Social media has greeted the lockdowns imposed in the face of the global spread of Covid-19 with reading recommendations for "plague fiction" and other speculative, post-apocalyptic or dystopian literary works. Readers of South African literature know that it, too, has been fascinated with imaginings of apocalypse. Before the transition to democracy, dystopian fiction…show moreSocial media has greeted the lockdowns imposed in the face of the global spread of Covid-19 with reading recommendations for "plague fiction" and other speculative, post-apocalyptic or dystopian literary works. Readers of South African literature know that it, too, has been fascinated with imaginings of apocalypse. Before the transition to democracy, dystopian fiction was often oriented towards the fall of the apartheid regime. After 1994, some literary dystopias used narratives of atavistic regression to express disillusionment with the postapartheid state and to question the very notion of political community. By contrast, other recent South African works combine the dystopian, the fantastic and the speculative to very different effect in texts that we might loosely term "Afrofuturist." Afrofuturism was originally used in the early 1990s to describe African American and diasporic speculative or science fiction, as well as investigations of futurity and technological innovation oriented towards black culture in music, cinema and the visual arts. show less

This special issue proposes to juxtapose accounts of anti-apartheid protest and solidarity efforts with the field of celebrity studies in order to deepen our understanding of both through their conjunction. As our contributors show, opponents of apartheid in South Africa and beyond were cognisant of the importance of cultivating ties with local and global media, as well…show moreThis special issue proposes to juxtapose accounts of anti-apartheid protest and solidarity efforts with the field of celebrity studies in order to deepen our understanding of both through their conjunction. As our contributors show, opponents of apartheid in South Africa and beyond were cognisant of the importance of cultivating ties with local and global media, as well as with individuals who enjoyed easy access to the media as a consequence of their “celebrity capital” (Olivier Driessens, “Celebrity Capital: Redefining Celebrity using Field Theory,” Theory and Society 42 (2013)). This introduction to the special issue revisits the notion of “networked celebrity” (F. Turner and C. Larson, “Network Celebrity: Entrepreneurship and the New Public Intellectuals,” Public Culture 27, 1 (75) (2015)) in order to set the stage for the case histories that follow. Rather than considering the actions of individual women and men of renown with respect either to their individual “consecration” as celebrities in Pierre Bourdieu's well-known sense, or their capacity to extract individual benefit from it, the emphasis falls on understanding various manifestations of celebrity culture that take their bearings from the collaborative and decentred nature of the global protest against apartheid. The special issue challenges the individualising emphasis of celebrity studies and its predominantly metropolitan orientation, while offering a new set of perspectives on the transnational dimensions of the global anti-apartheid struggle.show less

באוטוביוגרפיה שלו מ-2013 - צעיר עם עניבה אדומה: מנדלה ומהפכת הנפל, 1963-1960 - נזכר הפעיל הפוליטי הדרום-אפריקאי בוב הפל (Hepple) בבכורת ההצגה המוזיקלית קינג קונג: אופרת ג'אז אפריקאית, שהיתה מאז לאגדה. האופרה מילאה אולמות במשך שנתיים תמימות ברחבי דרום-אפריקה, לפני שיצאה לסיבוב הופעות מצליח בווסט-אנד של לונדון. הפּל, שסקר במבטו את הקהל באותו ערב גאלה ביוהנסבורג, הבחין…show moreבאוטוביוגרפיה שלו מ-2013 - צעיר עם עניבה אדומה: מנדלה ומהפכת הנפל, 1963-1960 - נזכר הפעיל הפוליטי הדרום-אפריקאי בוב הפל (Hepple) בבכורת ההצגה המוזיקלית קינג קונג: אופרת ג'אז אפריקאית, שהיתה מאז לאגדה. האופרה מילאה אולמות במשך שנתיים תמימות ברחבי דרום-אפריקה, לפני שיצאה לסיבוב הופעות מצליח בווסט-אנד של לונדון. הפּל, שסקר במבטו את הקהל באותו ערב גאלה ביוהנסבורג, הבחין בנוכחותו של נלסון מנדלה, ודיווחו חושף משהו מהלך הרוחות התרבותי והפוליטי של אותם זמנים. מנדלה "נהנה מהג'אז בסגנון עיירות השחורים ומשירי החירות", נזכר הפּל. "ראיתי אותו צוחק ומתרגש במקום מושבו באודיטוריום ויטס של אוניברסיטת ויטווטרסרנד (Witwatersrand) בפברואר 1959, בערב הבכורה של קינג קונג. המלחין, טוד מטשיקיזה, (Matshikiza) היה אחד מידידיו הקרובים, וידיד אחר, נתן מדלדלה, (Mdledle) לוהק לתפקיד הראשי של אלוף האִגרוּף, לצד מרים מקבה (Makabe) בתפקיד ג'ויס, בעלת מסבאה לא-חוקית לממכר משקאות אלכוהוליים". התיאור החטוף של הפּל ממקם את קינג קונג על קו התפר בין מחוזות תרבות שונים, ומְרַשת ברשתות של חברויות והתאגדויות פעילים פוליטיים רדיקלים, שחורים ולבנים כאחד, ודמויות מפתח ברנסנס האינטלקטואלי והתרבותי השחור של התקופה. ארטור גולדרייך, שהיה גם הוא מקורב למנדלה, מאיר את הרשתות הללו מזווית אחרת, המדגישה את המעורבות של אמנים ומוזיקאים לבנים ופרוגרסיבים בהפקת המופע המשותף, שהאציל מדמותו על הזיכרון הקולקטיבי של דור שלם.show less

Table of Contents Celebrity and Protest in the Anti-Apartheid Movement Louise Bethlehem & Tal Zalmanovich Nelson Mandela’s “Show Trials”: An Analysis of Press Coverage of Mandela’s Court Appearances Martha Evans “Trevor is ‘News’”: Celebrity as Protest in the Early Anti-Apartheid Struggle, 1948–1960 Tal Zalmanovich Not Merely a Newsworthy Commodity: Jean-Paul Sartre's…show moreTable of Contents Celebrity and Protest in the Anti-Apartheid Movement Louise Bethlehem & Tal Zalmanovich Nelson Mandela’s “Show Trials”: An Analysis of Press Coverage of Mandela’s Court Appearances Martha Evans “Trevor is ‘News’”: Celebrity as Protest in the Early Anti-Apartheid Struggle, 1948–1960 Tal Zalmanovich Not Merely a Newsworthy Commodity: Jean-Paul Sartre's Engagement in the Struggle Against Apartheid Tal Sela “A Black Rather Well-Known South African Recently Arrived in London”: Critical Responses to Todd Matshikiza’s Chocolates for My Wife Andrea Susan Thorpe Literary Celebrity and Political Activism: Wole Soyinka’s Nobel Prize Lecture and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle Karin Berkman The Gods must be Crazy, or the Rhetoric of Apartheid: A (Re)evaluation of Jamie Uys's Film in the Context of French Anti-apartheid Solidarity Namara Burki From South Africa to South Central L.A.: Transnational Black Protest, Celebrity, and the Cultural Boycott Myra Ann Housershow less

The contemporary mobilization of the apartheid-Israel analogy on the part of activists and academics alike obscures the fact that it has a long history of use on the part of Hebrew-speaking writers and intellectuals. Some of the earliest comparative references to apartheid arose from the Hebrew translation and stage adaptation of Alan Paton’s celebrated 1948 novel…show moreThe contemporary mobilization of the apartheid-Israel analogy on the part of activists and academics alike obscures the fact that it has a long history of use on the part of Hebrew-speaking writers and intellectuals. Some of the earliest comparative references to apartheid arose from the Hebrew translation and stage adaptation of Alan Paton’s celebrated 1948 novel Cry, the Beloved Country. Departing from the performative focus of Eitan Bar-Yosef who uses blackface in the stage adaptation to reflect on Jewish whiteness in the nascent state of Israel, we analyse critical intellectual responses to the prose translation on the part of figures who were very differently positioned in relation to the hegemonic Zionist ideology of the period. Analysis of the commentary by the socialist Rivka Gurfein, the liberal Ezriel Carlebach, and the revisionist Yohannan Pogrebinsky, allows us to position apartheid as a heuristic device through which to chart debates internal to Israeli politics in the early years of the Zionist state. These help to expose the constitutive ambivalence of Israel as a “colonial post-colony” in Joseph Massad’s reckoning, thus touching on the very self-definition of the Jewish state.show less

From the mid-1960s onward, compilations of the speeches and trial addresses of South African opponents of apartheid focused attention on the apartheid regime despite intensified repression in the wake of the Rivonia Trial. Mary Benson’s novel, At the Still Point, transposes the political trial into fiction. Its “stenographic” codes of representation open Benson’s…show moreFrom the mid-1960s onward, compilations of the speeches and trial addresses of South African opponents of apartheid focused attention on the apartheid regime despite intensified repression in the wake of the Rivonia Trial. Mary Benson’s novel, At the Still Point, transposes the political trial into fiction. Its “stenographic” codes of representation open Benson’s text to what Paul Gready, following Foucault, has analyzed as the state’s “power of writing”: one that entangles the political trialist in a coercive intertextual negotiation with the legal apparatus of the apartheid regime. Through a form of metaleptic rupture, however, the novel is also opened to constructs of Holocaust memory. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s paradigm of “multidirectional memory,” the article investigates how the novel stages other contestations over racialized suffering at the end of a decade that began with the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann.show less

Continuing the investigation of networked cultural responses in the Global South construed as “cultural solidarities” that was embarked upon in the first special issue of this two-part series, “Cultural Solidarities: Apartheid and the anti-colonial commons of world literature,” Safundi Vol. 19, no.3, the introduction to this, its second volume, investigates how…show moreContinuing the investigation of networked cultural responses in the Global South construed as “cultural solidarities” that was embarked upon in the first special issue of this two-part series, “Cultural Solidarities: Apartheid and the anti-colonial commons of world literature,” Safundi Vol. 19, no.3, the introduction to this, its second volume, investigates how the cultural imagination animates transnational solidarities across a variety of media, and against the backdrop of the Cold War. Taking the interplay between the local and the global in apartheid South Africa of the 1950s and 1960s as its point of departure, this special issue is particularly attuned to diasporic or exilic arenas of South African cultural production. As they consider figures including Mary Benson, Johnny Dyani, Mongezi Feza, Chris McGregor, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Dudu Pukwana, Oliver Tambo, and Trevor Huddleston, our contributors, Louise Bethlehem, Lindelwa Dalamba, and Tal Zalmanovich, draw attention to the imbrication of local histories with global movements engendered by the itineracy of these figures. Transnationalism figures differently in two additional contributions. Sarika Talve-Goodman explores the carceral imaginary of Alan Paton’s writing to sketch out intersections between racialized carceral state-building in South Africa and the United States, while Gautam Chakrabarti’s reflections on the Soviet-Indian axis in the formation of “committed” networks of theater practitioners in India lends additional impetus to the interrogation of the conditions of possibility underlying the establishment of long-distance solidarity that was broached in the previous special issue in this series.show less

Table of Contents Cultural solidarities: itineraries of anti-apartheid expressive culture—introduction to the special issue Louise Bethlehem, Lindelwa Dalamba & Uhuru Phalafala Cold War carceral liberalism and other counternarratives: the case of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country Sarika Talve-Goodman “What is needed is an ecumenical act of solidarity:” the World…show moreTable of Contents Cultural solidarities: itineraries of anti-apartheid expressive culture—introduction to the special issue Louise Bethlehem, Lindelwa Dalamba & Uhuru Phalafala Cold War carceral liberalism and other counternarratives: the case of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country Sarika Talve-Goodman “What is needed is an ecumenical act of solidarity:” the World Council of Churches, the 1969 Notting Hill Consultation on Racism, and the anti-apartheid struggle Tal Zalmanovich Stenographic fictions: Mary Benson’s At the Still Point and the South African political trial Louise Bethlehem The Blue Notes: South African jazz and the limits of avant-garde solidarities in late 1960s London Lindelwa Dalamba From Moscow with love: Soviet cultural politics across India in the Cold War Gautam Chakrabartishow less

This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers historiographic traction…show moreThis article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers historiographic traction over other Cold War settings. Throughout the international antiapartheid struggle, South African expressive culture was channeled through local paradigms of reception in the world beyond, in taut negotiation with aesthetic, institutional, linguistic, and political considerations. Instances of cultural translation, catachresis, and slippage resulting from the deterritorialization of South African cultural formations can thus be contextualized, historicized, and turned back reflexively on other conjunctures, to defamiliarize existing scholarship. Makeba’s long exile in Ahmed Sékou Touré’s Guinea between 1969 and 1986 is examined in the light of these claims. Here, Makeba crosses a theater of intense ideological contestation following Touré’s 1968 socialist cultural revolution, illuminating some of its constitutive features. The article concludes with a consideration of Makeba’s agency as performer at the interface between militant cultural nationalism and state prohibition in revolutionary Guinea.show less

