Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.2979/ral.2023.a905372
Ellen A. Ahlness
Reviewed by: And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism by Barbara Boswell Ellen A. Ahlness And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism BY BARBARA BOSWELL Wits UP, 2020. xix + 229 pp. ISBN 9781776146185 paper. In Gcina Mhlophe’s short story, “The Toilet,” a young woman living under the dehumanizing and brutal conditions of apartheid struggles to pursue her drive for writing poetry. She discovers a toilet in a park that is for whites only and goes on to turn this segregated space into a sanctuary for her to work on her poetry. While she temporarily finds safety and privacy in her new haven, the victory does not last long; she later returns to her newfound space to find the toilet locked, her access barred. From this short story, Barbara Boswell takes her own text’s title: upon losing access, the protagonist of the short story defiantly heads to a bench and writes her story anyway. The determination captured within this line well-articulates the underlying drive that Boswell seems compelled to capture in her analysis of ten black women fiction writers. Throughout the book, Boswell seems driven to challenge the reduction of women, minority, and intersectional authors to genre writers—those whose powerful stories are nonetheless reduced to context-informed products—to develop in readers a greater appreciation for the worlds created within and across their published works. Depending on readers’ familiarity with South African writers, the discussed authors—Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Zoë Wicomb, Sindiwe Magona, Bessie Head, Gcina Mhlophe, Yvette Christiansë, Rayda Jacobs, Kagiso Lesego Molope, and Zukiswa Wanner—may or may not be of high familiarity. Regardless of readers’ own familiarity, Boswell defends her position in discussing this varied selection of women: each represents some kind of “first” in literary history in the South African context and consequently has a unique influence on their political, social, and national landscapes. Yet even coming from the South African context, their impact is not bound by borders; their influence, Boswell positions, is also felt globally as seminal works developed from 1975 to 2012. [End Page 182] And Wrote My Story Anyway evolved out of Boswell’s PhD thesis, driven by a personal and intellectual curiosity: why did she, even as a literary scholar, see and know so few works of fiction by black women writers? This inquiry led to a deeper investigation of the structural conditions that cumulate to work against black women who would be published. The driving question that informs the book’s structure is a query into what can be learned: what can we—as readers, researchers, and scholars—learn from black women, who represent some of those most negatively impacted by apartheid and the legacy of colonialism? Boswell considers literary work as a theoretical body that suggests a direction for developing the foundations and premise
{"title":"And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism by Barbara Boswell (review)","authors":"Ellen A. Ahlness","doi":"10.2979/ral.2023.a905372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/ral.2023.a905372","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism by Barbara Boswell Ellen A. Ahlness And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism BY BARBARA BOSWELL Wits UP, 2020. xix + 229 pp. ISBN 9781776146185 paper. In Gcina Mhlophe’s short story, “The Toilet,” a young woman living under the dehumanizing and brutal conditions of apartheid struggles to pursue her drive for writing poetry. She discovers a toilet in a park that is for whites only and goes on to turn this segregated space into a sanctuary for her to work on her poetry. While she temporarily finds safety and privacy in her new haven, the victory does not last long; she later returns to her newfound space to find the toilet locked, her access barred. From this short story, Barbara Boswell takes her own text’s title: upon losing access, the protagonist of the short story defiantly heads to a bench and writes her story anyway. The determination captured within this line well-articulates the underlying drive that Boswell seems compelled to capture in her analysis of ten black women fiction writers. Throughout the book, Boswell seems driven to challenge the reduction of women, minority, and intersectional authors to genre writers—those whose powerful stories are nonetheless reduced to context-informed products—to develop in readers a greater appreciation for the worlds created within and across their published works. Depending on readers’ familiarity with South African writers, the discussed authors—Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Zoë Wicomb, Sindiwe Magona, Bessie Head, Gcina Mhlophe, Yvette Christiansë, Rayda Jacobs, Kagiso Lesego Molope, and Zukiswa Wanner—may or may not be of high familiarity. Regardless of readers’ own familiarity, Boswell defends her position in discussing this varied selection of women: each represents some kind of “first” in literary history in the South African context and consequently has a unique influence on their political, social, and national landscapes. Yet even coming from the South African context, their impact is not bound by borders; their influence, Boswell positions, is also felt globally as seminal works developed from 1975 to 2012. [End Page 182] And Wrote My Story Anyway evolved out of Boswell’s PhD thesis, driven by a personal and intellectual curiosity: why did she, even as a literary scholar, see and know so few works of fiction by black women writers? This inquiry led to a deeper investigation of the structural conditions that cumulate to work against black women who would be published. The driving question that informs the book’s structure is a query into what can be learned: what can we—as readers, researchers, and scholars—learn from black women, who represent some of those most negatively impacted by apartheid and the legacy of colonialism? Boswell considers literary work as a theoretical body that suggests a direction for developing the foundations and premise","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"110 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.06
