... or intellectual voice speaks, and in what manner that audience is framed, constituted and con... more ... or intellectual voice speaks, and in what manner that audience is framed, constituted and convened, has involved – as Khwezi Mkhize suggests in ... the situation in which Krog found herself working as a writer with that of nineteenth‐century author Magema Magwaza Fuze, with ...
This article critically examines the use of noir, neo-noir, and global noir conventions in Mike N... more This article critically examines the use of noir, neo-noir, and global noir conventions in Mike Nicol’s “revenge trilogy” of crime novels, Payback (2008), Killer Country (2010), and Black Heart (2011). Nicol invents a black femme fatale who acts as an evil concentrate of all that is perceived to be corrupt under postapartheid conditions. The article asks the question: why locate such a pronounced sense of political “evil” in a black female character? Might the white postapartheid writer, in this way, be seeking a sacrificial object for the perceived ills of the current milieu, in much the way classic noir projected its anxieties about the displacement of (white) male agency onto “bad” women after the Second World War?
... Piniel Viriri Shava, in his work on black South African writing in the twentieth century, A P... more ... Piniel Viriri Shava, in his work on black South African writing in the twentieth century, A People's Voice (1989), simply begins with the statement of fact that "[wjritten literature arose mainly in response to missionary initiative" (1989: 5 ... As Jean and John Comaroff (1988: 6) argue, ...
ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2015
The trend in analyses of postapartheid South African literature is to see a body of writing that ... more The trend in analyses of postapartheid South African literature is to see a body of writing that is largely “freed from the past” and which exhibits a wide range of divergences from “struggle” writing. This article provides a differently nuanced conceptualization and argues that some of the literature’s key dynamics are founded in “mashed-up temporalities.” My analysis borrows from Ashraf Jamal’s appropriation of art historian Hal Foster’s “future anterior” or a “will have been.” In my reading, emblematic strands of postapartheid writing are less “free from the past” than trading in an anxiety about never having begun. The body of literature in question—in this case, white post-transitional writing—is inescapably bound to the idea of the time of before, so much so that it compulsively iterates certain immemorial literary tropes such as those of the frontier and the journey of discovery. Further, I suggest that much postapartheid literature written in what I call “detection mode”—providing accounts of “crime” and other social ills—is distinguished by disjunctive continuity rather than linear or near-linear discontinuity with pre-transition literature, yet exhibits features of authorial voice and affect that place it within a distinctly postapartheid zone of author-reader interlocution.
... Mike Nicol. The wait-ing country: a South African witness. Gollancz 1995. Carmel Schrire. Dig... more ... Mike Nicol. The wait-ing country: a South African witness. Gollancz 1995. Carmel Schrire. Digging through dark-ness: chronicles of an archaeolo-gist. Witwatersrand University Press and University Press of Virginia 1995. LEON DE KOCK Fiction in South Africa has always ...
This article looks at inscriptions of whiteness in selected white Zimbabwean narratives. Through ... more This article looks at inscriptions of whiteness in selected white Zimbabwean narratives. Through a reading of Andrea Eames’ The Cry of the Go-Away Bird (2011), Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2003) and John Eppel’s Absent: the English Teacher (2009), the argument proposes that white Zimbabwean narratives situate whiteness within the context of change and marginality in Zimbabwe. The narratives deal with experiences of change and apprehensions of lived reality marked by the transfer of power from white minority to black majority rule. Our reading of The Cry of the Go-Away Bird examines how whiteness in the postcolonial Zimbabwean state is perceived through an outsider’s gaze, resulting in a kind of double consciousness within the (racialized, white) subject of the gaze. It is argued that the text depicts whites as torn between two unreconciled streams of possibility, reinforcing their sense of alienation. Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight represents whiteness as a thoroughly ephemeral experience. The meaning of whiteness is mediated through perpetual physical movement as whites travel from one point to another. Eppel’s Absent: the English Teacher affords a rethinking of whiteness as an unstable form of identity contingent on historical and political factors.
In this article we discuss how places of belonging are imagined in relatively recent white Zimbab... more In this article we discuss how places of belonging are imagined in relatively recent white Zimbabwean narratives dealing with issues of land, landscape, and belonging. Two white Zimbabwean narratives, Peter Rimmer’s Cry of the Fish Eagle (1993) and Douglas Rogers’ The Last Resort (2009), are read for the ways in which the paradoxically imagined spaces of the “bush” and the “farm” can be seen to enable, in alternate forms, exigent accommodations with place under different historical and political circumstances. In Cry of the Fish Eagle, which preceded Zimbabwe’s land reform process of the 2000s, “bush” is a privileged category by virtue of its supra-national allowance of a claim to white belonging in “Africa” at large. In The Last Resort, on the other hand, the “bush” is a derelict wilderness rescued by the ingenuity of white subjects, who create “farms” of splendid regenerative capacity in an effort to purchase belonging in the Zimbabwean nation-state.
... London: Jonathan Cape. Rose-Innes, Henrietta. 2004. The Rock Alphabet. Cape Town: Kwela. Titl... more ... London: Jonathan Cape. Rose-Innes, Henrietta. 2004. The Rock Alphabet. Cape Town: Kwela. Titlestad, Michael and Kissack, Mike. 2003. "'The Foot Does not Sniff: Imagining the Post-Anti-Apartheid Intellectual." Journal of Literary Studies 19.3/4: 255-70. ...