Table of Contents Cultural solidarities: preamble Louise Bethlehem, Lindelwa Dalamba, Gül Bilge Han, Stefan Helgesson & Uhuru Phalafala Cultural solidarities: apartheid and the anticolonial commons of world literature Stefan Helgesson, Louise Bethlehem & Gül Bilge Han Addressing an Afro-Asian public: Alex La Guma’s report to the 25th anniversary conference of the…show moreTable of Contents Cultural solidarities: preamble Louise Bethlehem, Lindelwa Dalamba, Gül Bilge Han, Stefan Helgesson & Uhuru Phalafala Cultural solidarities: apartheid and the anticolonial commons of world literature Stefan Helgesson, Louise Bethlehem & Gül Bilge Han Addressing an Afro-Asian public: Alex La Guma’s report to the 25th anniversary conference of the Afro-Asian Writers Association in 1983 Christopher J. Lee & Alex La Guma Nazım Hikmet’s Afro-Asian solidarities Gül Bilge Han “I slipped into the pages of a book”: intertextuality and literary solidarities in South African writing about London Andrea Thorpe “The island is not a story in itself”: apartheid’s world literature Ashleigh Harris Refusing interpellation: a double bind of African migrant writing Mohammad Shabangu Reading for hope: a conversation about texts and method Julia Willén & Andrew van der Vliesshow less

This special issue considers networked cultural responses loosely figured as “cultural solidarities” in the Global South, on the understanding that mid-twentieth century struggles to end colonialism were addressed within a transnational domain. It takes apartheid South Africa as its point of departure, positioning literature from South Africa within a broadly anti-colonial…show moreThis special issue considers networked cultural responses loosely figured as “cultural solidarities” in the Global South, on the understanding that mid-twentieth century struggles to end colonialism were addressed within a transnational domain. It takes apartheid South Africa as its point of departure, positioning literature from South Africa within a broadly anti-colonial commons. As they consider works by Alex La Guma, Nazim Hikmet Ran, Athol Fugard, and Todd Matshikiza, among others, our contributors—Christopher J. Lee, Gül Bilge Han, Ashleigh Harris and Andrea Thorpe—question the role of aesthetic forms in constructing long-distance solidarities in a Cold War setting. Mohammad Shabangu’s assertion of the necessity of “opacity” as a counter to the recuperation of the African writer brings such questions into the present, intersecting contemporary debates on world literature. Finally, solidarity is framed in temporal rather than geographical terms in Andrew van der Vlies and Julia Willén’s dialogue on “reading for hope” in the aftermath of failed revolutionary projects.show less

The centenary of the birth of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela offers a rich opportunity to reflect on the life of South Africa’s extraordinary political leader and on the legacies of the struggle against apartheid that he and his cohort of fellow activists shaped. Mandela’s life-writing offers a great deal of inspiration for such reflection across a range of themes, including…show moreThe centenary of the birth of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela offers a rich opportunity to reflect on the life of South Africa’s extraordinary political leader and on the legacies of the struggle against apartheid that he and his cohort of fellow activists shaped. Mandela’s life-writing offers a great deal of inspiration for such reflection across a range of themes, including as scholars have pointed out, the question of Madiba’s own mortality. Poetry is an under-explored source of additional reflection. Across the arc of Mandela’s defiant resistance to apartheid, through his incarceration, release and presidential term, his life became poetry. The scope of this corpus is enormous, spanning decades and continents alike. show less

What language is adequate to describe the coming into being of the new South Africa? What literary forms does newness take? What promises does the new “postapartheid fiction” deliver (or fail to deliver)? For many observers, the May 10, 1994, inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first democratically elected president of South Africa captured the optimism of the political…show moreWhat language is adequate to describe the coming into being of the new South Africa? What literary forms does newness take? What promises does the new “postapartheid fiction” deliver (or fail to deliver)? For many observers, the May 10, 1994, inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first democratically elected president of South Africa captured the optimism of the political settlement that ended apartheid. Writers finally seemed able to suspend the imperatives of a literary culture oriented primarily toward political struggle. Yet while regime change informs “postapartheid fiction” in the literal sense of the term, literary and political periodization do not wholly coincide. The divisive legacies of racism are not easily dismissed. This understanding informs a category of writing often called “transitional literature” that emerges in tandem with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, 1996–1998) as the site where the new nation comes into being. Often autobiographical or confessional in tone, it remains bound up with the country’s racist past. Transitional literature thus points toward the ambivalent nature of the “post” in “postapartheid fiction,” which scholars argue functions here much like it does in the term “postcolonial.” Both prioritize the continued unfolding of a long historical sequence rather than a punctual transition that abrogates the reckoning with the past.show less

The world continues to pay tribute to the legendary Hugh Ramapolo Masekela who died on 23 January 2018. His journeys have reminded us that the itineraries of South African exiles — writers, journalists, performers, photographers, and political activists — have much to offer transnational histories of anti-apartheid resistance. Masekela knew some formative moments during…show moreThe world continues to pay tribute to the legendary Hugh Ramapolo Masekela who died on 23 January 2018. His journeys have reminded us that the itineraries of South African exiles — writers, journalists, performers, photographers, and political activists — have much to offer transnational histories of anti-apartheid resistance. Masekela knew some formative moments during his own long exile. Radical black internationalism, pan-Africanism and anti-apartheid resistance were all woven into the texture of his sound. Masekela traversed these universes without ever relinquishing his claims to musical autonomy and creative agency as a black artist who made a living through his art.show less

Michael Titlestad has suggested that jazz serves “to mediate, manage and contest” what he terms a “staggered, but also cruel and unusual South African modernity.” His volume Making the Changes (2004) uses the “pedestrian” as a chronotope to describe the “local peripatetic appropriations of global symbolic possibilities” that jazz affords there. This paper proposes…show moreMichael Titlestad has suggested that jazz serves “to mediate, manage and contest” what he terms a “staggered, but also cruel and unusual South African modernity.” His volume Making the Changes (2004) uses the “pedestrian” as a chronotope to describe the “local peripatetic appropriations of global symbolic possibilities” that jazz affords there. This paper proposes a different “chronotope”: that of the train. This substitution facilitates the reading of jazz history in South Africa in tandem with histories of labour migration and other forms of displacement – including trajectories of exile that intersect my account elsewhere of the “global itinerary” of South African cultural formations under apartheid. The deterritorialisation of South African works of expressive culture and social actors associated with anti-apartheid resistance, I have argued, affords the cultural historian strong historiographic purchase over conjunctures outside of South Africa. The present discussion explores this claim in relation to Miriam Makeba’s memoir Makeba, My Story (1988), written during her stay in Guinea. Makeba’s life-writing shows the strategies of the black South African performer in exile to be embedded in the conviviality that shaped jazz performance culture during its emergence in urban South African. Conviviality can be shown to offer an implicit critique of nativist imaginaries in decolonising Africa – including in this instance, the doctrine of authenticité promulgated by Guinea’s controversial leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré.show less

This paper deploys the haptic, and more broadly speaking, notions of multisensory reading and spectatorship to reconfigure perceptions of home. It explores configurations of home in the practice of the late French-Israeli visual artist, Absalon, to draw tropes of “complicity” and “contagion” into an intersection with discourses of moral hygiene arising from the modernist…show moreThis paper deploys the haptic, and more broadly speaking, notions of multisensory reading and spectatorship to reconfigure perceptions of home. It explores configurations of home in the practice of the late French-Israeli visual artist, Absalon, to draw tropes of “complicity” and “contagion” into an intersection with discourses of moral hygiene arising from the modernist preoccupation with denuded surface in the history of architecture. It then goes on to read a postapartheid South African text, Lauren Beukes's Zoo City (2010), through the lens of these concerns. Beukes's text, it claims, can be made to precipitate the historicity of the white suburban home under apartheid. The novel offers alternative iterations of domesticity, however, as metonymies of contagion shift into metonymies of conviviality. The final section of the paper investigates the vulnerability of the home against the background of the 2014 Israeli war on Gaza and its assault on the built environment. It explores an art exhibition, Postcards for Gaza, staged by the dissident Israeli organization, Zochrot, in the context of a previous military assault on Gaza in 2008. Here the reworking of photographic surface is made to gesture towards the possibility of political reparation in an alternate modality of complicity that Mark Sanders parses as “human-foldedness” (Sanders 2002).show less

Nadine Gordimer died on July 13, 2014, six days into the war on Gaza that the Israeli government named “Operation Protective Edge.” I met the initial news of her death with something approaching detachment. There were, after all, other losses to mourn. Six days into the war, it had become evident that there would be no rapid cessation of the military assault, unlike…show moreNadine Gordimer died on July 13, 2014, six days into the war on Gaza that the Israeli government named “Operation Protective Edge.” I met the initial news of her death with something approaching detachment. There were, after all, other losses to mourn. Six days into the war, it had become evident that there would be no rapid cessation of the military assault, unlike the previous Israeli incursion into Gaza, “Pillar of Cloud,” in November 2012. Six days into the war, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz carried reports from Gaza indicating that 121 Palestinians had been killed there since the beginning of the military offensive, 14 of them over the course of the previous Friday night—“the most lethal yet” said Ha’aretz. The Israel Defense Force had already bombed a total of 1,100 targets in Gaza, the newspaper went on to record. 1 Six days into the war, I found myself slow to habituate to the devastation of the built environment in Gaza and of the life it housed; slow to assimilate images of concrete that crumpled improbably; or to reconcile myself with footage of collapsed strata that buried human beings. This devastation—a distinct form of political violence that scholarship terms “urbicide”—seemed already to have assumed proportions which would make the full resumption of civilian life in Gaza impossible for years to come.2 Closer to home, I contemplated an Israeli public sphere obscenely deformed by the killing of Muhammad Abu Khdeir less than two weeks previously. Reports emerged that left-wing demonstrators had been beaten on the streets of Tel Aviv, suggesting that the capacity for civil dissent within Jewish-Israeli society was rapidly becoming yet another casualty of the Occupation on this, the sixth day of the war.show less

This chapter explores the strange intimacies of dis/avowal that obtain between Holocaust studies and postcolonial theory, with particular reference to writing by Aimé Césaire and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. For all that the Jewish body remains, by and large, unmourned in the canonical texts of postcolonial theory, the Holocaust has, I seek to argue, made an engagement…show moreThis chapter explores the strange intimacies of dis/avowal that obtain between Holocaust studies and postcolonial theory, with particular reference to writing by Aimé Césaire and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. For all that the Jewish body remains, by and large, unmourned in the canonical texts of postcolonial theory, the Holocaust has, I seek to argue, made an engagement with the ascendancy of witness compelling for postcolonialism precisely because it, too, comes after; it, too, inhabits the traumatic belatedness of catastrophe.show less

On May 31 1910, Professor John Purves of the Transvaal University College in Pretoria would use the coming into being of the Union of South Africa as an occasion to address South African literature, treating his subject with a mixture of regard and regret. "The literature of South Africa," he observed, "has not yet attained, like that of Canada and Australia to the…show moreOn May 31 1910, Professor John Purves of the Transvaal University College in Pretoria would use the coming into being of the Union of South Africa as an occasion to address South African literature, treating his subject with a mixture of regard and regret. "The literature of South Africa," he observed, "has not yet attained, like that of Canada and Australia to the dignity of a formal history. The number of books published yearly in the four Provinces of the Union form a paltry and inconsiderable total compared with the records of the other Dominions, and South Africa cannot yet be said to have developed a literary consciousness. Yet the books that have come out of South Africa and the books South Africa has inspired are neither few nor wholly insignificant, while the literary associations of the great sub-continent are probably richer than those of any other of the great Colonial territories" ("South African Literature," Cape Times, Commemorative Number, 31 May 1910, qtd. in Gray English South African Literature, 6).show less

