South African literature in English

Subaltern studies have explored the dynamics of relationships between various binary oppositions i.e. master-slave, white-black and man-woman etc. J.M. Coetzee has revealed the dubious relationship of such binaries. His fictional world is full of characters and places witnessing the othering and dehumanizing processes and impacts of such dehumanizing others. Present paper is an attempt to explore the dehumanizing other in J.M. Coetzee's Dusklands.

This article explores the thematisation of contemporary socio-political transition in South Africa in Achmat Dangor's award-winning novel, Bitter Fruit (2001). I argue that the novel can be read as a palimpsest of overlapping twilights and liminal states that simultaneously operate as tropes of the country's transition. In this regard, I interrogate Dangor's use of the in-between and/or fluid subject positions of characters – in terms of race, youthfulness and sexual orientation – to problematise post-TRC social affiliation in metonymic ways. I also demonstrate how Dangor's portrayal of the figure of the family, its disintegration and the transformation of individual members (especially of the main protagonists – Michael, Silas and Lydia) can be read in allegorical ways for the changes and possibilities of South Africa's post-1994 transition.

Abstract
This paper outlines dominant views of South African English literature critics from the 19th century to the present.  Against this backdrop, I examine some English texts written by blacks in order to demonstrate how attempts by some critics subjectively to strengthen some postmodern notions such as transnationalism have blurred the differences between black and white South African English fiction. I argue that in their essays black critics such as Daniel Kunene, Es’kia Mphahlele and  Mbulelo Mzamane (all 1992), on the one hand,  adopt a literary-historical approach to a consideration of South African literature written in English, pointing to a yet to be clearly articulated tradition of black South African English writing.  On the other hand, white critics such as Ernest Pereira, Sally-Ann Murray, and Geoffrey Hutchings reveal how the South African fiction by white writers that they discuss basically shows how the writers of fiction endemically handle the South African milieu differently from the way their black counterparts do.    This study seeks to show that such a differentiation is necessary, for present and future South African literary criticism to be balanced and enriched.  I demonstrate that benefits of this kind of a rethinking of the humanities subsuming acknowledgement of heterogeneity in studies of South African English literature, include sustainable social cohesion.

The Greek poet George Seferis (1900-1971) spent 10 months in South Africa during WWII as a senior diplomatic official attached to the Greek government in exile. Drawing on his diary entries, correspondence and poetry this article challenges earlier interpretations of his work best described as a ‘synchronic
panoptic vision’ (Bhabha). Beginning with an exploration of the troubled relationship between the ‘glory that was Greece’ and the failure of its early 20th century nationalist, expansionist and modernization projects, the article argues that Seferis tried to overcome alienation from landscape and a crisis of creativity
in two ways: he transcribed and commented on Cavafy’s poetry, but was unable to resolve his relationship with the latter; by reaching down into the ruins of ancient Greece and back into its mythological past, through a process of negative displacement he transforms these crises into a descent to the world of the dead. Unlike Odysseus, he receives no guidance from its inhabitants, for they speak only the language of flowers and there are none. Accompanying Seferis’ dual purpose use of classical mythology as national heritage and ironic device is a
more problematic aspect of modernism – the relegation of Africa and its sub-Saharan inhabitants to a primitive otherness that, he felt, limited his ability to express himself, and which generated some of his greatest poetry.

"In their fictional critiques of colonialism/imperialism, both Thomas Pynchon and J.M. Coetzee emphasize the ways in which the colonial powers misrepresent their intent through the conscious misuse of metaphorical language, especially that surrounding the paternal relationship. Pynchon's _V._ (1966) and Coetzee's _Dusklands_ (1974) address the issue by presenting a number of settings in which such a distortion of language occurs. These disparate sections within the works span more than two hundred years of history, illustrating the longevity of such an approach on the part of European colonizers as well as the growing violence associated with this strategy.

This article examines the manner in which Pynchon and Coetzee deal with the subject of colonialism, primarily using Georges Bataille's _Erotism: Death and Sensuality_ (1986) and Keith Booker's _Literature and Domination_ (1993) to derive a critical formula concerning the linkage between the desire for domination, violence and the metaphor surrounding various forms of love. This formula is then used as the filter through which the two aforementioned novels are read, isolating instances in both authors’ writing that demonstrate the specific ways in which colonial powers intentionally blur, or thoroughly obscure, the line between fatherly and sexual love to justify their efforts at political and cultural supremacy."

