96 research outputs found
Freedom on a Frontier? The Double Bind of (White) Postapartheid South African Literature
The trend in analyses of postapartheid South African literature is to see a body of writing that is largely âfreed from the past,â exhibiting a wide range of divergences from locked-in âstruggleâ writing. This article provides a differently nuanced conceptualization, arguing that some of the literatureâs key dynamics are founded in âmashed-up temporalities.â The analysis borrows from Ashraf Jamalâs appropriation of art historian Hal Fosterâs âfuture anteriorâ or a âwill have been.â In this reading, emblematic strands of postapartheid writing are less âfree from the pastâ than trading in an anxiety about never having begun. The body of literature in question â in this case white post-transitional writing â can be seen to be inescapably bound to the idea of the time of before, so much so that it compulsively iterates certain immemorial literary tropes such as the frontier and the journey of discovery. Further, the article suggests that much postapartheid literature written in what it calls âdetection modeâ â providing accounts of âcrimeâ and other social ills â are distinguished by disjunctive continuity rather than linear or near-linear discontinuity with pre-transition literature, yet exhibit features of authorial voice and affect that place it within a distinctly postapartheid zone of author-reader interlocution
Offâcolour? Mike Nicolâs Neoânoir âRevenge Trilogyâ and the Postapartheid Femme Fatale
Abstract: This article critically examines the use of noir, neoânoir and global noir conventions in Mike Nicolâs âRevenge Trilogyâ of crime novels, Payback (2008), Killer Country (2010), and Black Heart (2011). Nicol invents a black femme fatale who is shown to be an âevilâ concentrate of all that is perceived to be corrupt under postapartheid conditions. The âdameâ in question, Shemina February, is portrayed in such a way that she becomes a projection of what scholars and commentators increasingly see as a corrupt, neoliberal powerâbase hijacking the legacy of the South African struggle against apartheid. However, the article raises the question: why locate such a pronounced sense of political âevilâ in a black female character? Coming from a white writer, regardless of his credentials, such a gesture raises the possibility of dubious racial and gender typecasting in an act of (perhaps unconscious?) projection. Might the white postapartheid writer, in this way, be seeking a sacrificial object for the perceived ills of postapartheid, in much the way classic noir projected its anxieties about the displacement of (white) male agency onto âbadâ women after the second world war? The article offers alternate readings of Nicolâs femme fatale
From the subject of evil to the evil subject : âCultural differenceâ in postapartheid South African crime fiction
Abstract: This article takes up the question of âcrime writingâ and rejoins the debate around whether such literature stands in for the âpolitical novelâ in postapartheid South Africa. What social function might crime writing be serving? Research by political economists and cultural anthropologists suggests that acts of writing in âsocial detectionâ mode (rather than âcrime writingâ) serve as an allegory for occulted sociopolitical conditions. Cultural difference is seen, once again, to play a pivotal role in the legitimation of power, and writers in the detection mode are correspondingly seen to be probing the possibility of a resurgence of âbadâ difference. This notion, it is argued, is a key differentiator in an otherwise murky scene in which the borderline between licit and illicit, and right and wrong, has become obscure. While many South African writers are brought into the discussion, including but not restricted to crime authors, a key novel by leading crime writer Deon Meyer is read as a case study to illustrate the more general points made in the article
Whitelier than white? : inversions of the racial gaze in white Zimbabwean writing
Abstract: This article looks at inscriptions of whiteness in selected white Zimbabwean narratives. Through a reading of Andrea Eamesâ The Cry of the Go-Away Bird (2011), Alexander Fullerâs Donât Letâs Go to the Dogs Tonight (2003) and John Eppelâs Absent: the English Teacher (2009), the argument proposes that white Zimbabwean narratives situate whiteness within the context of change and marginality in Zimbabwe. The narratives deal with experiences of change and apprehensions of lived reality marked by the transfer of power from white minority to black majority rule. Our reading of The Cry of the Go-Away Bird examines how whiteness in the postcolonial Zimbabwean state is perceived through an outsiderâs gaze, resulting in a kind of double consciousness within the (racialized, white) subject of the gaze. It is argued that the text depicts whites as torn between two unreconciled streams of possibility, reinforcing their sense of alienation. Fullerâs Donât Letâs Go to the Dogs Tonight represents whiteness as a thoroughly ephemeral experience. The meaning of whiteness is mediated through perpetual physical movement as whites travel from one point to another. Eppelâs Absent: the English Teacher affords a rethinking of whiteness as an unstable form of identity contingent on historical and political factors
