Various branches of current ecocriticism are exploring ways of dismantling or at least diminishing dominant anthropocentric ways of evaluating the relationships among humans, the non-human world, and the literary imagination. Critical Animal Studies, Critical Plant Studies, and multispecies ecocriticism endeavour to re-evaluate the roles, even agency, of non-human life, as represented in literary works. This article unpacks the depiction of plants in three early South African travelogues (1795–1836), illuminating the sources of some enduring assumptions and iconic imageries in our relations with the natural world.
{"title":"“A Sort of Arcadian Country”: Plant-Life in Some Early South African Travelogues","authors":"D. Wylie","doi":"10.4314/eia.v50i1.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v50i1.1","url":null,"abstract":"Various branches of current ecocriticism are exploring ways of dismantling or at least diminishing dominant anthropocentric ways of evaluating the relationships among humans, the non-human world, and the literary imagination. Critical Animal Studies, Critical Plant Studies, and multispecies ecocriticism endeavour to re-evaluate the roles, even agency, of non-human life, as represented in literary works. This article unpacks the depiction of plants in three early South African travelogues (1795–1836), illuminating the sources of some enduring assumptions and iconic imageries in our relations with the natural world.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48549860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, I discuss the mixture of English and Afrikaans that Jolyn Phillips employs in her short story collection, Tjieng Tjang Tjerries, to capture a sense of the idiom and the lived realities of the coloured fishing community of Gansbaai in the Western Cape. In addition, I locate the collection within a tradition of short story sequences by women writers from marginalized groups, and focus on the ways in which the interlinked narratives it contains emphasize the notion that personal identity, community and place are inextricably connected. Ultimately, I maintain that, despite the bleak socioeconomic circumstances, alcoholism and abuse that Phillips depicts in many of the stories, the dominant tone of the collection is not one of disenchantment with contemporary South African realities. This is because of the gentleness and affection with which Phillips treats her subjects, and the gleeful brand of raunchily direct humour she injects into her stories.
{"title":"“Writing Home”: Storytelling as Cultural Translation in Jolyn Phillips’s ,i>Tjieng Tjang Tjerries","authors":"Sue Marais","doi":"10.4314/eia.v50i1.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v50i1.5","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I discuss the mixture of English and Afrikaans that Jolyn Phillips employs in her short story collection, Tjieng Tjang Tjerries, to capture a sense of the idiom and the lived realities of the coloured fishing community of Gansbaai in the Western Cape. In addition, I locate the collection within a tradition of short story sequences by women writers from marginalized groups, and focus on the ways in which the interlinked narratives it contains emphasize the notion that personal identity, community and place are inextricably connected. Ultimately, I maintain that, despite the bleak socioeconomic circumstances, alcoholism and abuse that Phillips depicts in many of the stories, the dominant tone of the collection is not one of disenchantment with contemporary South African realities. This is because of the gentleness and affection with which Phillips treats her subjects, and the gleeful brand of raunchily direct humour she injects into her stories.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47912015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Journey (1991) is a virtually unknown “struggle” novel by Frank Anthony (d. 1993), a senior member of the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), who was incarcerated on Robben Island for six years. The novel and its author have been elided from South African history as a racialized literary establishment and the defensiveness of the resistance organization of which he was a member reinforced each other in tacit censorship. Anthony’s novel presents revealing insights into the repression of the personal in the anti-apartheid movement, which reflected the “liquidation” of love in leftist discourse of the period. The importance of love, especially romantic love– the highly volatile emotion which is often boundary-breaking and radically transformative–has been recognized in contemporary postMarxism and critical race theory. Blindness to the potential of love in dominant struggle politics is reflected in the protagonist of The Journey, whose passion for social justice leads, paradoxically, to repression of the empowerment and emancipation of self(lessness) through other(s), enabled by eros.