[NOTE: What is appended here is a preliminary draft of the essay that was ultimately published. This document should NOT be quoted as being the original essay as published in the journal.]

A poetry collection that addresses the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, colonialism and identity, from the South African context. Rozena Maart talks about being born and raised in District Six, the old slave quarter of the Cape, forced removal to Lavender Hill, and the day-to-day discussion of colonialism that seeps into every part of the body. Gender and sexuality cannot be separated from the overall history of colonialism under which we live and from which our experience of the world is constructed.

This article investigates contemporary South African Indian fiction in order to examine how this literature gives rise to new ways of thinking about South African culture. The dramatic changes that South Africa has experienced in recent years have prompted fresh ways of understanding its cultural history, which move beyond ideas based on difference, into ideas based on integration. South African Indian fiction offers a different lens through which to view the tangled and complex forms of interdependency that mark both South African and transnational cultures more broadly. I read South African Indian fiction as a model for an intellectually integrated cultural formation. Instead of focusing on ideas of embodiment and difference, South African Indian fiction pivots on the conception of race as a social category shaped by its historical routes. South African Indian fiction explores the movement of Indians to South Africa during the nineteenth century, covering issues of migration, diaspora, transnationalism, hybridity, difference, cultural undecidability, and a blurring of boundaries in the postapartheid fiction of Imraan Coovadia, Achmat Dangor, Farida Karodia, Beverley Naidoo, Shamin Sarif, and Ishtiyaq Shukri. I argue that these narratives focus on the tensions between race, place, and history in a South African and a transnational context in a way that suggests revisions to current postcolonial theory.

In this paper, I problematize the notion of the “post-transitional” (Samuelson
2008; Frenkel and MacKenzie 2010) as a way of theorizing and delineating
recent South African cultural expression. I argue that this idea relies –
whether intentionally or not – on a limiting conception of South Africa’s
contemporary socio-political history and transition in terms that are
inevitably linear and teleological. I propose that contemporary cultural
expression in South Africa (and indeed across Africa) may be productively
considered, in broad terms, as literatures of transition. This is an
overarching non-linear and non-teleological continuum embracing multiple
transitions that are not necessarily discrete or mutually exclusive, and that
can be delineated in connection with specific contexts and moments.
Without rejecting the general features and trends of recent South African
cultural expression identified under the problematical rubric of “posttransitional,”
I propose that the emergent post-2000 literatures be theorized
as “post-TRC.” This highlights the significance of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission as an influential point of reference without
ignoring the wider, non-linear, and non-teleological frame of on-going
multiple transitions – social, political, economic, and cultural.

This study examines the treatment of gender-related elements and the presence/ absence of practices associated with Queer-Feminist translations in "Afrikaans Poems with English Translations" (2018) – an anthology edited by H.P. van Coller, Helize van Vuuren, and Louise Viljoen. After presenting structural and critical motivations for the studying of anthologies of Afrikaans-English poetry translations and mapping a conceptualization of Queer-Feminist translations and gender-sensitive translational analyses, descriptive and comparative analyses and critical discussions of the relevant translations in "Afrikaans Poems with English Translations" (2018) are offered. Significant translational patterns noted during our readings include: the minor presence of collaborative and plural translations, limited efforts at contextualization, the unbalanced privileging of ‘masculine’ linguistic elements, the erasure and/ or reduction of ‘feminine’ and ‘queer’ signifiers, the utilization of gender-inclusive pronouns, but also the countering of gender-sensitive and gender-inclusive discourse components and opportunities. It is acknowledged that the individual translational choices might seem trivial when parochially separated from the other choices discernible in the text; however, when read together, especially as motivated by the anthologized and parallel nature of the text and its claims regarding ‘representativeness’, the text’s disproportionate presentation of heteropatriarchal ideologies and traditions (articulated via the exhibited translation choices and practices) call for a greater inclusion of Queer-Feminist translation practices. Additionally, on par with a Queer-Feminist tradition of answering to lexical gaps, this project contains a subsection that motivates for the inclusion of the term ‘kweer’ in the Afrikaans lexicon. Finally, in an attached appendix, an exercise in performing a Queer-Feminist translation process is also posed.

