Postcolonial violence: narrating South Africa, May 2008

The violent attacks on immigrants in May and June 2008 laid bare some of the contradictions of the South African postcolony. Focusing on the vigorous public debate which arose in the aftermath of violence, this essay explores a moment of interpretive crisis in which the privileged stories of the nation were unexpectedly unravelled. From there, it moves to a discussion of the political investments at stake in the government’s choice of the ‘crime story’ as dominant interpretive scheme, giving particular emphasis to what this revealed about national myth-making, the production of consensus and modalities of power in the postcolonial state

Culture in the public sphere : recovering a tradition of radical cultural-political debate in South Africa, 1938-1960.

Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005.This thesis is concerned with the negotiation of cultural and literary matters in South African public life during the period 1938 to 1960. While I begin with an exploration of the more 'orthodox' or 'academic' traditions of literary-cultural discussion in South Africa, the far more urgent preoccupation has been to explore a hitherto undocumented tradition of cultural-political debate in the South African public sphere, one which arose in the ' counter-public' circles of oppositional South African political groups. What has emerged is a rich and heterogeneous public debate about literature and culture in South Africa which has so far gone unrecorded and unrecognised. What sets this 'minority' discussion apart from more mainstream cultural discourses, I argue, is its overt engagement with contemporary socio-political issues. Articulated mainly by 'subaltern' writer-intellectuals - who occupied a precarious position in the social order either by virtue of their racial classification, class position or political affiliation - this is a cultural debate which offers a forthright critique of existing race and class norms. In these traditions, literary-cultural discussion becomes a vehicle for the articulation of radical political views and a means whereby marginalised individuals and groups can engage in oppositional public debate. In this regard, I argue, literary-cultural debate becomes a means of engaging in the kind of public political participation which is not available in the ' legitimate' public sphere. Focusing in the first instance on literary criticism 'proper', this thesis considers the distinctive reading strategies, hermeneutic practices, and evaluative frameworks which mark these alternative South African discursive traditions . Here I argue that the political, content-oriented, historical and ideological emphases of an alternative South African tradition are in marked contrast to the formalist, abstracted and moralising tendencies of more normative approaches. What the thesis points to is not only the existence of a substantial body of anti-colonial criticism and response in South Africa from the mid-1930s onwards, but also to a vigorous tradition of Marxist literary criticism in South Africa, one which predates the arrival of Marxist approaches in South African universities by some thirty years. Aside from the more traditional critical arena of literary consumption and evaluation, the thesis also considers a more general public discussion, one in which questions such as the place of politics in art, the social function of literature/culture, and the complex 'postcolonial' questions of cultural allegiance, identity and exclusion are debated at length. In this regard, culture becomes one of the primary sites of a much broader contestation of ruling class power. Regarded by many in these traditions as intrinsic to the operations of class and colonial oppression, culture also figures as one ofthe primary nodes of resistance. In seeking out these marginal South African 'subaltern counterpublics', the project has sought to retrieve a history of radical cultural-political debate in South Africa which is not available as part of the existing literary-cultural archive. In this regard, I hope not only to keep these ideas ' afloat' as a way of complicating and interrogating the present, but also seek to provide a more accurate and inclusive sense of the South African public sphere during the period under review. In particular, I offer a sense of the many competing intellectual discourses which formed the broader intellectual context out of which the dominant English Studies model was eventually constellated. I also give attention to the complex social processes by means of which certain intellectual discourses are granted legitimacy and permanence while others are discarded: what emerges in this regard, as I suggest, is gradual 'outlawing' of politics from South African cultural debates which coincides with the rise of the apartheid state

Crain Soudien (2019) the Cape radicals : intellectual and political thought of the new era fellowship. Johannesburg : Wits UP

The Cape Radicals presents a fascinating history of the New Era Fellowship (NEF), an organisation that emerged in the latter part of the 1930s as one manifestation of the South African anti-Stalinist Left. As such, the book is an important intervention in the ongoing effort to retrieve hidden intellectual-political traditions in early twentieth century South Africa, traditions which have been obscured by the dominant historiographical emphasis on the African National Congress. Soudien’s claims about the political and pedagogic significance of the NEF are centred on its grand ambitions, its intellectual foresight and its decisive local influence, as well as the paradox of its failure to establish a wider base and its subsequent historical marginalisation. In this latter sense, The Cape Radicals raises questions about the politics of contemporary historical retrieval and invites reflection on the larger historical processes of institutional sanction, neglect or erasure. This history of a relatively small but influential organisation is situated within the larger context of anti-colonial thinking in South Africa and is therefore an important addition to existing histories of left progressive movements. It is centred in particular on the Cape Town intellectual scene and undertakes an important recovery of the hidden social, intellectual and political history of Cape Town itself.http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/transformation/am2022Englis