In the aftermath of the rape of his daughter, Lucy, David Lurie, the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee’s postapartheid novel Disgrace, speculates that her assailants “will watch the newspapers, listen to the gossip. They will read that they are being sought for robbery and assault and nothing else. It will dawn on them that over the body of the woman silence is being…show moreIn the aftermath of the rape of his daughter, Lucy, David Lurie, the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee’s postapartheid novel Disgrace, speculates that her assailants “will watch the newspapers, listen to the gossip. They will read that they are being sought for robbery and assault and nothing else. It will dawn on them that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket” (110). Early responses to the novel in South Africa were anything but silent concerning its depiction of interracial rape. Rape was central to the controversies that the novel generated. The reception of the work tied different interpretations of the representation of rape to a set of moral assessments in thrall to the anxiety of the transition to democracy. Disgrace achieved notoriety then precisely because it resonated with the still unresolved tensions of apartheid. This notoriety is a distinctive part of what Edward Said called the “wordliness” of the novel (World 35), and I set forth that worldliness for my students early on in my presentation of the work. In my teaching of Disgrace to undergraduate and graduate students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I have found it useful to begin with an account of the conflicting appraisals of it in South Africa. I emphasize that local readers apprehended rape less in the context of a form of sexual violence endemic to South Africa than as the occasion for drawing inferences closely bound to the work of moral censure. These inferences circulated in and between groups, generating different consequences as an effect of their very circulation. For many white readers, Coetzee’s depiction of Lucy as a victim who chooses to remain silent intersected a broader pessimism regarding the viability of whiteness in postapartheid South Africa. The acclaimed antiapartheid play-wright Athol Fugard stated in January 2000, “I haven’t read it . . . but I could not think of anything that would depress me more than this book by Coetzee — Disgrace — where we’ve got to accept the rape of a white woman as a gesture to all the evil we did in the past” (qtd. in Marais, “Very Morbid Phenomena” 32). This interpretation, and others like it, reflected a sense of unease at odds with the reconciliation that democracy in South Africa promised to inaugurate. Lucy, whose rape conferred on her the status of quintessential victim in some quarters, was held to model self-abasement and voluntary marginalization as proper conduct for white South Africans seeking to atone for the collective guilt of apartheid.show less

Stephen Clingman’s “Looking from South Africa to the World: A Story of Identity for our Times” begins by charting a journey across Johannesburg in the company of George Bizos who, together with Bram Fischer and Arthur Chaskalson, among others, had represented Nelson Mandela and his co-accused in the Rivonia Trial of 1963-64. The circuit that the piece inscribes is, in…show moreStephen Clingman’s “Looking from South Africa to the World: A Story of Identity for our Times” begins by charting a journey across Johannesburg in the company of George Bizos who, together with Bram Fischer and Arthur Chaskalson, among others, had represented Nelson Mandela and his co-accused in the Rivonia Trial of 1963-64. The circuit that the piece inscribes is, in the first instance, spatial. Bizos and Clingman are driving across the city in order to meet Mandela, whom Clingman sought to interview in connection with the biography of Fischer that he was writing at the time. The trip, Clingman tells us, had “aspects of the clandestine”: “First to an apartment in one suburb where we were met by Mandela’s minders, his young ANC bodyguards; then in convoy behind them to a house in another suburb, where we were ushered in.” The journey that starts, stops, then starts again intersects various intellectual itineraries—themselves suggestive of interruption, adjustment, and beginning over in different company. Clingman describes Mandela’s “serious [...] introspection” in response to a question regarding the African nationalist militancy of the ANC Youth League during the mid-1940s. He attributes enduring significance to Mandela’s encounter with figures like Fischer, Joe Slovo, and Yusuf Dadoo, which cause Mandela to “change his mind.” “It is my profound belief,” comments Clingman, “that it was some of that history, some of that opening up and solidarity around questions of identity that underlay subsequent developments including the non-racial policy of the ANC, and the extraordinary transition to South African democracy in 1994.”show less

This article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes’s first novel, Moxyland (2008), set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner’s notion of “citiness”, asking how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South African city…show moreThis article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes’s first novel, Moxyland (2008), set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner’s notion of “citiness”, asking how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South African city. The article charts Beukes’s resolutely mobile characters as they negotiate the spatial itineraries and technologies of governance in which they are embedded. It explores how Beukes’s futuristic urban setting fuses punitive forms of digital technology with the biopolitical regulation of social relations in an unsettling reprise of the apartheid groundplan. The analysis relates Moxyland to discussions of African city textualities – a critical rubric introduced by Ranka Primorac in this journal to signal the interplay of urban and textual networks in constituting the African city.show less

This book offers a broad range of perspectives on major transformations in the research of labor in Africa contexts over the last twenty years. This is a groundbreaking work by social scientists and historians; adopting innovative paradigms in the study of African laborers, working classes and economies, it moves away from stringent Marxist perspectives towards more…show moreThis book offers a broad range of perspectives on major transformations in the research of labor in Africa contexts over the last twenty years. This is a groundbreaking work by social scientists and historians; adopting innovative paradigms in the study of African laborers, working classes and economies, it moves away from stringent Marxist perspectives towards more localized and fluid conceptions of materiality and productivity. Against the backdrop of increasing mobility of labor and capital, the authors demonstrate the need for a simultaneous consideration of local, national and transnational contexts. The collection of essays provides multiple perspectives on how African workers have negotiated changes and exploited opportunities in increasingly globalized workplaces, while at the same time confronting the impact of global capitalist expansion on local settings in Africa. This book was previously published as a Special Issue of African Identities. show less

Understanding photography is more than a matter of assessing photographs, writes Ariella Azoulay. The photograph is merely one event in a sequence that constitutes photography and which always involves an actual or potential spectator in the relationship between the photographer and the individual portrayed. The shift in focus from product to practice, outlined in…show moreUnderstanding photography is more than a matter of assessing photographs, writes Ariella Azoulay. The photograph is merely one event in a sequence that constitutes photography and which always involves an actual or potential spectator in the relationship between the photographer and the individual portrayed. The shift in focus from product to practice, outlined in Civil Imagination, brings to light the way images can both reinforce and resist the oppressive reality foisted upon the people depicted. Through photography, Civil Imagination seeks out relations of partnership, solidarity, and sharing that come into being at the expense of sovereign powers that threaten to destroy them. Azoulay argues that the “civil” must be distinguished from the “political” as the interest that citizens have in themselves, in others, in their shared forms of coexistence, as well as in the world they create and transform. Azoulay’s book sketches out a new horizon of civil living for citizens as well as subjects denied citizenship—inevitable partners in a reality they are invited to imagine anew and to reconstruct. Beautifully produced with many illustrations, Civil Imagination is a provocative argument for photography as a civic practice capable of reclaiming civil power.show less

This special edition of Critical Arts arose from the interchange between affect and institution. We wagered that Mieke Bal's (2007a: 23) notion of a 'migratory aesthetics' might be a productive way of revisiting the cultural studies classroom as a site of 'sentient engagement' across disciplinary and other boundary lines. For Bal, sentient engagement, along its…show moreThis special edition of Critical Arts arose from the interchange between affect and institution. We wagered that Mieke Bal's (2007a: 23) notion of a 'migratory aesthetics' might be a productive way of revisiting the cultural studies classroom as a site of 'sentient engagement' across disciplinary and other boundary lines. For Bal, sentient engagement, along its embodied and affective dimensions, is the constitutive condition of the aesthetic, since the artwork is considered 'to be empty as long as the act of viewing is not inherent to it, and that act is called upon to do political work' (ibid.). We sought to draw impetus from Bal to reflect on the terms of engagement of the sentient pedagogical encounter framed under the heading of 'Cultural Studies'. show less

הרומן השני של ג'.מ. קוטזי "בלב הארץ", היה יצירה יוצאת דופן לזמנה ולתקופתה. הוא ראה אור לראשונה בשנת 1977, במהדורות אנגליות ואמריקניות אשר השפיעו רבות על המוניטין העולים של קוטזי בזירה הבינלאומית. אבל גרסה דרום אפריקנית שהכילה דיאלוגים נרחבים בשפת אפריקאנס ראתה אור גם היא ב-Raven Press, הוצאה שהמו"ל שלה היה ממתנגדי השלטון, והגרסה הזאת הופצה רק בדרום אפריקה. מחשבותיי על…show moreהרומן השני של ג'.מ. קוטזי "בלב הארץ", היה יצירה יוצאת דופן לזמנה ולתקופתה. הוא ראה אור לראשונה בשנת 1977, במהדורות אנגליות ואמריקניות אשר השפיעו רבות על המוניטין העולים של קוטזי בזירה הבינלאומית. אבל גרסה דרום אפריקנית שהכילה דיאלוגים נרחבים בשפת אפריקאנס ראתה אור גם היא ב-Raven Press, הוצאה שהמו"ל שלה היה ממתנגדי השלטון, והגרסה הזאת הופצה רק בדרום אפריקה. מחשבותיי על הרומן הזה בעברית - תרגום משפת מקור, שכבר מחביאה בתוכה מעשה של תרגום - יחזירו אותנו למקור הדרום אפריקני של הספר בדיוק על מנת שנוכל להתמסר למקצבים העבריים שלו.
בשנת 1977 הייתה דרום אפריקה מעורערת עדיין מההתנגדות למשטר האפרטהייד, התנגדות אשר הוצתה מחדש עם ההתקוממות בסווטו בחודש יוני בשנה הקודמת. באווירה של דיכוי פוליטי אכזרי, סופרים וקוראים דרום אפריקנים רבים, שחורים ולבנים, הסכימו כי הספרות משמשת כלי נשק במאבק. ספרות דרום אפריקנית מגויסת צייתה לתכתיבים של מה שכיניתי "הרטוריקה של הדחיפות". הצורך לחשוף את חוסר הצדק של שלטון האפרטהייד אילץ את הספרות הדרום אפריקנית לעשות שימוש בריאליזם דוקומנטרי בצורתו הטהורה ביותר, כך שההתעקשות של קוטזי לפנות לאלגוריה, סגנונו הבוטה והאקספרימנטלי, הספרות המטא-בדיונית שהושחזה בעקבות חשיפותו לפוסטמודרניזם האמריקני בשנים שבהן היה סטודנט לדוקטורט ושמע הרצאות באוניברסיטה בארצות הברית, היו היפוכו הגמור של הקונסנזוס הספרותי. איזו רלוונטיות אפשר היה למצוא בתהפוכות הבלתי סבירות בעלילת הרומן "בלב הארץ"? בשוטטות ובפנטזיות המיניות המפורטות של מגדה? מה משמעות האלימות, זו שמגדה הרווקה ספגה בימי חייה אבל גם הפעילה על אחרים, באזור מרוחק ומבודד בדרום אפריקה הקולוניאלית?show less

Table of Contents Tribute to the late Professor Aggrey Brown Hopeton Dunn Unruly pedagogies; migratory interventions: unsettling cultural studies Louise Bethlehem & Ashleigh Harris Alter-egos: cultural and media studies Keyan G. Tomaselli Teaching disruption: reflections from a Johannesburg classroom Kelly Gillespie Into the borderlands: unruly pedagogy, tactile…show moreTable of Contents Tribute to the late Professor Aggrey Brown Hopeton Dunn Unruly pedagogies; migratory interventions: unsettling cultural studies Louise Bethlehem & Ashleigh Harris Alter-egos: cultural and media studies Keyan G. Tomaselli Teaching disruption: reflections from a Johannesburg classroom Kelly Gillespie Into the borderlands: unruly pedagogy, tactile theory and the decolonising nation Rob Garbutt, Soenke Biermann & Baden Offord Privileged migration: American undergraduates, study abroad, academic tourism Marcus Breen Pastoral in Palestine: a literary/political travelogue Neil Hertz A way with nature: notes on methodology Noam Gal The politics of curriculum and pedagogy: teaching cultural studies in North East India Parag Moni Sarmashow less

ספרה של לואיז בית-לחם צבע מקומי נדרש לשיח ההיסטוריוגרפי שהתגבש בדרום אפריקה בתקופת האפרטהייד. מה מקומה של הספרות בתנאים של מצב-חירום פוליטי? כיצד מתיישב מעמדו של הטקסט הספרותי בתור שכזה עם חובו הדחוף למציאות שהייתה לאזור אסון? הספר מציג באופן ביקורתי את התביעה שרווחה בחוגי הספרות באותם ימים - להקריב את היסודות ה"ספרותיים" לטובת ייצוג "שקוף" של המציאות הכואבת; הוא מציע…show moreספרה של לואיז בית-לחם צבע מקומי נדרש לשיח ההיסטוריוגרפי שהתגבש בדרום אפריקה בתקופת האפרטהייד. מה מקומה של הספרות בתנאים של מצב-חירום פוליטי? כיצד מתיישב מעמדו של הטקסט הספרותי בתור שכזה עם חובו הדחוף למציאות שהייתה לאזור אסון? הספר מציג באופן ביקורתי את התביעה שרווחה בחוגי הספרות באותם ימים - להקריב את היסודות ה"ספרותיים" לטובת ייצוג "שקוף" של המציאות הכואבת; הוא מציע חלופות לגישה זו מתוך מחשבה מחודשת על מושגים כמו עדות, תיווך ותרגום. מחקרה של בית-לחם חושף את נקודת המגע החמקמקות בין הסמיוטיקה של האפרטהייד לתרבות הספרותית והפוליטית של המחאה - מתנות הפרידה המורעלות שהוריש האפרטהייד למתנגדיו.show less