This draft pre-publication chapter meanders through language issues of various kinds, and comes basically to no conclusion as far as suggestions for multilingual policies may be concerned. Instead, my aim has been rather to revisit certain narrative - and even epistemological - sites through the issue of South African languages, more specifically Afrikaans, English, and isiXhosa, the main languages of the Western Cape. The work of Mqhayi, Langenhoven, and N.P. Van Wyk Louw are briefly examined.

I have also attempted to 'read' those languages and their social domains jointly rather than serially. Namely, I do not believe those languages have historically been constructed in isolation. Also, I must stress that they are to me first and foremost very complex historical constructs, not merely objects lying around for a linguist to take up and describe.

Invaded, displaced, and dispossessed, the aboriginal Khoisan populations of South Africa were enslaved and pushed to the margins of society well before the arrival of European settlers in the seventeenth century: the Bantu groups which had invaded southern Africa in the previous centuries had colonised various regions, due to their physical and military superiority. In contemporary South Africa, the condition of these people is still precarious, judging from the various forms of political protest reclaiming full citizenship for Khoisan communities. In some cases, however, the re-reading of History on the part of minority groups to obtain social and political recognition tends to reproduce, and therefore to confirm, the stereotypes and simplifications that contributed to their marginalisation in the first place. The case of the Khoikhoi populations in South Africa – classified as ‘coloured’, but still claiming specific ethnic identities of their own – is read here through the lens of literature, and specifically through the novel David’s Story by Zoë Wicomb – a South African writer who has always avoided the trap of simplism both as narrator and as social and literary critic.

This book is a meditation on the politics of failure; "bulletproof" refers to the claims of 19th century prophets around the world who promised to turn colonizers' bullets to water. My central example is the Xhosa cattle killing in 19th century southern Africa, whose young female prophet promised a renovation of the world and expulsion of Europeans if her people killed their cattle and destroyed their grain. Nearly 40,000 people died in 1857 when the ancestors and new cattle did not appear. "Bulletproof" examines the movement’s cultural, political, and imaginative afterlives: the uses to which it has been put after this spectacular failure. I show how its prophetic vision becomes “bulletproof,” surviving failure to become a repository of aspirations for later struggles against colonialism, apartheid, and contemporary globalization. Always-already global, the anti-imperialist solidarity limned in cattle-killing prophecies imagined a transnational "black race" united against British incursions in Africa, the Crimea, India, and China: adherents saw themselves not only as the charges of transhistorical Xhosa ancestors but also as resisting a global empire. I show how authors revive images of the prophecy and its aftermath to speak to contemporary predicaments. Afterlives, in this sense, are about unfinished business, incomplete projects, and the ways in which failures in the past inspire—and constrain—movements for justice in the present. To read afterlives is to attend to how pasts’ futures haunt each present moment differently.

This article considers challenges posed to reading practices and hermeneutics by Ishtiyaq Shukri’s I See You. The content of the novel is at times didactic, and surface reading might seem an appropriate means of analysis, yet the form is experimental: it includes radio reports, characters’ reflections and journalistic work. The connection between these “documents” is not readily apparent, thus one is obliged to study the gaps between them to make sense of the text. Symptomatic reading might seem apposite, but the protagonist’s photographic work reveals the limits of this form of reading, too. I argue that Shukri’s text demands a process that interweaves symptomatic and surface reading in complex ways that require the reader to assess the ideological position from which s/he reads. The novel therefore draws attention to the ways in which reading, like seeing, is a political act.

Against a backdrop of increasing academic interest in the pervasiveness and mutability of violence in African contexts, this paper explores how violence on women’s bodies, including punitive rape, partners’ violence, invasive state surveillance and medicalization, is dramatized in works by the South African authors Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, and in their filmic adaptations. While Gordimer’s short stories "City Lovers" and "Country Lovers" (both 1974) are mostly concerned with the corporeal transformations women undergo because of simultaneous race, class and gender violence, Coeztee’s post-apartheid "Disgrace" (1999) more explicitly interrogates the possibilities of undermining violence through corporeal resistance to documentation, medicalization and displacement. Drawing on a Deleuzian notion of the body as a relational and ever-changing ‘assemblage’, I contend that a comparison between these literary texts and their filmic adaptations, rather than leading to a sterile debate on trans-media ‘fidelity’, allows a further, deeper understanding of women’s violated corporealities: one which entails moving beyond the pervasive idea of violence as an inevitable facet of (South) African societies, and pushes us towards a vision of violated bodies as always self-inventive and potentially revolutionary forces. The irreducible materiality of the screened bodies will moreover be seen as intentionally, or sometimes unintentionally, interrogating the spectators’ own sense of vulnerability and responsibility.