{"title":"The Road Not Travelled: Tracking Love in Frank Anthony’s The Journey: The Revolutionary Anguish of Comrade B","authors":"F. F. Moolla","doi":"10.4314/eia.v50i1.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v50i1.4","url":null,"abstract":"The Journey (1991) is a virtually unknown “struggle” novel by Frank Anthony (d. 1993), a senior member of the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), who was incarcerated on Robben Island for six years. The novel and its author have been elided from South African history as a racialized literary establishment and the defensiveness of the resistance organization of which he was a member reinforced each other in tacit censorship. Anthony’s novel presents revealing insights into the repression of the personal in the anti-apartheid movement, which reflected the “liquidation” of love in leftist discourse of the period. The importance of love, especially romantic love– the highly volatile emotion which is often boundary-breaking and radically transformative–has been recognized in contemporary postMarxism and critical race theory. Blindness to the potential of love in dominant struggle politics is reflected in the protagonist of The Journey, whose passion for social justice leads, paradoxically, to repression of the empowerment and emancipation of self(lessness) through other(s), enabled by eros. ","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"51 41","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41244233","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Through a self-reflexive mode, this essay explores a set of reading experiences using Italo Calvino’s perspectives on reading classics, and Tony Bennett’s theorisation of reading formations. Calvino prioritises the text as a stable object with inherent capacity to generate different reading experiences, while Bennett insists on the text’s multiplicity. What is clear from both scholars is that reading is a highly contested practice: who reads, what they read, when they read, how they read, what meanings they derive from reading, what meanings they should or shouldn’t derive from reading are concerns that have historically swirled around reading, in many cultural contexts. In this essay, I offer snapshots of the patterns these concerns have taken in my reading experience as a variously untutored, tutored, youthful and adult reader in Kenya and South Africa; both locations being discursively laden with ideological views on literature and its political labour. The essay surfaces the contradictions that flow through the English and Kiswahili narratives I read, their enmeshment in these ideological contestations and their imprint on my reading experiences across the tutored-untutored continuum.
{"title":"Reading relations: Kenya and South Africa","authors":"G. Musila","doi":"10.4314/eia.v49i3.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v49i3.5","url":null,"abstract":"Through a self-reflexive mode, this essay explores a set of reading experiences using Italo Calvino’s perspectives on reading classics, and Tony Bennett’s theorisation of reading formations. Calvino prioritises the text as a stable object with inherent capacity to generate different reading experiences, while Bennett insists on the text’s multiplicity. What is clear from both scholars is that reading is a highly contested practice: who reads, what they read, when they read, how they read, what meanings they derive from reading, what meanings they should or shouldn’t derive from reading are concerns that have historically swirled around reading, in many cultural contexts. In this essay, I offer snapshots of the patterns these concerns have taken in my reading experience as a variously untutored, tutored, youthful and adult reader in Kenya and South Africa; both locations being discursively laden with ideological views on literature and its political labour. The essay surfaces the contradictions that flow through the English and Kiswahili narratives I read, their enmeshment in these ideological contestations and their imprint on my reading experiences across the tutored-untutored continuum.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45358592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this essay I explore how my reading of Homer has shaped my novels, The Broken River Tent (2018) and The Wanderers (2021). I reflect on the making of Nguni literature in relation to oral histories and stories. Engaging debates about language and colonialism, in conversation with writers such as James Joyce and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, I argue that it is possible for someone with a good grasp of isiXhosa as a living language and culture to transfer it through other languages. This essay offers a passionate argument for a reading of the classics for wonderfully strange affinities.
