Popular Memory' and Social Change in South African liistorical Drama of the Seventies in English: the Case of Credo Mutwzi'!; ufisilirnela (original) (raw)

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.

A History of South African Literature

International Journal of African Historical Studies, 2006

A History of South African Literature. By Christopher Heywood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xv, 296. $ 75.00. This historical study of South African literature from precolonial times to the close of the twentieth century takes on poetry, drama, and prose fiction as manifest in five ethnic traditions: Khoisan, Nguni-Sotho, Afrikaans, English, and Indian. Not all genres and ethnic groups receive equal treatment, yet the range is vast, from cosmogony of indigenous peoples of Southern Africa to orature among the amaZulu and amaXhosa, colonial war accounts by Afrikaner and English authors to the poetry of giants like Krune Mqhayi, H. I. E. Dhlomo, Benedict Vilakazi, Mazisi Kunene, and Jeremy Cronin, the usual suspects when it comes to novelists-Olive Schreiner, Sol T. Plaatje, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, and John Coetzee-to the theatre of Athol Fugard, Pieter-Dirk Uys, and Zakes Mda. Appropriately, the contents are organized around a series of historical turning poi...

The ghost of memory : literary representations of slavery in post-apartheid South Africa

2018

By submitting this thesis/dissertation electronically, I declare that the entirety of the work contained therein is my own, original work, that I am the sole author thereof (save to the extent explicitly otherwise stated), that reproduction and publication thereof by Stellenbosch University will not infringe any third party rights and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitted it for obtaining any qualification. Date: Signature ………………….

Narrating the past: reflections on recent Black Afrikaans writing

Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, 2018

A return to the past has been a dominant feature of recent Afrikaans writing. This is evident in the many novels re-visiting the Anglo-Boer War or recounting incidents from the apartheid past. The approaches include the debunking of myths and a nostalgic longing for the good old days. Whether this is true of the small body of Black Afrikaans writing, given its ambivalent relationship to the canon, needs to be investigated. A number of texts that was published recently either had a clear autobiographical background or emanated from the desire and imperative to "tell our own stories from our communities". This paper explores the way that the past is narrated in a number of selected texts by i.a. Fatima Osman, Simon Bruinders, Ronelda Kamfer and Valda Jansen. In the case of the texts by the firstmentioned authors the narrative is about survival, determination and the triumph of the human spirit in the face of a dehumanising system like apartheid. In the latter texts one finds...

Imagined pasts, suspended presents: South African literature in the contemporary moment

2009

Scholarship on Post-Apartheid South African literature has engaged in various ways with the politics of identity, but its dominant mode has been to understand the literature through an anxious rupture-continuation paradigm in which the Apartheid past manifests itself in the present. However, in the contemporary moment, there are writers whose texts attempt to forge new paths in their depictions of identities both individual and collective. These texts are useful in contemplating how South Africans experience belonging and dislocation in various contexts.

Dissolved black identity in dominant critiques of black South African Literature written in English

Abstract This paper outlines dominant views of South African English literature critics from the 19th century to the present. Against this backdrop, I examine some English texts written by blacks in order to demonstrate how attempts by some critics subjectively to strengthen some postmodern notions such as transnationalism have blurred the differences between black and white South African English fiction. I argue that in their essays black critics such as Daniel Kunene, Es’kia Mphahlele and Mbulelo Mzamane (all 1992), on the one hand, adopt a literary-historical approach to a consideration of South African literature written in English, pointing to a yet to be clearly articulated tradition of black South African English writing. On the other hand, white critics such as Ernest Pereira, Sally-Ann Murray, and Geoffrey Hutchings reveal how the South African fiction by white writers that they discuss basically shows how the writers of fiction endemically handle the South African milieu differently from the way their black counterparts do. This study seeks to show that such a differentiation is necessary, for present and future South African literary criticism to be balanced and enriched. I demonstrate that benefits of this kind of a rethinking of the humanities subsuming acknowledgement of heterogeneity in studies of South African English literature, include sustainable social cohesion.