This article argues for an overlapping notion of indigeneity in Alex La Guma's In the Fog of the Seasons' End and Aidan Higgins' Langrishe, Go Down articulated using critical Aboriginal Studies while exploring the materialist emergence of identity. The key tension, then, is not between both authors’ progressive politics nor the real differences between their Irish and South African settings—the tension is the in-betweenness of their shared difficulty articulating a form of indigeneity and artistic expression that does not conflict with a materialist history and the theoretical precepts of their anticolonial visions. This is to say, both La Guma and Higgins work to express a metaphysical localist understanding of indigeneity while retaining the characteristically materialist notions of decolonization of the 1960s. Rather than a faulty logic, this understanding of colonialism and indigeneity is plural and reflects the “in-between” nature of their experiences.

Present Imperfect asks how South African writers have responded to the end of apartheid, to the hopes that attended the birth of the 'new' nation in 1994, and to the inevitable disappointments that have followed. The first full-length study of affect in South Africa's literature, it understands 'disappointment' both as a description of bad feeling and as naming a missed appointment with all that was promised by the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid Struggle (a dis-appointment). Attending to contemporary writers' treatment of temporality, genre, and form, it considers a range of negative feelings that are also experiences of temporal disjuncture-including stasis, impasse, boredom, disaffection, and nostalgia. Present Imperfect offers close readings of work by a range of writers - some known to international Anglophone readers including J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavic, and Zoë Wicomb, some slightly less well-known including Afrikaans-language novelists Marlene van Niekerk and Ingrid Winterbach, and others from a new generation including Songeziwe Mahlangu and Masande Ntshanga.

It addresses key questions in South African studies about the evolving character of the historical period in which the country now finds itself. It is also alert to wider critical and theoretical conversations, looking outward to make a case for the place of South African writing in global conversations, and mobilizing readings of writing marked in various ways as 'South African' in order to complicate the contours of World Literature as category, discipline, and pedagogy. It is thus also a book about the discontents of neoliberalism, the political energies of reading, and the fates of literature in our troubled present.

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?

The Voice of Cloth explores the presence and purpose of cloth as metaphor, structure and object in the fiction of late Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera. Throughout this research, the production and consumption of cloth are understood to represent domestic graphologies, a term coined by Vera in her own Ph.D. which refers to communication that goes unnoticed by conventional discourse because of the domestic, and therefore seemingly inconsequential, materials appropriated to convey information. Here an inconsequential and often overlooked element of narrative and life – the textile – is shown to play a central role in the articulation of the often silenced experiences of incest, infanticide, abortion and rape that make up the narratives of Nehanda (1993), Without a Name (1994), Under the Tongue (1996), Butterfly Burning (1998) and The Stone Virgins (2002).

The demands of modernity and globalisation present print culture as dominant in such a way that oral tradition is forced into a shadowy position, because the latter tradition cannot be exploited entirely for profit. Dominant scholarship on oral studies therefore positions orality in the background of writing, so as to suggest that it is a past tradition of, and serves as a reservoir for, written literature. However, such approaches reveal theoretical gaps, highlighted, as will be shown in the thesis, by the effaced position of the black woman as storyteller. Orality, in this light, becomes the spectre which haunts the writing of most African writers, in the same way that the black woman haunts man-centred nationalism. Such spectrality is precisely one which is embodied, if not exemplified, by the black woman in nationalist discourse and in society in general. I begin by examining the representation of an archetypal black woman, namely, Sycorax, in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Even though Shakespeare is quite ambiguous about her racial identity, I interpret Sycorax – whose story is told by male characters – as a black woman. I then also consider Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, a postcolonial rewriting of Shakespeare’s play, and interrogate the ways in which discourses on nationalism, such as Negritude, can plunge the black female presence into effacement. I seek to establish that Sycorax’s present absence in the play allegorises the place of orality in black writing. I propose that the denigration of oral culture equates with the suppression of the authorial role of women as storytellers. From Sycorax, as a symbolic figure, I move on to political and literary “Sycoraxes”, namely, Winnie Madikizela Mandela and Sindiwe Magona. I argue that while Winnie Mandela’s role as the Mother of Nation – a storyteller in her own right – gets hidden in Nelson Mandela’s shadow, Sindiwe Magona is reduced to a pariah figure by her community, while her narratives get forced into the shadow of the black literary canon.

