Alan Muller | University of Pretoria (original) (raw)
Papers by Alan Muller
Journal of Creative Communications, 2023
The purpose of this article is to critically consider the roles that academic literacy facilitato... more The purpose of this article is to critically consider the roles that academic literacy facilitators fulfil in exposing students to Global Citizenship Education (GCE). In university disciplines, literacies are primary tools that students employ to interact with global events, knowledge, theories and problems. As such, multimodal literacies including written, audiovisual and cyber texts facilitate students’ access to the world through critical communication. Consequently, the authors construe GCE as disciplinary instruction that connects students to lived experiences beyond their own national borders. To demonstrate GCE, the authors employ the following methods for accessing, interpreting and generating knowledge: Firstly, a literature review is conducted. In doing so, key concepts and theories that define academic literacy and GCE are identified. Secondly, by combining reviewed literature that highlights GCE methods and scholarship pertaining to multimodal literacies, the authors make recommendations for integrating GCE into disciplines. In conclusion, the authors emphasise academic literacies, including digital discourses, as effective conduits for GCE principles and make further recommendations for future studies and methods that may be applied toward uniting literacies with international course content.
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Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 2023
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Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 2022
While the term ‘Afrofuturism’ has entered the global popular lexicon and is appropriately used to... more While the term ‘Afrofuturism’ has entered the global popular lexicon and is appropriately used to describe films like Black Panther, the term’s descriptive potential is necessarily culturally bound. In this article, I argue that the term is bound to an African-American context and that it cannot slip shoddily be applied to futuristic texts by African creatives in Africa. To problematise the term’s application in an African context, I provide an historical overview of futuristic speculative fictions (novels, films, and video games) from southern Africa, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and concluding with the present.
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A roundup of and reflection on South African speculative fiction in 2017. Published in the Postco... more A roundup of and reflection on South African speculative fiction in 2017. Published in the Postcolonial Studies Association newsletter (#21, June 2018).
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Cities in Flux: Metropolitan Spaces in South African Literary and Visual Texts PDF-, 2017
Imraan Coovadia’s writing has recently begun to gain considerable traction within the academic co... more Imraan Coovadia’s writing has recently begun to gain considerable traction within the academic community, with a special issue of the scholarly journal Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa being dedicated to research focusing solely on his work. This chapter aims to contribute to a growing body of work on this prolific novelist and essayist, while also contributing to the Swiss South African Research Project’s focus on the depictions metropolitan spaces in South African literary texts. Focusing on his debut novel, TheWedding, this article explores how Coovadia, although writing a novel set during early globalisation (and also about its accompanying cultural mixing and exchange), eschews any homogenising or cultural whitewashing that is often the concern of cultural purists. The port city of Durban, characterised by almost endless arrivals and departures, is given literary expression as a cosmopolitan city that exists as, to borrow Deleuze’s and Guattari’s term, a cultural rhizome. The concept of the rhizome, in addition to being applied to the city, is applied to Coovadia’s characters in the interests of understanding how identity can be understood as a complex cultural rhizome. As Ismet and Khateja settle in a city in flux, their own identities evolve to both contribute and conform to South African Indian culture.
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Since 2011, the genre of South African speculative fiction has seen a significant surfacing of ne... more Since 2011, the genre of South African speculative fiction has seen a significant surfacing of new writers working within the genre. One of them is Charlie Human, the author of Apocalypse Now Now (2013) and Kill Baxter (2014). Our article analyses Human’s two novels in terms of overlapping mythological and historical lineages as well as spatial confluences and their influence on the conception and (re-)definition of South African whiteness. Using Sarah Nuttall’s concept of entanglement (a state of being intertwined or engaged with) in connection with Melissa Steyn’s observations of South African whiteness and its idiosyncratic position in relation to other postcolonial countries, we illustrate how Human’s novels (re-)negotiate South African whiteness by endowing it with a distinctly (Southern) African inflection. By way of conclusion, the paper proposes that speculative fiction gives an easier way to envisage possible solutions to the socio-political complexities at play in present South Africa, which are less difficult to swallow than what realist fiction might be (plausibly) able to offer.
