Schreiner criticism over the last two decades or so has shown greater interest in her ideas than in her literary imagination. Without setting up ‘silos’ of approach – thought and imagination, after all, are inextricably bound – I revisit the power of the literary imagination in the works of both Olive Schreiner and Douglas Blackburn against a context of contemporaneous ‘colonial fiction’: that is, against a context that accentuates, in contrast, the substance and seriousness of the two novelists on whom I focus. Can these two novelists be seen to chart a shift from the story of a colony to a ‘South African’ story? We may conclude, in any case, that between them Schreiner and Blackburn revisioned the colonial novel Keywords: Schreiner, Blackburn, colonial South Africa, fiction, imagination/ideas, then/now
{"title":"Schreiner’s Karoo, Blackburn’s Joburg: Revisioning the Colonial Novel; or, From the Story of a Colony to a ‘South African’ Story","authors":"M. Chapman","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V47I2.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V47I2.2","url":null,"abstract":"Schreiner criticism over the last two decades or so has shown greater interest in her ideas than in her literary imagination. Without setting up ‘silos’ of approach – thought and imagination, after all, are inextricably bound – I revisit the power of the literary imagination in the works of both Olive Schreiner and Douglas Blackburn against a context of contemporaneous ‘colonial fiction’: that is, against a context that accentuates, in contrast, the substance and seriousness of the two novelists on whom I focus. Can these two novelists be seen to chart a shift from the story of a colony to a ‘South African’ story? We may conclude, in any case, that between them Schreiner and Blackburn revisioned the colonial novel \u0000Keywords: Schreiner, Blackburn, colonial South Africa, fiction, imagination/ideas, then/now","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"47 1","pages":"19-40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42732507","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}
Dance practices in Ethiopia remained vibrant, albeit transformed, as thecountry transitioned from feudalism to socialism (1974), and then to neoliberalcapitalism (1991). For centuries, a vast array of movement traditions has beenessential to religious and communal rituals in Ethiopia. Today, traditionalEthiopian dance is most visible in tourist restaurants or YouTube videos. Thetrajectory of dance from ritualised practices to commercialised performancespresents a seeming paradox: traditional Ethiopian dance as we know it today is,in fact, a modernised performance genre serving multiple functions: memorytransmission, ideological dissemination, and profit generation, among others.In the 1980s, the socialist state harvested dances from around the country toproduce “modernised” performances on the stages of government theatres,propagating the ideology of national unity amidst border wars and internaloppression. In the 1990s, as Ethiopia opened to the West, these dances continuedto be performed on restaurant stages, not so much to propagandise for thestate as to generate profit for the industry. The modernisation of traditionaldance continues in Ethiopia, under the auspices of neoliberal privatisation,which has also led to the westernisation of youth culture. Since the late 1990s,a group of young Ethiopians have devoted themselves to contemporarydance by adopting Western aesthetics and distinguishing their practice fromtraditional dance. Recently, they have grappled with the imperative to infuseEthiopian dance traditions in their work in order to be recognised in the globaldance field. Through dance ethnography, oral histories, and video archives,this paper illuminates both traditionality and contemporariness as historicalconstructs – categories of differential powers used to organise the currentdance field in Ethiopia. Keywords: Ethiopian dance, contemporary dance, traditional dance, multiple modernities, decolonizing dance
{"title":"Dance in Ethiopia: Traditionality and Contemporariness","authors":"H. Wilcox, M. Belay","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V47I3.2S","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V47I3.2S","url":null,"abstract":"Dance practices in Ethiopia remained vibrant, albeit transformed, as thecountry transitioned from feudalism to socialism (1974), and then to neoliberalcapitalism (1991). For centuries, a vast array of movement traditions has beenessential to religious and communal rituals in Ethiopia. Today, traditionalEthiopian dance is most visible in tourist restaurants or YouTube videos. Thetrajectory of dance from ritualised practices to commercialised performancespresents a seeming paradox: traditional Ethiopian dance as we know it today is,in fact, a modernised performance genre serving multiple functions: memorytransmission, ideological dissemination, and profit generation, among others.In the 1980s, the socialist state harvested dances from around the country toproduce “modernised” performances on the stages of government theatres,propagating the ideology of national unity amidst border wars and internaloppression. In the 1990s, as Ethiopia opened to the West, these