Part literary history, part cultural study, Grounds of Engagement examines the relationships and exchanges between black South African and African American writers who sought to create common ground ...throughout the antiapartheid era. Stéphane Robolin argues that the authors' geographic imaginations crucially defined their individual interactions and, ultimately, the literary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Subject to the tyranny of segregation, authors such as Richard Wright, Bessie Head, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Michelle Cliff, and Richard Rive charted their racialized landscapes and invented freer alternative geographies. They crafted rich representations of place to challenge the stark social and spatial arrangements that framed their lives. Those representations, Robolin contends, also articulated their desires for black transnational belonging and political solidarity. The first book to examine U.S. and South African literary exchanges in spatial terms, Grounds of Engagement identifies key moments in the understudied history of black cross-cultural exchange and exposes how geography serves as an indispensable means of shaping and reshaping modern racial meaning.
This book is an intellectual history that uses Am lcar Cabral's theory of the "return to the source," to examine Sol Plaatje's Mhudi, B.W. Vilakazi's poetry, and A.C. Jordan's The Wrath of the ...Ancestors within the broader context of African cultural nationalisms in the early twentieth century African Atlantic World. It shows the development of the idea of African equality with Whites in the face of prevailing ideas of White supremacy during Union-era South Africa. These authors were part of the New African Movement, which was one of eight literary movements among Africans and peoples of African descent in the Americas between 1915 and 1945, including the Harlem Renaissance, N gritude, Claridade in Cape Verde, and similar movements in Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, and Belize. The text presents new models for interpreting Union-era African literature, and recasts understanding of the nature of interactions between Africans and Europeans, including Western Syphilization, Chiral Interdiscursivity, and the relationship between history and memory informed by a neurobiological analysis of memory.
After apartheid, South Africa established a celebrated new political order that imagined the postcolonial nation as belonging equally to the descendents of indigenous people, colonizing settlers, ...transported slaves, indentured laborers, and immigrants. Its constitution, adopted in 1996, was the first in the world to include gays and lesbians as full citizens. Brenna M. Munro examines the stories that were told about sexuality, race, and nation throughout the struggle against apartheid in order to uncover how these narratives ultimately enabled gay people to become imaginable as fellow citizens. She also traces how the gay, lesbian, or bisexual person appeared as a stock character in the pageant of nationhood during the transition to democracy. In the process, she offers an alternative cultural history of South Africa. Munro asserts that the inclusion of gay people made South Africans feel "modern"-at least for a while. Being gay or being lesbian was reimagined in the 1990s as distinctly South African, but the "newness" that made these sexualities apt symbols for a transformed nation can also be understood as foreign and un-African. Indeed, a Western-style gay identity is often interpreted through the formula "gay equals modernity equals capitalism." As South Africa's reentrance into the global economy has failed to bring prosperity to the majority of its citizens, homophobic violence has been on the rise. Employing a wide array of texts-including prison memoirs, poetry, plays, television shows, photography, political speeches, and the postapartheid writings of Nobel Laureates Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee-Munro reports on how contemporary queer activists and artists are declining to remain ambassadors for the "rainbow nation" and refusing to become scapegoats for the perceived failures of liberation and liberalism.
Relations and Networks in South African Indian Writing explores recent writing by a variety of South African authors of Indian descent. The essays highlight the sociality and patterns of ...connectedness that are being forged between South Africa's hitherto divided communities.
More than a million black South African women are domestic workers. These nannies, housekeepers and chars continue to occupy a central place in in postapartheid society. But it is an ambivalent ...position. Precariously situated between urban and rural areas, rich and poor, white and black, these women are at once intimately connected and at a distant remove from the families they serve. 'Like family' they may be, but they and their employers know they can never be real family. Ena Jansen shows that domestic worker relations in South Africa were shaped by the institution of slavery at the Cape. This established social hierarchies and patterns of behaviour and interaction that persist to the present day, and are still evident in the predicament of the black female domestic worker. To support her argument, Jansen examines the representation of domestic workers in a diverse range of texts in English and Afrikaans. Authors include André Brink, JM Coetzee, Imraan Coovadia, Nadine Gordimer, Elsa Joubert, Antjie Krog, Sindiwe Magona, Kopano Matlwa, Es'kia Mphahlele, Sisonke Msimang, Zukiswa Wanner and Zoë Wicomb. Later texts by black authors offer wry and subversive insights into the madam/maid nexus, capturing paradoxes relating to shifting power relationships. Like Family is an updated version of the award-winning Soos familie published in 2015 and the highly-acclaimed 2016 Dutch translation, Bijna familie.
Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this book asks the question: how has contemporary South African literature grappled with ideas of time and history during the political transition ...away from apartheid? Reading the work of major South African writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Ivan Vladislavic as well as contemporary crime and science fiction, South African Writing in Transition explores how concerns about time and temporality have shaped literary form across the country's literary culture. Establishing new connections between leading literary voices and lesser known works, the book explores themes of truth and reconciliation, disappointment and betrayal.
This book contributes to the study of South African literature, offering readings of writers such as Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, and Mda. Focusing on the relationship between place, ...subjectivity, and literary form, the study examines our understanding of apartheid as a geographical form of control, and of its imagined and actual transformation.
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