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Imraan Coovadia is fast becoming one of South Africa’s most celebrated contemporary novelists. Sc... more Imraan Coovadia is fast becoming one of South Africa’s most celebrated contemporary novelists. Scholarship centred on his work is, however, in short supply. This article, through its focus on Coovadia’s second novel, Green Eyed Thieves (2007), aims to explore the extent to which this prolific voice in the South African literary landscape is able to reflect complex (inter)national and cultural entanglements in his novel. The following analysis of Coovadia’s characters in terms of their geographical flexibility, cultural plasticity, and hybridity is informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome as applied to culture. This application demonstrates how each of the characters, whether conscious thereof or not, is a complex cultural rhizome that exists as a hybridised entanglement of culture. While Coovadia’s transcontinental caper comedy has been labelled as “migrant literature”, this article suggests that this novel is better classified (albeit tentatively) as a cosmopolitan post-transitional novel that differs greatly from his debut novel, The Wedding (2001). What sets Green-Eyed Thieves apart from Coovadia’s debut offering is the absence of longing associated with migrant literature. The process of ‘fitting in’ in a new environment is also often accompanied by difficulties and even a failure to adjust. Coovadia eschews any notion of entropic homogeneity by maintaining a local specificity by crafting characters and a city that exist as rhizomian entanglements, which exhibit identifiable yet inextricable cultural threads linking South Africa and its inhabitants to the rest of the world.
Keywords: Imraan Coovadia; Green Eyed-Thieves; entanglement; globalised crime, contemporary South African fiction; identity
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19 January 2015 marked the tenth anniversary of South African writer K. Sello Duiker’s passing. F... more 19 January 2015 marked the tenth anniversary of South African writer K. Sello Duiker’s passing. Fifteen years after the publication of his first novel, Thirteen Cents, his works remain an important contribution to post-apartheid writing. His novels are taught at several South African universities, and they still attract interest for research, particularly amongst young academics. This article, which consists of two parts, commemorates Duiker’s life and oeuvre. The first part traces the author’s private life by relating our encounters and interviews with Duiker’s mother and brother, which took place in Johannesburg in January 2015. During the conversations, they allude to Duiker’s and his mother’s common love of reading, his protectiveness and love towards his siblings, and his need for space and privacy during phases of writing. The second part of the article focuses on the impact that Duiker’s oeuvre continues to have on academia and contemporary South African fiction. In addition, the latter half of the article crafts a collage of voices of various academics and writers who speak about the importance of Duiker’s novels for contemporary South African literature. The authors also explore Duiker’s influence on more recent South African literary texts by analysing both explicit and implicit intertextual references to Thirteen Cents (2000) and The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) in texts such as Fred Khumalo’s Seven Steps to Heaven (2007) Songeziwe Mahlangu’s Penumbra (2013), Perfect Hlongwane’s Jozi: A Novel (2013), Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home (2013) and Charlie Human’s Apocalypse Now Now
(2013).
Please contact me to request a copy of this paper. I will be happy to provide one.
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Masters Thesis
This is an abstract for my completed Masters dissertation. Please contact me if you are interest... more This is an abstract for my completed Masters dissertation. Please contact me if you are interested in the material. I have not uploaded the full piece as I am currently working on turning it into a series of articles.
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Book Reviews by Alan Muller
Review: The Wisdom of Adders, 2016
Review of Dan Wylie's novella, The Wisdom of Adders
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This review of Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese's Loud and Yellow Laughter was featured on BooksLive.co.za... more This review of Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese's Loud and Yellow Laughter was featured on BooksLive.co.za shortly after its publication.
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This review was featured on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website short;y after it... more This review was featured on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website short;y after its publication.
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This review of Shabbir Banoobhai's debut novel, Heretic, was featured on the KwaZulu-Natal Litera... more This review of Shabbir Banoobhai's debut novel, Heretic, was featured on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website shorty after its release.
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This review was featured on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website shorty after the... more This review was featured on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website shorty after the memoir's publication.
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This Review of Kobus Moolman's collection titled Left Over (2013) was posted on the KwaZulu-Natal... more This Review of Kobus Moolman's collection titled Left Over (2013) was posted on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website shortly after it's launch in Durban, South Africa.
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This review of Kobus Moolman's collection of poetry titled A Book of Rooms appeared on the KwaZul... more This review of Kobus Moolman's collection of poetry titled A Book of Rooms appeared on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website shortly after the collection's launch in Durban, South Africa.