dances continuedto be performed on restaurant stages, not so much to propagandise for thestate as to generate profit for the industry. The modernisation of traditionaldance continues in Ethiopia, under the auspices of neoliberal privatisation,which has also led to the westernisation of youth culture. Since the late 1990s,a group of young Ethiopians have devoted themselves to contemporarydance by adopting Western aesthetics and distinguishing their practice fromtraditional dance. Recently, they have grappled with the imperative to infuseEthiopian dance traditions in their work in order to be recognised in the globaldance field. Through dance ethnography, oral histories, and video archives,this paper illuminates both traditionality and contemporariness as historicalconstructs – categories of differential powers used to organise the currentdance field in Ethiopia. \u0000Keywords: Ethiopian dance, contemporary dance, traditional dance, multiple modernities, decolonizing dance","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"47 1","pages":"15-35"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47354330","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 Moroccan feminist sociologist Fatema Mernissi (1940–2015) is probably best known for her pioneering scholarly work on gender equality in Islam. This paper, however focuses on her life writing: her memoir, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, published in 1994 and her reflections on its Eurocentric reception, which culminated in the publication of her work of creative non-fiction Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems in 2001. Written in popular genres in accessible registers, Mernissi’s texts translate her scholarly feminism into stories of the everyday in order to encourage her readers to see possibilities of feminist practices within and against oppressive social structures. Both texts deal with the way in which women’s agency is circumscribed by particular horizons of constraint determined by their social contexts and thus the texts contrast local, particular forms of constraint with more diffuse forms of oppression that characterise western modernity. This paper offers a reading of her harem childhood to trace some of the alternative modes of enacting small freedoms that the memoir documents. As becomes apparent in Mernissi’s reflections on the memoir’s reception, these achievements seem to be largely illegible within meritocratic scripts of success. In contrast, Mernissi asserts that care for self and other – via modes of storytelling, performance, artistic production and looking after one’s physical wellbeing – mark direct, albeit subtle, forms of resistance even if they are not recognised as such. Drawing on a popular cultural repertoire, the well-known figure of Scheherazade emerges in Mernissi’s texts as a central role model for women crafting pockets of resistance and webs of care. In this way, Mernissi’s texts offers a Moroccan perspective on the debate of the conditions of possibility of ordinary feminist practices inspired by popular artistic forms. Keywords: Fatema Mernissi, life writing, Scheherazade, ethics of care, storytelling, Moroccan feminism
{"title":"Scheherazade’s Achievement(s): Practices of Care in Fatema Mernissi’s Memoir, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, and her Creative Non-Fiction, Scheherazade Goes West","authors":"T. Steiner","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V47I3.7S","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V47I3.7S","url":null,"abstract":"The Moroccan feminist sociologist Fatema Mernissi (1940–2015) is probably best known for her pioneering scholarly work on gender equality in Islam. This paper, however focuses on her life writing: her memoir, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, published in 1994 and her reflections on its Eurocentric reception, which culminated in the publication of her work of creative non-fiction Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems in 2001. Written in popular genres in accessible registers, Mernissi’s texts translate her scholarly feminism into stories of the everyday in order to encourage her readers to see possibilities of feminist practices within and against oppressive social structures. Both texts deal with the way in which women’s agency is circumscribed by particular horizons of constraint determined by their social contexts and thus the texts contrast local, particular forms of constraint with more diffuse forms of oppression that characterise western modernity. This paper offers a reading of her harem childhood to trace some of the alternative modes of enacting small freedoms that the memoir documents. As becomes apparent in Mernissi’s reflections on the memoir’s reception, these achievements seem to be largely illegible within meritocratic scripts of success. In contrast, Mernissi asserts that care for self and other – via modes of storytelling, performance, artistic production and looking after one’s physical wellbeing – mark direct, albeit subtle, forms of resistance even if they are not recognised as such. Drawing on a popular cultural repertoire, the well-known figure of Scheherazade emerges in Mernissi’s texts as a central role model for women crafting pockets of resistance and webs of care. In this way, Mernissi’s texts offers a Moroccan perspective on the debate of the conditions of possibility of ordinary feminist practices inspired by popular artistic forms. \u0000Keywords: Fatema Mernissi, life writing, Scheherazade, ethics of care, storytelling, Moroccan feminism","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"47 1","pages":"121-143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43603444","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}