Reading and roaming the racial city : R.R.R. Dhlomo and The Bantu World

Scholarship on the literary inscription of urban space in early twentieth-century South Africa has tended to focus on Sophiatown and the writers of the 1950s ‘Drum generation’. In this reading, the idea of Johannesburg as it emerges in Drum magazine is seen to contrast sharply with earlier literary renditions of the city as a place of vice and moral decay. In this article, I draw attention to an important but little-known precursor to this emergent tradition of writing and claiming the modern city, namely journalist and writer, R. R. R. Dhlomo. As the author of a moralising fable about the depredations of city life, An African Tragedy (1928), Dhlomo is conventionally positioned as one of those writers whose reading of the city would inevitably be surpassed. This perspective ignores the significance of his popular satirical column, “R. Roamer Esq.” which appeared in the commercial African weekly The Bantu World over a period of ten years. Concerned in particular with the urban and peri-urban environments of late 1930s Johannesburg, the column maps out a detailed urban topography. Using the first-person perspective of an observing and observant urban street-walker/roamer, it calls attention to particular sites of engagement and encounter such as the court room, the train station and the street as well as the more intimate spaces encoding black urban marginality such as the backyard servant’s room. In this paper I consider what forms of the metropolis emerge from Roamer’s verbal mapping as well as what kinds of city figures, topographies, movements and interactions are inscribed. I argue that the column grants particular significance to the experience, interpolation and movement of the black body in segregationist-era urban space, offering a striking early reading of the racial city as both a place of constraint and a zone of inventive resistance. The article makes a further claim for the importance of African print cultures as an index of urbanity, of African newspapers as significant but overlooked sites of city inscription and black urban life in which the boundaries between the ‘literary’ and the ‘journalistic’ are frequently breached.The “Urban Connections in African Popular Imaginaries” project at Rhodes University.https://journals.co.za/content/journal/iseaengEnglis

Frailties of the flesh : observing the body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies Purple hibiscus

In this article, I offer a reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003) through the lens of the body. References to the body in Purple Hibiscus are frequent, even excessive. In its insistent emphasis on the body, I suggest, the novel establishes affiliations with an emergent tradition of African writing in which various forms of “body writing” are deployed as part of a destabilizing aesthetic. These aesthetico-political concerns are developed in a number of ways—in the inscriptions of the body as a site of physical and discursive violence, in the positive reimagining of the black body against a history of shame, and in the novel’s refracted critique of the postcolonial potentate whose body becomes the object of a destabilizing and satirical gaze. By means of the trope of the bodily grotesque—along with a repeated gesture of ironic unmasking—the novel asserts the reciprocal connections between the private violence of the domestic sphere and the public violence of the postcolonial state. Also important is a pervasive structure of reciprocity or mirroring in which several unexpected connections between conventionally bounded conditions are disclosed. Not least of these, I suggest, are the links between Western enlightenment-democracy and the violence of the postcolonial state.http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication/?journalCode=reseafrilite&2017-10-30am2017Englis

Well-seasoned talks : the newspaper column and the satirical mode in South African letters

In this article, I examine the popular satirical column “R. Roamer Esq.” written by R.R.R. Dhlomo which appeared in The Bantu World newspaper. The study seeks to reassemble the archive of African intellectual and political life by foregrounding a hidden history of print culture practices and traditions. I assert the historical importance of the newspaper column and the satirical gesture in South African letters and emphasise the significance of the modes of humour and irony as forms of political resistance. In directing attention to the rhetorical and performative aspects of South Africa’s protest history, the article expands on the political role of the African press in the aftermaths of colonialism in articulating new modes of agency, resistance and critique. In particular, Dhlomo’s satirical column is approached as a space of literary expression in which opposition to various aspects of 1930s South African society is articulated in elusive, indirect and coded ways. As such, I advocate a reading of South African literary history that goes beyond the published literary text, one which can accommodate the idiosyncratic form of the newspaper column. In this sense, the newspaper itself is re-imagined as an important site of linguistic and genre-based experimentation, invention and play.https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsdy20hj2020Englis

The appearance of the book : towards a history of the reading lives and worlds of Black South African readers

This paper elucidates the material, spatial, social and infrastructural contexts of reading in early twentieth century South Africa. It adds to a growing body of work on reading practices and patterns of book consumption by drawing attention to the neglected question of the “where of reading” – the physical contexts and settings of reading and the ways in which the organisation of space and the allocation of resources impacted on particular reading experiences and habits. The article also takes up a related set of questions pertaining to the access of books, the nature of specific reading encounters, the social relations that developed in these contexts and the reading practices that ensued. It focuses in detail on the contexts of reading which developed around the various “Non-European” reading initiatives and advances the concepts of the “poor library” and “fugitive reading” in order to describe both the rudimentary and improvisational nature of black reading spaces at this time and the various practices of tactical, opportunistic and itinerant reading which arose in response. Finally, it draws attention to the sociable, convivial and inherently public nature of black reading encounters and highlights a pervasive practice of mediated reading in which book interests were shared and encouraged.https://journals.co.za/content/journal/iseaengEnglis

The idea of reading in early 20th-century South Africa

Early 20th-century South Africa saw the emergence of a range of liberal reading initiatives aimed at encouraging a black reading culture. What ensued was a lively public debate about reading and the uses of the book which included not only the liberal philanthropic groups that gave support to these projects but also those African readers and intellectuals who found themselves the targets of the reading initiative itself. In the first part of this article, I highlight the prominent role played by liberal advocates of the book in establishing the broad parameters of the book-reading encounter in South Africa, particularly as it related to emergent black reading communities. I give attention to the nature of this developing reading consensus and the assumptions about reading and the world of the book that it encoded. In the second part of the article, I explore the ways in which this consensus was negotiated by African readers and intellectuals. To this end, I look at some of the traces and fragments of an on-going debate about reading and its social and personal value recorded in the contemporary African press. The aim of the article is not only to ascertain how Africans responded to the liberal incitement to read but also to address some of the contestations over the meaning and use-value of reading during this period as part of a more general history of reading in early 20th-century South Africa.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjss202018-06-30hb2017Englis

South African and contemporary history seminar

Contesting a 'CULT(URE) of respectability. The radical intellectual traditions of the Non- European Unity Movement 1938-1960. In summing up the achievements of the NEUM, many commentators have criticised in particular its elitism, its middle-class roots, and its failure to connect with working class struggle

Review: Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa: Literature between Critique and Utopia.

David Johnson Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa: Literature between Critique and Utopia. 2020. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and Cape Town: UCT Press, 2020. 231 pp. ISBN 978177582260