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This review of Sihle Ntuli's debut collection of poetry appeared on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary To... more This review of Sihle Ntuli's debut collection of poetry appeared on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website on 4 February.
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This Review was featured on the Aerodrome Magazine website and posted on 18 August 2015
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Conference Presentations by Alan Muller
This paper was presented at the 40th African Languages Association (ALA) Conference: Texts, Modes... more This paper was presented at the 40th African Languages Association (ALA) Conference: Texts, Modes and Repertoires of Living in and Beyond the Shadows of Apartheid, hosted by University of the Witwatersrand (9-13 April 2014). This paper was extended to a full research article published in issue 28 (1) of Current Writing focusing on the work of Imraan Coovadia. Also presenting on this panel were Kerry Bystrom (Bard College), Ronit Frenkel (University of Johannesburg), and Katharina Fink University of Bayreuth).
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This paper was presented at the Swiss South African Join Research Programme (SSAJRP) workshop hos... more This paper was presented at the Swiss South African Join Research Programme (SSAJRP) workshop hosted by the University of Basel, Switzerland (9-10 June 2015). The workshop lead to the extension of this paper into a full research article published in a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Literary Studies in 2016.
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Journal of Creative Communications, 2023
The purpose of this article is to critically consider the roles that academic literacy facilitato... more The purpose of this article is to critically consider the roles that academic literacy facilitators fulfil in exposing students to Global Citizenship Education (GCE). In university disciplines, literacies are primary tools that students employ to interact with global events, knowledge, theories and problems. As such, multimodal literacies including written, audiovisual and cyber texts facilitate students’ access to the world through critical communication. Consequently, the authors construe GCE as disciplinary instruction that connects students to lived experiences beyond their own national borders. To demonstrate GCE, the authors employ the following methods for accessing, interpreting and generating knowledge: Firstly, a literature review is conducted. In doing so, key concepts and theories that define academic literacy and GCE are identified. Secondly, by combining reviewed literature that highlights GCE methods and scholarship pertaining to multimodal literacies, the authors make recommendations for integrating GCE into disciplines. In conclusion, the authors emphasise academic literacies, including digital discourses, as effective conduits for GCE principles and make further recommendations for future studies and methods that may be applied toward uniting literacies with international course content.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 2023
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 2022
While the term ‘Afrofuturism’ has entered the global popular lexicon and is appropriately used to... more While the term ‘Afrofuturism’ has entered the global popular lexicon and is appropriately used to describe films like Black Panther, the term’s descriptive potential is necessarily culturally bound. In this article, I argue that the term is bound to an African-American context and that it cannot slip shoddily be applied to futuristic texts by African creatives in Africa. To problematise the term’s application in an African context, I provide an historical overview of futuristic speculative fictions (novels, films, and video games) from southern Africa, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and concluding with the present.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A roundup of and reflection on South African speculative fiction in 2017. Published in the Postco... more A roundup of and reflection on South African speculative fiction in 2017. Published in the Postcolonial Studies Association newsletter (#21, June 2018).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cities in Flux: Metropolitan Spaces in South African Literary and Visual Texts PDF-, 2017
Imraan Coovadia’s writing has recently begun to gain considerable traction within the academic co... more Imraan Coovadia’s writing has recently begun to gain considerable traction within the academic community, with a special issue of the scholarly journal Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa being dedicated to research focusing solely on his work. This chapter aims to contribute to a growing body of work on this prolific novelist and essayist, while also contributing to the Swiss South African Research Project’s focus on the depictions metropolitan spaces in South African literary texts. Focusing on his debut novel, TheWedding, this article explores how Coovadia, although writing a novel set during early globalisation (and also about its accompanying cultural mixing and exchange), eschews any homogenising or cultural whitewashing that is often the concern of cultural purists. The port city of Durban, characterised by almost endless arrivals and departures, is given literary expression as a cosmopolitan city that exists as, to borrow Deleuze’s and Guattari’s term, a cultural rhizome. The concept of the rhizome, in addition to being applied to the city, is applied to Coovadia’s characters in the interests of understanding how identity can be understood as a complex cultural rhizome. As Ismet and Khateja settle in a city in flux, their own identities evolve to both contribute and conform to South African Indian culture.