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- I am a lecturer in English Studies in the School for Literature Language and Media at the University of the Witwaters... moreI am a lecturer in English Studies in the School for Literature Language and Media at the University of the Witwatersrand. My research interests include modern and contemporary literature and poetry, with particular emphases on the American mid-century, transnational modernism and modernities, and contemporary South African literature. I am currently preparing a monograph on Robert Lowell’s project of poetic translation (or “imitation”) within the context of Cold War containment culture. I also act as the academic editor for the Johannesburg Review of Books, an independent literary review based in South Africa that publishes reviews, essays, poetry, photographs, and short fiction from South Africa, Africa, and beyond. My first collection of poetry, "Transcontinental Delay," is due to appear in March 2021 through Dryad Press.edit
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This article reads Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland as novels similarly preoccupied with the surreptitious linkages between risk, financial speculation, and terror. In doing so, it argues that... more
This article reads Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland as novels similarly preoccupied with the surreptitious linkages between risk, financial speculation, and terror. In doing so, it argues that Hamid and O’Neill mark a shift away from the post-9/11 novel’s prevailing investment in traumatic domesticity in order to develop nuanced treatments of how, in the wake of 9/11, risk, speculation, and terror are intensified along racial lines, and unevenly distributed across geopolitical divides between the Global North and South. In this way, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland reveal the superficial nature of risk society’s ideal subject. Beyond this, however, these novels also demonstrate risk society’s continued production of speculative or dissembling narratives designed to shield precarious subjects against future risks, while also projecting risky affective and political reinvestments in national contexts presumably consigned to vestigi...
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ABSTRACT This paper returns to early twentieth-century America’s concern with democracy and “the local” in order to frame the populist parameters of poetic appeals to “the people” in the work of the Southern Fugitive poets on the one... more
ABSTRACT This paper returns to early twentieth-century America’s concern with democracy and “the local” in order to frame the populist parameters of poetic appeals to “the people” in the work of the Southern Fugitive poets on the one hand, and William Carlos Williams on the other. It argues that the Southern Fugitives’ commitment to what Chantal Mouffe identifies as a populist politics of antagonism runs counter to Williams’s very different attempt to grapple with the idea of “the people.” The Fugitives’ claims to a form of constitutional autochthony depended upon the violent exclusion of Native and African-American “uninhabitants”: the negative requirement for the decidedly populist continuation and preservation of what Allen Tate explicitly called “White rule.” By contrast, Williams’s more self-reflexive lyrical voice foregrounds the epistemological limitations of the poetic imagination and hence the problematic maneuvers by which a “people” may be conscripted into the service of populist national allegories.
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During the interval to Geoffrey Hyland's spirited and stylish adaptation of Shakespeare's As You Like It at Maynardville, I overheard someone mention that he was most struck by what he called the play's potjiekos of styles. He... more
During the interval to Geoffrey Hyland's spirited and stylish adaptation of Shakespeare's As You Like It at Maynardville, I overheard someone mention that he was most struck by what he called the play's potjiekos of styles. He had a point ; Hyland's adaptation, at first, seems to be characterised by disorderly stylistic juxtapositions.
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Thou art translated! ( A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1.98) Out of doubt he is transported. (4.2.2)
Research Interests: Art and Literary studies
This paper is due to appear in a forthcoming ALA/Safundi Special Issue, "Writing America 'through' South Africa". CA Davids' sustained preoccupation with the Foucauldian concepts of heterotopia... more
This paper is due to appear in a forthcoming ALA/Safundi Special Issue, "Writing America 'through' South Africa". CA Davids' sustained preoccupation with the Foucauldian concepts of heterotopia and heterotypology in The Blacks of Cape Town (2013) allows her to inhabit and accommodate American, South African, and other global, literary imaginaries in a way that foregrounds their points of intersection and overlap. Davids' representations of heterotopic spaces—the garden, the library, the prison and the grave—are characterized by a ghostly superimpositionality in which the frequently limiting distinctions between world and home, past and present, and national and transnational histories coalesce. Heterotopic spaces and heterotypologies, therefore, offer Davids a peculiarly productive means by which to 'float'—to suggest and to suspend—mnemonic literary, and ethical potentialities that transect, traverse, and conjoin local and global divides. ! Keywords: Heterotopia, prison and garden, cosmopolitanism, The Blacks of Cape Town, complicity, entanglement Request a copy of the paper.