Some new primary sources make an important contribution to re-thinking Olive Schreiner’s ideas about war and pacifism and are discussed in depth and their analytic reverberations explored. Many previously unknown Schreiner letters and postcards to her niece Lyndall (Dot) Schreiner have become available; Schreiner’s open letters, essays and allegories written over the Great War period have been collected and published; and the manuscripts of her unfinished treatise on war, conscientious objection and pacifism, The Dawn of Civilisation, have been edited in a completed version. These sources throw much light on the interconnections between Schreiner’s personal relationships, writing, feminism and pacifism. Taken together, they show that over the period of the Great War she was led to a new conviction that the aspects of human nature responsible for violence, conquest and killing were intractable and could be changed only in the distant future. Keywords: Olive Schreiner, letters, manuscripts, pacifism, violence, war
{"title":"Olive Schreiner, War and Pacifism","authors":"L. Stanley","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V47I2.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V47I2.4","url":null,"abstract":"Some new primary sources make an important contribution to re-thinking Olive Schreiner’s ideas about war and pacifism and are discussed in depth and their analytic reverberations explored. Many previously unknown Schreiner letters and postcards to her niece Lyndall (Dot) Schreiner have become available; Schreiner’s open letters, essays and allegories written over the Great War period have been collected and published; and the manuscripts of her unfinished treatise on war, conscientious objection and pacifism, The Dawn of Civilisation, have been edited in a completed version. These sources throw much light on the interconnections between Schreiner’s personal relationships, writing, feminism and pacifism. Taken together, they show that over the period of the Great War she was led to a new conviction that the aspects of human nature responsible for violence, conquest and killing were intractable and could be changed only in the distant future. \u0000Keywords: Olive Schreiner, letters, manuscripts, pacifism, violence, war","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"47 1","pages":"59-78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48466140","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}
{"title":"Sites in Contestation: Reading Contemporary Popular Culture in Africa","authors":"N. Moonsamy, C. Sandwith","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V47I3.1S","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V47I3.1S","url":null,"abstract":"No Abstract.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"47 1","pages":"7-14"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47649479","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 Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 has been widely seen as a watershed moment, marking a fundamental shift in the nature of the resistance to apartheid. Its effect on cultural production was monumental: in the face of a massive government crackdown, almost every black writer and artist of note was forced into exile. The poets who write within the long shadow of the massacre must negotiate its legacy and the fraught question of its commemoration.This article takes as its point of focus two poems by Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile that address the place of Sharpeville in cultural memory. I consider the distinctiveness of the poetics of mourning and commemoration that they fashion in relation to South Africa’s most renowned elegy for the victims of Sharpeville, Ingrid Jonker’s “The Child.” I suggest that Brutus’ anti-poetic, subverted elegy “Sharpeville” re-stages commemoration as an act of resistance that is prospective rather than retrospective. In considering Kgositsile’s poem “When Brown is Black,” I examine Kgositsile’s transnational framing of Sharpeville and its location on a continuum of racial suffering, drawing attention to the significance of the links that Kgositsile forges between Malcolm X and “the brothers on Robben Island,” (42) and between Sharpeville and the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965. This paper suggests that for both Brutus and Kgositsile commemoration is framed as a mode of activism. Keywords: Sharpeville, Ingrid Jonker, Dennis Brutus, Keorapetse Kgositsile, cultural memory, commemoration, elegy