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Since 2011, the genre of South African speculative fiction has seen a significant surfacing of ne... more Since 2011, the genre of South African speculative fiction has seen a significant surfacing of new writers working within the genre. One of them is Charlie Human, the author of Apocalypse Now Now (2013) and Kill Baxter (2014). Our article analyses Human’s two novels in terms of overlapping mythological and historical lineages as well as spatial confluences and their influence on the conception and (re-)definition of South African whiteness. Using Sarah Nuttall’s concept of entanglement (a state of being intertwined or engaged with) in connection with Melissa Steyn’s observations of South African whiteness and its idiosyncratic position in relation to other postcolonial countries, we illustrate how Human’s novels (re-)negotiate South African whiteness by endowing it with a distinctly (Southern) African inflection. By way of conclusion, the paper proposes that speculative fiction gives an easier way to envisage possible solutions to the socio-political complexities at play in present South Africa, which are less difficult to swallow than what realist fiction might be (plausibly) able to offer.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Imraan Coovadia is fast becoming one of South Africa’s most celebrated contemporary novelists. Sc... more Imraan Coovadia is fast becoming one of South Africa’s most celebrated contemporary novelists. Scholarship centred on his work is, however, in short supply. This article, through its focus on Coovadia’s second novel, Green Eyed Thieves (2007), aims to explore the extent to which this prolific voice in the South African literary landscape is able to reflect complex (inter)national and cultural entanglements in his novel. The following analysis of Coovadia’s characters in terms of their geographical flexibility, cultural plasticity, and hybridity is informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome as applied to culture. This application demonstrates how each of the characters, whether conscious thereof or not, is a complex cultural rhizome that exists as a hybridised entanglement of culture. While Coovadia’s transcontinental caper comedy has been labelled as “migrant literature”, this article suggests that this novel is better classified (albeit tentatively) as a cosmopolitan post-transitional novel that differs greatly from his debut novel, The Wedding (2001). What sets Green-Eyed Thieves apart from Coovadia’s debut offering is the absence of longing associated with migrant literature. The process of ‘fitting in’ in a new environment is also often accompanied by difficulties and even a failure to adjust. Coovadia eschews any notion of entropic homogeneity by maintaining a local specificity by crafting characters and a city that exist as rhizomian entanglements, which exhibit identifiable yet inextricable cultural threads linking South Africa and its inhabitants to the rest of the world.
Keywords: Imraan Coovadia; Green Eyed-Thieves; entanglement; globalised crime, contemporary South African fiction; identity
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
19 January 2015 marked the tenth anniversary of South African writer K. Sello Duiker’s passing. F... more 19 January 2015 marked the tenth anniversary of South African writer K. Sello Duiker’s passing. Fifteen years after the publication of his first novel, Thirteen Cents, his works remain an important contribution to post-apartheid writing. His novels are taught at several South African universities, and they still attract interest for research, particularly amongst young academics. This article, which consists of two parts, commemorates Duiker’s life and oeuvre. The first part traces the author’s private life by relating our encounters and interviews with Duiker’s mother and brother, which took place in Johannesburg in January 2015. During the conversations, they allude to Duiker’s and his mother’s common love of reading, his protectiveness and love towards his siblings, and his need for space and privacy during phases of writing. The second part of the article focuses on the impact that Duiker’s oeuvre continues to have on academia and contemporary South African fiction. In addition, the latter half of the article crafts a collage of voices of various academics and writers who speak about the importance of Duiker’s novels for contemporary South African literature. The authors also explore Duiker’s influence on more recent South African literary texts by analysing both explicit and implicit intertextual references to Thirteen Cents (2000) and The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) in texts such as Fred Khumalo’s Seven Steps to Heaven (2007) Songeziwe Mahlangu’s Penumbra (2013), Perfect Hlongwane’s Jozi: A Novel (2013), Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home (2013) and Charlie Human’s Apocalypse Now Now
(2013).