The confessio of an academic Ahab: or, how I sank my own disciplinary ship
Inaugural lecture delivered on 19 November 2012.Leon de Kock matriculated at Mayfair High School,
Johannesburg, in 1973. In 1974 he enrolled at the former
Rand Afrikaans University, now the University of Johannesburg,
to read for a BA in law, completing a BA Honours in English
in 1978. After six years full time in journalism, he re-joined
academia when a British Council scholarship enabled him to
read Commonwealth, American and African Literature at the
University of Leeds. Upon his return to South Africa from
Leeds in 1984, he was appointed as lecturer in the department
of English at the University of South Africa (UNISA), where
he eventually became a full professor. In 2007/2008, he was
appointed â after 22 years of service at UNISA â as Head of
the School of Literature and Language Studies at the University
of the Witwatersrand, assuming the position of personal
professor. At Wits he also convened and expanded the creative
writing programme. In 2010 he accepted a chair in English at Stellenbosch
University. He has published widely, producing 37 accredited scholarly
articles to date, with more in the pipeline, as well as 10 accredited book
chapters, a monograph, several book-length works of literary translation, a
novel, and three volumes of poetry. He has also edited literary works. His
awards include the Pringle Prize (for poetry, 1995, and for best scholarly
article, 2011), the SA Translatorsâ Institute for Outstanding Translation (for
Triomf, 2000), the SA Literary Awards (SALA) prize for literary translation,
the Chancellorâs Prize for Research, UNISA (twice), and the Council of
Editors of Learned Journalsâ (CELJ, affiliated to the MLA) award for Best
Special Issue of a journal, for Poetics Today 22 (2) 2001, South Africa in the
Global Imaginary
Postapartheid as verwondingskultuur binne ân patologiese openbare ruimte : Mark Gevisser se Lost and found in Johannesburg
Abstract: Postapartheid as a wound culture within a pathological public sphere: Mark Gevisserâs Lost and Found in Johannesburg In his work on âwound cultureâ and the âpathological public sphereâ Mark Seltzer (1997) identifies âaddictive violenceâ as ânot merely a collective spectacle but one of the crucial sites where private desire and public space crossâ in late modernity (1997:3). For Seltzer the convening of the public âaround scenes of violenceâ (such as rushing to the scene of an accident, either an on-the-scene event or a voyeuristically experienced multimedia happening) is constitutive of so-called wound culture. The latter is the âpublic fascination..
Freedom on a Frontier? The Double Bind of (White) Postapartheid South African Literature
The trend in recent literary analyses of postapartheid South African literature is to see a body of writing that is âfreed from the past,â exhibiting a wide range of divergences from earlier, âstruggleâ writing. This article provides an alternative conceptualization of âtransitionalâ and âpost-transitionalâ South African literature, arguing that some of its key dynamics are founded in what is here conceived as âmashed-up temporalities.â The analysis borrows from Ashraf Jamalsâ appropriation of art historian Hal Fosterâs concept of a âfuture anteriorâ or a âwill have been.â In this reading, emblematic strands of postapartheid writing are less âfree from the pastâ than trading in an anxiety about never having begun. The body of literature in question â in this case white post-transitional writing â can be seen to be inescapably bound to the idea of the time of before, so much so that it compulsively iterates certain immemorial literary tropes such as the frontier and the journey of discovery. Further, the article suggests that much postapartheid literature written in what it calls âdetection modeâ â providing accounts of âcrimeâ and other social ills â are distinguished by disjunctive continuity rather than linear or near-linear discontinuity with pre-transition literature, yet exhibit features of authorial voice and affect that place it within a distinctly postapartheid zone of author-reader interlocution
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