Towards an archaeology of Dusklands

This essay seeks to explore the question of origins: the beginnings of the literary career of arguably South Africa's most significant author, and the development of a form of authorship that was, at its inception, situated both locally and globally. An archaeology of the publication history of the debut novel Dusklands (1974) can shed light on the emergence of a particularly complex form of transnational authorship that J. M. Coetzee came to assume, a form locating itself within the South African literary landscape while simultaneously connecting itself to broader international literary currents.Department of HE and Training approved lis

Late style in J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year

J.M. Coetzee’s post-millennial writing has been marked by new forms of inventiveness, formal risk-taking and narrative experimentation that have blurred the boundaries between fiction, autobiography and social commentary. Using the example of the novel Diary of a Bad Year (2007), it is argued that this latter fiction is exemplary of Edward Said’s idea of “late style”, accounting not only for Coetzee’s surprising venture into explicit political commentary, but also his narrative minimalism. The paper looks carefully at the content and style of Coetzee’s novel, contrasting its descriptive technique with earlier fictions

The Boer and the jackal: Satire and resistance in Khoi orature

Bushman narratives have been the subject of a large volume of scholarly and popular studies, particularly publications that have engaged with the Bleek and Lloyd archive. Khoi story-telling has attracted much less attention. This paper looks a number of lesser known Khoi narratives, collected by Thomas Baines and Leonhard Schultze. Despite commonalities in the respective oral traditions, Khoi folklore appears more open to discursive modes of satire, mockery and ridicule, features which are not readily found in Bushman story telling. A number of Khoi narratives that feature the trickster figure of the jackal are presented and analysed as discursive engagements with historical realities and political forces that impinged on indigenous societies. It is argued that Khoi orature was able to mock and subvert settler dominance by making imaginative use of animal proxies such as the jackal. This capacity for satire in Khoi oral culture allowed it to resist colonial violence on a discursive level, a strategy that was much less pronounced in Bushman narration

The taint of the censor: J.M. Coetzee and the making of In the Heart of the Country

With the publication of In the Heart of the Country by the London publisher Secker & Warburg in 1977, J. M. Coetzee had achieved international recognition for his second novel, transcending the narrow national literary culture of South Africa. Although In the Heart of the Country, with its overtly South African subject matter and setting certainly strengthened his credentials as a significant new South African writer, a careful look at the publication history of this novel shows a degree of ambivalence in the way Coetzee's authorship emerged in the force-field of tension between the local and the global. On the one hand, In the Heart of the Country's British publication was a further step in Coetzee's transnational authorship, a process that I have argued took place already with the writing and local South African publication of Dusklands (1974) ; on the other hand, Coetzee was also addressing himself for the first (and possibly last) time in a very particular and focused manner to a local readership. This complex doubled form of authorship was reflected in the dual publication history of In the Heart of the Country, both as an international version for the metropolitan Anglophone market (with a parallel United States edition), and as an edition published by Ravan Press in the following year, licensed for distribution only in South Africa. The South African edition distinguished itself not only by a different imprint and jacket design, but was decidedly local, with much of the novel's extensive dialogue in Afrikaans.Department of HE and Training approved lis

Alan Paton’s writing for the stage: towards a non-racial South African theatre

Introduction: It would not be an exaggeration to assert that no South African playwright in the 1950s and 1960s received as much international attention and recognition as Alan Paton, until eclipsed by Athol Fugard’s emerging career. Paton’s own plays and musicals, and the stage adaptations of his novels, had some extensive and successful runs on Broadway in New York, and also played to packed houses in South Africa. Some highly acclaimed artists, ranging from the German avant-garde composer Kurt Weill to South Africa’s jazz musician Todd Matshikiza, helped to bring his work to the stage. Yet Paton’s theatrical work has received surprisingly scant attention from critics, which is all the more remarkable, given the author’s prominence as one of South Africa’s most well-known writers. Like his novels, Paton’s plays are not simply light human dramas or romantic comedies as much colonial theatre at the time, but serious works that were deeply concerned with the socio-political issues facing South Africa under apartheid. As Paton once put it, he was never interested in “writing a ‘jolly good fellow’ sort of play.” Three of his major plays were written and performed in a crucial period of South African history: the Sharpeville massacre, the implementation of the Group Areas and other cornerstone apartheid acts, the treason trials, and the declaration of the republic.Department of HE and Training approved lis

Wilhelm Bleek and the Khoisan imagination: a study of censorship, genocide and colonial science

In 1864, Wilhelm Bleek published a collection of Khoi narratives titled Reynard the Fox in South Africa, or Hottentot Fables and Tales. This article critically examines this foundational event in South African literary history, arguing that it entailed a Victorian circumscription of the Khoisan imagination, containing its libidinal and transgressive energies within the generic limits of the naıve European children’s folktale. Bleek’s theories of language and race are examined as providing the context for his editorial approach to Khoi narratives in which the original ‘nakedness’ was written out. The extent of Bleek’s censorship of indigenous orature becomes visible when comparing his ‘fables’ to a largely unknown corpus of Khoi tales, collected by the German ethnographer Leonhard Schultze during the Nama genocide in the early twentieth century. The article compares these collections of oral narratives, and suggests that this has implications for the way the famous Bleek and Lloyd /Xam archive was subsequently constituted in the 1870s. Wilhelm Bleek’s interventions in civilising the Khoisan imagination marks a move away from a potentially Rabelaisian trajectory in South African literature through which the Khoisan could be represented and represent themselves. In admitting a sanitised indigenous orature into the colonial literary order, it is argued that Bleek helped to create a restrictive cultural politics in South Africa from which the country is yet to emerge fully.Department of HE and Training approved lis