. The excess of the body is also problematised as a site of exercising state power. These politics of excess are clearly marked by the omnipresence of the Ruler in private and public domains of the citizens of Aburĩria, his plan of constructing the unlimited tower of Marching to Heaven, funded by the Global Bank, and the politics of eating which perpetuates dispossession of the Aburĩrian citizenry. Though the Ruler claims to be mighty and powerful he is still caught in the clutches of the puppetry of colonial power which reduce him to a typical colonial subject.

The Decorative Voice of Hidden, Secret Flesh: Corporeal Dynamics in Patrick White’s Fiction

Abstract: SummaryWith reference to Roland Barthes’s and Julia Kristeva’s observations on the bodily origins of language, this article argues that physicality is an important aspect, both thematically and stylistically, of the fiction of Australian Nobel prizewinner, Patrick White. Kristeva’s theory of the “symbolic” and “semiotic” aspects of signification, developed in her book Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), informs the argument that White’s writing emphasises a dualism of rationality and physicality at work within language and literature. Taking Kristeva’s observation that the “semiotic” or bodily aspect of language – evident in asymbolic poetic effects such as rhythm and rhyme – is comparable to music, the article explores White’s interest in music as expressed within his fiction. It argues, accordingly, that White’s frequent descriptions of music function as metatextual elements within his writing that draw attention to the materiality of language, the poetic dimension of his prose, and his association of...

The Archaeology of Rock Art and Western Philosophy

Abstract: SummaryThe article aims to excavate some layers of Western philosophy in order to see how far Western thinkers can illuminate aspects of prehistoric rock art. It will focus on David Lewis-Williams's neuropsychological and shamanistic theory of San and prehistoric rock art, attempting to supplement his emphasis on states of consciousness with a focus on volition. The article thereby aims to theorise, in metaphysical terms, what the shamans may have been attempting to do in their trance dances and rock art. Just as Lewis-Williams argues that the traditional archaeological focus on intellect, instrumental rationality and alert consciousness cannot do full justice to an understanding of important aspects of prehistoric human culture and behaviour, particularly their art, so this article purposes to show the importance of volition in this respect. Implicit in this article, therefore, is a critique of the rationalism of the mainstream Western philosophical tradition. The excavation will thus begin with a consid...

Spaces of Death in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Abstract: SummaryIn this article I explore the idea expressed by philosophers and social geographers such as Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and Henk van Houtum that “space” is a social construct; that the space in which a society exists and of which it consists is shaped by that society itself, and that specific locations are assigned to each of the members of the community. I discuss how the dominant spaces in society are shaped by those in positions of authority according to their own ideologies so as to ensure social order and their continued empowerment within the social structure. Additionally, I suggest that it is possible for those who do not conform to social norms, and who are consequently cast into dominated spaces, to undermine the authority of those in positions of power by embracing their marginalised state, and thereby to generate new spaces they can inhabit. I explore these ideas in relation to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and its depiction and examination of central nineteenth-century ideas and an...

“Love Is a Losing Game”: Textual Games in Milan Kundera's “The Hitchhiking Game”

Abstract: SummaryA couple who indulge in a tongue-in-cheek game of pretence soon discover that role-play can, in fact, reveal more about themselves – their real selves – and their partner, than it conceals. What begins on a whim as an indulgent and innocent bit of sport soon spirals out of control to threaten the dynamics of the couple's relationship, increasingly hampering their ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy. The authors of this article contend that Milan Kundera's “The Hitchhiking Game”, one of seven short stories in the anthology Laughable Loves (1974), benefits from being read in terms of Roger Caillois's (1967) taxonomy of games and play, which differentiates between competition, chance, mimicry and vertigo in respect of players’ attitudes towards play. This theory is expanded by Wolfgang Iser (1993), who relates these four categories to the analysis of texts, introducing the concept of textual games. Employing the mimicry—chance binary seems particularly apt for this story as it highlights t...