This unique volume seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct the pervasive, almost ritualistic, association of Africa with forms of terrorism as well as extreme violence, the latter bordering on and including genocide. Africa is tendentiously associated with violence in the popular and academic imagination alike. Written by leading authorities in postcolonial studies…show moreThis unique volume seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct the pervasive, almost ritualistic, association of Africa with forms of terrorism as well as extreme violence, the latter bordering on and including genocide. Africa is tendentiously associated with violence in the popular and academic imagination alike. Written by leading authorities in postcolonial studies and African history, as well as highly promising emergent scholars, this book highlights political, social and cultural processes in Africa which incite violence or which facilitate its negotiation or negation through non-violent social practice. The chapters cover diverse historical periods ranging from fourteenth century Ethiopia and early twentieth century Cameroon, to contemporary analyses set in Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast and South Africa. It makes a crucial contribution to a revitalized understanding of the social and historical coordinates of violence - or its absence - in African settings. Violence and Non-Violence in Africa will be of interest to students and scholars of African history and anthropology, colonialism and post-colonialism, political science and Africanist cultural studies. Table of Contents Introduction: ‘Unsettling Violence’ 1. The Glorious Violence of Amada Seyon of Ethiopia 2. The Unwritten History of Ethnic Co-Existence in Colonial Africa: An Example from Douala, Cameroon 3. The Vulgarization of Politics: Ethnic Violence in Kenya 4. Sacral Spaces in Two West African Cities 5. The ‘Rugged Life’: Youth and Violence in Southern Nigeria 6. Security and Violence on the Frontier of the State: Vigilant Citizens in Nkomazi, South Africa 7. ‘Keeping the Peace’: Violent Justice, Crime and Vigilantism in Tanzania 8. Mellow Yellow: Image, Violence, and Play in Apartheid South Africa 9. Childhood in the Shadow of Violence: Kathorus, South Africa 10. To Live With It show less

In the background stands a ruin: partly collapsed stone walls, a cavity, the roundness of a dome. There are fields receding in the background to a line of cypress trees, perhaps. I reconstruct, filling in the details from memory, or from a template of the ruin (‫] חורבה‬churvah] in Hebrew; ‫] خربة‬khirbe] in Arabic). This is a landscape so intimately familiar that it…show moreIn the background stands a ruin: partly collapsed stone walls, a cavity, the roundness of a dome. There are fields receding in the background to a line of cypress trees, perhaps. I reconstruct, filling in the details from memory, or from a template of the ruin (‫] חורבה‬churvah] in Hebrew; ‫] خربة‬khirbe] in Arabic). This is a landscape so intimately familiar that it does not warrant a second glance. But the camera which fixes the ruin at the center of its frame does not look away. In the foreground, cars are passing. The camera is positioned so as to register the precise rhythms of their passing. One after the other, the cars speed past the ruin—their drivers impervious to its presence and to that of the camera, both. Their staccato passage is held in counterpoint against the silent duration of the ruin. And still the camera does not look away. Nor do I. The lens delivers its freight of commentary slowly, cumulatively. This long spool of cars loops back on itself the way a spool of film in a video installation unfolds, then curls back on itself, begins its broadcast anew. And indeed, it is a video installation that I am recalling, the work of the Israeli artist Oded Shimshon: one of a series of pieces by Jewish Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel assembled by activist curator Norma Musih for the launch of the gallery attached to the learning center of the dissident Israeli organization, Zochrot, on August 30, 2007.show less

Literary conferences have long provided a stage for negotiating transformations in South African literary studies in the various incarnations of the field. As an unscheduled guest at the symposium on Post-Transitional Literary Studies in Johannesburg in October 2009, I was keenly aware of my own ‘double involve [ment], double detach [ment]’with respect to the particular…show moreLiterary conferences have long provided a stage for negotiating transformations in South African literary studies in the various incarnations of the field. As an unscheduled guest at the symposium on Post-Transitional Literary Studies in Johannesburg in October 2009, I was keenly aware of my own ‘double involve [ment], double detach [ment]’with respect to the particular shift it sought to stage–I take this phrase from a lecture on ‘South African Writers and English Readers’ by the then-expatriate William Plomer which he delivered at Wits in 1956, and not incidentally so. If I am no longer totally at home in the emergent ‘post-transitional’corpus whose contours were so richly explored by various participants in the symposium; if I am, moreover, no longer completely at home in the city of my birth, the negotiation with distance has its own compensation. One that crystallized for me, last October, concerned the question of …show less

Gabi Ngcobo’s curatorial intervention “PASS-AGES: References & Footnotes” located in the space of the former Pass Office at the corner of Albert and Polly Street in Johannesburg engages with what it describes as “the most basic work of the apartheid state . . . the control of black bodies across the South African landscape.” It references in part the photography of the…show moreGabi Ngcobo’s curatorial intervention “PASS-AGES: References & Footnotes” located in the space of the former Pass Office at the corner of Albert and Polly Street in Johannesburg engages with what it describes as “the most basic work of the apartheid state . . . the control of black bodies across the South African landscape.” It references in part the photography of the late Ernest Cole, of Drum pedigree, whose iconic “Young boy is stopped for his pass as white plainclothesman looks on” is reprinted in the program accompanying the project, fittingly more “newspaper” than catalogue. In order to animate the moment of arrest--apprehension but also stasis—that is the substance of Cole’s tableau, we might invoke Mongane Wally Serote’s “City Johannesburg”, a key text of the “Soweto Poetry” of the 1970s. Serote offers a kind of contingent ekphrasis tied to the same technology of power which had produced Cole’s image a decade earlier.show less

In 1998, four years after the transition to democracy in South Africa, a five-volume Report answerable to the formal mandate of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was tabled on the public agenda there. The Commission, a crucial dimension of South Africa's negotiated settlement, was empowered to grant amnesty to politically motivated perpetrators…show moreIn 1998, four years after the transition to democracy in South Africa, a five-volume Report answerable to the formal mandate of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was tabled on the public agenda there. The Commission, a crucial dimension of South Africa's negotiated settlement, was empowered to grant amnesty to politically motivated perpetrators of all affiliations in return for the full disclosure of their offences. But the Commission's power to confer amnesty did not exhaust its role. No less significantly, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was instituted in order to “[afford] victims an opportunity to relate the violations they suffered” and was required to “[report] to the Nation about such violations and victims.” Through the workings of its various committees, the TRC called forth individual and collective acts of testimony on an unprecedented scale. The narratives of approximately 22,000 victims were elicited and processed. Roughly ten percent of these were heard in the public hearings across South Africa which became the hallmark of the TRC. Such acts of breaking silence were integral to the “restorative justice” that the Commission sought to implement. In the words of its Report, “People came to the Commission to tell their stories in an attempt to facilitate not only their individual healing process, but also a healing process for the entire nation.show less

This article investigates the cultural economy of an inner-city Johannesburg park through tracking the work of itinerant photographers who operate there. The authors revisit Johannesburg artist Terry Kurgan's interactions with the photographers of Joubert Park in order to raise questions relating to their material and symbolic – or ‘immaterial’ – labour. They point to…show moreThis article investigates the cultural economy of an inner-city Johannesburg park through tracking the work of itinerant photographers who operate there. The authors revisit Johannesburg artist Terry Kurgan's interactions with the photographers of Joubert Park in order to raise questions relating to their material and symbolic – or ‘immaterial’ – labour. They point to the mnemonic or archival dimensions of this labour and investigate the visual idioms in which inner-city migrants conduct their self-fashioning, forging modes of vernacular urbanity in the photographic encounter.show less

The study of labour in Africa has undergone important transformations over the last 20 years. Following a period of intense scrutiny from the 1950s to the 1980s, research on working classes, labour unions, capitalist expansion and proletarianisation in Africa experienced a decline that paralleled the political reality of the gradual marginalisation and disempowerment…show moreThe study of labour in Africa has undergone important transformations over the last 20 years. Following a period of intense scrutiny from the 1950s to the 1980s, research on working classes, labour unions, capitalist expansion and proletarianisation in Africa experienced a decline that paralleled the political reality of the gradual marginalisation and disempowerment of the working classes and of organised labour more generally. Early approaches to the study of labour in Africa, heavily influenced by Marxist theory, underwent a process of self-examination and revision as poststructuralist and postcolonial critics exposed the Eurocentric biases underlying prevalent conceptualisations of labour-related research (see, for example, William Sewell 1993). The resulting retreat from universalist conceptualisations of class, work and productivity led researchers to eschew imposed notions of working-class consciousness and proletarianisation.show less

Table of Contents Rethinking labour in Africa, past and present Lynn Schler, Louise Bethlehem & Galia Sabar Dialogical subjectivities for hard times: expanding political and ethical imaginaries of subaltern and elite Batswana women Pnina Werbner Work discipline, discipline in Tunisia: complex and ambiguous relations† Béatrice Hibou Migration for ‘white man's work’:…show moreTable of Contents Rethinking labour in Africa, past and present Lynn Schler, Louise Bethlehem & Galia Sabar Dialogical subjectivities for hard times: expanding political and ethical imaginaries of subaltern and elite Batswana women Pnina Werbner Work discipline, discipline in Tunisia: complex and ambiguous relations† Béatrice Hibou Migration for ‘white man's work’: an empirical rebuttal to Marxist theory Isaie Dougnon Casting aluminium cooking pots: labour, migration and artisan production in West Africa's informal sector, 1945–2005 Emily Lynn Osborn Transnationalism and nationalism in the Nigerian Seamen's Union Lynn Schler What goes around, comes around: rotating credit associations among Ethiopian women in Israel Hagar Salamon, Steven Kaplan & Harvey Goldberg Park pictures: on the work of photography in Johannesburg Louise Bethlehem & Terry Kurganshow less

In the last of the eight lessons that partly constitute the work which bears her name, Elizabeth Costello stands at the gate, and, standing there, is abandoned to a form of deixis which is irreducible to the coordinates, in time or space, of her literal positioning in a town where ‘the guardian of the gate never sleeps and the people in the cafés seem to have nowhere…show moreIn the last of the eight lessons that partly constitute the work which bears her name, Elizabeth Costello stands at the gate, and, standing there, is abandoned to a form of deixis which is irreducible to the coordinates, in time or space, of her literal positioning in a town where ‘the guardian of the gate never sleeps and the people in the cafés seem to have nowhere to go’ (J. M. Coetzee 2003: 195). We are thoroughly in the province of metafiction, a conventional enough emplacement for a text by J. M. Coetzee, as David Attwell has so productively argued (1993: 20). It is thus not surprising to see the fiction of reference to setting turning back on itself to trace instead a ‘supplementary’ course (Jacques Derrida 1976 [1967]) which targets not so much the fictional world as fictionality itself. The very title of the entry, ‘At the Gate’, constitutes a form of fictive diversion: the distraction – or entertainment – of intertextuality.show less

“It is clear to me,” declared Chinua Achebe to an audience at Makerere University College, Kampala, in August 1968, “that an African creative writer who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant—like that absurd man in the proverb who leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames”…show more“It is clear to me,” declared Chinua Achebe to an audience at Makerere University College, Kampala, in August 1968, “that an African creative writer who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant—like that absurd man in the proverb who leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames” (“African Writer” 78). The timing of this address, delivered at the height of the Biafran War, which had already claimed the life of the poet Christopher Okigbo, amplifies the call to engagement that Achebe is issuing. But it is central to Achebe’s argument that the war, for all its urgency, intensifies the writer’s orientation toward political commitment and social relevance but is not a precondition for engagement. “The fact of war,” in his words, “merely puts the matter in sharper focus” (78). Certainly, the deep involvement of African writers in the process of decolonization, as reflected in the spectacular malleability of the boundary between writer and politician for Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Sédar Senghor, and Agostinho Neto, to note only the most visible instances, would seem to provide concrete evidence for Achebe’s statement. On the one hand, becoming a writer constituted “one of the most important sources of legitimacy for the political class in Africa,” as Simon Gikandi has noted (“Theory” 1). On the other hand, decolonization and its long aftermath appear to render engagement less a choice in the African context than a structural constraint, as if the writer’s house were always burning, to revisit Achebe’s proverb, or as if history itself were constantly called on to underwrite the politicization of African writing. For all the confidence of Achebe’s pronouncement however, the very need for its enunciation betrays his understanding that political or historical necessities do not become aesthetic ones without certain discernible interventions. His support for the frank instrumentalism of the African writer— evident for instance in his declaration that “the involvement of the Biafran writer today in the cause for which his people are fighting and dying is not different from the involvement of many African writers . . . in the big issues of Africa” (“African Writer” 78)— certainly speaks directly to his specific historical emplacement. But, as Achebe well knows, his exhortation also subtends the history of the art- versus- politics debate in Western literary culture and its relevance for an African literature that is enfolded in a global (i.e., a Western and capitalist) cultural and pedagogical system (see Amoko 23; Brown 832; Mudimbe).show less

