Apart and Yet a Part: The Dilemmas of the Dissident White Writer in Apartheid South Africa (original) (raw)
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ATHENS JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY
Some writers have attempted a comparison of South African post-apartheid literature written by blacks with that produced by their white compatriots, as in Anne Putter's (2012) enlightening analyses of Ivan Vladislavic's The Restless Supermarket (2012) and Kgebetli Moele's Room 207 (2006). A writer such as has discussed some discourses tying together apartheidera and post-apartheid South African English literature, among them continued considerations of institutional racism. The point of departure of my present study is that postmodernist transnational features, seen by some critics as characterising post-apartheid South African literature written in English, have been highlighted at the cost of the deviances obtained in the literature. In this paper, I compare conceptions of the post-apartheid South African city represented by Ivan Vladislavic's satirised white characters on the one hand, and on the other hand those of the black characters in the works of Niq Mhlongo, Kgebetli Moele and Phaswane Mpe. Collectively and across the two categories, I scrutinize the four writers' novels Welcome to Our Hillbrow . I interpret the later texts by black writers in relation to their earlier long narratives, in order to take account of the evolution of this category of my selected texts to the period in which their later works grapple with social issues of the same era as those of the white writer Vladislavic. I hope to reveal how dynamically the discourses in the fiction of the two categories of writers constitute counterpoints that, decoded with adequate rigour, represent more nuanced depictions of the post-apartheid society of their common milieu.
Literature as social barometer in post-apartheid South Africa: reading contemporary 'White Writing'
H. Yeatman (eds),, 2010
Contemporary South African literature shows a renewed concern with the close bonds between land, place and people in the New South Africa. In the post-apartheid period, this is literature that reflects a close awareness of the need for an art that retains both a sense of creative integrity and the ethical and political demands of the narrative of the new, postapartheid nation. Often history is invoked not as the deterministic frame that regulates each character’s lives typical of so much of the country’s literature, but as the accumulated mesh of individual experiences encompassed by the historical narrative. More to the point, this is writing of great aesthetic energy and political relevance, strengthened by an urgent need to justify its own relevance and a desire to contribute to the healing of a nation that remains in many ways deeply wounded.
Voice of Protest against Choice of Politics: A Study of Selected Texts in South African Literature
Asian Journal of Humanity, Art and Literature, 2015
This paper interrogates the nature of protest literature as well as their issues and problems while addressing the discourse on apartheid South Africa underlined the politics. In this paper, I explore the connection of banned books of history with the present time. In South Africa: the numbers of the books banned, and these books never become part of a literary form. As a result, it also claims to the Censorship Act (have an authority to ban the books). This paper relates to examine the relationship between these two major research queries, which underpins as under two contexts as: (i) Protest literature and (ii) Racial discrimination. The racial discrimination needs for understanding the problems and struggle in South African. It also ignites to the fight for human rights of the people, who suffer from inequality and struggling for their identity crisis. South African novels represent the problems and concerns of people who belong to the marginal group. However, this paper focuses on South African protest literature, which demands to the end of racial discrimination, unequal educational system and segregation as divided land policy represents through the discourses. This paper has significant to demand for equality and justice through the protest literature also it demands of non-racial society as well. I come to conclude, it can be inferred in apartheid and the postapartheid government failed to give equal rights to all.
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 “freed from the past” and which exhibits a wide range of divergences from “struggle” writing. This article provides a differently nuanced conceptualization and argues that some of the literature’s key dynamics are founded in “mashed-up temporalities.” My analysis borrows from Ashraf Jamal’s appropriation of art historian Hal Foster’s “future anterior” or a “will have been.” In my reading, emblematic strands of postapartheid writing are less “free from the past” than trading in an anxiety about never having begun. The body of literature in question—in this case, white post-transitional writing—is inescapably bound to the idea of the time of before, so much so that it compulsively iterates certain immemorial literary tropes such as those of the frontier and the journey of discovery. Further, I suggest that much postapartheid literature written in what I call “detection mode”—providing accounts of “crime” and other social ills—is distinguished by disjunctive continuity rather than linear or near-linear discontinuity with pre-transition literature, yet exhibits features of authorial voice and affect that place it within a distinctly postapartheid zone of author-reader interlocution.