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This article reads Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) against the “confessional” grain for which it is widely celebrated. It argues that Lowell’s appeal to techniques of poetic "imitation" - a liberal form of... more
This article reads Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) against the “confessional” grain for which it is widely celebrated. It argues that Lowell’s appeal to techniques of poetic "imitation" - a liberal form of translation - during the composition of the Life Studies poems allows the poet to simultaneously stage and to conceal his reliance upon foreign poetic sources. In this way, Lowell’s Life Studies imitations betray an attempt to “cover-up” poetic collusions with foreign sources at a time when cold war “containment culture” and the specter of McCarthyism threatened to render any such collusion increasingly suspect, if not entirely “Un-American.” The Life Studies imitations, by this account, offer furtive testimony to Lowell’s potentially subversive poetic preoccupation with cold war cultural anxieties circulating around terms such as containment, conspiracy, domesticity, paranoia, security, secrecy.
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Published in 1929, Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica was praised by reviewers and critics across the spectrum of the British and American literary scenes (among them Rebecca West, Ford Madox Ford, Vita Sackville-West, Cyril Connelly,... more
Published in 1929, Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica was praised by reviewers and critics across the spectrum of the British and American literary scenes (among them Rebecca West, Ford Madox Ford, Vita Sackville-West, Cyril Connelly, John Masefield, Hugh Walpole, and Arnold Bennett). At the same time, its readers were generally shocked by its portrait of child psychology (“the mind of the child”). While several critics applauded its realism, the record of its reception suggests that it induced — what one critic referred to as — “a sort of mental panic”. This article considers aspects of Hughes’ “new psychology”, which derived largely from the writings of Freud and the Freudians. Reading the novel and Freud in counterpoint, the argument concludes that — while Hughes constructs A High Wind in Jamaica as a rejoinder to the ideological logic of the imperial romance — in inscribing Freudian “primitivism” it reiterates colonial assumptions about “civilization”.
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Robert Lowell’s earliest volumes, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), are centrally preoccupied with the myth of the American frontier. These volumes anticipate, in related (yet also surprisingly unique) ways,... more
Robert Lowell’s earliest volumes, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), are centrally preoccupied with the myth of the American frontier. These volumes anticipate, in related (yet also surprisingly unique) ways, William Appleman Williams’ (1973) argument that America exploited the myth of the frontier in order to execute and authorise policies of transatlantic or global expansion in the post-war and Cold War years. Land of Unlikeness proceeds from Lowell’s conscious and youthful alignment with a curiously Weberian form of Southernist politics. His criticism of the industrial, commercial, and martial excesses of the American North in this collection owes much to his sympathies with the Agrarian South and, as I wish to argue, attests to the essentially nationalistic limits of his poetic vision. Lord Weary’s Castle is, by contrast, less explicit (and less explicitly local) in its censure of America’s expansionist impulses. Lowell’s liberal translation, throughout this volume, of a variety of cultural and poetic resources derived from a wide range of European inter-texts, is designed to display rather than to critically disavow the interests of an American imperium deeply invested in laying claim to the political, cultural, and poetic resources of a trans-Atlantic frontier.
Research Interests: Cultural Cold War, Modernist poetry, American imperialism, Modernism, Frontier Studies, and 15 moreTransatlantic Literature, Contemporary American Poetry, Literary translation, Transatlantic studies, Literary studies, Borders and Frontiers, Robert Lowell, Late modernist poetry, American Poetry, American Expansion, Transatlantic Studies, Transatlantic Cultural Flows, American Modernist Poetry, American foreign policy and imperialism, and Frontier Thesis
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This article argues that Robert Lowell’s employment of techniques of poetic "imitation" - a liberal form of translation - during the composition of the Life Studies poems allows him to simultaneously stage and to conceal his reliance upon... more
This article argues that Robert Lowell’s employment of techniques of poetic "imitation" - a liberal form of translation - during the composition of the Life Studies poems allows him to simultaneously stage and to conceal his reliance upon foreign poetic sources. Lowell’s Life Studies imitations thus represent an attempt to “cover-up” poetic collusions with foreign sources at a time when cold war “containment culture” and the specter of McCarthyism threatened to render any such collusion increasingly suspect, if not entirely “Un-American.” The Life Studies imitations, by this account, offer furtive testimony to Lowell’s potentially subversive poetic preoccupation and engagement with cold war cultural anxieties circulating around terms such as containment, conspiracy, domesticity, paranoia, security, secrecy.
