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English in Africa
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ISSN (Print) 0376-8902
Published by Sabinet Online Ltd

[185 journals]

The emergence of the South African farm crime novel : socio-historical
crimes, personal crimes, and the figure of the dog
- Authors: Sam Naidu
  Abstract: Crime fiction is an established and popular literary genre in South Africa that has gained international recognition and acclaim. The genre continues to expand and develop in terms of thematic concerns and experiments in form. One such notable development is the farm crime novel, which extends the tradition of the South African plaasroman. Recent texts, such as Elaine Proctor's The Savage Hour and Karin Brynard's Weeping Waters, quite deliberately set their respective murder mysteries on remote farms, and both novels particularise details of farm life. This article argues that the main concerns of the farm crime novel are, on one level, socio-historical - that is, the crimes perpetrated are the result of relationships to the land, land claims and land re-distribution, and the complex, evolving relationship between landowner and labourer. On another level, true to the conventions of crime fiction, the farm crime novel also explores interpersonal or intimate relationships that result in crimes of passion. Of particular interest is the observation that common to both thematic levels is a profound rendering of the link between human-animal relations and human-human relations. Drawing on Karla Armbruster's work on the cultural significance of narratives about dogs and the need for more just and ethical relationships with animals, the article then demonstrates how this rendering occurs, often, through the figure of the dog. To conclude, some comments are offered on the position of the farm crime novel in a post-apartheid literary landscape.
  PubDate: 2016-08-01T00:00:00Z
Towards a reconceptualization of "(post)transitional" South African
cultural expression
- Authors: Aghogho Akpome
  Abstract: In this paper, I problematize the notion of the "post-transitional" (Samuelson 2008; Frenkel and MacKenzie 2010) as a way of theorizing and delineating recent South African cultural expression. I argue that this idea relies - whether intentionally or not - on a limiting conception of South Africa's contemporary socio-political history and transition in terms that are inevitably linear and teleological. I propose that contemporary cultural expression in South Africa (and indeed across Africa) may be productively considered, in broad terms, as literatures of transition. This is an overarching non-linear and non-teleological continuum embracing multiple transitions that are not necessarily discrete or mutually exclusive, and that can be delineated in connection with specific contexts and moments. Without rejecting the general features and trends of recent South African cultural expression identified under the problematical rubric of "post-transitional," I propose that the emergent post-2000 literatures be theorized as "post-TRC." This highlights the significance of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an influential point of reference without ignoring the wider, non-linear, and non-teleological frame of on-going multiple transitions - social, political, economic, and cultural.
  PubDate: 2016-08-01T00:00:00Z
Diving the reef : water metaphors in the work of Ivan Vladislavić
- Authors: Kirby Mania
  Abstract: This article exposes the groundswell of water metaphor prevalent in Ivan Vladislavić's Johannesburg texts, particularly the creative nonfictional Portrait with Keys. It attempts to construct a hermeneutic, or perhaps a "hermenautic," for the incongruity of this metaphor in works representing the landlocked city. While examining the peculiar urban geography of the Witwatersrand, it considers how water is used to explore the interplay of the surface/depth binary in relation to Vladislavić's critique of the Baudrillardian simulacrum. Late capitalist practitioners in the Johannesburg built environment have constructed a number of ersatz waterways to compensate for this pronounced geographic scarcity. Vladislavić thoroughly satirises this simulacral exercise to indicate the entropy of hyperconsumerism. However, the significance of water as a literal and figurative substance goes beyond a chastening hypermodern critique. In uncovering the ancient geological history of water in the broader Witwatersrand region, the article looks to the ways in which water metaphors may signal forces beyond the bounds of the comparatively brief anthropocene. This history destabilises virtuality and surface, and instead points towards water as a symbol of depth and continuity with the past. Water, being emblematic of flux, becomes a conceptual mechanism to convey a semiology of transformation, flow, and renewability in Vladislavić's works.
  PubDate: 2016-08-01T00:00:00Z
Saying "yes" to the human condition : Don Maclennan's confrontation with
death and the meaning of life
- Authors: Ben Shermbrucker
  Abstract: This essay seeks to establish a connection between the poet Don Maclennan's views on death and on the meaning of life. Specifically, after exploring the various attitudes that Maclennan adopts towards death, an argument is made that - owing to Maclennan's views on the meaning of life - neither one of these attitudes is more definitive than the other. Although such a reading stresses the ambiguous and unresolved nature of Maclennan's confrontation with death, evidence is supplied that such a reading harmonises with Maclennan's overall understanding of what poetry ought to accomplish.