Please contact me to request a copy of this paper. I will be happy to provide one.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Masters Thesis
This is an abstract for my completed Masters dissertation. Please contact me if you are interest... more This is an abstract for my completed Masters dissertation. Please contact me if you are interested in the material. I have not uploaded the full piece as I am currently working on turning it into a series of articles.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Review: The Wisdom of Adders, 2016
Review of Dan Wylie's novella, The Wisdom of Adders
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This review of Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese's Loud and Yellow Laughter was featured on BooksLive.co.za... more This review of Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese's Loud and Yellow Laughter was featured on BooksLive.co.za shortly after its publication.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This review was featured on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website short;y after it... more This review was featured on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website short;y after its publication.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This review of Shabbir Banoobhai's debut novel, Heretic, was featured on the KwaZulu-Natal Litera... more This review of Shabbir Banoobhai's debut novel, Heretic, was featured on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website shorty after its release.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This review was featured on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website shorty after the... more This review was featured on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website shorty after the memoir's publication.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This Review of Kobus Moolman's collection titled Left Over (2013) was posted on the KwaZulu-Natal... more This Review of Kobus Moolman's collection titled Left Over (2013) was posted on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website shortly after it's launch in Durban, South Africa.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This review of Kobus Moolman's collection of poetry titled A Book of Rooms appeared on the KwaZul... more This review of Kobus Moolman's collection of poetry titled A Book of Rooms appeared on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website shortly after the collection's launch in Durban, South Africa.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This review of Sihle Ntuli's debut collection of poetry appeared on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary To... more This review of Sihle Ntuli's debut collection of poetry appeared on the KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project's website on 4 February.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This Review was featured on the Aerodrome Magazine website and posted on 18 August 2015
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This paper was presented at the 40th African Languages Association (ALA) Conference: Texts, Modes... more This paper was presented at the 40th African Languages Association (ALA) Conference: Texts, Modes and Repertoires of Living in and Beyond the Shadows of Apartheid, hosted by University of the Witwatersrand (9-13 April 2014). This paper was extended to a full research article published in issue 28 (1) of Current Writing focusing on the work of Imraan Coovadia. Also presenting on this panel were Kerry Bystrom (Bard College), Ronit Frenkel (University of Johannesburg), and Katharina Fink University of Bayreuth).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This paper was presented at the Swiss South African Join Research Programme (SSAJRP) workshop hos... more This paper was presented at the Swiss South African Join Research Programme (SSAJRP) workshop hosted by the University of Basel, Switzerland (9-10 June 2015). The workshop lead to the extension of this paper into a full research article published in a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Literary Studies in 2016.
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AI Approaches to Literacy in Higher Education, 2024
Edited with Oscar Eybers.
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Cities in Flux: Metropolitan Spaces in South African Literary and Visual Texts - Swiss South African Joint Research Programme (2009-2015)., 2017
Urbanisation is a worldwide phenomenon that affects the future of any population in its economic,... more Urbanisation is a worldwide phenomenon that affects the future of any population in its economic, political, societal, and cultural development. Today more than 70% of Europe’s, North-, and South America’s population live in an urban environment; in Africa and Asia 35% and 40% of the population respectively live in metropolitan areas. By 2030 more than two thirds of the population in the Global South will be living in cities and surrounds. The African Continent features the fastest increase in urbanisation. By the beginning of the 21st century rural lifestyles have largely lost favour to urban attraction and sophistication. According to politicians and researchers alike, the navigation and analysis of urbanisational processes with their positive and negative side effects will be the most challenging tasks to be mastered in the future.
Next to economic, sociological, historical, or anthropological studies, literary and visual texts are further ways of mirror individual and public conflicts of the past and present. They create dreams deferred or, rarely, fulfilled and develop utopian/dystopian ‘alternative scenarios’ to deadlock situations. They are condensed artistic means of both addressing and stylistically expressing socio-historical facts and societal change. In South Africa alike, literary and visual texts critically and aesthetically reflect rural and urbanisational processes since the beginnings of the country’s literary and cultural traditions in the 1880s.
Since 2009, the University of Basel has been involved in the Swiss South African Joint Research Programme (SSAJRP) of which the 'City in Flux'-project is part. There has been a series of conferences and workshops both in Switzerland and South Africa (2009 Universities of Potchefstroom and Witwatersrand; 2010 University of Johannesburg; 2011, 2012, 2013 & 2015 University of Basel; 2014 University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban). This collection of essays emerges out of the research conducted within the framework of the SSAJRP “City in Flux”-project.
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