Traumatised Narrators in Hisham Matar's Novels

Abstract: SummaryThis article concerns the child-protagonist narrators, Suleiman and Nuri, of Hisham Matar's two novels In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance respectively. Noting how their traumatised experiences relate closely to the writer's own Libyan childhood, the discussion focuses on their use of desperate strategies to cope with, or challenge, their predicaments. Matar's personal awareness of lives marked by “shame, pain and fear”, and the difficulty of imagining a “better reality”, helps to create his awareness of both boys' anguish, especially in relation to their fathers (lost in Suleiman's case; disappeared, like Matar's, in Nuri's). The stages of each narrator's childhood are traced, highlighting how much more self-defeating Nuri's choices ultimately are, despite his life apparently being easier. The greater pessimism of the second novel may reflect a growing awareness in Matar himself of the profound difficulties for Libyans in constructing a new post-Gaddafi vision for themselves.

The Grounds of Cynical Self-Doubt: J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, Youth and Summertime

Abstract: SummaryIn this article, I argue that J.M. Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy can be read as a set of texts in which the author responds to the problem of cynical self-doubt, as it is described in Coetzee’s writings on confession from the mid-1980s. Against Derek Attridge’s critical view of the relation between Coetzee’s autobiographies and these early writings, I argue that Coetzee’s texts do not passively abide by the author’s early scepticism, but rather inspect the grounds of cynical self-doubt and show its position to be intellectually confused. I specifically demonstrate that Coetzee’s texts present cynical self-doubt as an intellectualisation of akratic failure (weakness of will). The texts not only analyse the crisis from which cynical self-doubt emerges, but also try to look beyond a sceptical perspective. With this in mind, this article will read Coetzee’s autobiographies as writings that “aspire to a condition of gossip”. In this aspiration, the autobiographies point to an ethic of assent they t...

Figuring the Animal Autobiography: Animals and Landscapes in Daniel Naudé's Exhibition “African Scenery & Animals”

Abstract: SummaryDaniel Naude's exhibition of photographic artworks, “African Scenery & Animals”, is discussed in this article, to consider the ways in which images of animal beings are mostly received as figurative vehicles for anthropocentric narratives. Naude's particularised portraits of AfriCanis dogs and other domestic creatures are considered in relation to figurative anthropocentric analysis of the artworks that the artist's gallery and other reviewers have undertaken. I argue that Naude's oeuvre is more in line with J.M. Coetzee's fictional character Elizabeth Costello's notion of imaginative empathy, proposing the capacity of human beings to imagine what it might be like to be an(other) (Coetzee 2004: 79), and that Naude's portraits of animal beings provoke imaginative empathetic (Coetzee 2004: 79) transposition in the viewer. I recount my imaginative empathetic encounters (Coetzee 2004: 79) with particular artworks from the “African Scenery & Animals” series, and consider the imperial legacy of the lands...

Rethinking Marikana: Warm and Cold Lenses in Plea for Humanity

Abstract: SummaryThis article examines a rethinking of the historic Marikana tragedy of 16 August 2012, as encoded in the eNCA documentary film The Marikana Massacre: Through the Lens. My approach is in the form of commentary on the act, scene, actor, agent and agency pertaining to the way the Marikana massacre is selectively revived in the documentary film. I make these comments in order to scaffold discussions of the documentary producers’ poiesis and praxis giving shape to their narrative. The presencing and absencing of the documentary are discussed in making the case for a need to analyse carefully the background of the Marikana shootings and the situation in which they occurred, in much the same way as it is necessary to explore the producers’ purpose and narrative in selecting to produce the documentary as they did. The study argues that the producers of the documentary film chose to narrate the small-person plight of the killed Marikana miners, security guards and police officers by silencing issues around ...

Violence in Postcolonial African Film

Abstract: SummaryDifferent forms of violence surround Africans. These forms of violence go by different names, but all are built into and sustained by the fabric of everyday life. Contemporary African film delves into the subject of violence in a variety of ways. Some films show violence in its Fanonian sense, as liberatory and creative; others treat violence as a perpetually destructive force; and others still are ambivalent about the meaning of violence. Ultimately, the issue appears to rest on the matter of which specific violence one is talking about. This article looks at the representation of violence in Bamako (2006), a film by Mauritanian film-maker Abderrahmane Sissako. The author argues that in Bamako, violence is often invisible to the naked eye and is easily missed if one is looking for stereotypes of violence such as rape, killings and beatings. Rather, violence is endemic to our socio-economic order and overt instances of violence may be regarded as mere symptoms and flare-ups of a more sinister, quie...

