The cultural politics of adaptation : fools and the politics of gender

The shifts in the priorities of literary and cultural theory and criticism were already underway in the South African academy by the end of the 1980s, with the gathering momentum of the mass political movement reaching its apotheosis with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990. Whereas creative literary and cultural expression has often lagged behind advances in theory, there was nevertheless a steady acknowledgement of the necessity for a corresponding shift in the discursive character of the creative arts, even if the material conditions on the ground remained largely unchanged. Ramadan Suleman’s film Fools, which appeared in 1997 as an adaptation of Njabulo Ndebele’s 1983 novella by the same title, entered the fray with its argument for a new or, as it were, broader consciousness of the deeper, more complex legacy of ‘sexual violence’. This legacy included the weak ‘place of women in the everyday life of the township’ (Suleman 1995: 1), and indeed in the very idea of ‘the everyday’ that some in literary and cultural circles sought to inscribe. This article provides an assessment of the nature and extent of the film’s intervention in the context of the systematic breakdown of the old certainties of race, identity and nation post-apartheid, together with the literary-critical cultures and apparatuses that presided over their coherences and raptures. I take as my starting point Robert Stam and Louise Spence’s (1983: 3) assertion that ‘[a]though […] those questions bearing on the cinematic industry, its processes of production, distribution and exhibition’ – in short, questions bearing on ‘the contextual’ – are of ‘crucial importance’, they need to be tempered with those bearing on the ‘textual and intertextual’ (emphasis in original). Fools is a film that enters the textual and contextual terrain of Ndebele’s novella, but in doing so contests its textuality by shifting its narrative ground and voice

Space, body and subjectivity : shifting conceptions of black African masculinities in four audio-visual texts.

Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.Research in constructions of masculinities in South Africa is already an established field, having in part developed out of the need to contextualise global theories in the social, economic and cultural realities of African subjects. In its turn, this research has engendered a number of focused studies which have sought to depart from the traditional ‘men’s studies’ paradigm. Needless to say, studies in constructions of masculinities have infused the traditional paradigm with a new vitality. This thesis proceeds from the premise that to be a man in (South) Africa and elsewhere is contingent upon a diversity of social, economic, political, generational and cultural expectations. I argue that these expectations, which are linked variously to status, sexual orientation and choice, mean that recognition of gender subjectivity as performed must take precedence over the idea of a stable gender role. And, at times, this applies with more force in African societies, traditional and modern (or, as is often the case, a confluence of both), than it does in western ones where class, rather than the complex intersection of tradition and modernity, tends to set gender identities on a more stable platform. I then propose the view that a nuanced conceptualisation of masculinities in South Africa needs to inform analysis of representations of men and women, and I do so by means of an in-depth critical analysis of the shifting conceptions of black African men and women in Shaka Zulu (1986), Mapantsula (1988), Fools (1998) and Yizo Yizo 1 (1999)