Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa Lyric↔L/language: Essaying the poetics of contemporary women's poetry PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLEpage/terms-and-conditions (original) (raw)
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The twenty-first century has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of poetry being written and published by South African women writers. Unfortunately, this has not been matched by a corresponding increase in critical responses. This article attempts to address this situation through a discussion of the linguistic themes and strategies found in South African women’s poetry, seen within the artistic and socio-political context of post-apartheid South Africa. Nevertheless, South African women poets use poetry as a vehicle for defining identities within the contested postcolonial space. They also write in protest against their silencing by patriarchy and by colonial forces. They frequently use language to overcome the gendered binary opposition between private and public utterance. Finally, women poets engage productively with cultural, ethnic and gender difference. While it is not possible exhaustively to define the ways in which South African women poets use language, the article identifies significant trends and concerns in this area.
South African women poets article for GQ revised
Considerable theoretical and critical work has been done on the way British and American women poets re-vision (Rich 1976) male-centred myth. Some South African women poets have also used similar strategies. My article identifies a gap in the academy's reading of a significant, but somewhat neglected, body of poetry and begins to address this lack of scholarship. My article argues that South African women poets use their art to re-vision some of the central constructs of patriarchal mythology, including the association of women with the body and the irrational, and men with the mind and logic. These poems function on two levels: they demonstrate that the constructs they subvert are artificial; and they create new and empowering narratives for women in order to contribute to the re-imagining of gender relations.
31st AIA conference “Future Horizons: New Beginnings in English Studies”. 13-16 September 2023. Università della Calabria, Rende (CO), 2023
As a space historically marked by a violent politics of segregation, South Africa has lived the experience of spatial, social, and temporal partition at every level of public and private life. From the thorough dissecting of the urban and rural spaces imposed by the Group Areas Act to the dismembering of the social body induced by the laws prohibiting all intimate interracial contact, the country has been shaped by the painful intersections of physical and virtual barriers of several kinds. The confines established among the different languages of the nation, endowed with varying degrees of legitimacy based on their standing in the colonial hierarchy, has further partitioned the everyday experiences of South Africans for a long time, leaving behind steep discursive edges and scars that often bleed, in plain sight or in the shadows. Critical of the violence of this regime of in/visibility and inspired by bell hooks’ claim that “language is also a place of struggle” (1989, p. 146), a new generation of women poets has recently accelerated the re-shaping of the public discourse over subjectivity and the body – both collective and individual – in South Africa. This paper will focus, in particular, on Koleka Putuma’s Collective Amnesia (2017) and Gabeba Baderoon’s The History of Intimacy (2018) as works that helped to impose a political and poetical turn in the country’s consciousness. Variously dealing with bodily, discursive, and social intimacies, as well as with history, identity, and the nation, these collections of poems interrogate old and new boundaries, place themselves at the frontiers, and explore life in margins, on edges, and in borderlands.
The Coloured Voice: Finding Its Place in South African Poetry
Education Journal, 2021
South African poetry has found its place in many parts of the world. Topics such as racism, discrimination and issues resulting from the past of South Africa, have all found themselves in South African literary journals and anthologies. One of the achievements of the South African poet has been finding a place for the disadvantaged group/s of South Africa, the group/s that have suffered through the past and present South Africa. However, through all the major South African journals and literary collections, the voice and life of the Coloured individual has been left out and overlooked. More importantly, this has resulted in the Coloured individuals of South Africa not knowing their place in the poetry world. More specifically, because they are not reading about their cultural power in poetry, they tend to believe that poetry is not for the Coloured culture and language. In this paper I intend to show that there has been a lack of place in poetry for the Coloured individual, and furthermore, to show that there is a place for the Coloured story and culture in poetry. As a result, what will be shown is the effect that the Coloured voice will have on South African poetry, and how it will benefit a large portion of the South African population.
New Myths, New Scripts: Revisionist Mythopoesis in Contemporary South African Women’s Poetry
Gender Questions
Considerable theoretical and critical work has been done on the way British and American women poets re-vision (Rich 1976) male-centred myth. Some South African women poets have also used similar strategies. My article identifies a gap in the academy’s reading of a significant, but somewhat neglected, body of poetry and begins to address this lack of scholarship. I argue that South African women poets use their art to re-vision some of the central constructs of patriarchal mythology, including the association of women with the body and the irrational, and men with the mind and logic. These poems function on two levels: They demonstrate that the constructs they subvert are artificial; and they create new and empowering narratives for women in order to contribute to the reimagining of gender relations.
Provisional Pleasures: The Challenge of Contemporary Experimental Women Poets
Feminist Review, 1999
This article is an introduction to contemporary experimental poetry by women. It considers the reasons for the resistance to such work in this country. It refutes arguments made against it, for example that avant-garde writing is elitist or not related to women's experience. It further suggests why this writing, in particular in its complex engagement with issues of language, subjectivity and gender, should in fact be of great interest to the woman/feminist reader. In particular, it suggests parallels between the concerns of this work and those of feminist poststructuralism. Above all, throughout the piece, it attempts to introduce the ‘provisional pleasures’ of the contemporary avant-garde to the reader, introducing, quoting and providing multiple interpretations of the work of several diverse writers in this tradition. It aims to provide a sense of the linguistic and formal innovations of these writings, alongside a sense of their relevance to questions of female subjectivity ...
Identity, Culture and Contemporary South African Poetry
2004
The main focus of this thesis is to examine how identity and culture are conceived and articulated in a representative selection of contemporary South African poetry. In the introductory chapter, an examination is made of the concepts of identity and culture, in the course of which the polarities of inside and outside, self and other, personal and political, subjective and objective, are carefully examined. Then, through close textual reference to relevant poems considered under the titles “Poetry of the Self”, “Black Consciousness Poetry”, “The Poetry of Revolution”, “Worker Poetry” and “Feminist Poetry”, the thesis attempts, by tracing the dialectical relationship of these polarities, to analyse how each putative body of poetry conceives and articulates cultural identity. The concluding chapter of the thesis, titled “Towards a New Aesthetics”, argues that current research into the relationship between identity and culture opens the way to a “new” aesthetics, a new literary-critical practice, one that takes into cognisance the intersubjective complexities that shape cultural expression.