Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2019.1618088
Duncan Brown
Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country: A Story of Comfort in Desolation (1984 [1948]), appeared around 70 years ago, and has been the subject of widely discrepant responses ever since its initial publication. It has sold millions of copies across the globe, appeared in multiple forms – abridged versions, translations, stage productions, as set work on school and university syllabi – becoming, in the process, arguably South Africa’s most canonical, transnational, novel. This article reflects on my own personal, family and academic history of engagement with the novel over almost four decades, and the differing readings and responses which it has elicited. In so doing, the article tries to shed light not just on Paton’s novel, but on questions of use, value and meaning in our encounters with literary texts which seem, insistently, to demand our renewed attention.
艾伦·帕顿（Alan Paton）的小说《哭泣，亲爱的国家：荒凉中的安慰故事》（Cry，the Beloved Country:A Story of Comfort in Desolation，1984[1948]）出现在大约70年前，自其首次出版以来，一直受到广泛不同的回应。它在全球售出了数百万册，以多种形式出现——删节版、翻译、舞台制作，作为学校和大学教学大纲的背景作品——在这个过程中，它可以说是南非最经典的跨国小说。这篇文章反映了我自己近四十年来参与这部小说的个人、家庭和学术史，以及它引发的不同解读和反应。在这样做的过程中，这篇文章不仅试图阐明巴顿的小说，还试图阐明我们在遇到文学文本时的使用、价值和意义问题，这些文本似乎一直需要我们重新关注。
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Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929x.2019.1618095
C. Stobie
This special issue of Current Writing – 32(2) 2020 – will consist of articles that analyse literary texts with a theme of precarity in various forms in contemporary Africa, and that illuminate ways in which authors evoke empathy for precarious or marginalised groups, thereby contributing to attitudes conducive to social justice and harmony. Internationally, precarity is currently gaining traction as a significant field of study. Key theorist Judith Butler views precarity as a type of precariousness by which human life can be understood from a communal and political perspective. All lives are precarious, as they are vulnerable and finite; however, precarity is maintained by political, social and economic systems which permit offences against humanity including poverty, disease, starvation, violence or death. Precarity studies is compatible with fields such as feminist, subaltern and postcolonial studies, which enable challenges to Eurocentric models of the precariat. Instead of relying solely on theorists from the centres of intellectual power, it is important to deploy theoretical conversations with commentators from the locations under study. While the research may employ concepts of precarity as defined by Judith Butler, it may also focus on theories developed within the African context, such as Achille Mbembe’s influential concept of necropolitics (2003). Mbembe maintains that while social and political regulation of people’s lives leads to forms of metaphoric and literal death, alternative, resistant viewpoints and agency are also possible. The special issue aims to examine African narratives about precarity as acts of communication possessed of their own aesthetics and truth-values, that the reader is called upon to respond to imaginatively in order to challenge injustice. Such narratives represent the predicament of individuals marginalised by various issues such as poverty, childhood, gender, sexuality, albinism, ethnicity, xenophobia, and migrancy. The issue aims to contribute to a new wave of scholarship on the theme of precarity, which has a strong social relevance. Cheryl Stobie will edit this issue of the journal. A 200-word abstract and a brief biographical note are to be sent to stobiec@ukzn.ac.za by 31 October 2019. The deadline for submission of the article, of about 6 000 words, is 28 February 2020.
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Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2019.1618089
M. Chapman
It is said that in the years 2000 + 20, literature has rejected depth for surface; at least in ‘New World’ societies of shallow tradition. From the United States, we hear that the sign of the times is “reality hunger”, an aesthetic not of exploration, but of affect; a structure not of intricate plot, but of plotlessness; of facts that eclipse imagination. If serious fiction is outsold by nonfiction, genre fiction and self-help books, what might be ‘fiction's response’? I turn to the minority form of the fictional repertoire – poetry – to ask: might poetry suggest a contract between fiction's response and the society?
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Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2019.1618092
A. Y. Kenqu
This article presents a close reading of Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home, particularly its representation of the post-apartheid nation-state as a place of excess or, indeed, what James Ogude might call a “a site of eating”. To begin, I locate Mhlongo’s oeuvre within the long and rich tradition of black-centred artistic expression that is preoccupied with black masculinities and the politics/performance of ‘hustling’. Turning to Way Back Home specifically, I argue that the novel functions as a critique of the excesses, including the kleptocracy, of the ruling elite. I show that the novel ultimately reveals the underside of South Africa’s euphoric discourse of the ‘Rainbow Nation’. I wish to evoke not only his novel’s interrogation of the notions of home, belonging, desire and the unheimlich in post-apartheid South Africa, but also the sense in which failure is always already a certainty in postcolonial states which adopt and function within structures that were never designed for African progress.