Kazeem Adebiyi-Adelabu
ABSTRACT: This article examines how Remi Raji, a third-generation Nigerian poet, reenacts the social pains and “dis-eases” of the military dictatorship era in Nigeria in A Harvest of Laughters as traumatogenic, as well as how the poet writes himself out of the trauma. While the article espouses the extant critical notion that the poet offers laughter to the victims of structural violence, social pains, and “dis-eases” of the military rule era in the country as a balm, it complicates the view by arguing that the poet’s versification in the volume and, more importantly, his infatuated exploration of laughter is readable as scriptotherapy. The poems titled “Introit,” “I rise now,” “Gift,” “Black Laughter,” “Silence,” “Silence II,” “Orphan Cry”, and “Harvest I–VI” are used to demonstrate this. The analysis draws anchor from Laura Brown’s and Stef Craps’s conceptions of trauma and Geri Chavis’s and some other psychological therapists’ insights on writing and therapy.
摘要:本文探讨了尼日利亚第三代诗人雷米·拉吉在《笑声的收获》中如何再现尼日利亚军事独裁时代的社会痛苦和“疾病”，以及诗人如何从创伤中走出。虽然这篇文章支持现存的批评观点，即诗人为该国军事统治时代的结构性暴力、社会痛苦和“疾病”的受害者提供笑声作为一种安慰，但它认为诗人在书中的诗句，更重要的是，他对笑声的迷恋探索是可读的剧本疗法，从而使观点复杂化。《Introit》、《我现在站起来》、《Gift》、《黑色的笑声》、《Silence》、《Silence II》、《Orphan Cry》、《Harvest I - vi》等诗都是为了说明这一点。这一分析从劳拉·布朗和斯蒂夫·克拉普斯对创伤的概念，以及杰里·查维斯和其他一些心理治疗师对写作和治疗的见解中汲取灵感。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.11
Hugo Salas
ABSTRACT: On account of her particular reading of surrealism, this essay contends that Suzanne Césaire’s intellectual production is best understood not as heralding later strains of thought (such as Glissant’s or ecocriticism), but as part of the diverse practices of critical theory contemporary to her. To support this thesis, this article studies the coincidences and differences between her ideas on the notion of mimicry and those of Roger Callois, leading to a more complex understanding of her cardinal notion of camouflage.
{"title":"The Dead End of Representation: Suzanne Césaire Discusses Roger Caillois","authors":"Hugo Salas","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.11","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: On account of her particular reading of surrealism, this essay contends that Suzanne Césaire’s intellectual production is best understood not as heralding later strains of thought (such as Glissant’s or ecocriticism), but as part of the diverse practices of critical theory contemporary to her. To support this thesis, this article studies the coincidences and differences between her ideas on the notion of mimicry and those of Roger Callois, leading to a more complex understanding of her cardinal notion of camouflage.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"93 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136208931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.1.03
C. Thurman
ABSTRACT:The mine dump, long a useful metonym for South African writers, has receded from view in "Johannesburg fiction" of recent years. By contrast, in the visual arts, there has been a burgeoning of renewed engagement with mines and mine dumps. Does this tell us something about representation, and the unrepresentable, in these different creative forms? Mine dumps, urban mountains, are related to histories of oppression, to ongoing economic inequality, and to environmental degradation, but they are still visually impressive. For about a decade, South African novelists have tended to avoid this paradox. One might extrapolate such a trend to suggest that, while in the visual arts there is some level of continuity—the continuation of a tradition—when it comes to fiction there has been a rupture, or at least a disruption. Is it that mine dumps are too familiar, that it has become impossible to avoid cliché in literary evocations of them? Or is the rupture to some degree coterminous with the Marikana massacre of 2012? Marikana has been the subject of essays, poems, long form journalism, and nonfiction books, as well as documentary films, music, and theater. But it has not substantially or explicitly found its way into literary fiction. Like the artificial mine-mountains of the reef, Marikana's natural "mountain," Wonderkop, seems to remain out of the immediate purview of contemporary fiction. While Marikana might mark the end of one phase and the beginning of another in South African literary production, it is not (as yet) encompassed by or taken account of in the country's fiction.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.1.04
A. van der Vlies