{"title":"‘Remember Sharpeville’: Radical Commemoration in the Poetry of the Exiled South African Poets, Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile","authors":"Karin Berkman","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V47I1.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V47I1.2","url":null,"abstract":"The Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 has been widely seen as a watershed moment, marking a fundamental shift in the nature of the resistance to apartheid. Its effect on cultural production was monumental: in the face of a massive government crackdown, almost every black writer and artist of note was forced into exile. The poets who write within the long shadow of the massacre must negotiate its legacy and the fraught question of its commemoration.This article takes as its point of focus two poems by Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile that address the place of Sharpeville in cultural memory. I consider the distinctiveness of the poetics of mourning and commemoration that they fashion in relation to South Africa’s most renowned elegy for the victims of Sharpeville, Ingrid Jonker’s “The Child.” I suggest that Brutus’ anti-poetic, subverted elegy “Sharpeville” re-stages commemoration as an act of resistance that is prospective rather than retrospective. In considering Kgositsile’s poem “When Brown is Black,” I examine Kgositsile’s transnational framing of Sharpeville and its location on a continuum of racial suffering, drawing attention to the significance of the links that Kgositsile forges between Malcolm X and “the brothers on Robben Island,” (42) and between Sharpeville and the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965. This paper suggests that for both Brutus and Kgositsile commemoration is framed as a mode of activism. \u0000Keywords: Sharpeville, Ingrid Jonker, Dennis Brutus, Keorapetse Kgositsile, cultural memory, commemoration, elegy","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"47 1","pages":"25-46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46447022","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 article describes my experience teaching Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway as part of a third-year English Literature course during the #FeesMustFall protests in South Africa and the calls for curriculum transformation across the academy that ensued. In particular, it discusses students’ heightened awareness of “the social function of difficulty” (Diepeveen 30) and the critical doubt to which activist readings of Woolf’s aesthetic were subsequently subjected. It then explains how the introduction of recent neuro-cognitive approaches to Woolf’s writing provided a surprisingly enabling approach to the novel in this context by illuminating both the intuitive and “transforming” (Miall and Kuiken 125) version of literariness that Mrs Dalloway explicitly promotes, as well as the specialized and arguably elitist one that Woolf’s difficult and “multiply embedded” (Zunshine 279) aesthetic implicitly inscribes. My conclusion is a largely speculative one: I propose that the cognitive approach had some efficacy in this context because it helped students translate their intuitive and affective responses to Woolf’s difficulty into analytical terms and, moreover, legitimized the feelings of alienation that her work often engenders.
{"title":"Mrs Dalloway in Johannesburg: Reconceptualizing Literariness in Woolf’s Novel after #FeesMustFall1","authors":"S. Kostelac","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V47I1.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V47I1.1","url":null,"abstract":"This article describes my experience teaching Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway as part of a third-year English Literature course during the #FeesMustFall protests in South Africa and the calls for curriculum transformation across the academy that ensued. In particular, it discusses students’ heightened awareness of “the social function of difficulty” (Diepeveen 30) and the critical doubt to which activist readings of Woolf’s aesthetic were subsequently subjected. It then explains how the introduction of recent neuro-cognitive approaches to Woolf’s writing provided a surprisingly enabling approach to the novel in this context by illuminating both the intuitive and “transforming” (Miall and Kuiken 125) version of literariness that Mrs Dalloway explicitly promotes, as well as the specialized and arguably elitist one that Woolf’s difficult and “multiply embedded” (Zunshine 279) aesthetic implicitly inscribes. My conclusion is a largely speculative one: I propose that the cognitive approach had some efficacy in this context because it helped students translate their intuitive and affective responses to Woolf’s difficulty into analytical terms and, moreover, legitimized the feelings of alienation that her work often engenders.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"47 1","pages":"7-24"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45844017","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 analyse aspects of a father/daughter story that is emblematic of dislocation and a yearning to belong. It is a story of a deep-seated, recurrent condition of ‘estranged belonging’. Most critical responses to Anne Landsman’s prize-winning novel have focused on the narrator’s (the daughter’s) memory and nostalgia within the trope of an ‘elegy for a dying parent’. I embed such a trope, however, in the quite insistent – but hitherto largely ignored – societal dimension of the story. Accordingly, the expatriate daughter reconnects with her dying father not only by recollecting her affective memories of him and the ‘lessons’ learned. She also reconnects by entering imaginatively into the life of her father as the son of a poor, immigrant Lithuanian family. The reader enters, intimately, into the ‘estranged belonging’ of a country doctor, in the class marginalisation, hardship, fracture and resilience of small-town South Africa. Key words: Anne Landsman, The Rowing Lesson, double dislocation, estranged belonging, father-daughter
