African cultural memory in Fred Khumalo’s Touch my blood and its metafictional para-texts

This article gleans its momentum from Ronit Frenkel’s palimpsestic observation that the local and the global exist as “coeval discourses of signification in South African transitional literature,” with the intention to push the boundaries set in a recent issue of the Journal of Black Studies that carried a literature-inspired title, “Cultural Memory and Ethnic Identity Construction in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy” by Zhou Quan. The latter prompted a consideration whether a peculiarly South African literary representation of cultural memory is possible or not, or whether it is monolithic or multiplicitous. Therefore, partly in response, I introduce the transcendent idea of allochthonous memory, taking my cues from Molefi Kete Asante’s Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge where he elucidates that the Afrocentrist “seeks to uncover and use codes, paradigms, symbols, motifs, myths, and circles of discussion that reinforce the centrality of African ideals and values as a valid frame of reference for acquiring and examining data” (p. 6). One such paradigm is Allochthonous memory, which is here defined as a configuration of cultural memory that finds expression in references that are simultaneously intertextual, transnational, transcultural, and ethical.English Studie

Enter the jargon: the intertextual rhetoric of Radical Economic Transformation following the logic of Demosthenes’s oratory

This paper considers the timing and entry into public discourse of ‘Radical Economic Transformation’ as a concept that is open to deliberate misinterpretation in the media. Whilst, as the title suggests, it is necessary to distil the content signified by its rhetorical signposts, the diverse uses to which ‘radical economic transformation’ is being put by the media, government and researchers requires examination relative to parameters of debate set by the Greek orator Demosthenes’s thesis in his Against Meidias, during times of political crisis in Athens Macedonian expansion. Similarly, in the wake of oligarchies and deepening economic inequality along racial lines, Jacob Zuma’s Radical Economic Transformation (RET) was intended to be a bulwark against further expansion, exploitation and pauperization. In its intention, the rhetoric RET signposted a pro-poor intervention for ownership, management and control of the economy in favour of all South Africans. If the exordium is whether ‘Radical Economic Transformation’ should be embraced, then the debate takes stock of the observation by Mark Swilling that while there is a clear need for ‘radical economic transformation,’ there are concerns that ‘this is being used as an ideological smokescreen to mask the rent-seeking practices of the Zuma-centred power elite’ (Bhorat et al., 2017). In the media, Schutte argues that Radical Economic Transformation is part of a ‘distorted discourse [which] is the weapon of choice [at a time when] empty rhetoric is served up on Orwellian platters’. Following the logic of Demosthenes, the debate around the rhetoric of Radical Economic Transformation demands and deserves to be tested against legality, justice, expediency, practicability, decency and consequences.English Studie

Representations of the National and Trans-national in Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow

As creative agents of knowledge production in the domain of humanities knowledge, South African writers such as Phaswane Mpe have the historical burden of participating in the transformation of knowledge in ways that revolutionize the role of artistic performance with a view to prompting social transformation. In our context, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow (2001) actively generates emergent grammars that underpin a transformational thrust through a distinctive transnational bent, where xenophobia and rural myopia are countered through a deliberative narrative of doubt cast on a putative insular South African-ness pitted against master narratives of national unity, on the one hand, and disruptive vectors such as HIV/AIDS and witchcraft, on the other. As a significant discourse that constitutes humanities knowledge, a novel such as Mpe’s contributesto a project’s transformation of knowledge in its departure from, and disavowal of, a totalizing master narrative of nationalism, putting in place a macabre post-national struggle of dystopia. It specifically tests the limits knowledge production and consumption around the topical issues of HIV/AIDS and immigration. It proceeds to show how Phaswane Mpe’s novel has successfully debunked myths of a privileged autochthonous habitus. The novel eschews characterising unstable homologies of the rural and urban divide and, in like manner, the South African and ‘foreigner’ bar, as a starting point for meaningful knowledge transformation about immigration and the HIV/ AIDS stigma through transnationalism and transculturation of language by way of an idiom of intertextuality represented by a transnational bent. We demonstrate throughout that transnationalism prompts a signifcation of cultural transformation in the novel under discussion, viz. Welcome to our Hillbrow.University of South Africa (UNISA)English Studie

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

The airport geography of power as site and limit of NEPAD’s Transnational African Assemblage

This article mobilises the Deleuzian analytical category of ‘assemblage’ to distinctly bring to view how racial profiling in South African airport spaces operationalises a paradoxical discourse of invidious visibility and invisibility that flies in the face of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) as articulated in the vision embraced by the member states of the African Union, of which South Africa is part. The said discourse, this article argues, runs counter to the spirit of NEPAD as it becomes an inscribing socius in a territorial machine that is geared towards not only processing entries and exits of African migrants into the airport. It recolonises the African airport into a zone of exception, reterritorialising the African assemblage into a space definable by the particularities of race and nation. The airport becomes a veritable zone of exception: no recognition of movement rights for African migrants despite proclamations of priorities of regional integration in Africa. Over South African airports now hover signature meta-narratives that are at variance with NEPAD. Nothing exemplified this more than the unfair detention of Wole Soyinka in a South African airport, especially because the Nobel Laureate was officially invited to give an address in honour of Nelson Mandela.Keywords: Assemblage, NEPAD, Airport, migrants, South Africa, terrorist, tourist