在这篇文章中，我探讨了我对荷马史诗的阅读是如何影响我的小说《断河帐篷》(2018)和《流浪者》(2021)的。我反思了恩古尼文学与口述历史和故事的关系。参与关于语言和殖民主义的辩论，在与詹姆斯·乔伊斯(James Joyce)和Ngugi wa Thiong 'o等作家的对话中，我认为，一个很好地掌握了伊西科萨语作为一种活的语言和文化的人，是有可能通过其他语言将其转移的。这篇文章为阅读经典作品提供了一个充满激情的论点，以获得奇妙的亲和力。
{"title":"Reading Homer and the Nguni novel","authors":"Mphuthumi Ntabeni","doi":"10.4314/eia.v49i3.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v49i3.7","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay I explore how my reading of Homer has shaped my novels, The Broken River Tent (2018) and The Wanderers (2021). I reflect on the making of Nguni literature in relation to oral histories and stories. Engaging debates about language and colonialism, in conversation with writers such as James Joyce and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, I argue that it is possible for someone with a good grasp of isiXhosa as a living language and culture to transfer it through other languages. This essay offers a passionate argument for a reading of the classics for wonderfully strange affinities.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46213986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy1 is remarkable for its depth and groundedness, and this has established The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as classics, although their place is still being defined. Tolkien’s work continues to offer new pleasures as it is re-read. Things that give me special pleasure range from individual phrases to the intertextual engagement of Tolkien’s fantasy with older motifs: these idiosyncratic pleasures appear to derive from the text itself and its participation in a tradition of textual influence, so that, for me, the pleasure is independent of where one reads Tolkien.2 University teaching of English literature should equip students to cope with literature that is not of their own place and time. Within the South African academy, we should not be seduced into reading only contemporary literature from Africa, or reading only according to the tenets of postcolonialism. Twentieth-century fantasy should be accessible to students independently of their background, because it is inherently and deliberately different from ordinary reality. However, when I have had the pleasure and privilege of guiding students writing on Tolkien’s work, I have found that their responses to it are enriched if they are equipped to read works that are older or in some way other. Tolkien’s classic fantasy is a source of pleasure in many ways, and this delight and discovery is not and should not be limited to readers from certain backgrounds only.
{"title":"There and back again”: Reading Tolkien’s fantasy in South Africa","authors":"Michèle Du Plessis-Hay","doi":"10.4314/eia.v49i3.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v49i3.6","url":null,"abstract":"J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy1 is remarkable for its depth and groundedness, and this has established The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as classics, although their place is still being defined. Tolkien’s work continues to offer new pleasures as it is re-read. Things that give me special pleasure range from individual phrases to the intertextual engagement of Tolkien’s fantasy with older motifs: these idiosyncratic pleasures appear to derive from the text itself and its participation in a tradition of textual influence, so that, for me, the pleasure is independent of where one reads Tolkien.2 University teaching of English literature should equip students to cope with literature that is not of their own place and time. Within the South African academy, we should not be seduced into reading only contemporary literature from Africa, or reading only according to the tenets of postcolonialism. Twentieth-century fantasy should be accessible to students independently of their background, because it is inherently and deliberately different from ordinary reality. However, when I have had the pleasure and privilege of guiding students writing on Tolkien’s work, I have found that their responses to it are enriched if they are equipped to read works that are older or in some way other. Tolkien’s classic fantasy is a source of pleasure in many ways, and this delight and discovery is not and should not be limited to readers from certain backgrounds only.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42090497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay critically responds to recent calls to decolonise the classics. In rejecting claims about the inherent value of certain literary works, I unravel my socially situated reading and responses, and therefore counter assumptions that literary value or acts of reading can be universalised. I reflect on personal encounters with Jane Austen’s novels and Emily Dickinson’s poetry, demonstrating how this generated my cognitive, sensory and imaginative growth. Analysed memories of discovering and first reading particular works are connected to a critique of prescriptive decolonial discourse. The essay illustrates this by focusing on readers’ embodied encounters with certain books, affective responses and heterogeneous subject positions. These can lead to their finding emotionally satisfying, edifying and inspirational meanings – irrespective of the historical, geopolitical or cultural worlds delineated by the works’ authors.
