Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2021.1969094
Hedley Twidle
This is an account of reading Albert Camus's The Plague in the wake of various real-world epidemics, and from a place, South Africa, that emerges as a kind of mirror image of the north Africa in which the novel is set. It suggests that what seems at first like a simple story is in fact a deeply complex, even contradictory work: one that that absorbs and reflects back as much history and difficulty as the reader is willing to bring to it. While giving postcolonial critiques of the work their due, I explore how and why The Plague still holds energy and meaning for a 21st-century audience.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2021.1969122
M. Oike
Abstract A memory book is a therapeutic document and personal testament – a workbook written, most commonly, by a HIV-positive caregiver or parent for their child, about the family’s background and the parent’s life experiences, to guide the child in the parent’s absence. In Uganda, memory projects first emerged in 1998 as public health outreach for people with HIV. They encourage writers, often agrarian widows with limited literacy, to deliver their messages to their children and the world. While reports have focused on the psychosocial support the projects provide to the beneficiaries, the content, and modes of representation in individual books, have received little attention. This article undertakes a close textual analysis of the words and images in one memory book, written in English by a subsistence farmer with seven years’ schooling. Using the frameworks of narrative therapy and illness writing, it examines how this reticent writer represents, obliquely, through textual gaps and contradictions, her painful memories of her child’s abuse by her husband and her co-wife and the difficult experience of living with HIV. This article argues that memory books as a new genre of illness writing can help less literate, less heard people with HIV write their stories in their own words and can help us, the readers, understand their experiences and lifeworlds from their perspectives.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2021.1969118
Damian Shaw
This paper investigates how African nations have portrayed the COVID-19 pandemic in their postage stamps. After an introduction, a timeline offering short descriptions of global editions of this theme from its inception until March 2021 will be established. The timeline will consider most issues to the above date, with the caveat that additional examples might still be found, and that more will no doubt be produced after the publication of this paper, as the pandemic persists. Major design types will then be determined based on the preceding information. Then various publications related to Africa will be discussed. These primarily concern the so-called ‘Stamperijia’ issues, produced in Lithuania, and then bogus stamps produced in the name of various African countries. Apart from the ‘Stamperijia’ and similar issues, it is noted that only two African nations have produced a COVID-19-themed stamp on the continent itself up to 20 March 2021. The implications of this will be discussed in the conclusion, with suggestions for future action.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2021.1969099
Zhiyong Mo
In the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, countries, regions and international organizations dispatched personal protective equipment (PPE) to frontline workers and afflicted people. Lines of ancient Chinese poetry were printed on the side of boxes dispatched by the People’s Republic of China both nationally and globally, as well as some sent from Japan to China. Many of these lines invoked shared histories and the long tradition of crosscultural communication and international friendship between China and other countries. But the printing of poetry was also motivated by a desire to remove people – albeit temporarily – from the context of COVID-19 suffering, to lead them to a more peaceful and harmonious world. The good will and friendship among people, as well as the common destiny of all humanity, is a recurrent theme. On the boxes of PPE sent to Wuhan, initially the most affected city, by the Chinese language academy (HSK) in Japan, eight Chinese characters read, ‘Mountain, River, Different, Areas / Wind, Moon, Same, Sky’ (Figure 1). The elemental and ethereal images, wind, moon and sky emblematize a lofty, magnanimous, and capacious mind, able to accommodate ‘ten thousand things’. These words were first embroidered on a thousand cassocks – on the orders of Japan’s Emperor Tenmu’s grandson Prince Nagaya (circa. 684–729) – and were sent to the Tang Dynasty court about 1300 years ago. After receiving them, the high monk Ganjin (Jianzhen 688–763), inspired by the gift, sailed to Japan to propagate Buddhism there. Invoking and rekindling this ancient memory of Japan reaching out – reiterating the gift – the HSK affirmed the long history of solidarity between the two nations. As the pandemic unfolded, China reciprocated the gift by sending PPE to Japan. China’s poem to Japan also affirmed their common heritage despite the distance separating them. The Tiantai Sect was founded during the Tang Dynasty and Japanese monks traveled to Tiantai to study, which led to them establishing the Tiantai Sect in Japan and instigating ongoing exchange. The Buddhist scholar Juzan’s lines allude to this history by using the metaphor of a tree’s blossom spreading its fragrance to two places (Figure 3). In the lines by Southern Song Dynasty poet, Zhang Xiaoxiang (Figure 7), printed on the PPE
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2021.1969152
Yanbin Kang
{"title":"Ten Chinese COVID-19 Poets","authors":"Yanbin Kang","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2021.1969152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2021.1969152","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43394824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2021.1969106
D. Daniels
Abstract What are the affordances of reading apocalyptic fiction under apocalyptic conditions, when a realism without apocalypse hardly seems realistic at all? What does it mean that our attempts to imagine a future beyond capitalism seem tethered to such an apocalyptic event, and what might these attempts tell us about the present – and the past – from which they emerge? While apocalyptic fiction contends to imagine a world beyond capitalism, I argue that it is more effective at exposing the apocalyptic nature of our present. I tether my analysis to a novel as prototypical of the genre as it is exceptional: Fever by the South African crime novelist Deon Meyer. I explore this protean text through a variety of generic frames – as fictional memoir, as Bildungsroman, and as multi-genre hybrid – to consider what the post-apocalyptic genre is and can be. Ultimately, I propose that, by rerouting our readings of post-apocalyptic and other speculative fictions towards what they reveal of our present cultural logics, this literature and our readings of it hold the capacity to escape the confines of anticipatory mourning towards the politically urgent task of recognizing and reckoning with the world of late capitalism and the affective trap of capitalist realism.
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