  PubDate: 2016-08-01T00:00:00Z
Rewriting abject spaces and subjectivities in Lauren Beukes's Zoo City
- Authors: Jocelyn Fryer
  Abstract: This examination of Zoo City (2010) by Lauren Beukes calls for a re-imagining of denigrated South African urban spaces and their inhabitants. Drawing primarily on the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, it investigates the making of abject spaces and subjectivities, suggesting that novels such as Beukes's might allow for readers to see anew so-called slums such as inner-city Hillbrow. It proposes that readers might come to know such spaces and subjectivities more intimately, bringing otherwise marginalised characters and their urban spaces more sharply into focus. This analysis of Beukes's novel considers the role of "ex-centric" fiction, fiction that challenges privileged centres of "belonging." Ultimately, this paper explores the potential for resistance such literature might have in the face of the dehumanising impact of othering and abjectification in post-apartheid South Africa.
  PubDate: 2016-08-01T00:00:00Z
Confronting "self" and "other" in Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor
- Authors: Renate Lenz; Marita Wenzel
  Abstract: This article evaluates the position and experience of whites in South Africa after the advent of a black majority government, insofar as these are represented by the English-speaking white male protagonist in The Good Doctor (2003) by Damon Galgut. Analysis of the novel will illustrate that the legacy of colonisation and apartheid continues to influence the settler descendants' perceptions of self and the other and their place in the country.
  PubDate: 2016-08-01T00:00:00Z
Contesting masculinities : two Border War memoirs
- Authors: Paul Mason
  Abstract: This article begins by discussing what Christo Doherty in his article "Trauma and the Conscript Memoirs of the South African 'Border War'," published in English in Africa 42.2 (2015), calls the "explanatory schema" for the analysis of "anti-heroic" conscript memoirs. At the centre of Doherty's schema is the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with its satellite concerns of "trauma narratives" and the "victim-perpetrator." In contrast, my analysis of two memoirs hinges upon a concern with the contest between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses of masculinity that prevailed in the 1980s. The memoirs I focus upon are two that are briefly discussed by Doherty - Rick Andrew's Buried in the Sky (2001) and Anthony Feinstein's Battle Scarred: Hidden Costs of the Border War (1998/2011). The aim of the article is to apply to the memoirs an analytic framework that does justice to a wider range of intra- and inter-masculine dynamics than can be accommodated by a trauma-centred analysis.
  PubDate: 2016-08-01T00:00:00Z
Introduction : the problem of nostalgia
- Authors: Dirk Klopper
  Abstract: We distrust nostalgia not only because we are wary of the seduction of sentiment, but also, and perhaps more especially, because we are suspicious of a sentimental feeling centred on home, childhood, family, the past, the community. On the one hand, we have been taught that such attachments may serve a politics of exclusion and oppression; on the other hand, we have learned that such attachments may be precluded under conditions of political oppression. Yet nostalgia persists, and what renders it interesting is precisely that it is a problem, particularly in South Africa, in the immediate post-apartheid context, where the home to which the feeling refers may be located in an impoverished black township or in an affluent white suburb, on a plot of land in a Bantustan or on a family farm in the Karoo. Within the current generation of those whose individual memory reaches back into the apartheid era, some are seen not to be entitled to nostalgia because they benefited from the politics of the past, and some are said to have little to be nostalgic about because they were exploited by these politics.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
The work of nostalgia in Denis Hirson's I Remember King Kong (The Boxer)
- Authors: Erica Lombard
  Abstract: This paper examines the work of nostalgia in Denis Hirson's I Remember King Kong (The Boxer), a poetic memoir of childhood that met with both critical acclaim and remarkable commercial success when it was published in South Africa in 2004. The book provides a telling case study of the multifaceted operation of nostalgia in literature and culture, which is explored in this paper as not only a concern within literature, but also an affect produced in the reading of literature, which may take on ethical, social or political significance as a personal or cultural narrative as well as value as a commodity. Accordingly, the discussion attends both to the literary features of King Kong and to its publication and reception in South Africa. It is argued that the text presents a reflective engagement with memory that foregrounds the fluid and often dissonant relationship between the past and present, individual memory and public history. Yet the reception of this book about white childhood in a predominantly white market, within a society in which white nostalgia is an especially vexed phenomenon, also foregrounds nostalgia's ambivalent potential for both critique and consolation in the post-apartheid literary and cultural field.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