ABSTRACT:The creative and critical work of the South African-born, Scottish-resident writer and public intellectual Zoë Wicomb (b. 1948) has spanned the sociocultural epochs we now label "transitional," "post-transitional," and perhaps even "post-post-transitional" in South African literary historiography. Her work has repeatedly explored collective political inheritances refracted through the consciousness of characters who are writers (or writers manqué), from Frieda in the linked stories of her debut, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), to the academic Mercia Murray in October (2014), via the unnamed narrator-amanuensis of David's Story (2000) and several writer-characters in the stories collected in The One That Got Away (2008). Wicomb's fictions repeatedly cast projects of writing as problematically complicit acts of witnessing that require readers to consider what is occluded from foundational narratives—whether these be racial or ethnic, parochial or cosmopolitan, or even anti- or decolonial. The author's range of reference has always looked to the future and beyond the borders of South Africa, as much for the trajectories of her characters as for the intertextual allusions with which the works engage. Wicomb's most recent novel, Still Life (2020), revisits many of these preoccupations, although predictably with a twist.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.1.08
Minesh Dass
ABSTRACT:Thando Mgqolozana's Unimportance traces one night in the life of a student on the verge of being elected Student Representative Council (SRC) president of the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Troublingly, though, the protagonist, Zizi, has physically and verbally abused his girlfriend, Pamodi, and he now fears the imminent revelation of this news. But through the course of one night, Zizi undergoes a seemingly dramatic transformation. Where for much of the narrative he is willing to go to great lengths to ensure that what he has done to Pamodi is not revealed to others, by the end of the story he himself discloses his actions to the student body in the form of a speech. He does so because he comes to the conclusion that he lacks integrity and must act to restore it in himself, even if it costs him his political career. In order to do so, Zizi will renounce the "spectacular" political world for the "ordinary" world of people. In this article, I explore the complexity of the vision of renewal (of Zizi and more broadly of South African politics) that Zizi provides and argue that his development is fundamentally flawed because it is premised on the notion of a personal sense of self that is separate and distinct from the social order. I therefore show that it is inevitable that his change of character does not correlate with a meaningful alteration of his relationship to and ideas on women. Instead, I contend that the novel actually is quite critical of Zizi's so-called transformation precisely because of its limited invocation of responsibility. By way of contrast, I discuss the #RememberKhwezi protest of 2016 and focus on the ways in which it confronted then-President Jacob Zuma, his party, and the wider South African public with their complicity with gender-based violence. What most interests me, finally, is the potential of a South African literature that, like Unimportance, moves beyond ideas of personal culpability and agency in order to explore power and its effects in complex and transformative ways.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.1.05
J. Remmington
ABSTRACT:This article shines a spotlight on the 21st-century growth of published travel books and blogs by black South Africans, with a focus on the 2013–20 period. It concerns itself with the publication of black South African travelogues of various kinds during the tumultuous post-transition years of the century's second decade, marked in extremis by the Marikana massacre. The period gave rise to diverse black literary-cultural forms, including travel texts with their spatial explorations and searching meditations. Through a survey of popular black post-2012 travelogues, many by women, I explore how the texts pursue spatial horizons and probe the parameters of the nation, continent, and world. The article engages with South Africa's heightened historical and contemporary contexts of racialized mobility and border tightening against which to examine impetuses and articulations of boundary-traversing black travel. Its dual focus is on travelogues that venture across the African continent and on those that cover the length and breadth of South Africa, if taking in some trips beyond. It engages with works by Sihle Khumalo, Zukiswa Wanner, Lerato Mogoatlhe, Niq Mhlongo, Lesego Malepe, Fikile Hlatshwayo, and the Black Project Children of Post-Apartheid South Africa collective. On one level, the travelogues are concerned with claiming the map and the page, centering black travel subjectivities. On another level, the texts evaluate and calibrate the extent to which post-apartheid, post-Marikana South Africa has "traveled" in relation to its fraught past and how it is faring in relation to imagined futures. As the travelogues reach and breach South Africa's borders, they draw on senses of distance—spatial and temporal—to reflect on individual lives, national trajectories, and considerations beyond. The article thus attends to how the travelogues explore what black South African freedoms mean, what it is to be black and on the move in 21st-century contexts, and how questions of the nation and other identifications push and pull in space, as well as in time. In sum, the article argues that the travelogues test concepts of freedom through negotiating and narrating mobility in and beyond contemporary South Africa with all its instabilities, contradictions, and hopes.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.1.02
