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}
In his recent (2020) book, Matthew Shum offers an important rereading of the life, work and contemporary significance of Thomas Pringle, the Scottish South African poet and activist. The book’s challenge stems from three interrelated lines of energy. First is the author’s tracking of Pringle through the three locations of his activity: Scotland, the Cape, London. Second is the argument that Pringle was not from birth or early conviction the liberal champion he is remembered as in South Africa. Third, Shum warns against seeking in Pringle a model for the settler presence in post-colonial South Africa today. A comparison with two near-contemporary Scottish poets, fellow “Borderers”, who both also had colonial experience, leads this essay to a conclusion that acknowledges Shum’s account of the challenge our reading of Pringle offers to South Africa today.
{"title":"Thomas Pringle: “the beginning of a future that has not arrived”","authors":"T. Voss","doi":"10.4314/eia.v49i2.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v49i2.5","url":null,"abstract":"In his recent (2020) book, Matthew Shum offers an important rereading of the life, work and contemporary significance of Thomas Pringle, the Scottish South African poet and activist. The book’s challenge stems from three interrelated lines of energy. First is the author’s tracking of Pringle through the three locations of his activity: Scotland, the Cape, London. Second is the argument that Pringle was not from birth or early conviction the liberal champion he is remembered as in South Africa. Third, Shum warns against seeking in Pringle a model for the settler presence in post-colonial South Africa today. A comparison with two near-contemporary Scottish poets, fellow “Borderers”, who both also had colonial experience, leads this essay to a conclusion that acknowledges Shum’s account of the challenge our reading of Pringle offers to South Africa today.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44561307","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 considers the photograph as representation and metaphor in select work by Zoë Wicomb (b. 1948). It asks how the photograph functions in her prose fiction and criticism in service of a recuperation of late- and postapartheid stasis in potentially affirmative vein. Many of Wicomb’s most illuminating essays and many of her fictions – from her debut, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), to the most recent, Still Life (2020) – engage with photographs, drawing in highly suggestive ways on vivid descriptions of acts of seeing that are indebted to photographic theory. What, I ask, is constellated in the moment captured in the photograph represented in Wicomb’s fiction, as well as in the moment of engagement with the image – by her characters, or by Wicomb herself (including as critic)? How does the photograph function in Wicomb’s reimagination of the possibilities for ethical engagement with otherness beyond the stasis of South Africa’s long post-transition, post-postapartheid moment?
{"title":"Constellated in a flash: on the dialectics of seeing (beyond stasis) in Zoë Wicomb’s work","authors":"A. van der Vlies","doi":"10.4314/eia.v49i2.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v49i2.1","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers the photograph as representation and metaphor in select work by Zoë Wicomb (b. 1948). It asks how the photograph functions in her prose fiction and criticism in service of a recuperation of late- and postapartheid stasis in potentially affirmative vein. Many of Wicomb’s most illuminating essays and many of her fictions – from her debut, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), to the most recent, Still Life (2020) – engage with photographs, drawing in highly suggestive ways on vivid descriptions of acts of seeing that are indebted to photographic theory. What, I ask, is constellated in the moment captured in the photograph represented in Wicomb’s fiction, as well as in the moment of engagement with the image – by her characters, or by Wicomb herself (including as critic)? How does the photograph function in Wicomb’s reimagination of the possibilities for ethical engagement with otherness beyond the stasis of South Africa’s long post-transition, post-postapartheid moment?","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44739283","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 paper discusses how Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu (2014) undercuts the androcentric Buganda myth of creation by offering an alternative version of the narrative and unpacking the silent treatment of female figures. The discussion pays attention to how Makumbi recasts the myth as a historical event, destabilises its images and objects, and then again mythologises this event to present women in a different light where they are assigned new roles. I employ a counterfactual feminist approach to tease out how the narrative contests the linearity of both the myth and the Buganda nationalist histories that have always sought to return to the myth for purposes of a unified identity. The article argues that by counterfactually reworking a popular Buganda myth of origin, the narrative desacralises it and reveals that women in Buganda’s past have more complicated histories than what the masculinist narratives have always presented.
{"title":"“There is Another Woman in the Story”: counterfactuality and re-mythification in Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu","authors":"Joseph Michael Kwanya","doi":"10.4314/eia.v49i2.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v49i2.2","url":null,"abstract":"This paper discusses how Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu (2014) undercuts the androcentric Buganda myth of creation by offering an alternative version of the narrative and unpacking the silent treatment of female figures. The discussion pays attention to how Makumbi recasts the myth as a historical event, destabilises its images and objects, and then again mythologises this event to present women in a different light where they are assigned new roles. I employ a counterfactual feminist approach to tease out how the narrative contests the linearity of both the myth and the Buganda nationalist histories that have always sought to return to the myth for purposes of a unified identity. The article argues that by counterfactually reworking a popular Buganda myth of origin, the narrative desacralises it and reveals that women in Buganda’s past have more complicated histories than what the masculinist narratives have always presented.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49211917","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 paper uses the vexed publication history of Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi to try to ‘read’ various aspects of the New Historicism – a school of historiographical thought recently evoked by Zakes Mda in his writing about the novel. Taking the alleged 1976 petrol bombing that is said to have unearthed Plaatje’s lost typescript, my essay suggests that the lingering disagreements in South African literary circles over issues of the ‘correct version’ of the text – disagreements, as we will see, that rage on in the collection of commemorative essays published in 2020 entitled Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi: History, Criticism, Celebration – signal not only the fertility of the novel’s extra-textual life, but the inseparability of that life from the words on Mhudi ’s pages. I argue that conceptualizing Plaatje’s text as indistinguishable from a series of what might usually be considered ‘contextual’ (rather than ‘textual’) interruptions, deviations and anecdotes produces a disruptive set of readings.