Michael Chapman's review of my volume Skin tight: apartheid literary culture and its aftermath (Unisa/Brill 2006) provides an interesting occasion for self-reflection. My emphasis here does not fall on the question of whether or not I am able to recognise my book in the account Chapman gives of it. Rather it seems more useful to engage with some of the collective…show moreMichael Chapman's review of my volume Skin tight: apartheid literary culture and its aftermath (Unisa/Brill 2006) provides an interesting occasion for self-reflection. My emphasis here does not fall on the question of whether or not I am able to recognise my book in the account Chapman gives of it. Rather it seems more useful to engage with some of the collective concerns that tacitly inform his response. What are the underlying commitments of South African literary history, historiography or scholarship, more generally? What is the object of our shared pursuit--to the extent that our objects and objectives are, indeed, shared? Chapman's reading of my work prompts two interrelated speculations. The first concerns an exaggerated anxiety in the face of theory that is, in fact, sedimented into the very constitution of South African literary studies in its local formations. To this extent, Chapman's evident chagrin is less a response to my book than symptomatic of the trajectories which the book analyses, although I should add immediately that 1 refuse to position myself as having provided an institutional historiography of the field. On the evidence that Chapman produces, South African literary studies continues in some quarters to take comfort in its belatedness. This despite the fact that shifts within the theoretical humanities--I am thinking here primarily of the ascendancy of cultural studies, gender and queer theory--have profoundly altered the forms of knowledge which can be presumed to animate our analysis in advance of any given intervention.show less

'Literature', the late Edward Said remarked in his The World, The Text and the Critic (1983), is 'in the world', meaning that verbal articulations always bear the traces of the pulls and pressures exerted by the locality, the society and the time of the writer. Critics and teachers are equally entangled in a particular world although often not in the same one as…show more'Literature', the late Edward Said remarked in his The World, The Text and the Critic (1983), is 'in the world', meaning that verbal articulations always bear the traces of the pulls and pressures exerted by the locality, the society and the time of the writer. Critics and teachers are equally entangled in a particular world although often not in the same one as the writer. A reader who engages with the essays presented here, not to mention those previously published in the 100 issues of English Studies in Africa referred to in the "Introduction', finds plenty of evidence to this effect. What s/he does not find, though, is what was - and still is - not reflected in the journal. The gaps are numerous. They relate to the understanding of the emplacement of English Studies in the past, and for the foreseeable future, within the larger enterprise of the Humanities They demonstrate the troubled relation between literary and language studies; between literature written in English by English first-language and second- (or third-) language speakers; between 'original' and translation in South Africa (from any of the other ten official languages', especially Afrikaans); between 'local' and transnational literatures (reflected in the work of, say, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie); between "English', and so-called 'cognate' studies including the literatures of other languages, established disciplines such as History, Philosophy, Sociology, Economics, etc., and the emergent fields of, for instance, Gender and Cultural Studies. Moreover, the question of what constitutes English, let alone literature has become increasingly problematic in the face of ever more numerous "Englishes' and English literatures across continental trajectories, from the southern tip of Africa to other African regions, to the Indian subcontinent, to North America and Australia, and last but not least to the former imperial centre: Great Britain.show less

Table of Contents REVISING ETERNAL VERITIES Michael Titlestad LINEAGES OF INFLUENCE AND DISPUTE IN SOUTH AFRICAN LITERARY STUDIES David Robinson & Mike Kissack HOW SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE GOT SQUEEZED OUT, AND THEN SLIPPED IN: ENGLISH ACADEMIC LITERARY DISCOURSE IN SOUTH AFRICA 1946–1996 Derek Barker & Leon de Kock BEYOND BUTLERISM: REVISITING ASPECTS OF SOUTH…show moreTable of Contents REVISING ETERNAL VERITIES Michael Titlestad LINEAGES OF INFLUENCE AND DISPUTE IN SOUTH AFRICAN LITERARY STUDIES David Robinson & Mike Kissack HOW SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE GOT SQUEEZED OUT, AND THEN SLIPPED IN: ENGLISH ACADEMIC LITERARY DISCOURSE IN SOUTH AFRICA 1946–1996 Derek Barker & Leon de Kock BEYOND BUTLERISM: REVISITING ASPECTS OF SOUTH AFRICAN LITERARY HISTORY Christopher Thurman EMERGENCY CONTINUED Adam Sitze GAY TIMES: READING LITERATURE IN ENGLISH IN SOUTH AFRICA TODAY Tim Trengove-Jones A HISTORY OF RESTLESSNESS: AND NOW FOR THE REST Leon de Kock PROVINCIALIZING ENGLISH/RETHINKING LITERATURE Stefan Helgesson WALKING THROUGH THE DOOR AND INHABITING THE HOUSE: SOUTH AFRICAN LITERARY CULTURE AND CRITICISM AFTER THE TRANSITION Meg Samuelson ‘THE MOBILE INHERITORS OF ANY RENAISSANCE’: SOME COMMENTS ON THE STATE OF THE FIELD Natasha Distiller ‘BUT HOW IS THAT ENGLISH?’ ENGLISH/ENGLISH STUDIES/LITERARY STUDIES IN SOUTH AFRICA Duncan Brown TSOTSI: FROM ABANDONED NOVEL TO ACADEMY AWARD WINNER: AN INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN GRAY Andie Miller READING THE GAPS—RELOCATING ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA Louise Bethlehem & Reingard Nethersoleshow less

Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and its Aftermath traces the responses to the emergent paradigm of South African literary studies from the 1970s onwards. Embedded in the influential critical texts of the field, it claims, are hidden narratives - of land, race, gender, desire and embodiment. This volume explores these submerged dimension's of South African…show moreSkin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and its Aftermath traces the responses to the emergent paradigm of South African literary studies from the 1970s onwards. Embedded in the influential critical texts of the field, it claims, are hidden narratives - of land, race, gender, desire and embodiment. This volume explores these submerged dimension's of South African literary history and the influence they continue to exert well into the post-apartheid era. It suggests that significant continuities exist between late-apartheid and post-apartheid literary culture, and positions these against the interpretive horizon of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.show less

״איגרות לארץ הישנה״, החלום האוטוביוגרפי בהקיץ שלי מתחיל, כשאני מוצאת את עצמי כותבת את הטקסט הזה במקום לכתוב את ביקורת הספר האקדמית אשר לה הוא מהווה - ואינו מהווה - תחליף. ״אינני אוהבת,״ אומרת המספרת בגוף ראשון: צעד הפתיחה שלה בדרמה אישית של עקירה. ״אינני אוהבת את הפוליטיקה של המסחרית בצבע בז׳ מתקלף, שנראית כעומדת לחנות פה, במקום חניה קטן מדי בשבילה, בעיר קטנה מדי בשביל…show more״איגרות לארץ הישנה״, החלום האוטוביוגרפי בהקיץ שלי מתחיל, כשאני מוצאת את עצמי כותבת את הטקסט הזה במקום לכתוב את ביקורת הספר האקדמית אשר לה הוא מהווה - ואינו מהווה - תחליף. ״אינני אוהבת,״ אומרת המספרת בגוף ראשון: צעד הפתיחה שלה בדרמה אישית של עקירה. ״אינני אוהבת את הפוליטיקה של המסחרית בצבע בז׳ מתקלף, שנראית כעומדת לחנות פה, במקום חניה קטן מדי בשבילה, בעיר קטנה מדי בשביל המכוניות שלה, גדולה מדי בשביל תאוות הבצע הקטנונית של רבים מדי מעסקניה. היא עומדת כמו קופסה, הגלגל האחורי הימני על המדרכה. לא פה ולא שם - אבל הרכב הישראלי הזה קובע נוכחות ברורה, בכוחה המוחלט של הטרנסגרסיה שלו ובמספר הסטיקרים הרב שעל הפגוש שלו. ״העם עם הגולן״. הנהג יוצא החוצה. ״עקירת ישובים קורעת את העם״. הוא מנער את האבק ממכנסי הג׳ינס שלו. ״אני בעד הגולן״. טוב, אז מי אתה? ״פחח, חייט, חייל, מלח״...? לא חייל, לפחות לא עכשיו. אנחנו מחליפים מבטים חטופים. השׂער שלי (קצר, קצר מאוד) והשרוולים שלי (קצרים, קצרים מאוד) ממקמים אותי עבורו בדיוק כשם שהכיפה הסרוגה והסיסמאות על החולצה שלו ממקמים אותו עבורי. מתנחל. איש עשיר, איש עני, קבצן, גנב...show less

Africa is tendentiously associated with violence in the historical, political and anthropological imagination, as well as in contemporary media representations. At the same time, forms of non-violent practice, significantly under-represented in theoretical and historical discussions, are integral to African social and historical experience and constitute an important…show moreAfrica is tendentiously associated with violence in the historical, political and anthropological imagination, as well as in contemporary media representations. At the same time, forms of non-violent practice, significantly under-represented in theoretical and historical discussions, are integral to African social and historical experience and constitute an important dimension of African personhood. The present volume seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct the pervasive, almost ritualistic, association of Africa with forms of everyday as well as extreme violence, the latter bordering on and including genocide. But it also holds up to scrutiny occluded histories of non-violence that must be restored to our scholarly narratives of the African past and present. The contributions to this volume are accordingly directed at political, social and cultural processes in Africa which incite violence or which facilitate its negation through non-violent social action, whether or not explicitly formulated as such.show less

This unique volume seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct the pervasive, almost ritualistic, association of Africa with forms of terrorism as well as extreme violence, the latter bordering on and including genocide. Africa is tendentiously associated with violence in the popular and academic imagination alike. Written by leading authorities in postcolonial studies…show moreThis unique volume seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct the pervasive, almost ritualistic, association of Africa with forms of terrorism as well as extreme violence, the latter bordering on and including genocide. Africa is tendentiously associated with violence in the popular and academic imagination alike. Written by leading authorities in postcolonial studies and African history, as well as highly promising emergent scholars, this book highlights political, social and cultural processes in Africa which incite violence or which facilitate its negotiation or negation through non-violent social practice. The chapters cover diverse historical periods ranging from fourteenth century Ethiopia and early twentieth century Cameroon, to contemporary analyses set in Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast and South Africa. It makes a crucial contribution to a revitalized understanding of the social and historical coordinates of violence - or its absence - in African settings. Violence and Non-Violence in Africa will be of interest to students and scholars of African history and anthropology, colonialism and post-colonialism, political science and Africanist cultural studies.show less

There is something foreknown about the set itself, its self-conscious gentility lovingly nurtured in the imagined space of the New Brighton township where Kani locates his characters. Take those covers on the back of the chair in which Kani will seat himself in just a few moments, those … ummm … antimacassars. The word surfaces from memory — and a certain comfort attaches…show moreThere is something foreknown about the set itself, its self-conscious gentility lovingly nurtured in the imagined space of the New Brighton township where Kani locates his characters. Take those covers on the back of the chair in which Kani will seat himself in just a few moments, those … ummm … antimacassars. The word surfaces from memory — and a certain comfort attaches to having found it. Looking around me, I find reassurance, too, in the discovery that the old wooden boards advertising fruit-sellers still hang from the upstairs galleries of the theatre, as they always did. show less