Remembering life under apartheid with fondness : the memoirs of Jacob
Dlamini and Chris van Wyk
- Authors: David Medalie
  Abstract: A number of works of non-fiction written in the post-apartheid period reflect on childhood and adolescent experiences during the apartheid years. This paper looks at three of them: Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia (2009) and Chris van Wyk's two memoirs, Shirley, Goodness and Mercy (2004) and Eggs to Lay, Chickens to Hatch (2010). Dlamini's memoir describes his childhood in Katlehong, while van Wyk's deal with his early experiences in Riverlea. These memoirs are unusual in that, while they do not hesitate to expose the injustices of apartheid, they nevertheless seek to convey the persistence of normality and the "ordinariness" of family and community life within the abnormality of apartheid. This paper considers the implications of "fondness" or nostalgia in all three memoirs, as well the ways in which Dlamini and van Wyk present non-deterministic conceptions of identity and pay tribute to powerful matriarchal figures. The use of humour in Shirley, Goodness and Mercy and Eggs to Lay, Chickens to Hatch is also analysed. Finally, some possible reasons are given as to why van Wyk's memoirs seem to have been spared much of the criticism which has been directed at Dlamini's.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
Nostalgia and apocalypticism in two post-apartheid films
- Authors: Michael Titlestad
  Abstract: This paper presents readings of Jason Xenopoulos's film Promised Land (2003) and Treurgrond (2015), directed by Daryl Roodt. It considers both of these films to be trapped - with different ideological consequences - between "restorative nostalgia" and apocalyptic anticipation. Following a reading of each of the films, I argue that both inscribe a linear temporality reminiscent of monotheistic theology and that, trapped within the confines of this provenance, neither can imagine a meaningful version of "living on" in the post-apartheid dispensation. An alternative to the mundanity of linear temporality is suggested through a brief examination of recent psychosocial work by Derek Hook.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
A "funny" feeling : laughter and nostalgia in Alex Latimer's The Space
Race
- Authors: Nedine Moonsamy
  Abstract: Alex Latimer's The Space Race deploys the fairly conventional science fiction narrative where humans travel to the moon in search of a new home and, set in a post-apartheid context, the progressive possibilities of this search are exciting to consider. Yet, I argue, this future-oriented opportunity is - somewhat unwittingly - squandered in favour of a more nostalgic focus. Latimer uses the trope of space exploration to revisit the broken dreams of the Afrikaner volk whose goal of finding a home in South Africa has finally been thwarted by the post-apartheid era thus leading to a covert plan to colonise the moon. Latimer, wants us to laugh at the longings of the volk but the humour misfires, instead producing an uncomfortable state of disavowal that ultimately restores the nostalgic dreams of the volk by turning it into a science fiction prophesy.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
Post-apartheid nostalgia and the sadomasochistic pleasures of archival art
- Authors: Zamansele Nsele
  Abstract: The burgeoning genre of archival art practice in post-apartheid South Africa has catalysed the evocation of nostalgia in abundance. The archive has been at the centre of numerous exhibitions in contemporary art. This paper explores the meaning of an emerging nostalgic turn in post-apartheid South Africa. The discussion considers the pleasure afforded by the sentimentality underpinning nostalgia and attends to the manner in which nostalgia coheres with the creative and aesthetic techniques of archival art. Scopophilia and the covert function of the sadomasochistic gaze are outlined. It is suggested that such acts of retrieval and repetition generally override ethical considerations in part because they unfold from the realm of the unconscious. The paper draws on psychoanalysis by way of Frantz Fanon.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
Reading nostalgia and beyond : the hermeneutics of suspicion and race;
and, learning to read, again, with Zoë Wicomb
- Authors: Meg Samuelson
  Abstract: Nudged into a new interpretive approach by a comment in her most recent novel, this essay presents an account of reading Wicomb's fiction that seeks to move beyond what Ricoeur describes as a "hermeneutics of suspicion", and that responds to it rather as a gathering in which reader and text are mutually composed. Informed by Sedgwick's distinction between "paranoid" and "reparative" reading, Best and Marcus's "surface reading" and, particularly, Felski's "postcritical" and Barthes's earlier "expressive" reading, it follows Nuttall in locating questions of "how we read now" in a South African context that is framed by race. Drawing on Fanon and Latour, it thus charts how Wicomb's fiction dislodges race from a "matter of fact" by moving readers to respond to it instead as a "matter of concern" that, for all its fabrication, does things, and thus demands our care.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