In this chapter I present an overview of the most prominent trends in South African working-class literature from the beginning of the 20th century until 1994. Since its emergence, South African working class was a heterogeneous formation which encompassed diverse ethnicities, both of European and non-European origin. Each of them created its own literature and culture, using various languages, incorporating traditional elements and means of expression, and merging them with borrowed foreign discourses and literary devices belonging to the repertoire of socialist literature that had been created mostly in the Soviet Union, the USA and other European countries. Consequently, South African working-class literature can be conceived of as conglomerate of heteroglot hybrid forms and manifestations of a subversive counter-discourse of protest literature. The forms presented here include writings of European socialists commenting on South African situation, novels utilizing the Jim goes to Joburg plot pattern, drama incorporating the Soviet socialist realism and references to the Afrikaans farm novel, Afrikaans folk tunes functioning as protest songs, and black workers praise poetry based on tribal oral conventions. As a carrier of a new working-class identity, this literature promoted a modern urban model which, nevertheless, relied on the continuity with local rural traditions.

A short reflection from within the Coronavirus crisis on the lessons that Lauren Beukes's Moxyland and Masande Ntshanga's Triangulum hold for thinking about lockdown.
Published in the South African newspaper _City Press_
https://city-press.news24.com/Trending/Books/reading-for-lockdown-two-afrofuturist-texts-from-south-africa-20200430

From fresh archival evidence we know that J. M. Coetzee was reading works by Rudolf Bultmann, a German New Testament scholar and theologian, while writing Life & Times of Michael K. In these texts Bultmann had developed a conception of the ‘meaning’ of the Gospel of John, in particular, as inseparable from the reading experience it stages. Notably, he claimed that the Gospel aims to stage a dialectical reading experience: it encourages reliance on mythological language and formal features (thesis), which it then undermines (antithesis), in order to invite potential encounters with the divine, as that which exceeds even the best mythological description (synthesis). Drawing on Coetzee’s archived notes, I show how Michael K diffusely reorients this dialectical strategy. Instead of deploying mythological language to invite encounters with the divine, Coetzee relies upon, but also undermines, biographical conventions to cultivate conditions that might expand readers’ awareness of the limitations of this narrative before the life it purportedly represents. By tracing a religious register, my reading also foregrounds episodes in which characters undergo encounters that exercise a claim over them, which they cannot quite articulate. Indeed, by attending to Coetzee’s readings of Bultmann, I show how this fiction depicts the very phenomenon it stages. For there is good reason to believe that Michael K was specifically crafted with a view toward cultivating attentiveness to ways in which life persistently exceeds representational specificity. Moreover, this was a particularly politically freighted endeavour for an author grappling with life under the apartheid narrative.

What is a "postapartheid" writer? This essay, condensed for the New Haven Review from my forthcoming book, Losing the Plot: Crime, Reality, and Fiction in Postapartheid Writing (Witwatersrand University Press), seeks answers to this question.

This article employs oppositional black geography as a lens to examine spatiality in the novels of two black South African women writing during apartheid, Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo. In analyzing Tlali’s Muriel at Metropolitan and Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die, it argues that the authors used a critical spatial analysis of the nation to critique apartheid and its oppressive policies. It holds that by insisting on authoring their own worlds in a country that sought to deny them creative agency, Tlali and Ngcobo carved out intellectual space that enabled them to critique dominant ideologies of Afrikaner nationalism and white supremacy, while imagining and writing alternatives to a nation to which their relationships were primarily ones of disavowal and subjugation. Both Tlali and Ngcobo render visible the fissures within the seemingly naturalized apartheid sites they construct in their fiction, revealing the inherent contradictions and injustices of apartheid spatiality. Through their fiction, they were thus engaged in situated knowledge production and a reconfiguration of apartheid space into a more socially just place. In narrating subaltern discourses in their novels from the standpoint of those most oppressed by apartheid law and ideology and by creatively engaging the spatiality of apartheid, Tlali and Ngcobo offer new modes for reading the nation, valuable for elucidating the ways in which the national space genders black women, and how black women, in turn shape and reshape that space.