Mike Marais | Rhodes University (original) (raw)

Papers by Mike Marais

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2019

Like much white Zimbabwean writing in the aftermath of the land invasions of 2000, Ian Holding’s ... more Like much white Zimbabwean writing in the aftermath of the land invasions of 2000, Ian Holding’s What Happened to Us concerns itself with the issue of white identity, but does so through its invocation of Zimbabwe’s failed policy of racial reconciliation. In this article, I examine this novel’s meditation on reconciliation and the possibility of attaining a postcolonial condition that breaks with colonial modes of identity predicated on negating forms of racial difference. I trace, in particular, Holding’s use of the confessional mode of writing in his engagement with the idea of reconciliation. Whereas this mode ordinarily focuses on individual guilt, I show that, in Holding’s novel, it expresses the collective shame of whites for their separatism, which is presented as a failure of imagination. Throughout, my focus is Holding’s recalibration of the confessional mode of writing to accommodate a community perspective, and the implications of this reconceptualization for confession’s...

Research in African Literatures, 2019

abstract:In this article, I read the postcolonial Bildung that Ian Holding's protagonist unde... more abstract:In this article, I read the postcolonial Bildung that Ian Holding's protagonist undergoes in Of Beasts and Beings in the context of Zimbabwe's policy of reconciliation. On becoming aware of his whiteliness, this character, prompted by shame, writes a narrative in which he projects himself into the position of a black person. I argue that this act of imaginative identification may be read as the white protagonist's attempt to reconcile with his black compatriots, but also show that the form of reconciliation here involved is dialectical in nature rather than assimilative. Thus conceived, reconciliation places the two races in a dialectical relationship that posits the possibility of their sublation and with it the attainment of a truly postcolonial condition. I, however, go on to argue that the novel self-reflexively questions its representation of this post-racial state by acknowledging its own implication in colonial history. Through a critique of its shameful complicity with this history, it casts doubt on the ability of the sympathetic imagination to enable a transcendence of the discourses of whiteness. Finally, I contend that the novel's desire for transcendence, despite its awareness of its implication in colonial history, invests it with an ambivalence that allows it to negotiate the problem of the shamefulness of white, postcolonial writing.

Modern Fiction Studies, 2000

Scrutiny2, 2001

I n JM Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), the character Lucy Lurie is raped by three black men on her... more I n JM Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), the character Lucy Lurie is raped by three black men on her smallholding outside Salem in the Eastern Province. For reasons that are never directly articulated in the novel, Lucy responds to her ordeal rather enigmatically: she does not report the rape to the police and she continues to live on the smallholding without attempting to secure the premises. Critics in South Africa have responded to Coetzee's depiction of the rape and ensuing events in terms that are predictable in a literary establishment which seems, as a matter of course, to reduce heterogeneous political, social and literary positions to the simplistic oppositions of race politics. On the one hand, Coetzee has been criticized for the supposed conservatism or racism implicit in his portrayal of the rape of a white woman by black men. Although this criticism is most evident in the African National Congress's submission to the Human Rights Commission's inquiry into racism in the media, it can also be seen in Michiel Heyns's dismissive reference to Disgrace as a "Liberal Funk" novel (2000), that is, as representative of a sub-genre of the South African novel that records liberal fear at the marginalization of whites in the post-apartheid period. On the other hand, Coetzee's portrayal of Lucy Lurie's passivity following her rape has been read as exemplifying whites' acceptance of their peripherality in the "new" South Africa. This interpretation was first offered by Athol Fugard and has since become something of an orthodox response to the novel, which is somewhat ironic, given that Fugard, by his own admission at the time of his comments, had not yet read the novel:

English in Africa, 1996

... Underpinnings of the Early English Novel ... Since it is immersed in discursive structures, t... more ... Underpinnings of the Early English Novel ... Since it is immersed in discursive structures, the novel implies, the subject's consciousness is, in phenomenological terms, "intentional," that is, it is always directed at objects and therefore constitutes them (see Husserl 1931, 257). ...

ENGLISH IN AFRICA-GRAHAMSTOWN-, 2002

In The Restless Supermarket (2001), Ivan Vladislavic invests Aubrey Tearle, his first-person narr... more In The Restless Supermarket (2001), Ivan Vladislavic invests Aubrey Tearle, his first-person narrator, with a hermeneutic sensibility. This is, of course, evident in the fact that Tearle is a proofreader, albeit a retired one, who is dedicated" to matter in its proper order"(42), and ...

Journal of Literary Studies

English in Africa, 1989

Teresea Dovey raises a number of pertinent points in her criticism of Coetzee's detractors on... more Teresea Dovey raises a number of pertinent points in her criticism of Coetzee's detractors on the political left. l Her survey of the censure which Coetzee's work has received from this quarter reveals that the grounds for rejection are generally of an ideological nature, ranging from accusations that his "writing is preoccupied with problems of consciousness, thus betraying an idealist rather than a materialist stance" to the contention that in "failing to delineate the economic complexities of oppression, [he] has got his history all wrong."2 To her list could be added the accusation levelled at Coetzee's Foe* at a recent seminar on the novel, that it is divorced from South African social and political realities - another essentially ideological complaint.4 Dovey argues that this type of criticism, with its desire that Coetzee "write in some other way,"5 exemplifies what Eagleton calls the "normative illusion," defined as follows...

Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2005

The Review of English Studies, 2012

According to Patrick Hayes, J. M. Coetzee's fiction, on a thematic level, ‘repeatedly suggest... more According to Patrick Hayes, J. M. Coetzee's fiction, on a thematic level, ‘repeatedly suggests that the condition of modernity is made up of competing, equally important, and yet incommensurate ways of imagining the good community’ (p. 4). The first of these imaginings is grounded in the Kantian notion that the human individual is a rational and autonomous agent, and that it is precisely his or her rational autonomy, and capacity to direct life through neutral principles that commands the respect and recognition of other individuals. As is evident in its emphasis on rationality, this politic of equal dignity and recognition is universalistic in its claims. In contrast, the second imagining of community is based on the recognition of cultural specificity, and the argument that freedom and equal recognition are only possible through a revision of deleterious cultural stereotypes. In its terms, the good community ‘must be founded on the recognition, and active fostering of cultural particularity’ (p. 12). This politic of difference is highly suspicious of the universalizing claims of the politic of dignity, arguing that its appeal to equal dignity is itself a form of particularism masquerading as universalism

Journal of Narrative Theory, 2008

During the 1980s, a perennial criticism of Coetzee’s fiction was that it did not engage with the ... more During the 1980s, a perennial criticism of Coetzee’s fiction was that it did not engage with the depredations of apartheid. Thus, for instance, Michael Vaughan complained that this writing downplays “material factors of oppression and struggle in contemporary South Africa” (1982, 126), and Michael Chapman attacked Foe for failing to “speak to Africa” and simply providing a “kind of masturbatory release . . . for the Europeanising dreams of an intellectual coterie” (1988, 335). Many critics have responded to the crude literalism of this argument. David Attwell’s J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, for instance, is a sustained attempt to place what he refers to as Coetzee’s “situational metafiction” in its historical context and thereby expose the nature and extent of its engagement with the realities of apartheid (1993). More recently, Derek Attridge has questioned the instrumentalist assumptions that underlie this critical debate by arguing that Coetzee’s writing is aware of and sensitive to literature’s singular relationship to an otherness which seeks constantly to enter and change the cultural formation. While Attridge contends that the reader’s encounter with the alterity of the work must needs have a tangible impact on the lifeworld, he maintains that since the other in question

ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 1997

Secretary of the Invisible, 2009

Journal of Narrative Theory, 2021