PhDThis thesis examines the trope of the child in South African literature from the
early years of apartheid to the contemporary moment. The chapters focus on
some of the most established and prolific authors in South African literary
history and roughly follow a chronological sequence: autobiographies by the
exiled Drum writers (Es’kia Mphahlele and Bloke Modisane) in the early 1960s;
Nadine Gordimer’s writing during the apartheid era; confessional novels by
Afrikaans-speaking authors (Mark Behr and Michiel Heyns) in the transitional
decade; and J. M. Coetzee’s late and post apartheid works. I argue that, while
writing from diverse historical and political positions in relation to South
Africa’s literary culture, these authors are all in one way or another able to
articulate their subjectivities—with their underlying ambiguities, contradictions,
and negations—by imagining themselves as the child or/and through childhood.
My analyses of the works under discussion attend to the subversive and
transformative potential of, and the critical energies embedded in the trope of
the child, by investigating narrative reconfigurations of temporality and space.
Firstly, I will be looking at the ways in which the images, structures, and
aesthetics making up the imaginings of the child disrupt a linear temporality
and serve as critique of a teleological historiography of political emancipation
and the liberation struggle. Secondly, I will pay attention to the spatial relations
with which representations of the child are bound up: between the country and
the city, black townships and white suburbs, the home and the street. By
attending to specific transgressions and reorderings of these spatial relations,
my reading also explores the ways in which spatial underpinnings and
ideological boundaries of national identities are contested, negotiated, and
restructured by forces of the transnational, the diasporic, and the global around
the figure of the child.China Scholarship Council and Queen Mary University of London
Queen Mary University of London Postgraduate Research Fund
School of English and Drama Doctoral Allowanc