{"title":"Bombs, ghosts, devils: Mhudi and the new historicism","authors":"J. Henning","doi":"10.4314/eia.v49i2.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v49i2.3","url":null,"abstract":"This paper uses the vexed publication history of Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi to try to ‘read’ various aspects of the New Historicism – a school of historiographical thought recently evoked by Zakes Mda in his writing about the novel. Taking the alleged 1976 petrol bombing that is said to have unearthed Plaatje’s lost typescript, my essay suggests that the lingering disagreements in South African literary circles over issues of the ‘correct version’ of the text – disagreements, as we will see, that rage on in the collection of commemorative essays published in 2020 entitled Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi: History, Criticism, Celebration – signal not only the fertility of the novel’s extra-textual life, but the inseparability of that life from the words on Mhudi ’s pages. I argue that conceptualizing Plaatje’s text as indistinguishable from a series of what might usually be considered ‘contextual’ (rather than ‘textual’) interruptions, deviations and anecdotes produces a disruptive set of readings.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45024922","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}
As a feminist writer for social justice, Amma Darko exposes various instances of religious exploitation in Ghanaian society in the novel Not without Flowers. This study adds to the corpus of literature that critiques the androcentric organisation of patriarchal African societies, in which patriarchal and religious ideologies are used to institutionalise gender inequality. My argument in this paper is that the fear and anxiety surrounding mental illness, HIV and Aids, or other illnesses provide a fertile ground for religious exploitation and oppression of vulnerable women, as represented in Darko’s novel. My study offers an analysis of how Darko uses her literary work to challenge deeply engrained and culturally sanctioned patriarchal and religious hierarchies of gender-based dominance and cultural valorisation. The main objectives of this article are to explore the religious exploitation and/or stigmatisation of vulnerable women, the human rights violations that occur in religious institutions, as well as how mental illness is considered to be caused by a spiritual force or demonic possession in the selected text.
{"title":"“Driven by and blinded by our desperation”: religious exploitation of vulnerable women in Amma Darko’s Not without Flowers","authors":"Kimméra Pillay","doi":"10.4314/eia.v49i2.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v49i2.4","url":null,"abstract":"As a feminist writer for social justice, Amma Darko exposes various instances of religious exploitation in Ghanaian society in the novel Not without Flowers. This study adds to the corpus of literature that critiques the androcentric organisation of patriarchal African societies, in which patriarchal and religious ideologies are used to institutionalise gender inequality. My argument in this paper is that the fear and anxiety surrounding mental illness, HIV and Aids, or other illnesses provide a fertile ground for religious exploitation and oppression of vulnerable women, as represented in Darko’s novel. My study offers an analysis of how Darko uses her literary work to challenge deeply engrained and culturally sanctioned patriarchal and religious hierarchies of gender-based dominance and cultural valorisation. The main objectives of this article are to explore the religious exploitation and/or stigmatisation of vulnerable women, the human rights violations that occur in religious institutions, as well as how mental illness is considered to be caused by a spiritual force or demonic possession in the selected text.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49301404","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 on Zoë Wicomb’s “When the Train Comes” from the collection You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), I read the short story as exemplary in its engagement at both the level of representation and the level of genre in the formation of the subjectivity of the central character, Frieda Shenton. The textual strategies and rhetorical tactics – which include delay, ellipsis, postponement and stoppage – fissure narrative discourse with its dependence on the conventions of time (story) and causality (plot) that ensures the smooth operation of a well-wrought fictional or literary text. The rupture of the traditional components of narrative curiously unconceals the originary moment of subject formation primarily based on Jacques Lacan’s concept of desire, the notion of the story as a unique and singular element, Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the genre of the novella and the tale, and Judith Butler’s term “gender performance”.