פוליטיקה של זהויות ותיאוריה פוסטקולוניאלית הן צמד חמד במפעל התיאורטי הישראלי. כתבי-עת מקומיים העוסקים בתיאוריה, אסופות ביקורתיות וגליונות מיוחדים המוקדשים לנושא אחד, לרבות גליון זה של תיאוריה וביקורת, יוצאים נשכרים מן הזיווג של תיאוריה פוסטקולוניאלית ורביזיוניזם מזרחי. בלי לחטוא בביקורת מיותרת על המסלול הפרדגימטי שנבחר כאן, ברצוני לפתוח בזהירות את שערי הלימודים…show moreפוליטיקה של זהויות ותיאוריה פוסטקולוניאלית הן צמד חמד במפעל התיאורטי הישראלי. כתבי-עת מקומיים העוסקים בתיאוריה, אסופות ביקורתיות וגליונות מיוחדים המוקדשים לנושא אחד, לרבות גליון זה של תיאוריה וביקורת, יוצאים נשכרים מן הזיווג של תיאוריה פוסטקולוניאלית ורביזיוניזם מזרחי. בלי לחטוא בביקורת מיותרת על המסלול הפרדגימטי שנבחר כאן, ברצוני לפתוח בזהירות את שערי הלימודים הפוסטקולוניאליים לקריאה משוקללת אחרת של כמה ממחויבויותיהם התיאורטיות המכוננות. אבקש לבחון כאן את ההסכמה הכללית למדי, שטרם נבדקה כראוי, באשר להכרחיותה של התיאוריה הפוסטקולוניאלית כפיגום המאפשר, הן לאנשי אקדמיה והן לפעילים חברתיים מקומיים, לקדם פוליטיקה של זהויות ורביזיוניזם קאנוני. אינני רוצה כמובן לגרוע משהו מן המטרות העכשוויות של הפעילות הפדגוגית או של צורות אחרות של פעילות חברתית ופוליטית , הנגזרות מיישומה של תיאוריה פוסטקולוניאלית. עם זאת, ברצוני להדגיש כי היישום הוא חלקי ומעוגן בהבנה חלקית של הפרדיגמה המונחת בבסיס הלימודים הפוסטקולוניאליים. לפיכך, מסה קצרה זו חותרת להחזיר את הפוסטקולוניאליזם העברי ההולך ומתמסד אל אתגרי הרדיקליות שלו באמצעות עיון מחדש בכמה מושגים שהובילו להתגייסותו.כיצד קרה ש"היברידיות" הפכה, בכמה מהטיותיה המקומיות, לשם נרדף לרב תרבותיות תפלה, לתחליף המעכב תוכניות פוליטיות במקום להקל על יישומן? מדוע נדמה שרומנטיזציה עמוקה של ההיברידיות חוברת לעיתים קרובות מדי לתפיסה א-פוליטית של התנגדות, שאופיה הרטרוספקטיבי (ראו מאמרו של אבי שושנה בגליון זה) והעדפתה את פני השטח המבוקעים של האתניות היהודית מדיפים ריח של נוסטלגיה, ובד בבד סוג של קיפאון אינטלקטואלי לנוכח הכיבוש? כיצד נוכל להתנהל כחוקרים פוסטקולוניאליים בלי להשתמש במודל רזה של היברידיות, שנועד לאשש את תביעותינו הפולחניות למימוש זכותנו על ה"פוסטקולוניאלי"?show less

גיליון זה, המוקדש למחקר ולתיאוריה בלימודים פוסטקולוניאליים, הוא תוצר של סדנה ללימודים מתקדמים שהתקיימה במכון ון ליר בירושלים בספטמבר 2005. כל המאמרים בגיליון הוצגו ונידונו במהלך הסדנה, ואחר כך עברו תהליך ארוך של כתיבה, שיפוט, עיבוד והכנה לפרסום. גם אם מה שמובא כאך לפנינו הוא נתח קטן יחסית משפע העבודות שהוצגו בסדנה (בסך הכל הוצגו יותר מארבעים עבודות ותגובות -- ראו נספח…show moreגיליון זה, המוקדש למחקר ולתיאוריה בלימודים פוסטקולוניאליים, הוא תוצר של סדנה ללימודים מתקדמים שהתקיימה במכון ון ליר בירושלים בספטמבר 2005. כל המאמרים בגיליון הוצגו ונידונו במהלך הסדנה, ואחר כך עברו תהליך ארוך של כתיבה, שיפוט, עיבוד והכנה לפרסום. גם אם מה שמובא כאך לפנינו הוא נתח קטן יחסית משפע העבודות שהוצגו בסדנה (בסך הכל הוצגו יותר מארבעים עבודות ותגובות -- ראו נספח בסוף הגיליון), יש בצבר זה כדי להעביר את רוח היצירתיות, את הגיוון האינטלקטואלי ואת ההתלהבות שליוו את הדיונים במהלך שלושת ימי הסדנה. העבודות המוצגות מתכתבות עם מגוון תחומי ידע: היסטוריה, מגדר, קולנוע, ספרות, מרחב, גזע, גלובליזציה, סוציולוגיה, אנתרופולוגיה, מדע המדינה ותיאולוגיה פוליטית. צבר העבודות, הסטודנטים ואנשי הסגל העוסקים בתחום חידדו את העובדה שמלבד קורסים בודדים, בעיקר במחלקות לספרות ולקולנוע, אין כיום אף לא באוניברסיטה אחת בישראל תוכנית מוסדרת ללימודים פוסטקולוניאליים. צבר מרשים זה מבטא היטב הן את הגיוון הדיסציפלינרי של הסדנה והן את האופנים המורכבים שבאמצעותם אפשר להגדיר את הקורפוס המכונה לימודים פוסטקולוניאליים. אכן, למשתתפים היו הגדרות מגוונות למעמדו של התחום. היו שגרסו למשל שלימודים פוסטקולוניאליים מייצרים חלל אפיסטמי, החסר באקדמיה, ללימודי מזרחיות. בעוד שהממסד האקדמי הכיר בצורך לייסד מחלקות ללימודי מגדר, הרי לימודי מזרחיות לא זכו מעולם להכרה ממסדית וסביר להניח שלא יזכו לכך בעתיד הקרוב. זאת על אף שטף העבודות ההולך וגדל ולמרות המספר הרב של הסטודנטים, מזרחים ולא מזרחים, הכותבים וקוראים מזרחיות בישראל (מה שלואיז בית-לחם מכנה "רביזיוניזם מזרחי"). תחושה דומה רווחה בקרב הסטודנטים הפלסטינים שהשתתפו בסדנה והצביעו על היעדרה של זירה המכונה "לימודי פלסטין". משתתפים אחרים הצביעו על כך שהלימודים הפוסטקולוניאליים הם מסמן מובהק של הקשר בין לימודים אקדמיים לספֶּרה הפוליטית. ולראיה, חלק מן החוקרים בתחום מפתחים פרדיגמה לחקר הכיבוש, לחקר הגזענות הביולוגית והתרבותית ולביקורת פוליטית של אופני הידיעה הן באקדמיה והן בשיח הציבורי. כך או כך, לא היה ספק שמשתתפי הסדנה הם חלק מקהילה פעילה של תחום אינטלקטואלי תוסס. עם זאת, השתתפות ערה זו נושאת בחובה גם מגבלות והיא מחייבת משנה זהירות.

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Unlike the “situationsl metafiction” (Attwell 1993: 20) of J.M. Coetzee's earlier novels, whose imbrication in the political matrix of the late‐apartheid State has become a matter of critical orthodoxy, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) rejects a South African emplacement for its writer‐protagonist and hereby seems to suspend questions relating to the…show moreUnlike the “situationsl metafiction” (Attwell 1993: 20) of J.M. Coetzee's earlier novels, whose imbrication in the political matrix of the late‐apartheid State has become a matter of critical orthodoxy, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) rejects a South African emplacement for its writer‐protagonist and hereby seems to suspend questions relating to the positioning of this work within post‐apartheid literary culture. Coetzee's privileging of the transcultural, or formal aesthetic, dimensions of the work ratifies the normative exclusion of the historical master‐narrative in the name of universalism (Butler 2000). Yet, for all that it defensively forecloses the possibility of “post‐apartheid South Africa” being taken as its referent, I claim, “Lesson 8: At the Gate”, of Elizabeth Costello contains a persistent interrogation of the relations between representation and material embodiment that draws the text back ‐ despite itself ‐ into the semiotic matrix of South African literary culture, here to intersect the working through of these relations in extraliterary form before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The survie/survival of the material body before a tribunal oriented towards “confession” (Coetzee 2003: 211) presents an opportunity for the haunted and displaced analogy with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that my paper pursues.show less

I am not primarily drawn to this work as historical fiction in a conventional sense, however. The events of the South African War (1899–1902) will interest me only tangentially, for one thing. Nor are questions of historiographic adequacy at stake. While conceding in advance that the historical event is inevitably congealed into trope in any written account, fictional…show moreI am not primarily drawn to this work as historical fiction in a conventional sense, however. The events of the South African War (1899–1902) will interest me only tangentially, for one thing. Nor are questions of historiographic adequacy at stake. While conceding in advance that the historical event is inevitably congealed into trope in any written account, fictional or otherwise (de Certeau 1988; White 1978, 1987, 1992), I am concerned with a different aspect of the way in which the process of writing informs and constitutes that “stenographic reduction”(Conley 1988: xv) whereby history is made. Although the South African War is the putative “subject” of Nathan’s book, I will be seeking to open the text up to the traces of a different nationalist conflict that marks it at the time of its writing—South Africa in the late 1930s—a conflict, moreover, that necessarily marks its author, the Jewish South African lawyer Manfred Nathan, as definitively as the mark of circumcision, the sign of his racial or ethnic or religious difference, does. It will be my claim that Manfred Nathan's elaboration of a canonical version of nationalist Afrikaner historiography in Sarie Marais embeds within its own narrative logic a defensive response to the increasingly vulnerable position of South African Jews as full members of he nation in South Africa of the 1930s.show less

This award-winning collection of essays about culture and identity was written from the perspective of post-apartheid South Africa. Voted best special issue of 2001 by the Council of Editors of Learned Journal.

Disgrace disturbs. South African literary culture has not been dilatory in using the disturbance that Coetzee’s 1999 novel incites to elaborate a certain pessimism regarding the viability of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa. Whether articulated as ‘The Lucy Syndrome’(Roodt 2000) or as ‘Liberal Funk’(Heyns 2000, see also Marais 2001), both of which impute…show moreDisgrace disturbs. South African literary culture has not been dilatory in using the disturbance that Coetzee’s 1999 novel incites to elaborate a certain pessimism regarding the viability of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa. Whether articulated as ‘The Lucy Syndrome’(Roodt 2000) or as ‘Liberal Funk’(Heyns 2000, see also Marais 2001), both of which impute that white selfabnegation and marginalization somehow atone for the collective responsibility of apartheid, this melancholy might be read in ironic reprise to that anxiety, at once existential and significatory, which JM Coetzee famously argues is the historical legacy of the white poet in the face of an intractable African landscape (1988: 36–62, 163–77). In this particular post-apartheid version however, intractability is constructed not as the resistance of the landscape but rather as the turbulence of the post-colony where the state has–quite spectacularly–lost its monopoly of control over the means of violence. Against the long duration of the transitional moment in South Africa, against the background of the longer duration of the apartheid past, social crisis frequently figures as a kind of stasis in which the 'morbid symptoms' of Antonio Gramsci's 'interregnum' routed say, through such apartheid-era imaginings as Nadine Gordimer's apocalyptic 1981 novel July's People have persisted beyond liberation. It is partly this persistence that Disgrace charts. The novel intersects the post-apartheid morbidity of violence and bodily violation in a manner which makes its male protagonist, David Lurie, the perpetrator-hero of its peculiarly ambivalent regard.show less

Coetzee, who casts a sober and even somewhat cruel gaze over the aftermath of the enormous victory of the anti-apartheid struggle, demands sustained skepticism regarding some of the illusions attaching to 'Truth and Reconciliation' in South Africa. Recently published in Hebrew in Smadar Millo's very fine translation, JM Coetzee's Disgrace tells the story of David…show moreCoetzee, who casts a sober and even somewhat cruel gaze over the aftermath of the enormous victory of the anti-apartheid struggle, demands sustained skepticism regarding some of the illusions attaching to 'Truth and Reconciliation' in South Africa. Recently published in Hebrew in Smadar Millo's very fine translation, JM Coetzee's Disgrace tells the story of David Lurie, a professor of modern languages who is constrained by the changing realities of post-apartheid Cape Town to work for his living as an adjunct professor of communication. A sexual encounter with a female student who charges him with sexual harassment sets in motion the decline which leads to Lurie's retirement from the university. The disciplinary committee convened to judge his case demands a public apology from Lurie, but the latter rejects the narrative of self-abasement, purification and restitution which the committee sees it as its task to produce. Lurie refuses to voice his regret, an act which would imbue his dry admission of involvement with metaphysical overtones of transcendence and reparation. show less

We are reminded of a complaint widely associated with the work of Coetzee in his more allegorical phase, a kind of de-referential slipperiness which, said Coetzee's detractors (and they were many), amounted to a `studied refusal to accept historical responsibility'.