Reimagining the "literary" in South African literary studies
- Authors: Duncan Brown; Duncan Brown Duncan Brown
  Abstract: In a review article published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, entitled "Reimagining South African Literature" (2014), I argued that most of the attention to the probing question which Leon de Kock asked in 2005, "Does South African Literature Still Exist?," has focused more on the qualifier "South African" than the noun "literature." It remains a powerful question - deceptively simple, but concealing in its formulation several depth charges: questions of literary value; modes of reading; literary historiography; national/transnational identities; translation; readership; institutional location; and so on. In this article, I focus more on the notion of the "literary" in literary studies in universities in South Africa (and elsewhere). It is to me perhaps the most challenging aspect of de Kock's interrogative.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
Misfits in the margins : transgression and transformation on the (South)
African frontier
- Authors: Malvern Van Wyk Smith
  Abstract: The story of the European encounter with Africa includes many liminal characters who mostly play little part in the larger sweep of events but everywhere suggest alternative scenarios that might have developed, or at least discordant readings of what did actually happen. They range from the Khoi interpreter Coree, who was taken to England in 1614, to a group of London women sent to Sierra Leone in the 1790s to marry local slave traders, or from various Cape avatars of Shakespeare's Caliban to several picturesque originals for Defoe's African eccentrics; from early African articulants of African independence and dignity, such as the Prince Naimbanna of Sierra Leone, to many intriguing individuals (both African and European) who emerge from the records of Portuguese shipwrecks along the southern African coast and the sixteenth-century Portuguese penetration of south-east Africa. Nor is the story short on the occasional African Queen and Sable Venus who not only enliven events but at times impact significantly on the developing politics of colonialism.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
Roy Campbell and the cowboy-dandies
- Authors: Alannah Birch
  Abstract: With reference to Roy Campbell's notion of an "equestrian nation", this essay argues that the figure of the cowboy in Campbell's poetry should be read in light of a London cultural scene in the early post-First World War period in which two Modernist performative traditions drew together. The first of these is the energetic celebration of declining "Western" frontiers in popular culture through Western film, Western fiction, and rodeo performances, while the second tradition is that of Anglo-European dandyism. Thus, while Campbell's vision of an equestrian "brotherhood" appears to have colonial roots, I argue that it functions as a generalised ideal, abstracted from a real history of colonialism. Campbell's poetic cowboys are hybrid, labile figures who display spectacular, and apparently redemptive, masculine energy. These figures, I suggest, are emblematic of a Modernist preoccupation, shared with the "dandy-writers" of the nineteenth century, with the place of individual distinction in the face of the levelling effects of bourgeois and democratic social life. I argue that Campbell's hypermasculinist performances, both personal and poetic, should thus be read as dramatising a typically Modernist symbiosis between the figures of the apparently unrefined frontiersman, and the metropolitan sophisticate.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
"The reality of the singular" : anima and unus mundus in Laurens van der
Post's A Story Like the Wind and A Far-Off Place
- Authors: Matthew A. Fike
  Abstract: Laurens van der Post's A Story Like the Wind and A Far-Off Place include a variety of Jungian themes and motifs but dramatize most thoroughly the ways in which the anima mediates between reason and other faculties necessary for wholeness. In the writings of C. G. Jung, the anima is not only the contrasexual in men but also a unifier akin to the unus mundus or unitary world. In the two novels the anima bridges binaries such as reason and intuition and provides an antidote to the twentieth-century malaise arising from loss of the archaic. Although van der Post's work on Jung does not mention the unus mundus, Wind and Place depict not only various connections among matter, psyche, and spirit, but also portray the main characters, François and Nonnie, as a necessary hybrid of European and native African qualities.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
Chains of voices : multiperspectivity and historical 'truth' in three
novels, by André Brink
- Authors: Jochen Petzold
  Abstract: The essay examines three novels by André Brink, A Chain of Voices (1982), Devil's Valley (1998) and Philida (2012), arguing that Brink uses the heteroglossia of various voices and their stories about the past to question and destabilize notions of historical truth. More specifically, the essay suggests that Brink presents an alternative past in A Chain of Voices, deconstructs the very notion of truth in Devil's Valley, but offers a more traditional historical novel in Philida.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
