Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852697
J. Kosgei
This paper presents an analysis of Valerie Cuthbert’s The Great Siege of Fort Jesus (1970) by interrogating the relationship between its historical sources and its bias and omissions. Written for young adults, the novel engages with histories of the Kenyan coast during the 16th and 17th centuries. Using this text as a lens permits more general reflections on writers’ use of sources and how their choices shape the historical novels that emerge. I examine Cuthbert’s sources to determine which she adopts, what revisions she undertakes and which she neglects entirely. I conclude that the history Cuthbert relies on is notably one-sided, amounting to misrepresentation with potentially detrimental political consequences. Both her sources and the novel that emerges from them, I conclude, implicate and inscribe specific ideological positions tied to a specific arrangement of power.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852686
C. Stobie
Two speculative novels, which were recently published in South Africa, are analyzed in this article as they reveal forms of precarity in various African settings, and they imaginatively portray forms of conviviality to offset or transcend political and social oppression. The Book of Malachi by T.C. Farren was published in 2019 and The Theory of Flight by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu in 2018. These works are particularly pertinent to current public debate and outrage in South Africa about recurring outbreaks of xenophobia and the prevalence of gender-based violence, rape and femicide. I begin by providing a brief overview of the novels before expanding on my theoretical perspective, combining African and Western work. In the heart of the paper, I examine each of my primary texts in turn, arguing that, in these examples of speculative fiction, precarity and conviviality are presented as intimately connected concepts that simultaneously highlight the effects of oppression, violence and trauma, while they portray interpersonal and transcultural connections enacting hard-won empathy, generosity and courage as hopeful antidotes to pessimism, despair and defeatism.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852693
L. Wright
Set during the Anglo-Boer War, The Hero is the story of a young man’s rebellion against the mores of fin de siècle England. It offers a fierce critique of military heroism, anticipating by some years the drastic demolition of military idealism that was to follow WWI. Ambiguous off-stage soldierly heroics, under the big skies of South Africa, take the novel far beneath the gently comic surface of life in Little Primpton to probe fundamental questions about human nature: war and sex, politics and combat, mating and marriage. Published in 1901, Maugham never permitted this novel to be republished. No reason was given, but this article proffers an explanation presenting the novel as a revealing autobiographical fable that establishes the philosophical roots of Maugham’s emerging aesthetic.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852685
Deena Dinat
This article theorizes the relationship between the concepts of national time and national literature in contemporary South African fiction. Contemporary South African literary criticism has largely understood South African literature as existing in the same concept of temporality as the nation-state itself. I argue here that this temporal conflation limits the possibilities for reading South African literature after the end of apartheid by reinforcing the nation-state’s institutional claims to the experience of time itself; this conflation thus inadvertently reproduces the power of the nation-state over the literary. I turn to Imraan Coovadia’s 2014 Tales of the Metric System, a novel obviously concerned with notions of standardization, rationalization and measurement, as an example of a text that disarticulates the competing claims to time itself. While it mimics the nation-state’s claim to homogenous, empty time, the novel simultaneously populates its historical national narrative with what Partha Chatterjee calls the heterogenous time of the nation, and thus suggests the possibilities for reading South African literature through multiple and contested temporalities.