Zionism transported me. In 1985, I left Johannesburg to take up residence in a city on the periphery of Tel Aviv. I expected, in time, to rewrite the rupture of longing as the rapture of belonging: for I had been transported, carried away by strong emotion. But with time, I learnt to see my displacement as colluding in an old apartheid narrative instead: to each ethnicity…show moreZionism transported me. In 1985, I left Johannesburg to take up residence in a city on the periphery of Tel Aviv. I expected, in time, to rewrite the rupture of longing as the rapture of belonging: for I had been transported, carried away by strong emotion. But with time, I learnt to see my displacement as colluding in an old apartheid narrative instead: to each ethnicity, its tribal homeland. In recent times, more aware of rupture than ever, I have sought to invoke the dismantling of the old apartheid narrative in a kind of therapeutic modality. This text partakes of the genre of theorised autobiography. Don't look to it for continuity. It is strung out, as I am, between the contours of a liberation struggle--the South African one --reconstructed from a distance of time and place, and the contours of a liberation struggle--the Palestinian one--from whose time and place I cannot distance myself. The South African inter-text suggests certain parameters, certain political agendas, nevertheless. How might one begin to think about the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a mass democratic movement against the Occupation in present-day Israel? How might this effort be linked to the question--radically premature but necessary--of what happens on the day after the establishment of a Palestinian state? Is it possible to begin to imagine the vocabulary of a language of restitution? You will find traces of these agendas here, but only as they are subverted by more or less violent returns of the repressed. Need I highlight the Freudian vocabulary? Perhaps not, except to insist that it has a political agenda too. Wait, you'll see. She now tries to demonstrate with her own body how this should be done. But I have anticipated myself. Let us begin, anew.show less

מאמר זה עוסק בפראקסיס של גוף, בפרדוקס הפוליטי של ייצוג הגוף הנשי, הגוף הלסבי - אצל ג'ון קוטזי. עליך לדמיין את הגוף של המחברת של הטקסט הנוכחי שפונה אליך עתה בשפה, שאיננה שפת-אמה.
בפעם הראשונה כשסוראיה אירחה את דיוויד לורי, כותב ג'ון קוטזי, היא היתה מאופרת באודם עז ובצללית כבדה. "האיפור הדביק לא מצא חן בעיניו" של לורי והוא ביקש שתסיר אותו. סוראיה - הזונה, האשה…show moreמאמר זה עוסק בפראקסיס של גוף, בפרדוקס הפוליטי של ייצוג הגוף הנשי, הגוף הלסבי - אצל ג'ון קוטזי. עליך לדמיין את הגוף של המחברת של הטקסט הנוכחי שפונה אליך עתה בשפה, שאיננה שפת-אמה.
בפעם הראשונה כשסוראיה אירחה את דיוויד לורי, כותב ג'ון קוטזי, היא היתה מאופרת באודם עז ובצללית כבדה. "האיפור הדביק לא מצא חן בעיניו" של לורי והוא ביקש שתסיר אותו. סוראיה - הזונה, האשה השְׂכוּרה - כמצופה ממנה, מפסיקה להתאפר. "היא צייתה ומאז חדלה להשתמש בו" (הפוגה. הדוברת מוציאה מראה קטנה בצורת פרח ומניחה אותה על הדוכן). "מהירה ללמוד", מסיימת הפיסקה, "סבלנית, סתגלנית" (פיסקה 5. כל הציטוטים מן הספר "חרפה", בתרגום סמדר מילוא, עם עובד 2000). (הדוברת מנגבת את האודם האדום שלה תוך שהיא מתבוננת במראה. היא מתעלמת מכתם הצבע שעל לחייה. היא שולחת מבט איטי סביב החדר, מפגיעה בקהל בעיניה להגיב למחווה). במונחים נרטולוגיים, המשפט האחרון שהקראתי מרתק אותי (אך אולי לא כמו שהמחווה החתרנית מרתקת אתכם). למי שייכת השפה הזו? הצורה הקביעתית של המשפט "מהירה ללמוד, סבלנית, סתגלנית" יוצרת סירוב דקדוקי לבגוד בדובר: אין כאן בסוגריים "חושב לורי", למשל, כדי להבהיר את המצב עבורנו. הרגש המבוטא מושהה בצורה של "דיבור חופשי עקיף" או "מבע משולב" (Perry 1979) ונותרת הצהרה, הנטווית בין החוויה או המיקוד התודעתי של לורי לבין הכותב הקודם לו, והמכילה את כל הסמכות הנרטיבית של הגוף השלישי. איננו יכולים לומר, ברמה כלשהי של ודאות, מי אומר את המלים האלה, "בסבלנות, בסתגלנות..."show less

Under apartheid, discussions of literary function and value in South African literature in English are refracted through an elaborate rhetoric that posits "urgency" as the necessary correlative and consequence of political commitment. My essay examines this "rhetoric of urgency" in the context of the overwhelmingly realist dominant of South African literary culture in…show moreUnder apartheid, discussions of literary function and value in South African literature in English are refracted through an elaborate rhetoric that posits "urgency" as the necessary correlative and consequence of political commitment. My essay examines this "rhetoric of urgency" in the context of the overwhelmingly realist dominant of South African literary culture in English. I suggest that South African literary critics of both liberal and radical orientations have been unwitting partners in a commonly held instrumentalist concept of language. A clear regime of meaning may be discerned in literary studies in English which seeks to effect closure between the word and the world in order to safeguard the ethical claims of South African literary culture.show less

This special issue of Poetics Today explores the development of a South African literary identity in the face of its staggering cultural, historical, and linguistic diversity. The collection uses the idea of the "global imaginary" to explore the ways the outside world has constructed ideas about South African literature as well as the way South Africans themselves have…show moreThis special issue of Poetics Today explores the development of a South African literary identity in the face of its staggering cultural, historical, and linguistic diversity. The collection uses the idea of the "global imaginary" to explore the ways the outside world has constructed ideas about South African literature as well as the way South Africans themselves have fashioned their literary selfhood. Articles address the legacy of colonialism and apartheid and wrestle with the fact that in spite of the fact that there are eleven official languages in South Africa and that many of the cultures have historically relied on an oral tradition, the dominant works continue to be those that are written down, in English. As de Kock writes in his introduction, the collection "raises a multiplicity of questions about the colonization of culture." There has been a "trope of binary pairing," he writes, between white and black, civilized and backward, home and exile, colonizer and colonized, which obscures the richness and complexity of the South African literary tradition. This collection promises to at least begin to correct that oversimplification. Table of Contents South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction Leon de Kock, University of South Africa "Civilised Off the Face of the Earth": Museum Display and the Silencing of the /Xam Pippa Skotnes, Cape Town A Staggered Orientalism: The Cape-to-Cairo Imaginary Peter Merrington, Western Cape "A Primary Need as Strong as Hunger": The Rhetoric of Urgency in South African Literary Culture under Apartheid Louise Bethlehem, Hebrew University, Jerusalem Sitting for the Civilization Test: The Making(s) of a Civil Imaginary in Colonial South Africa Leon de Kock, University of South Africa Black Hamlet: Psychoanalysis on Trial in South Africa Jonathan Crewe, Dartmouth Tradurre e Tradire: The Treason and Translation of Breyten Breytenbach Simon Lewis, Charleston Narrative Time and the Space of the Image: The Truth of the Lie in Wirmie Madikizela-Mandela's Testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Dirk Klopper, Rand Afrikaans "Shoo—This Book Makes Me to Think!": Education, Entertainment, and "Life-Skills" Comics in South Africa Loren Kruger, Chicago and Patricia Watson Shariff, Witwatersrand "Making the Paper Speak Well," or, the Pace of Change in Consumer Magazines for Black South Africans Sonja Laden, Tel Avivshow less

"Notes to the old country," my autobiographic reverie begins, as I find myself penning this text instead of writing the academic book review, for which it is--and is not--a substitute. "I do not like," says the first-person narrator: her opening move in a personal drama of displacement. I do not like the politics of the peeling cream pickup-truck which seems…show more"Notes to the old country," my autobiographic reverie begins, as I find myself penning this text instead of writing the academic book review, for which it is--and is not--a substitute. "I do not like," says the first-person narrator: her opening move in a personal drama of displacement. I do not like the politics of the peeling cream pickup-truck which seems about to park here in a parking space too small for it, in a town too small for its cars, too big for the small-minded greed of many of its functionaries. The truck stands box-like, right rear wheel on the pavement. Neither here nor there--but this Israeli vehicle asserts a definite presence by the sheer force of its transgression. And the sheer quantity of its bumper stickers. "THE PEOPLE APE FOR THE GOLAN HEIGHTS. " The driver gets out . "TEARING UP SETTLEMENTS TEARS THE PEOPLE APART. " He dusts off his jeans. "I AM FOR THE GOLAN. " Well then, who are you? Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor . . . ? Not a soldier, at least, not at present. We exchange glances. My hair (short—very short) and my sleeves (short--very short) place me for him just as his knitted head-covering and the logo on his T-shirt place him for me. A settler. Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief...show less

The dust-jacket of Kate Darian-Smith, Sarah Nuttall and Liz Gunner's collection Text, Theory, Space terms it a "landmark text in post-colonial criticism and comparative studies." The publishers' recourse here to the word "landmark" is, to my mind, curiously and ambiguously replete. "Landmark" is foregrounded in excess of its cliched or made-for-review usefulness, precisely…show moreThe dust-jacket of Kate Darian-Smith, Sarah Nuttall and Liz Gunner's collection Text, Theory, Space terms it a "landmark text in post-colonial criticism and comparative studies." The publishers' recourse here to the word "landmark" is, to my mind, curiously and ambiguously replete. "Landmark" is foregrounded in excess of its cliched or made-for-review usefulness, precisely in light of the major claim enunciated in the volume: that landscape generates historical narratives mediating the complex inter-actions between space and power which help constitute South Africa and Australia as distinctively "southern spaces" emerging out of a shared, but by no means identical, intersection of colonization and modernity. Land-scape, the editors remind us, serves to "create and naturalize the histories and identities inscribed upon it, and so simultaneously hides and makes evident social and historical formations" (3). It is culture, they stress, which transforms the seemingly neutral category of "space" or "geo-graphical territory" into "place"—with its concomitant associations: imagined, seen, historicized, remembered (3). show less

Johannesburg. Late winter, 1996. I begin reading The Heart in Exile: South African Poetry in English, 1990-1995. The polemics of its reception render it a promising site to investigate the role of the poetry anthology in shaping the national imaginary of a "new" South Africa. Still, I cannot deny the intimation that, viewed from the anticipated retrospect of Tel…show moreJohannesburg. Late winter, 1996. I begin reading The Heart in Exile: South African Poetry in English, 1990-1995. The polemics of its reception render it a promising site to investigate the role of the poetry anthology in shaping the national imaginary of a "new" South Africa. Still, I cannot deny the intimation that, viewed from the anticipated retrospect of Tel Aviv, my investment in a work whose title condenses "an alternating series of versions in which 'the heart' conceives of its ,exile' in, from or within the imaginative entity we call South Africa" will exceed professional interest! For now, though, it is enough to read. But I do not-cannot--proceed past the second poem: Denis Hirson's "Long-Distance South African," with its searing layering of personal and public memory. My reading falters in its middle passages, snags, stops. For someone has mentioned "gooseberries, and soon the old house / in Johannesburg comes Up." 2 South African like Hirson (in what John Ash calls the "longing distance"'), I find that these mnemonics cut too close to home, although on reflection that is precisely the wrong idiom.show less

This article discusses the central function translated litterature had in the crystallization of original Hebrew culture. It looks at how translated literature was used to fill some of the missing functions of original literature and how the activity of translation was perceived as a form of literary creation. It analyses the process according to which the attitude…show moreThis article discusses the central function translated litterature had in the crystallization of original Hebrew culture. It looks at how translated literature was used to fill some of the missing functions of original literature and how the activity of translation was perceived as a form of literary creation. It analyses the process according to which the attitude towards translational activity changed from a favorite one (regarding it as an essential condition for the creation of a literary center), to a hostile one which saw it as a rival to original literature and Hebrew culture. When the literary system began to be self-sufficient, translated literature was no longer required to serve a "stop-gap" as it was the case in the early years of the establishment of a literary center in Eretz-Israel. The debate about the desired relationship between original and translated literature continued all the same to be one of the fundamental issues facing those responsible for determining editorial policy, showing decreasing tolerance for the status of translated literature and demanding an "improvement" in the status of original writing, together with calls to allocate fewer resources to translation.show less