Versions and Subversions of Islamic Cultures in the Film The Stoning of Soraya M

Abstract: SummaryThe aim of this article is to explore the idea of versions and subversions of narrative constructions and reinterpretation of Islamness or Muslim cultures from an analysis of the film The Stoning of Soraya M. This will be done by focusing on the narratives authorised by men in comparison to those narratives of Islam created by women in the film. It will be demonstrated that male-authored narratives are anchored in the dastardly law of the stoning/lapidation of women as found in the Hadith. In the fictional world of the film The Stoning of Soraya M, the stoning/lapidation of women is depicted as a gross distortion of the Qur'an. In short, it will be revealed that women can create their own narratives that shun and complicate the Qur'an and critique men, most of whom are the interpreters of the Qur'an. If male narratives in the film incline towards violent actions against women, women's response to these forms of violent narrative of Islamness is uneven. The film benefits narrative versions of women ...

Synecdoche and Allegory in the Filmic Record of the Memory of African Genocide in John le Carré's The Constant Gardener

Abstract: SummaryThis article shows that the filmic depiction of the death of Tessa Quayle, a social activist portrayed by Rachel Weisz, is a memorialised historical allegory of genocide caused by deliberate and lethal clinical trials of drugs conducted throughout Africa. Although the film is set in Kenya, it tells the real story of the clinical genocide committed in Nigeria. The authors of this article do not delve into the academically naive question of whether or not the film (released in 2005) is a faithful representation of the 2001 novel, for the discrepancies – whether glaringly obvious or tastefully subtle – follow Fernando Mireilles's style and interpretative variorum as a director who is capable of signature adjustments to the face of death. In this case, the death of one white woman (Tessa Quayle) is a synecdoche of the multitudinous African deaths caused by genocide. It is in this sense that the setting (Kenya and not Nigeria) lends credence to the paradoxical representation of the silent genocide in ot...

Joseph Conrad in the Popular Imaginary: The case of Heart of Darkness

Abstract: SummaryIn his defining work The Great Tradition (1948), F.R. Leavis declared, with characteristic asperity, that apart from Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, “there are no novelists in English worth reading” (Leavis [1948]1962: 9). Notwithstanding Conrad's canonisation in the pantheon of the “great tradition” of English literature, he has been a controversial figure, first, in his native country Poland, and subsequently in parts of Africa where Achebe's ad hominem attack on the writer still echoes in the corridors of academe well into the 21st century. In this paper I argue that Heart of Darkness, as is often referenced in the media and the popular imaginary, is much more than just a journalistic shorthand or cliche for stereotypes about Africa or Conrad for that matter. Stated differently, the title of Conrad's novella has become metonymic of anything and everything negative about Africa, which in turn has detracted from the story's impact as an expose of the evils of colonialism.

Between Past and Future: Temporal Thresholds in Narrative Texts

Abstract: SummaryThis article is concerned with time and temporality in human experience as well as in narrative representation. The focus is directed at the representation of thresholds, threshold experiences, borders and boundaries in narrative texts, but where these concepts are more often than not analysed from a spatial perspective, the temporality of these forms of liminality is foregrounded here. Using Ricoeur's views on time, temporality, historicality and the representation of time as points of departure and referring to Jesse Matz's discussion of the postmodern time crisis, the so-called “era of the nanosecond”, the representation of time-related themes and the aesthetic rendering of threshold experiences in Anne Michaels's novel Fugitive Pieces are explored.

“You Are Suffering from Literary Kwashiorkor”: Transculturation at the Confluence of African Literature, Vegetarianism and Indigenous Ritual Practice in Nape ’a Motana’s Son-In-Law of the Boere

Abstract: SummaryOn the surface, Nape ’a Motana’s fictional work Son-In-Law of the Boere (2010) is a tale of love between a black “Jim-comes-to-Jo’burg” stereotype and a white Afrikaans female teaching colleague during a transitional era in South African political and social history. However, as this article will reveal, the text is a compelling and transformative narrative which should be read as a literary transculturation of three veins of social discourse: (1) the literary historiography of African literature and the provision of access for contemporary readers to the African literary archive, (2) vegetarianism as a metaphor for transformation in a postcolonial and post-apartheid society, and (3) the representation of indigenous ritual practices in the modernity of liberation-era South Africa. Furthermore, the novel suggests that access to African fictional texts and a corps of motivated educators in South African schools would go some distance toward developing the necessary literacies to overcome the “literar...

