4 research outputs found
Self, life and writing in selected South African autobiographical texts.
Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1994.Autobiographical writing acquired increasing importance during the apartheid period, with greater numbers of autobiographical texts being published by a more representative range of South Africans across race, class and gender categories. This thesis analyzes the implications of shifts in autobiographical production, in English, during the years 1948-1994 through the examination of selected texts. The readings are informed by poststructuralism, modified by information about indigenous black South African cultural practices, as well as by input supplied by some of the autobiographical texts themselves. This theoretical approach may be referred to as a "pratique de metissage" (Glissant). The texts selected for close reading are from a field of over 120 autobiographical texts. They were chosen for their ability to illustrate important trends in South African autobiographical writing, specifically with regard to the three constituent parts of autobiography: autos, bios, and graphe. The chapter dealing with the depiction of self interrogates the hierarchized discourses of male-biased humanism in Roy Campbell's Light on a Dark Horse (1951). In Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman (1985) I analyze the melding of the conceptual frameworks of indigenous
black cultures and Western individualism by which the autobiographical subject is defined. Breyten Breytenbach's The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984) is read as an exploration of the postmodernist decentred self. In the chapter focusing on the portrayal of life experiences, I examine the ways in which the narrator of Albert Luthuli's Let My People Go (1962) seeks to secure the reader's approval of his version of recent South African history; while the analysis of the sub-genre referred to
here as worker autobiography is principally concerned with the politics of life-writing. In Chapter 5, I look at how Godfrey Moloi's My Life: Volume One (1987) uses the discourses of popular American movies of the 40s and 50s in order to validate a self victimized by racism, and also at the ways in which Lyndall Gordon's Shared Lives (1992) probes the limits and possibilities of biography through autobiographical speculation. In general, apartheid autobiography moves away from individualism to contribute, through various means, to social and political change
The Textualities of the AutobiogrAfrical
In your mind’s eye, summon a map of the world—that famous text.
There, there is Africa. The familiar, highly visible bulge of head to horn
and curve, and the islands as you travel down to the continent’s southernmost point. It is likely that your imagination, like ours, has archived the
inherited template of a Mercator projection, the powerful sixteenth-century cartography which remains influential offline and e-nfluential on
Google Maps, even though it misleadingly distorts the size of continents.
The 30.2 million square kilometers of the African continent appear much
smaller than, say, the areas of the US (9.1 million square kilometers),
Russia (16.4 million square kilometers), or China (9.4 million square kilometers). In comparison, the corrective cartographic morphing of the GallPeters projection revises the habituated representational geography of the
world’s landmasses, showing the relational sizes of continents more
accurately.1
Such tensions are not surprising, for the map, we know, is not to be
equated with the territory and, in the context of our interest in this special issue in the textualities of the AutobiogrAfrical, divergent cartographies of the same space, drafted from different ideological perspectives,
remind us to ask questions about how life narratives might make Africa
intelligible. If, as Frances Stonor Saunders observes, “the self is an act of
cartography, and every life a study of borders,” then “[e]nvisioning new
acts of cartography that give substance and dynamism to the spaces
between borders … produces new selves—or, at the very least, new ways
of thinking about selfhood—and thus new objects of autobiographical
enquiry.”
2 Any map of Africa reflects assumptions about a collective
(“Africa”), as well as the political-geographical divisions of nation-states.
“Africa” implies degrees of commonality among the (possibly more than)
fifty-four countries that comprise the continent. Yet we know the dangers
of a single story. Africa is not, after all, a country. Bear in mind, too, that
our editorial team is located at the bottom end of the continent in South Afric