Acting Like a White Woman: Cynthia Jele’s Black South African Chick Lit Novel "Happiness Is a Four-Letter Word" (2010) as "New Weltliteratur" (original) (raw)

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature , 2024

Abstract

By nature of its popularity and economic pull, chick lit can certainly be regarded as world literature, even if it has not found much acceptance within academic circles as such. This essay analyzes the frictions between major circulation and minor reputation, between transculturation and decolonization in South African chick lit. Focusing on Cynthia Jele’s Happiness is a Four-Letter Word, the essay argues that by transforming the Anglo-American chick lit formula into its local Johannesburg setting, Jele skillfully weaves “the minor” into “the major,” i.e. the global genre of chick lit into the realm of world literature. This generic appropriation has a direct impact on the gender representations and use of language in the novel. Negative attributions of white femininity, rather than merely indicating female competition and jealousies, serve to indirectly address the consequences of colonialism and racism without deviating far from the genre convention or becoming politically too explicit. Jele further illustrates the coexistence of the phenomena of globalization and regionalism by combining the cosmopolitan Joburg lifestyle of her protagonists with local Zulu and Sotho cultures. The English dialogue, interspersed with phrases from other South African languages (especially Zulu, but also Afrikaans, Sotho, and various slang expressions), particularly emphasizes that hybrid cultural context. In analyzing the inclusions and exclusions that characterize the novel, the essay highlights the linkages between the global and the local, while using the history of colonialism and decolonization to question the universality of the market.

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