Violence, Cynicism and the Cinematic Spectacle of (Mis)Representing African Child Soldiers in Black Hawk Down and Blood Diamond

Abstract: SummaryThe aim of this article is to explain why and with what ideological effect Western film directors depict the African child soldier as victim, reluctant recruit and unwilling participant in Africa's violent wars in Black Hawk Down (Scott 2001) and Blood Diamond (Zwick 2007). Using Agamben's ideas of the “state of exception” (Agamben 2005) and the “paradox of sovereignty” (Agamben 1998), this article engages symbolical processes by which the formal rhetorical devices of the technology of audiovisual film texts “remediate an account vested in the perspective of only one party” (Potzsch 2011: 80-81). It will be demonstrated that within the narrative topoi of the films Black Hawk Down (Scott 2001) and Blood Diamond (Zwick 2007), African child soldiers are symbolically constituted as enemy, the other, and as existing on the margin of “bare life” (Agamben 1998: 4) and whose value is not worth mourning for – simply, “ungrievable” (Butler 2010). However, this article argues differently and stresses that vio...

Touching Trunks: Elephants, Ecology and Compassion in Three Southern African Teen Novels

Abstract: SummaryNothing may be more crucial to the future of animals within ecology than appropriately educating our children. In this article, the author explores the question “How do we educate children about wild animals?” through an examination of three teen novels about elephants. All three novels are set in southern Africa, and so can be contextualised (indeed, contextualise themselves) tightly within quite specific socio-political, racial, economic and ecological conditions. Two of the novels – Dale Kenmuir's The Tusks and the Talisman (1987) and John Struthers's A Boy and an Elephant (1998) – are set in Zimbabwe's Zambezi Valley. The third novel, Lauren St John's The Elephant's Tale (2009), was written by an ex-Zimbabwean but it is set in Namibia and South Africa. While all three novels are richly grounded in ecological specifics, and evince awareness of the geo-political dimensions of the region's elephant management programmes, the relationships between children and elephants also owe something to the “f...

Artefaktuele geheue in Alastair Bruce se post-apokaliptiese roman Wall of Days

Abstract: OpsommingIn hierdie artikel bespreek ek Alastair Bruce se roman Wall of Days (2010) binne die raamwerk van post-apokaliptiese fiksie. 'n Historiese oorsig word gegee van die ontwikkeling van post-apokaliptiese fiksie as 'n subgenre van wetenskapsfiksie en distopiese literatuur. Wetenskapsfiksie en distopiese literatuur word tradisioneel beskou as fiksies van vervreemding. Ek voer aan dat 'n nuwe strategie van vervreemding toegepas word in onlangse post-apokaliptiese fiksie: in die post-apokaliptiese ruimtes word hedendaagse gebruiksartikels uitgebeeld as argeologiese artefakte. Hierdeur kan die voorstellings verbind word aan 'n relatief nuwe ontwikkeling binne die veld van argeologie: die argeologie van die kontemporere verlede. In die argeologie van die kontemporere verlede word nuwe betekenis aan alledaagse items geheg deur argeologiese metodes te gebruik om hulle te klassifiseer en analiseer. Ek kyk verder hoe die argeologiese uitgrawingsproses oor die algemeen gekoppel kan word aan kwessies rondom geh...

Body as Battlefield: Genocide, and the Family in Goretti Kyomuhendo's Secrets No More

Abstract: SummaryIn Goretti Kyomuhendo's Secrets No More, the faces of the individual characters often come through vividly, and the events and situations can be precisely located in time and place in the Rwandan genocide as corroborated by the historical evidence. However, despite its accessibility and the relationship between the real and the fictive, there is little or no reference to Secrets No More in the major studies about the fictional narratives on the Rwandan genocide. In most of the narratives on the genocide, the historicity of the carnage is explored by means of the stark images of human bestiality and the debility of the victims. Kyomuhendo specifically deals with the same experience and issues, but through the different vignettes that make up the narrative. She makes eloquent the devastating blow that the genocide wreaked on the family as a unit and, by extension, the relationship between the woman's body and the nation in moments of crisis. The narrative captures the gory images of total and unmitig...