本文从理论上分析了当代南非小说中民族时间概念与民族文学的关系。当代南非文学批评在很大程度上把南非文学理解为与民族国家本身存在于相同的暂时性概念中。我在这里认为，这种时间上的合并限制了阅读种族隔离结束后南非文学的可能性，因为它强化了民族国家对时间本身经验的制度要求;因此，这种合并无意中再现了民族国家对文学的权力。我转向Imraan Coovadia在2014年出版的《公制系统的故事》(Tales of the Metric System)，这本小说显然是关于标准化、合理化和测量的概念，作为一个文本的例子，它消解了对时间本身的竞争主张。虽然它模仿了民族国家对同质、空的时间的主张，但小说同时用帕塔·查特吉(Partha Chatterjee)所说的民族的异质时间填充了其历史民族叙事，从而暗示了通过多重和有争议的时间来阅读南非文学的可能性。
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852707
James Hodapp
Recently, literary critics have grown concerned that serious literary criticism is slowly being replaced by a literary culture of endorsement that has proliferated online. They fear that ‘hot takes,’ listicles and simplified systems of ranking books (‘buy or don’t buy,’ star ratings and so on) are gaining cultural currency while serious analysis and critique is going out of style. One critic, Christian Lorentzen, even wonders: ‘What if a generation of writers grew up with nobody to criticize them?’ At the same time, reviews, interviews and other content concerning African literature have become widely available online. In particular, African literary podcasts have become increasingly popular and influential. By examining the nature of paratextuality, via Gérard Genette, in reference to African literary podcasts, this article examines whether African literary podcasts are contributing to this decline, offering audio equivalents of traditional reviews or creating an innovative mode of critique. It concludes that African literary podcasts are sui generis and provide both substantive critique and an outlet for voices traditionally marginalized from mainstream literary discourse.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852700
Damian Shaw
Makhanda ka Nxele has finally received official recognition by the South African government as a national hero. While recent historical research has made great contributions to our knowledge of Makhanda as an historical figure, surprisingly little attention has been paid, except in the case of Thomas Pringle’s poem ‘Makanna’s Gathering,’ to other representations of the man in English literature. This article attempts to fill this gap by comparing four substantial texts on Makanna, starting with Pringle’s poem, and followed by an anonymous novel of 1834, Makanna, Or, The Land of the Savage, Bronze Napoleon, a novel by M. Norbert Morgan (1940), and a slightly later poem by John Cargill Rae, ‘Makanna and The Battle of Grahamstown.’ Makhanda has been depicted in the historical record in a range of guises, from that of a heroic freedom fighter to a very demon. Whether he is praised or vilified, it is hard to deny that Makhanda is a man who emerged from a complex contact zone and used his knowledge of both European and amaXhosa culture to unite the majority of his own people and make a substantial mark on history. This article will investigate how the four authors have situated the character ‘Makanna’ within this dynamic, and then question how literary depictions of Makhanda might function in either negative or positive ways.
Makhanda ka Nxele终于被南非政府正式承认为民族英雄。虽然最近的历史研究为我们了解马汉达作为一个历史人物做出了巨大贡献，但令人惊讶的是，除了托马斯·普林格尔的诗歌《马坎纳的聚会》外，人们很少关注英国文学中马汉达的其他表现。本文试图通过比较四篇关于马坎纳的实质性文本来填补这一空白，从普林格尔的诗开始，接着是1834年的一部匿名小说《马坎纳，或者，野蛮之地，青铜拿破仑》，M.Norbert Morgan（1940）的一部小说，以及约翰·卡吉尔·雷（John Cargill Rae）稍晚的一首诗《马坎娜与格拉汉姆镇之战》在历史记录中，马汉达以各种伪装被描绘，从英雄的自由战士到恶魔。无论他是受到赞扬还是诋毁，都很难否认，马汉达是一个从复杂的接触区走出来的人，他利用自己对欧洲和阿科萨文化的了解，团结了自己的大多数人民，并在历史上留下了重要的印记。这篇文章将调查四位作者是如何将“玛坎娜”这个角色定位在这种动态中的，然后质疑文学对玛坎达的描述是如何以消极或积极的方式发挥作用的。
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1780762
A. Levin
Abstract In this article I use Angie Thomas’s popular young-adult novel The Hate U Give as a lens through which to explore how young adult fiction, produced by African American writers, can serve to facilitate social activism and change. In the novel, Thomas’s Black teenage protagonist, Starr Carter, undergoes a transformation from victim and witness to activist after she sees her Black male friend murdered by a white police officer. As I will demonstrate, the novel is guided and shaped by the ideologies of the Black Lives Matter Movement as it explores the complexities of Blackness in both post-racial and communal spaces. By drawing on these ideologies and employing the perspective of a Black teenage girl, Thomas engages her Black female readers in a readerly process in which they reflect on how Starr’s narrative relates to their own lives. In doing so, I argue, she encourages these readers to explore ways in which their own narratives can be used to instigate social activism and change.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1784554
Inderpal Grewal