{"title":"Father, Daughter and ‘Estranged Belonging’: Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson","authors":"Ileana Dimitriu","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V47I1.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V47I1.3","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I analyse aspects of a father/daughter story that is emblematic of dislocation and a yearning to belong. It is a story of a deep-seated, recurrent condition of ‘estranged belonging’. Most critical responses to Anne Landsman’s prize-winning novel have focused on the narrator’s (the daughter’s) memory and nostalgia within the trope of an ‘elegy for a dying parent’. I embed such a trope, however, in the quite insistent – but hitherto largely ignored – societal dimension of the story. Accordingly, the expatriate daughter reconnects with her dying father not only by recollecting her affective memories of him and the ‘lessons’ learned. She also reconnects by entering imaginatively into the life of her father as the son of a poor, immigrant Lithuanian family. The reader enters, intimately, into the ‘estranged belonging’ of a country doctor, in the class marginalisation, hardship, fracture and resilience of small-town South Africa. \u0000Key words: Anne Landsman, The Rowing Lesson, double dislocation, estranged belonging, father-daughter","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"47 1","pages":"47-67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47748954","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, primarily, explores the extent to which Fred Khumalo’s novel, Bitches’ Brew, can be considered a jazz novel by looking at both its subject matter and form. It argues that the transgressive power of Khumalo’s novel lies in its use of epistolary form as a narrative strategy that is akin to a jazz solo, marked as it is by a dialogical narrative that is similar to the call and response pattern that bears an affinity to a jazz performance. In terms of the subject matter, the central thrust of the argument is that the over-arching predominance of sex and violence in the text threatens to overshadow the musicality of the text, even as masculinity and misogyny are considered as the other side of the coin of jazz. In its exploration of the jazz and gender interface, this paper highlights how the phallocratic logic that informs and dominates the novel is indicative of the fact that Khumalo may have ‘pushed the envelope’ too far in his representation of masculinity and misogyny in jazz culture in his writing of this work. That Khumalo's novel fails to interrogate the relationship between jazz and black masculinity, but rather endorses and valorises it, serves to reinforce the stereotype of misogyny in jazz culture. Keywords: Fred Khumalo, Bitches’ Brew, jazz, musicality, masculinity, misogyny
{"title":"‘Pushing the envelope’: The Representation of Jazz, Sex and Violence in Fred Khumalo’s Bitches’ Brew","authors":"J. Mkhize","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V47I1.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V47I1.4","url":null,"abstract":"This paper, primarily, explores the extent to which Fred Khumalo’s novel, Bitches’ Brew, can be considered a jazz novel by looking at both its subject matter and form. It argues that the transgressive power of Khumalo’s novel lies in its use of epistolary form as a narrative strategy that is akin to a jazz solo, marked as it is by a dialogical narrative that is similar to the call and response pattern that bears an affinity to a jazz performance. In terms of the subject matter, the central thrust of the argument is that the over-arching predominance of sex and violence in the text threatens to overshadow the musicality of the text, even as masculinity and misogyny are considered as the other side of the coin of jazz. In its exploration of the jazz and gender interface, this paper highlights how the phallocratic logic that informs and dominates the novel is indicative of the fact that Khumalo may have ‘pushed the envelope’ too far in his representation of masculinity and misogyny in jazz culture in his writing of this work. That Khumalo's novel fails to interrogate the relationship between jazz and black masculinity, but rather endorses and valorises it, serves to reinforce the stereotype of misogyny in jazz culture. \u0000Keywords: Fred Khumalo, Bitches’ Brew, jazz, musicality, masculinity, misogyny","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"47 1","pages":"69-95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47773761","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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