Since Hayden White's interrogations of the practices of historiography (i.e., history viewed as a form of writing, or written knowledge; cf. White 1973, 1975, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987, 1992), it has become commonplace to acknowledge the mutual imbrication of history and narrative. Building on the insights of White, Edward Said (1978), Benedict Anderson (1986 [ 1983])…show moreSince Hayden White's interrogations of the practices of historiography (i.e., history viewed as a form of writing, or written knowledge; cf. White 1973, 1975, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987, 1992), it has become commonplace to acknowledge the mutual imbrication of history and narrative. Building on the insights of White, Edward Said (1978), Benedict Anderson (1986 [ 1983]), Michel de Certeau (1988), Homi Bhabha (1991, 1994), and others, much recent research in literary and cultural theory has insisted on the triple imbrication of the historical, the literary and the national. My research, which takes as its object South African literary historiography between the years 1976-1985, investigates this discourse as a form of social and cultural practice in the context of the apartheid State. How, it asks, does literary historical scholarship concerning South African literature in English, which is produced by the emergent paradigm of South African literary studies at this time, encode the larger political, social and cultural history within which it subsists? This dissertation is framed by the awareness that "English," in the South African conjuncture, has functioned as a "disciplinary condition" (Leon de Kock 1996a: 188) or "assemblage of discursive machinery" (ibid.) which maintains fraught and complex relations to power, and to the production of the subjectivities of modern South Africans—whether black or white. Influential research by South African scholars has elucidated foundational historical moments of this trajectory (David Attwell 1994, see also 1997; de Kock 1996a). The present research project has a more recent orientation. The years 1976-1 985 (dates delineating the formal boundaries of my primary corpus) mark a time of crisis in South African politics. Spanning the interval from the June 1976 Soweto Revolt, on the one hand, and the first nationwide “State of Emergency” imposed in July 1985, on the other, the period saw the increasingly draconian State repression of overt political activism with a displacement of political energies onto the cultural sphere as one of its consequences. Thus, the institutionalization of South African literary studies has an implicitly political purchase both within the academy and beyond. show less

"Poetry comes alive at Wits" proclaimed the advance publicity in the Mail and Guardian some three weeks before the start of the "Languages of poetry conference" (1-7 August 1997). Elsewhere on the page, Leon de Kock's review of Jeremy Cronin had the reviewer poised somewhere between regret that Cronin's "lyrical locutions are not also published in the…show more"Poetry comes alive at Wits" proclaimed the advance publicity in the Mail and Guardian some three weeks before the start of the "Languages of poetry conference" (1-7 August 1997). Elsewhere on the page, Leon de Kock's review of Jeremy Cronin had the reviewer poised somewhere between regret that Cronin's "lyrical locutions are not also published in the Sunday Times" and exhortation — "Buy [Even the Dead]. Read it. But don't stop there. Read Lionel Abrahams, too, and Basil du Toit, and Ingrid de Kok, and Chris Mann, and many others Make the idea of many voices in one country come alive". Similar passion informed Nhlanganiso Dladla's appeal, in the same issue of the M&G, to integrate oral family lore and titsakatelo (clan praises) into the school curriculum in the name of "a fuller and close-to-the-heart national story". As a prelude to the conference, I found these juxtapositions intriguing. Alongside an unease about the vitality of South African poetry in its present institutional and cultural sites runs the assumption that poetry, for all its marginality, remains a preeminent vehicle in the construction of national identity. Or as Gerrit Olivier, Dean of the Wits Faculty of Arts, put it in his welcome address to the conference: "Poetry is an important indicator of the national ability to make sense of our own lives". show less

In a well-known formulation of the equally well-known difficulties of South African literary historiography, A. C. Partridge states: "The critic who essays to chart the terra incognita of S. A. English prose is, perhaps, less intrepid than foolish. In the state of our knowledge about it all he can safely do is locate the landmarks a pleasant kloof here, a rugged eminence…show moreIn a well-known formulation of the equally well-known difficulties of South African literary historiography, A. C. Partridge states: "The critic who essays to chart the terra incognita of S. A. English prose is, perhaps, less intrepid than foolish. In the state of our knowledge about it all he can safely do is locate the landmarks a pleasant kloof here, a rugged eminence there, a crop of noxious sociological thorns almost everywhere . . ." (1959 [1957], 13). Partridge's accumulation of cartographic and topographic tropes tropes of map and landscape is by no means remarkable in South African literary historiography in English. Such tropes are ritualistically pressed into service as the underside or the other side of the historiographer's consciousness (whether momentary or sustained) of the act of writing a literary history. Every retrospective, every self-proclaimed 'turning point,' every 'new' beginning rehearses a preoccupation with drawing and redrawing the 'map' of the South African literary 'landscape.' Writers with such divergent ideological, institutional and even linguistic affiliations as Andre Brink (1983 [1976], 105-106), Guy Butler (1994 [1956], 46), Tim Couzens (1977, 29), Isabel Hofmeyr (1979, 39), Sarah Christie, Geoffrey Hutchings and Don Maclennan (1980, 7), and Malvern van Wyk Smith (1990, i), among others, all share that carto-topographic drift which one notes in Partridge, here and elsewhere. "A scout who stands upon an ant-heap in the Bushveld, hemmed in by low trees, is unlikely to see much of the surrounding country," he asserts in the opening paragraph of his 1949 article "The Condition of South African English Literature."show less

SINCE THE EARLIEST DAYS OF THE JEWISH SETTLEMENT (Yishuv) in pre-State Israel, the literary form of the anthology has served as an instrument for creating as well as documenting Hebrew cultural discourse. Once it was included within an anthology and thereby trans-mitted to the community of writers and readers, even an individual poem or story played a role in the…show moreSINCE THE EARLIEST DAYS OF THE JEWISH SETTLEMENT (Yishuv) in pre-State Israel, the literary form of the anthology has served as an instrument for creating as well as documenting Hebrew cultural discourse. Once it was included within an anthology and thereby trans-mitted to the community of writers and readers, even an individual poem or story played a role in the construction of what Benedict Anderson has called the "imagined national community." Yet in contrast to Anderson's description of the formation of such a national community—as a linear, homogeneous process—the case of anthology shows that this process is profoundly hybrid, simultaneously encoded as natural and yet always bound up with the operation of mechanisms of production and distribution? show less

This article concerns itself with the reading of a body of similes which depart markedly from conventional expectations about this figure, in particular, and about figurality in general. To speak of simile as figure; moreover as exemplifying a certain altered view of figurality, is already to assume a doubly scandalous stance with respect to dominant tendencies in the…show moreThis article concerns itself with the reading of a body of similes which depart markedly from conventional expectations about this figure, in particular, and about figurality in general. To speak of simile as figure; moreover as exemplifying a certain altered view of figurality, is already to assume a doubly scandalous stance with respect to dominant tendencies in the mainstream rhetorical tradition. In the first place, such prominent voices in canonical Anglo-American literary criticism as Paul Henle (1958) and Winifred Nowottny (1972 [1965]: 54) have contested the very figurative status of simile. I have elsewhere analyzed at length how the subordination of simile to metaphor by theorists of figurative language is precisely what brings about its defiguration (Bethlehem 1991, 1996). The connective of similitude becomes the literal surplus which apparently devalues simile, leaving metaphor free to assume its position as the "figure of figures, the figure for figurality" (Culler 1981: 189).show less

This article challenges the status of simile in some central contributions to the canonical tradition of metaphor theory, including those of Paul Henle, Winifred Nowottny, and Max Black. It claims that a trajectory leading to the defiguration of simile characterizes these theoretical interventions, since the privileging of metaphor as the "figure of figures, the figure…show moreThis article challenges the status of simile in some central contributions to the canonical tradition of metaphor theory, including those of Paul Henle, Winifred Nowottny, and Max Black. It claims that a trajectory leading to the defiguration of simile characterizes these theoretical interventions, since the privileging of metaphor as the "figure of figures, the figure for figurality" (Culler 1981: 189) is best served by the literalization of simile. I explore the manner in which simile is defigured through its subordination to theories of metaphor, as well as the critical and theoretical consequences of this process of defiguration for both metaphor and simile. Of central importance is the dynamic whereby the prima facie structural difference between metaphor and simile (the absence of connectives of similitude in the former, their presence in the latter) is made to bear the burden of simile's literality. The connective becomes the literal surplus which apparently devalues simile, according to the view that permeates modern rhetoric. A revisionist reading of the connective, anchored in an alternative theorization of the figurality of simile, is pre-sented here. In addition, a sample corpus of figurative similes— in my reading—is analyzed in support of this alternative.show less

"Every day, in every way," writes Kwame Anthony Appiah, quoting John Wisdom, "we are getting meta and meta" (1991:150). Irony aside, my paper resolutely seeks to "get meta" on the understanding that metatheoretical investigation is far from an ivory-tower luxury of First World post-structuralists. Rather it is a crucial component of theoretical practice, not least so…show more"Every day, in every way," writes Kwame Anthony Appiah, quoting John Wisdom, "we are getting meta and meta" (1991:150). Irony aside, my paper resolutely seeks to "get meta" on the understanding that metatheoretical investigation is far from an ivory-tower luxury of First World post-structuralists. Rather it is a crucial component of theoretical practice, not least so when the constructs of cultural nationalism are being contested — as Appiah's "Out of Africa: Topologies of Nativism" shows. But if Appiah treats the imbrication of "nativist" African literary theory — represented by Chin weizu, Jemie and Madubuike's "Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1985 [1980]) — in precisely that Western ideological matrix it rejects, my concern is with literary theories which are literally "out of Africa" in a second sense. It is the attempt to articulate the practices of South African literary scholarship with both polysystem theory and postcolonial discourse theory — two paradigms with an international provenance that will occupy us below.show less

Teresa Dovey sees in J. M. Coetzee's novels a fusion of novelistic and critical discourses. "They are criticism-as-fiction, or fiction-as-criticism" (9). Coetzee's White Writing, for its part. may be less ambiguously classified. In this collection of seven critical essays. Coetzee addresses "certain of the ideas, the great intellectual schemas through which South…show moreTeresa Dovey sees in J. M. Coetzee's novels a fusion of novelistic and critical discourses. "They are criticism-as-fiction, or fiction-as-criticism" (9). Coetzee's White Writing, for its part. may be less ambiguously classified. In this collection of seven critical essays. Coetzee addresses "certain of the ideas, the great intellectual schemas through which South Africa has been thought by Europe," on the one hand, and "the land itself, South Africa as landscape and landed property" (10). on the other. Coetzee's point of departure is the failure of the "garden myth. the myth of a return to Eden and innocence" (2). to take root in the newly established Cape Colony. In his first chapter, "Idleness in South Africa," Coetzee interrogates what he dubs the "Discourse of the Cape" (15), or the body of protoanthropological writings produced by seventeenth-century travelers to the colony, to elucidate this failure. Central to the discourse is a pervasive denunciation of Hottentot idleness.' This idleness, says Coetzee, takes on the force of an "anthropological scandal" (22). Not only is it incompatible with European ideological schemas—the Reformation's insistence on work as a divine edict. the Enlightenment's concept of leisure as a time for self-improvement—but it also "aborts one of the more promising of discourses about elemental man" (23).show less

THUS WROTE BRENNER in Meihathalah (From the Beginning), a work describing the first generation of Hebrew youth growing up in Israel at the beginning of the century.' The same might equally be said of Israeli literature subsequent to the establishment of the State. During the 1950s, it absorbed elements originating in European Decadence, without its authors'…show moreTHUS WROTE BRENNER in Meihathalah (From the Beginning), a work describing the first generation of Hebrew youth growing up in Israel at the beginning of the century.' The same might equally be said of Israeli literature subsequent to the establishment of the State. During the 1950s, it absorbed elements originating in European Decadence, without its authors' or critics' being full conscious of the original context of these elements. Israeli literature, in fact, renewed the paradoxical link, dating from the 1890s and continuing into the 1930s, that had existed between the literature of the Hebrew Renaissance and European Decadence. Nathan Zach played a major role in this process. In popular usage today, the word "decadence" still retains overtones of moral reproach. This discussion, however, seeks neither to judge the morality of Israeli literature, nor that of the poetry of Nathan Zach. Rather it aims to elucidate the connections between Israeli literature and an important school within world literature during the transitional period between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as to reappraise the cultural and social forces behind the rapid and widespread absorption of "decadent" principles by post-Independence Israeli literature.show less