{"title":"The “Single S”: Desire for Subjectivity and Story in Zoë Wicomb’s “When the Train Comes”","authors":"Andrew Matthews","doi":"10.4314/eia.v49i1.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v49i1.3","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay on Zoë Wicomb’s “When the Train Comes” from the collection You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), I read the short story as exemplary in its engagement at both the level of representation and the level of genre in the formation of the subjectivity of the central character, Frieda Shenton. The textual strategies and rhetorical tactics – which include delay, ellipsis, postponement and stoppage – fissure narrative discourse with its dependence on the conventions of time (story) and causality (plot) that ensures the smooth operation of a well-wrought fictional or literary text. The rupture of the traditional components of narrative curiously unconceals the originary moment of subject formation primarily based on Jacques Lacan’s concept of desire, the notion of the story as a unique and singular element, Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the genre of the novella and the tale, and Judith Butler’s term “gender performance”.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47033200","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}
Makhosazana Xaba’s “Behind The Suit”, a revisioning of Can Themba’s “The Suit”, takes the form of a letter written by Mbatha, ex-lover of Philemon (Themba’s protagonist), to his estranged daughter. In it, he tells her about their ancestors’ lives and he confesses his role in Philemon’s abuse of his wife, Matilda, which eventually led to her suicide. In this article, we examine Mbatha’s attempt to solidify his and his daughter’s sense of self through the act of confession – a confession that is not wholly true. Consequently, Mbatha’s false self prevails. Bearing in mind the dominance of this false self, we pay attention to the significance of the story’s epistolary form – how it enables Mbatha to build a bridge between himself (I) and his daughter (You). The letter also assists Mbatha in locating him and his daughter in time and place through repeated references to their ancestors to Johannesburg and Sophiatown. We determine that, ultimately, Mbatha’s project cannot succeed due either to his unwillingness or inability to access his true self, with the result that the meaningful connection he hopes to have created with his daughter is rendered impossible. In the end, the onus falls on his daughter to locate and assert her own identity through the information given to her in the letter.
{"title":"“My Version of it Matters Too”: Confession and Identity in Makhosazana Xaba’s Short Story “Behind The Suit”","authors":"K. Jennings, Neuda Alves Do Lago","doi":"10.4314/eia.v49i1.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v49i1.2","url":null,"abstract":"Makhosazana Xaba’s “Behind The Suit”, a revisioning of Can Themba’s “The Suit”, takes the form of a letter written by Mbatha, ex-lover of Philemon (Themba’s protagonist), to his estranged daughter. In it, he tells her about their ancestors’ lives and he confesses his role in Philemon’s abuse of his wife, Matilda, which eventually led to her suicide. In this article, we examine Mbatha’s attempt to solidify his and his daughter’s sense of self through the act of confession – a confession that is not wholly true. Consequently, Mbatha’s false self prevails. Bearing in mind the dominance of this false self, we pay attention to the significance of the story’s epistolary form – how it enables Mbatha to build a bridge between himself (I) and his daughter (You). The letter also assists Mbatha in locating him and his daughter in time and place through repeated references to their ancestors to Johannesburg and Sophiatown. We determine that, ultimately, Mbatha’s project cannot succeed due either to his unwillingness or inability to access his true self, with the result that the meaningful connection he hopes to have created with his daughter is rendered impossible. In the end, the onus falls on his daughter to locate and assert her own identity through the information given to her in the letter.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45910700","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}
Our essay continues the critical discussion of Flora Nwapa’s treatment of the Ogene family’s involvement in the slave trade and domestic slavery in Efuru, as first articulated in Taiwo Adetunju Osinubi’s 2014 article “Provincializing Slavery: Atlantic Economies in Flora Nwapa’s Efuru”. We agree with Osinubi’s reading of the compromised liberation that Efuru represents and how patriarchal structures are upheld throughout most of the novel. However, we argue that Nwapa begins to outline an important shift towards her novel’s end: from a patriarchal, colonial order back to a matriarchal, precolonial one – at least for the heroine. We support this assertion by revisiting the relationship between Efuru and Ogea to point out its ambivalences, paying close attention to their dynamic at the book’s conclusion. Moreover, we contend that this change is most evident when Efuru is chosen by Uhamiri. We maintain that the wealth Uhamiri bestows provides a way out of paternalistic structures, as it serves as an antidote to the patriarchal inheritance by ensuring that Efuru has a source of income independent from her paternal family’s blood money.
{"title":"Opportunity Cost in Flora Nwapa’s Efuru: Refinancing Efuru’s Inherited Wealth through Uhamiri","authors":"Sarah Namulondo, Christine L. Grogan","doi":"10.4314/eia.v49i1.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v49i1.4","url":null,"abstract":"Our essay continues the critical discussion of Flora Nwapa’s treatment of the Ogene family’s involvement in the slave trade and domestic slavery in Efuru, as first articulated in Taiwo Adetunju Osinubi’s 2014 article “Provincializing Slavery: Atlantic Economies in Flora Nwapa’s Efuru”. We agree with Osinubi’s reading of the compromised liberation that Efuru represents and how patriarchal structures are upheld throughout most of the novel. However, we argue that Nwapa begins to outline an important shift towards her novel’s end: from a patriarchal, colonial order back to a matriarchal, precolonial one – at least for the heroine. We support this assertion by revisiting the relationship between Efuru and Ogea to point out its ambivalences, paying close attention to their dynamic at the book’s conclusion. Moreover, we contend that this change is most evident when Efuru is chosen by Uhamiri. We maintain that the wealth Uhamiri bestows provides a way out of paternalistic structures, as it serves as an antidote to the patriarchal inheritance by ensuring that Efuru has a source of income independent from her paternal family’s blood money. ","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47830850","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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