Sikhumbuzo Mngadi
ABSTRACT:Recent studies of contemporary South African writing have remarked on the challenges that have come with naming the time and place, and thus the interpretive framework, in which this writing could be situated today. In part, this is because the past remains the point of reference and the foundational moment for both the writing and the studies of it in the present. Moreover, it is not a singular and absolute past that has shaped the present, but a multiplicity of contending senses of the past. Another reason for the challenge could lie in the nature of the time itself, in its relation to space and events. This is especially so when the time seems, as Hamlet says of his own time, "out of joint" (Hamlet, 1.5.195–96). Besides marking particular historical sensibilities and trajectories—they are all conspicuous by their sense of time as moving inexorably forward, even though what has actually been said about South African literature under these terms suggests a more complex reality—the terms "post-apartheid," "transition," "post-transition," "post-post-apartheid," "post-anti-apartheid," "post-Marikana," and others that have served at various times to give the present shape and meaning are indicative of the groping for fitting calibrations of our times. Nevertheless, they have had something to say about what is otherwise a "dizzyingly heterogeneous corpus" of "postapartheid South African literature" (de Kock 1).
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Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.1.10
R. Fasselt
ABSTRACT:Migration has never before occupied such a prominent place in African cultural production as it does today. Yet, notwithstanding an increasing focus on intra-African migration in the social sciences, literary migration scholarship has largely focused on African migration to the West, as the growing body of studies on outward-oriented Afropolitan migration novels indicates. In this paper, I examine how the Afropolitan consciousness that structures South-North migration novels is reframed in literature of continental migration and mobility in post-Marikana South Africa. While the themes of xenophobia and migration have emerged as central preoccupations in South African literature from the early 2000s onward, there has been a shift in literary production more recently with the publication of a range of works by African diasporic writers in South Africa. Drawing on Ekow Duker's Yellowbone (2019), Rémy Ngamije's The Eternal Audience of One (2019), and Sue Nyathi's The Gold Diggers (2018), I argue that these texts interrogate South Africa's complex relationship to "Africanness" and forge new pathways for continental dialogue that allow us to resituate South African-based writing within larger debates in contemporary African literary studies. This category of intra-African diasporic fiction calls into question simplifying binaries of outward, Western-oriented African writing and locally produced popular, yet internationally disregarded, texts (Harris). Rather, it scrutinizes the idea of "Africa" in global literary circuits from the position of intra-African diasporic subjectivities. Drawing attention to the long history of intra-African mobilities, the cross-continental thrust in many of these works also productively speaks to recent scholarly efforts to reframe migration studies in ways that insist on the de-exceptionalization of migration and the breakdown of binary formulations of migrant and non-migrant identities.
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Pub Date : 2022-08-15DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.01
O. Ogede
ABSTRACT:Ayi Kwei Armah levels some very serious and unfounded allegations against me in his The Eloquence of the Scribes pertaining to my request for permission to quote from his novels in my critical study of his writing while it was in production at Heinemann's USA station. As my side of the story of that ordeal will reveal, the reasons he gives for denying my petition for permission clearance are puzzling, but one thing is certain: he wants, and quite needlessly so, to place me, an innocent academic, at the center of his stormy royalty disputes with his British publisher.
{"title":"The Other/Missing Side to the Botched Permissions Request Story Characterized in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Eloquence of the Scribes: Veiled Censorship Attempt, Unreasonableness, Inflexibility, and Lack of Magnanimity Writ Large","authors":"O. Ogede","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.01","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Ayi Kwei Armah levels some very serious and unfounded allegations against me in his The Eloquence of the Scribes pertaining to my request for permission to quote from his novels in my critical study of his writing while it was in production at Heinemann's USA station. As my side of the story of that ordeal will reveal, the reasons he gives for denying my petition for permission clearance are puzzling, but one thing is certain: he wants, and quite needlessly so, to place me, an innocent academic, at the center of his stormy royalty disputes with his British publisher.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"1 - 11"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43044749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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