2012
Drawing on broader discussions that attempt to envision new ways of negotiating identity, nationalism and race in a post-colonial, post-apartheid South Africa, this thesis examines how whiteness is constructed and negotiated within the framework of literary-journalistic narratives. It is significant that so many established journalists have chosen a literary format, in which they use the structure, conventions, form and style of the novel, while clearly foregrounding their journalistic priorities, to re-imagine possibilities for narratives of identity and belonging for white South Africans. I argue that by working at the interstice of literature and journalism, writers are able to open new rhetorical spaces in which white South African identity can be interrogated. This thesis examines the literary narratives of Rian Malan (My Traitor’s Heart, 1991), Antjie Krog (Country of My Skull, 1998, and Begging to be Black, 2009), Kevin Bloom (Ways of Staying, 2009) and Jonny Steinberg (Midlands, 2002). These writers all seem to grapple with the recurring themes of ‘history’, ‘narrative’ and ‘identity’, and in exploring the narratives of their personal and national history, they attempt to make sense of their current situation. The texts that this thesis examines exhibit an acute awareness of the necessity of bringing whiteness into conversation with ‘other’ identities, and thus I explore both the ways in which that is attempted and the degree to which the texts succeed, in their respective projects. I also examine what literary genres offer these journalists in their engagement with issues of whiteness and white identity that conventional forms of journalism do not. These writers are challenging the conventions of genre – both literary and journalistic – during a period of social and political flux, and I argue that in attempting to limn new narrative forms, they are in fact outlining new possibilities for white identities and ways of belonging and speaking. However, a close reading of these literary-journalistic narratives reveals whiteness in post-apartheid South African to be a multifaceted and often contradictory construct and position. Despite the lingering privilege and structural advantage associated with whiteness, South African whiteness appears strongly characterised by a deep-seated anxiety that stems from a perpetual sense of ‘un-belonging’. However, while white skin remains a significant marker of identity, there does appear to be the possibility of moving beyond whiteness into positions of hybridity which offer interesting potential for ‘becoming-other’.
New Directions in Post-Apartheid South African Fiction and Scholarship
After the formal end of the apartheid period in 1994, some writers and critics expressed a sense of unease about the future of South African literature. Yet, the post-apartheid period has produced an array of texts on topics not previously part of South African literary discourse. Writing from the transitional period for the most part turned inward, working in or against the confessional mode modeled by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. During the current post-transitional period, marked loosely by the publication of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace in 1999, a younger generation of writers has begun to represent new social issues surrounding difference and inequality, especially representations of Black women, gays and lesbians, and migrants. Recent critical approaches to this literature have offered valuable conceptual tools for further research.
Beyond protest: Ethics of reconciliation in post-Apartheid South African white writing
Writing examines the politics and poetics of reconciliation in South Africa by comparing the defining (or, at least the initiating) document the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (TRC) with the ways in which concepts of "racial harmony" are presented in the post-apartheid novels of white authors like J.M.Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Antje Krog, and Andre Brink. South Africa's complex racial history dating back to the colonial times, the consequent internalization of imposed racial identities within resistance movements, and the institutionalization of racist practices through state policies mean that its effort to move beyond racism suffers from a perpetual lag-effect. The intertwining of race and colonialism also means that eradication of racism must account for colonial history. Racial reconciliation, under the circumstances, is an openended, dynamic, spatially and temporally sensitive process. By defining reconciliation as a dynamic process I identify a discrepancy between the celebration of the end of apartheid as end of racism in South Africa and the sedimentation of past racist practices in the present social and political structures. My dissertation uses postcolonial and race theory, primarily Goldberg's Foucauldian concept of race and Spivakean ethics, to explore how moving beyond apartheid and the nation's complex racist colonial past places signal demands on representation politics. Central to my argument is my claim that imaginative literature needs to be recognized as vital to reconciliation and to the reconceptualization of historical process required if reconciliation is to be a successful, ongoing project. I explore reconciliation as policy and practice-a policy and practice that literature, particularly white literature, critiques and supports. For the white authors, beneficiaries