South African female subjectivity (1868-1977): life writing, the agentive "I" and recovering stories (original) (raw)
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By submitting this thesis, 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.
Gender and "History": 1980s South African Women's Stories in English
Ariel-a Review of International English Literature, 1996
It's very important for tuomen to write what they feel. Really, toe need more writing from women. I think women understand each other better when they are alone together than when there's a man around because then there is always the possibility of pretending and that's not communication. . . . So we should come together as women and try to do some creative uniting—I mean writing that will help or encourage other people who might become our fellowwriters in the future.
Twentieth-Century South African Women's Memoir as Historiography
African Studies, 2023
While historians of twentieth-century South Africa have made use of women's memoirs as an archive, this article argues that these memoirs can also be regarded as historiography. In Ruth First's 117 Days (1965), Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman (1985), and Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: A South African Autobiography by Emma Mashinini (1989), authors critique and reconstitute narratives of the South African past, told through the lives of politically engaged women. They present versions of South African history that not only act as a corrective to the apartheid state-sanctioned narrative of South African history as white supremacist triumph, but also probe the limits of the histories narrated by liberation movements.
Journal of Literary Studies, 1993
This essay focuses on the history of short stories by South African women of all races in an attempt to elucidate existing concepts pertaining to race, class and gender. It transpires that the first phase of modern feminist criticism was directed at exposing patriarchal tendencies prevalent in language and literature, while the second phase assessed the meaning and value of writing by women. The writer postulates that a perspective is imperative that both recognises and articulates intrinsic differentiation. Simultaneously, there should be an awareness of existing interrelationships allowing for different identities, divergent politics and dissimilar struggles. "Woman", per se, cannot be regarded as a stable identity because of diversification related to politics, culture and customs. The writer maintains that differences within ourselves have to be understood first before we can come to grips with differences inherent in others. Differentiation of identity is discussed with reference to three instances namely precolonial narrative art manifesting in historical documents, journals, letters, diaries and other forms. White Afrikaans-speaking women were, due to British imperialism, alienated from white English women and regarded as being superior to black South African women. This status quo was maintained until the fifties when black women began making themselves heard. Several examples of writing are cited leading to the conclusion that identity cannot be dealt with perfunctorily as it possesses both negative and positive facets to be explored by future feminist writers.
This article examines creative agency in the lives of four black South African women writers during South African apartheid: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Gladys Thomas, and Sindiwe Magona. Drawing theoretically on Mamphela Ramphele's conceptualizations of space, it analyzes life review interviews with these writers, who were among the first black women to publish novels and poetry in apartheid South Africa, about the ways in which they came to understand themselves as writers and creative subjects within a political system that severely curtailed their political and creative expression. It considers agency a key tool for understanding how these authors transcended their received identities as laborers and reproducers of labor for the apartheid nation, to become authors of their own lives and works. In elucidating how writing increased personal agency for these writers, the article posits the concept of creative re-visioning -a subject's ability to re-envision what is possible for her to achieve beyond received expectations for her life. It theorizes such creative re-visioning as a strategy of resistance during apartheid and an additional dimension to feminist conceptualizations of human agency.
Judith Lütge Coullie, ed. The Closest of Strangers: South African Women’s Life Writing
Ariel-a Review of International English Literature, 2008
B o o k R e v i e w s transcultural analysis. e transcultural experiences and displacements that shape the unfolding effects of contact and de-colonization may serve as a rich ground for revising long-standing injustices. Cross-pollinating discussions with transnational feminisms also leap to mind, as a way to consider the relative and interpenetrating scales of global, national, cultural, interpersonal and subjective frameworks for imagining the transcultural lives. Migrations that skirt the west altogether also seem fruitful ground for transcultural analysis, as do interdisciplinary discussions of mediated social relations. e demands of negotiating relative velocities of change and shifting needs for personal and shared experiences of creative security suggest that the questions posed by complex transnational lives are critically informative to a wide range of social and creative projects and problems. is text will be of interest to interdisciplinary scholars of autobiography, and anyone who appreciates wide-ranging scales of critical reference in a shrinking world.
In: Boehmer, Elleke & De Mul, Sarah (eds.) 2012. The Postcolonial Low Countries. Literature, Colonialism, Multiculturalism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books: 139-162 , 2012
Afrikaans women's writing was one of the marginal discourses in Afrikaans literature that however, for all its marginality, played an important part in interrogating the structures of power in South Africa during the apartheid era. As such, Afrikaans women's writing formed part of Afrikaans literature's history of resistance and dissidence which grew especially strong after 1960, as political repression, too, grew stronger. 1 Using broad and over-simplified strokes, one can paint early Afrikaans literature as largely nationalist. On the one hand it could be seen a postcolonial literature, resisting colonial oppression by the British; on the other hand it could be regarded as a colonial literature, co-opted culturally to reinforce an Afrikaner nationalism which itself continued the colonial oppression of the past.