Research Interests:
CA Davids’ sustained preoccupation with the Foucauldian concepts of heterotopia and heterotopology in The Blacks of Cape Town (2013) allows her to inhabit, accommodate, and traverse global, rather than narrowly national, literary... more
CA Davids’ sustained preoccupation with the Foucauldian concepts of heterotopia and heterotopology in The Blacks of Cape Town (2013) allows her to inhabit, accommodate, and traverse global, rather than narrowly national, literary imaginaries. This paper demonstrates that heterotopic locations such as the garden, the library, the prison, and the graveyard allow Davids to explore unlikely intersections and overlaps between places as far afield as South Africa, America, and Mali. It argues, furthermore, that the ghostly superimpositionality that characterizes Davids’ employment of heterotopia collapses distinctions between home and world, history and memory, and text and intertext. In this way, heterotopological spaces offer Davids a peculiarly productive means by which to “float” – to suggest, but also to suspend – forms of memory, literary imaginaries, and ethical potentialities that transect, traverse, and conjoin local and global divides.
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This paper reconsiders J.M. Coetzee’s self-reflexive return, in Youth (2002), to his own ephebic preoccupation with metropolitan forms of poetic modernism. Coetzee’s decision to refer to two instances of his own poetic juvenilia in Youth... more
This paper reconsiders J.M. Coetzee’s self-reflexive return, in Youth (2002), to his own ephebic preoccupation with metropolitan forms of poetic modernism. Coetzee’s decision to refer to two instances of his own poetic juvenilia in Youth raises pertinent questions about the relationship between his sustained investment in metropolitan forms of modernist production on the one hand, and a little remarked upon, peculiarly South African, poetic and political archive on the other. By reading Youth in relation to this archive, I hope to retrieve and to rehabilitate potentially significant, yet frequently overlooked, local literary contexts informing Coetzee’s longstanding preoccupation with metropolitan forms of modernism. In this way, Youth is reframed as a text that speaks directly to Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s interest in ‘the intimate connections’ –and, indeed, disconnections – ‘between cultural texts and geographical location’ that has informed recent interest in the global, rather than narrowly metropolitan, scale of modernist production. Beyond this, I argue that Coetzee's manipulation of his own poetic archive is designed to align his work with – or to relocate it within – specifically metropolitan versions of modernism. This is not to suggest that any divestment on Coetzee's part from local forms of poetic production. Rather, I suggest that Youth works in tandem with Coetzee's poetic archive to disturb the idea that metropolitan forms of modernist style and praxis are discontinuous from or alien to post-colonial literary imaginaries. Reading Youth in relation to its archival sources, in other words, illuminates the specifically local contexts informing Coetzee's preoccupation with metropolitan forms of literary modernism.
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This article reads Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland as novels similarly preoccupied with the surreptitious linkages between risk, financial speculation, and terror. In doing so, it argues that... more
This article reads Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland as novels similarly preoccupied with the surreptitious linkages between risk, financial speculation, and terror. In doing so, it argues that Hamid and O'Neill mark a shift away from the post-9/11 novel's prevailing investment in traumatic domesticity in order to develop nuanced treatments of how, in the wake of 9/11, risk, speculation, and terror are intensified along racial lines, and unevenly distributed across geopolitical divides between the Global North and South. In this way, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland reveal the superficial nature of risk society's ideal subject. Beyond this, however, these novels also demonstrate risk society's continued production of speculative or dissembling narratives designed to shield precarious subjects against future risks, while also projecting risky affective and political reinvestments in national contexts presumably consigned to vestigial status in an otherwise global imaginary.
Research Interests:
This paper returns to early twentieth-century America’s concern with democracy and “the local” in order to frame the populist parameters of poetic appeals to “the people” in the work of the Southern Fugitive poets on the one hand, and... more
This paper returns to early twentieth-century America’s concern with democracy and “the local” in order to frame the populist parameters of poetic appeals to “the people” in the work of the Southern Fugitive poets on the one hand, and William Carlos Williams on the other. It argues that the Southern Fugitives’ commitment to what Chantal Mouffe identifies as a populist politics of antagonism runs counter to Williams’s very different attempt to grapple with the idea of “the people.” The Fugitives’ claims to a form of constitutional autochthony depended upon the violent exclusion of Native and African-American “uninhabitants”: the negative requirement for the decidedly populist continuation and preservation of what Allen Tate explicitly called “White rule.” By contrast, Williams’s more self-reflexive lyrical voice foregrounds the epistemological limitations of the poetic imagination and hence the problematic maneuvers by which a “people” may be conscripted into the service of populist national allegories.