of the persisting white supremacy, reconciliation involves, among other things, aesthetic strategies used to map the limits of empathy for the non-white other. Chapter 1 charts the central claims, the theoretical framework, and the historical context of my project. In Chapter 2 I examine the TRC's Final Report through the lens of the theoretical and historical framework of the first chapter to explore ethics as a temporal, rhetorical, and textual construct, and the TRC as the primary site of that construction. In Chapter 3 I argue that J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace presents reconciliation as an irony where acknowledging the impossibility of understanding the other, especially in relations marked by historical power imbalance and violence, opens the possibility of ethical relations. Chapter 4 argues that Andre Brink's post-apartheid novels use magic realism to challenge the possibility of recovering an authentic past as the basis of justice. My final chapter compares Nadine Gordimer's None to Accompany Me with Antje Krog's Country of My Skull to discuss the role of women in patriarchal conceptions of reconciliation. A brief epilogue explores the more universal currency of my conception of racial reconciliation. iii DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to my grandmother, the Late Tapatee Roy to the rest of the world, and Amma to me. Your stories about your traumatic experiences during the 1947 Partition, on the lazy Thursday afternoons of my childhood, first made me realize the power of narratives.
This paper interrogates the nature of protest literature as well as their issues and problems while addressing the discourse on apartheid South Africa underlined the politics. In this paper, I explore the connection of banned books of history with the present time. In South Africa: the numbers of the books banned, and these books never become part of a literary form. As a result, it also claims to the Censorship Act (have an authority to ban the books). This paper relates to examine the relationship between these two major research queries, which underpins as under two contexts as: (i) Protest literature and (ii) Racial discrimination. The racial discrimination needs for understanding the problems and struggle in South African. It also ignites to the fight for human rights of the people, who suffer from inequality and struggling for their identity crisis. South African novels represent the problems and concerns of people who belong to the marginal group. However, this paper focuses on South African protest literature, which demands to the end of racial discrimination, unequal educational system and segregation as divided land policy represents through the discourses. This paper has significant to demand for equality and justice through the protest literature also it demands of non-racial society as well. I come to conclude, it can be inferred in apartheid and the postapartheid government failed to give equal rights to all.
Reconciling Racial Revelations in Post-Apartheid South African Literature
Research in African Literatures, 2016
Offering a reading of Mongane Wally Serote’s Revelations (2010) alongside other recent novels by black South African writers, this essay answers calls for more careful analyses of the roles that race plays within post-apartheid literature and culture. As it questions the shift away from a concern with institutional racism and white supremacy that is evident in much contemporary South African criticism, the essay contends that post-apartheid literature is not only racially marked, but also continues to produce knowledge on racial inequality, racial ideology, and resistance. In the process, it illustrates that grappling with colorblindness challenges pervasive understandings of nonracialism, reconciliation, and post-1994 literature. Revelations portrays nonracialism and reconciliation as necessary and inevitable, yet shows that the discourses are in conflict with demands for equality and justice. Concurrently veiling and revealing paradoxes inherent in South Africa’s dominant racial discourses from within, Serote’s novel demonstrates that enforcing colorblindness is an act of epistemic violence: not even at the diegetic level is nonracialism achievable.
Introduction: The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing
Desire has had notoriously negative connotations in southern African contexts due to its association with racialized and gendered violence as part of the region’s experience of settler colonialism. In this book, desire in South African and Zimbabwean fiction and poetry written between 1960-2005 is re-evaluated as a positive force that can contravene the racially exclusive identity discourses of the region’s history. In a context where rationalism failed to offer ways out of colonial violence, affective impulses towards the other – associated here with Levinas’ eros, as well as Derrida’s friendship and hospitality – become a boundary-breaking energy that can redefine both the body and the nation. Through the trope of dissident desire, the creolisation and hybridity of culture and identity in southern Africa is emphasized, placing the region at a crossroads of cultures and as part of a cosmopolitan community. The study has implications for recent developments in South African and Zimbabwean history and politics, where racial and ethnic nationalisms are seen to have clandestinely entered the discourses of multiculturalism and development.