Theories of authoritarianism and populism are insufficient if they do not take into account the power of gender and sexuality, in relation to other social divisions, within authoritarian power and the erotics that produce populism. Patriarchal power is a more comprehensive approach, showing how the new authoritarians rely on gendered security and securitization to produce the new post-secular and the post-postcolonial nationalisms of today. While populisms are divergent in empire and postcolony, for instance in the US and India, generated by grievances and disappointments of a waning empire on the one hand, and a failed modernization on the other, their authoritarian leaders are linked not just in modes of power and governance but also through sharing technologies of surveillance, security and accumulation.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1780752
Robyn Pierce
Abstract The chief antagonist of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is the Magisterium, a powerful multinational religious organization reminiscent of the Roman Catholic Church. In the first two novels of the new Book of Dust trilogy, Pullman expands upon the original series and further explores the authoritarian populist tactics utilized by the various branches of the Magisterium to assert its authority and to exert a commanding influence over state politics. Set in opposition to the Magisterium is the republic of heaven, which invokes the underlying principles of Milton’s republicanism and seeks to establish a democratic and egalitarian society. This paper examines Pullman’s representation of authoritarian populism in the agencies of the Magisterium, and contrasts this with the democratic vision of the republic of heaven. It argues that in drawing on Milton’s republicanism, Pullman is less concerned with a specific mode of government than with the underlying principles of republicanism that seek to enable the shared participation of the members of a society in its governance and which serve as a means to circumvent the potential for tyranny that accompanies the concentration of power. In invoking Milton, Pullman, however, fails to account for the tension in Milton’s politics between his support for a free and equal polity and his elitist stance towards governance founded upon a belief in humanity’s inherent fallibility. Unlike Milton, whose view of democracy is informed by a belief in Biblical ‘truth,’ Pullman conceives of democracy as a system that underpins pluralism and which facilitates the dynamic exchange of a socio-political collective. His representation of the Magisterium and the republic of heaven are shown to be directly concerned with the dangers posed by hegemonic ideology, as well as the oppressive forms that it can take.
摘要菲利普·普尔曼（Philip Pullman）的《黑暗物质》（His Dark Materials）系列的主要反对者是Magisterium，这是一个强大的跨国宗教组织，让人想起罗马天主教会。在新的《尘埃之书》三部曲的前两部小说中，普尔曼对原系列进行了扩展，并进一步探讨了司法机构各分支为维护其权威和对国家政治施加压倒性影响而使用的威权民粹主义策略。与君主政体相对立的是天堂共和国，它援引了米尔顿共和主义的基本原则，并寻求建立一个民主和平等的社会。本文考察了普尔曼在君主机构中对专制民粹主义的表现，并将其与天国的民主愿景进行了对比。它认为，在借鉴米尔顿的共和主义时，普尔曼与其说关心一种特定的政府模式，不如说关心共和主义的基本原则，这些原则旨在使社会成员能够共同参与其治理，并作为规避权力集中带来的暴政的一种手段。然而，在援引米尔顿的话时，普尔曼没有解释米尔顿政治中的紧张关系，即他对自由平等政体的支持和他对建立在人类固有易犯错误信念基础上的治理的精英主义立场。与米尔顿不同的是，他对民主的看法是基于对《圣经》“真理”的信仰，普尔曼认为民主是一种支持多元主义并促进社会政治集体动态交流的制度。他对君主政体和天国的描绘被证明与霸权主义意识形态带来的危险以及它可能采取的压迫形式直接相关。
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1780753
Wamuwi Mbao
Recent confrontations across institutions of higher learning in South Africa have brought into sharp focus that universities, though they may market themselves as spaces of critical citizenship, are not satisfying the desires of a large section of the students who occupy them. The outbreaks of protests that are untidy and discomfiting – students disrupting classes, occupying the built fabric of the university, or staging spectacular demonstrations – have signaled the possibility that the economy of knowledge-exchange symbolized by universities is exclusionary for these students. The psychic cost of these disruptions has yet to truly be measured. But what has become apparent is that we have entered a transitional after-moment that warrants reading. Indeed, as the surging waters of ‘Fallism’ ebb from the university, it becomes necessary to rethink the ways in which the forms of violence enacted by the universities to defend their solidity demonstrated the limitations of their current form. This article is impelled by the notion that there is no single ‘university’ approached by both students and the network of employees who orchestrate its functions. It asks what other potentials might be realized if we think of the university as a liquid space, rather than a rigidly unyielding one.
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