"Hades this place, and I a fugitive shade" : Classical cultures and
languages in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron
- Authors: Gillian Dooley
  Abstract: Mrs Curren, in Coetzee's Age of Iron, is a retired Classics lecturer. Greek and Roman mythology, and Latin and Ancient Greek, are part of her consciousness. Her humanistic, Enlightenment sensibility is shaped by a liberal education which could be regarded as irrelevant in the South Africa of the novel, and which could therefore function as a symbol of the marginalisation of western liberal culture in Africa. Christian and biblical discourses are also important in the novel. Latin, in the form of phrases taken from the Vulgate and the Catholic liturgy as well as from classical texts, is woven through the texture of Mrs Curren's consciousness: her mode of thought and expression tends to the etymological and the allusive. In this paper I will consider the part these two discourses, classical and biblical, seemingly incompatible in some ways and overlapping in others, play in shaping the character of Mrs Curren. I will consider how the Latin language in her internal monologue and speech mediates her interactions with other characters and her reactions to particular events in the novel.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
Herman Charles Bosman : a man of profound contradictions
- Authors: Carol Leff
  Abstract: Herman Charles Bosman is best known for his humorous short stories with signature twist endings. He is less well known for his essays and journalistic writing, which illustrate another side of this enigmatic man. This essay focuses on the paradox that Bosman was (and continues to be) and aims to respond to the following questions: How are we to understand the identity of Herman Charles Bosman? How did he contribute towards an understanding of language and culture in South Africa during his lifetime? Was Bosman consistent in expressing his views through his literary works, or is there evidence of incongruity? These complexities are explored by, first, paying close attention to various biographies on Bosman. His hybrid identity is then illustrated by providing examples of the many pseudonyms he employed over a period of time. This is followed by discussion of several of Bosman's non-fiction pieces, highlighting how contradictions are apparent in his beliefs and philosophy. The essay concludes that Bosman vacillated in both his writing and his beliefs, and was indeed a man of contradictions.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
Collecting darkness, scattering light : the poetry and presence of Don
Maclennan : review article
- Authors: P.R. Anderson
  Abstract: Don Maclennan, who died in 2009, has been extraordinarily well-served in the labours of those who loved and admired him and have now brought these two books before the public they deserve. The Collected Poems gathers together the 21 published volumes, with a few additions and subtractions of little consequence to the project of the book, which aims at a summary statement rather than an archival compendium. Besides, Maclennan was a poet of immediacies, so he would prefer a poem to be abroad in the world than festering in a drawer; this means that he brought his poems to readiness and completion, and before a public, without haste but with the promptitude of a good correspondent or bookkeeper. Certainly this is the evidence of the rate and tidiness of his later books. His reckonings (Reckonings is the title of a 1983 volume) are swift and exact, and both inwardly and outwardly leave little in the way of an untidy horde of till-slips, for either reader or editor. So, at any rate, is the impression that Wylie gives of his editorial burden, and, for now at any rate, this is more than sufficient.
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
J. M. Coetzee : Two Screenplays, Hermann Wittenberg (Ed.) : review
- Authors: Eckard Smuts
  Abstract: J. M. Coetzee, arguably one of the finest prose writers working in English, has not always had encouraging things to say about the business of screenwriting. Thus, in an essay on the life of William Faulkner, Coetzee remarks on the financial burdens - chief among them the burden of having to support an extended family circle, swollen by any number of hangers-on - that led Faulkner to squander his literary talents, first by writing short stories for popular magazines, and then, between 1932 and 1945, by writing screenplays for Hollywood. Some of the short stories could still be salvaged and reworked into novels, but that the years Faulkner spent writing film scripts were artistically a waste of time there is, for Coetzee, no doubt. We learn that Faulkner had "no gift for putting together snappy dialogue" and that nothing he wrote for the movies "proved worth rescuing" ("William Faulkner" 195). By far the most alarming aspect of Faulkner's Hollywood career, however, is the possibility that writing films could have had "a bad effect on his prose" (195).
  PubDate: 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z