{"title":"Reading Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson: A Personal essay","authors":"Desiree Lewis","doi":"10.4314/eia.v49i3.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v49i3.2","url":null,"abstract":"This essay critically responds to recent calls to decolonise the classics. In rejecting claims about the inherent value of certain literary works, I unravel my socially situated reading and responses, and therefore counter assumptions that literary value or acts of reading can be universalised. I reflect on personal encounters with Jane Austen’s novels and Emily Dickinson’s poetry, demonstrating how this generated my cognitive, sensory and imaginative growth. Analysed memories of discovering and first reading particular works are connected to a critique of prescriptive decolonial discourse. The essay illustrates this by focusing on readers’ embodied encounters with certain books, affective responses and heterogeneous subject positions. These can lead to their finding emotionally satisfying, edifying and inspirational meanings – irrespective of the historical, geopolitical or cultural worlds delineated by the works’ authors.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44389517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Encountering an old story in a reimagined way is sometimes deliberately more unsettling than pleasurably familiar in its new guise. A case in point is a recent revisioning of Sophocles’ Antigone, arguably the most frequently recalled story from the classical canon, which has seen several local iterations over time – most notably in The Island by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona (1973). The focus here is how the re-enactment of the Antigone story, Antigone (not quite/quiet) at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in 2019, produced as part of a project on Re-imagining Tragedy in the Global South, generates a multi-layered reading experience within the affect-laden and communal atmosphere of a live performance event. Reading here encompasses several dimensions: apart from reading the re-envisioned performative response in relation to its much-translated ‘original’ version, there is the experience of reading as an embodied, affective encounter in the context of the live performance event. In addition, this invites a process of reading around classic texts, which as I argue, can revitalise the intersections between current and apparently forgotten texts in one’s own reading history. In reflecting on Antigone (not quite/quiet) for instance, in relation to the contemporary need for ‘stark fictions’ of the past in developing an ethics of responsibility, I was struck by an unbidden recollection of Thomas Hardy’s preoccupation with tragedy in late nineteenth-century Victorian England. As I shall show, Hardy’s frequent rebuttals in response to often somewhat dismissive accusations of his over-determined pessimism reveal his foresight in understanding the necessity of a tragic sensibility, which in hindsight now makes sense ‘differently’ and even anticipates some current debates on the revelatory and critically urgent aspects of a tragic consciousness.
{"title":"Antigone’s return: When a once-told story is not enough","authors":"Miki Flockemann","doi":"10.4314/eia.v49i3.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v49i3.4","url":null,"abstract":"Encountering an old story in a reimagined way is sometimes deliberately more unsettling than pleasurably familiar in its new guise. A case in point is a recent revisioning of Sophocles’ Antigone, arguably the most frequently recalled story from the classical canon, which has seen several local iterations over time – most notably in The Island by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona (1973). The focus here is how the re-enactment of the Antigone story, Antigone (not quite/quiet) at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in 2019, produced as part of a project on Re-imagining Tragedy in the Global South, generates a multi-layered reading experience within the affect-laden and communal atmosphere of a live performance event. Reading here encompasses several dimensions: apart from reading the re-envisioned performative response in relation to its much-translated ‘original’ version, there is the experience of reading as an embodied, affective encounter in the context of the live performance event. In addition, this invites a process of reading around classic texts, which as I argue, can revitalise the intersections between current and apparently forgotten texts in one’s own reading history. In reflecting on Antigone (not quite/quiet) for instance, in relation to the contemporary need for ‘stark fictions’ of the past in developing an ethics of responsibility, I was struck by an unbidden recollection of Thomas Hardy’s preoccupation with tragedy in late nineteenth-century Victorian England. As I shall show, Hardy’s frequent rebuttals in response to often somewhat dismissive accusations of his over-determined pessimism reveal his foresight in understanding the necessity of a tragic sensibility, which in hindsight now makes sense ‘differently’ and even anticipates some current debates on the revelatory and critically urgent aspects of a tragic consciousness.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49610739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay reflects on how we read the classics from our location in South Africa, in conversation with the other essays in the special issue. How do our reading spaces shape our reading and re-reading of classic works of literature which come to hold meaning for us? How is our “sense of discovery” of a classic work re-ignited by conversations, spoken and written? How do wemake, and re-make, connections between texts and contexts of reading, over time, and in different places?
{"title":"Reading the classics in South Africa","authors":"Cheryl-Ann Michael","doi":"10.4314/eia.v49i3.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v49i3.1","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reflects on how we read the classics from our location in South Africa, in conversation with the other essays in the special issue. How do our reading spaces shape our reading and re-reading of classic works of literature which come to hold meaning for us? How is our “sense of discovery” of a classic work re-ignited by conversations, spoken and written? How do wemake, and re-make, connections between texts and contexts of reading, over time, and in different places?","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43885798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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