... or intellectual voice speaks, and in what manner that audience is framed, constituted and con... more ... or intellectual voice speaks, and in what manner that audience is framed, constituted and convened, has involved – as Khwezi Mkhize suggests in ... the situation in which Krog found herself working as a writer with that of nineteenth‐century author Magema Magwaza Fuze, with ...
This article critically examines the use of noir, neo-noir, and global noir conventions in Mike N... more This article critically examines the use of noir, neo-noir, and global noir conventions in Mike Nicol’s “revenge trilogy” of crime novels, Payback (2008), Killer Country (2010), and Black Heart (2011). Nicol invents a black femme fatale who acts as an evil concentrate of all that is perceived to be corrupt under postapartheid conditions. The article asks the question: why locate such a pronounced sense of political “evil” in a black female character? Might the white postapartheid writer, in this way, be seeking a sacrificial object for the perceived ills of the current milieu, in much the way classic noir projected its anxieties about the displacement of (white) male agency onto “bad” women after the Second World War?
... Piniel Viriri Shava, in his work on black South African writing in the twentieth century, A P... more ... Piniel Viriri Shava, in his work on black South African writing in the twentieth century, A People's Voice (1989), simply begins with the statement of fact that "[wjritten literature arose mainly in response to missionary initiative" (1989: 5 ... As Jean and John Comaroff (1988: 6) argue, ...
ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2015
The trend in analyses of postapartheid South African literature is to see a body of writing that ... more The trend in analyses of postapartheid South African literature is to see a body of writing that is largely “freed from the past” and which exhibits a wide range of divergences from “struggle” writing. This article provides a differently nuanced conceptualization and argues that some of the literature’s key dynamics are founded in “mashed-up temporalities.” My analysis borrows from Ashraf Jamal’s appropriation of art historian Hal Foster’s “future anterior” or a “will have been.” In my reading, emblematic strands of postapartheid writing are less “free from the past” than trading in an anxiety about never having begun. The body of literature in question—in this case, white post-transitional writing—is inescapably bound to the idea of the time of before, so much so that it compulsively iterates certain immemorial literary tropes such as those of the frontier and the journey of discovery. Further, I suggest that much postapartheid literature written in what I call “detection mode”—providing accounts of “crime” and other social ills—is distinguished by disjunctive continuity rather than linear or near-linear discontinuity with pre-transition literature, yet exhibits features of authorial voice and affect that place it within a distinctly postapartheid zone of author-reader interlocution.
... Mike Nicol. The wait-ing country: a South African witness. Gollancz 1995. Carmel Schrire. Dig... more ... Mike Nicol. The wait-ing country: a South African witness. Gollancz 1995. Carmel Schrire. Digging through dark-ness: chronicles of an archaeolo-gist. Witwatersrand University Press and University Press of Virginia 1995. LEON DE KOCK Fiction in South Africa has always ...
This article looks at inscriptions of whiteness in selected white Zimbabwean narratives. Through ... more This article looks at inscriptions of whiteness in selected white Zimbabwean narratives. Through a reading of Andrea Eames’ The Cry of the Go-Away Bird (2011), Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2003) and John Eppel’s Absent: the English Teacher (2009), the argument proposes that white Zimbabwean narratives situate whiteness within the context of change and marginality in Zimbabwe. The narratives deal with experiences of change and apprehensions of lived reality marked by the transfer of power from white minority to black majority rule. Our reading of The Cry of the Go-Away Bird examines how whiteness in the postcolonial Zimbabwean state is perceived through an outsider’s gaze, resulting in a kind of double consciousness within the (racialized, white) subject of the gaze. It is argued that the text depicts whites as torn between two unreconciled streams of possibility, reinforcing their sense of alienation. Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight represents whiteness as a thoroughly ephemeral experience. The meaning of whiteness is mediated through perpetual physical movement as whites travel from one point to another. Eppel’s Absent: the English Teacher affords a rethinking of whiteness as an unstable form of identity contingent on historical and political factors.
In this article we discuss how places of belonging are imagined in relatively recent white Zimbab... more In this article we discuss how places of belonging are imagined in relatively recent white Zimbabwean narratives dealing with issues of land, landscape, and belonging. Two white Zimbabwean narratives, Peter Rimmer’s Cry of the Fish Eagle (1993) and Douglas Rogers’ The Last Resort (2009), are read for the ways in which the paradoxically imagined spaces of the “bush” and the “farm” can be seen to enable, in alternate forms, exigent accommodations with place under different historical and political circumstances. In Cry of the Fish Eagle, which preceded Zimbabwe’s land reform process of the 2000s, “bush” is a privileged category by virtue of its supra-national allowance of a claim to white belonging in “Africa” at large. In The Last Resort, on the other hand, the “bush” is a derelict wilderness rescued by the ingenuity of white subjects, who create “farms” of splendid regenerative capacity in an effort to purchase belonging in the Zimbabwean nation-state.
... London: Jonathan Cape. Rose-Innes, Henrietta. 2004. The Rock Alphabet. Cape Town: Kwela. Titl... more ... London: Jonathan Cape. Rose-Innes, Henrietta. 2004. The Rock Alphabet. Cape Town: Kwela. Titlestad, Michael and Kissack, Mike. 2003. "'The Foot Does not Sniff: Imagining the Post-Anti-Apartheid Intellectual." Journal of Literary Studies 19.3/4: 255-70. ...
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