A Linguistic Reading of the Metaphor of Genocide in Hotel Rwanda

Abstract: SummaryHistorical films on Africa are few and far between when viewed against the backdrop of many social upheavals that plague the continent. One such film is Hotel Rwanda, based on the Rwanda genocide of 1994. The film is set in Sabana Hotel des Milles Collines. The article focuses on the theme of genocidal acts that include amongst others violent destruction of lives and property, and systematic rape of Tutsi females by Hutu extremists. The theoretical underpinning of this study is Systemic Functional Grammar as espoused by M.A.K. Halliday (2004). The article examines how the producer of Hotel Rwanda manipulates the resources of language at the levels of syntax and lexis to highlight the distortions created in Rwanda by the genocide. It also discusses how rhetorical devices are employed to illuminate the large number of deaths, rapes and other abnormalities in Rwanda. The article concludes that genocidal acts should be prevented in Africa due to their deleterious effects.

Violence and Genocide in African Literature and Film

Abstract: Studies on violence and genocide in Africa have for many years relied on the disciplines of history, sociology, and individual testimonies to make sense of the crimes against humanity The main justification for using anthropological and sociological accounts to explain violence and genocide in Africa has been encouraged by an empiricist research culture that relied on quantitative methods to measure the impact of violence and genocide in Africa The main aim in these sorts of research had been to over-awe the world with the image of Africa as the heart of darkness These approaches are forcefully recreated in the worked by critics like Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal (1999) for whom it is disorder that makes Africa work Furthermore the reliance on the evidence provided in statistics gathered from the victims who of violence and genocide unfortunately was manipulated by some critics to create the wrong perception which that only the people in Africa affected directly by violence and genocide could write insightfully and authoritatively on the subject These views have now been challenged in a new scholarship by young African intellectuals These African intellectuals as are represented in this issue argue in different ways that the structural, systemic and symbolical forms of violence introduced by colonialism, found a new life and was and then intensified by some postcolonial leaders whose politics undermined the potential of Africa to grow out of the stereotype constituted in the view that the continent is a place where anything and everything negative that can happen in the world is manifested The power of the voices of victims of genocide has also provided compelling evidence of, and provided a robust moral argument to convince the world to act whenever the spectre of genocidal wars rears its head But the actions of the world's powerful governments have been selective Where their interests lay, they would act or not act depending on the global coalition forces' immediate interests There is however in Africa, a refreshing look by young African intellectuals that refuse to minimize the complicity of Africans in their own historical misfortunes This issue "Violence and Genocide in African Literature and film" tackles the above described themes of violence, genocide, and African complicity The authors represented in this issue are drawn from different parts of Africa and the divergent nature of their views on the roots and routes of violence and genocide provide stimulating reading For example, the authors in the issue sometimes distinguish and on other times deliberately collapse the conceptual boundaries between violence, civil war and genocide in ways that seek to provoke readers to further interrogate the forces that shape and frame the discourses on violence and genocide in Africa Nyasha Mboti's "Violence in Postcolonial African Film" explores the site of Sissako's film, Bamako to argue that violence is often invisible to the naked eye, and is easily missed if one is looking for the stereotypes of violence such as rape, killings and beatings The article further argues that the way we read representations of violence needs to be constantly subjected to rigorous contextualising and historicising, and that analytical frameworks should allow for more questions as opposed to certainties Maurice Vambe uses Agamben's ideas of the "state of exception" (2008), and the "paradox of sovereignty" to demonstrate that within the narrative topoi of the films, Black Hawk Down and Blood Diamonds, produced and directed by white people from the west, the African child-soldiers are symbolically constituted as enemy, the other, and one existing on the margin of "bare life" (Agamben 1998) and whose value is not worth mourning for--simply, "ungrievable" (Butler 2010) …

Representations of the “Other” in Southern African Art Praxis

Abstract: SummaryThis article considers if it is possible to move past the impasse of the political, the specifically cultural, religious and other constructed categories and structures that influence the identity of the non-human and human animal in contemporary South African society. Is it possible for the visual arts to contribute to a “discussion”, an emerging sensibility and understanding of what it means to be part of a specific species group, the human animal, cohabiting with the non-human animal? What role could the aesthetic representation of the non-human animal, of the “other”, play in the unfolding reality of a post-apartheid South Africa?