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Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2019.1644840
Ileana Dimitriu
With a focus on Zoë Wicomb’s novel, October (2014) – the title signalling an ‘aesthetic’ elevation of the events of a journey home – I explore the trope of the ‘home visit’ as a catalytic moment of insight into the protagonist’s dislocated life. In October, the syntagmatic chain of events (the plot) yields a paradigmatic resonance: the transitional month of the year embodying the tenuousness of a temporary homecoming. I draw on the concept of ‘home visit’ from the fields of mobility and destination studies, where it indicates a recently established research niche, variously referred to as “personal memory tourism” (Marschall 2017) or “visiting home and familiar places” (Pearce 2012). The object of such investigation concerns the temporary home visit by first-generation migrants, as triggered by both sensory experiences and cognitive processes of searching for personal redefinitions of what it means to be at home in a place. I draw also on Heidegger’s reflections on the concept of home beyond conventional understanding: home as conceptual “dwelling” and as a process of “home-making” (2001 [1954]).
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Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2019.1618086
Hedley Twidle
In this reflection on his recently published book, Hedley Twidle explores historical and theoretical approaches to the question of non-fiction in South African literature. Experiments with Truth reads the country's transition as refracted through an array of documentary modes that are simultaneously refashioned and blurred into each other: long-form analytic journalism and reportage; experiments in oral history, microhistory and archival reconstruction; life-writing, memoir and the personal essay. Its case studies trace the strange and ethically complex process by which actual people, places and events are shuffled, patterned and plotted in long-form prose narrative. While holding in mind the imperatives of testimony and witness so important to the struggle for liberation and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the book is increasingly drawn to a post-TRC aesthetic: to works that engage with difficult, inappropriate or unusable elements of the past, and with the unfinished project of social reconstruction in South Africa. It places southern African materials in a global context, and in dialogue with other important nonfictional traditions that have emerged at moments of social rupture and transition.
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2018.1547020
M. Chapman
Given demands in South Africa ‘to decolonise’, I argue that to decolonise is more complex and challenging than currently constitutes the discourse of decolonisation, either in South Africa or the globe. Focusing on the Humanities, more specifically on literature – with reference to Ngũgĩ’s ‘Nairobi Literature Debate’ of the late 1960s – I frame discussion ‘in-between’ two significant gatherings, Bandung (1955) and the 10th BRICS Summit (2018), the former identified by Robert JC Young and Walter Mignolo as a marker in both postcolonial and decolonial ‘theory’; the latter, in a shift between an earlier ideology-speak and the trade-investment speak of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. What might be the consequence of such an in-between space for research, teaching and curriculum design?
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2018.1547013
J. Murray
This article analyses selected literary representations of the intersections of gender, violence and the dynamics of shaming female bodies and women’s sexuality to demonstrate how discursive and epistemological constructions of gender create an environment where gender violence becomes the norm rather than an aberration. I seek to unpack how selected authors represent the ways in which seemingly harmless assumptions about women’s bodies and sexualities form part of a much larger, insidious and profoundly misogynist system of gendered power inequalities. The analysis suggests that this is a social system in which all women are both vulnerable and acutely aware of their gendered vulnerability to violence. The primary texts that I will analyse are Period Pain (2016) by Kopano Matlwa and Broken Basket (2016) by Francine Mann. Both these novels represent how female characters, albeit ones who are differently situated, negotiate their lives against a backdrop of repeated references to the shame that is vested in their bodies and sexualities and how they must ultimately deal with the progression of violence from a discursive to a physical reality.
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2018.1547503
M. Chapman
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929x.2018.1547010
C. Stobie
This special issue of Current Writing – 32(2) 2020 – will consist of articles that analyse literary texts with a theme of precarity in various forms in contemporary Africa, and that illuminate ways in which authors evoke empathy for precarious or marginalised groups, thereby contributing to attitudes conducive to social justice and harmony. Internationally, precarity is currently gaining traction as a significant field of study. Key theorist Judith Butler views precarity as a type of precariousness by which human life can be understood from a communal and political perspective. All lives are precarious, as they are vulnerable and finite; however, precarity is maintained by political, social and economic systems which permit offences against humanity including poverty, disease, starvation, violence or death. Precarity studies is compatible with fields such as feminist, subaltern and postcolonial studies, which enable challenges to Eurocentric models of the precariat. Instead of relying solely on theorists from the centres of intellectual power, it is important to deploy theoretical conversations with commentators from the locations under study. While the research may employ concepts of precarity as defined by Judith Butler, it may also focus on theories developed within the African context, such as Achille Mbembe’s influential concept of necropolitics (2003). Mbembe maintains that while social and political regulation of people’s lives leads to forms of metaphoric and literal death, alternative, resistant viewpoints and agency are also possible. The special issue aims to examine African narratives about precarity as acts of communication possessed of their own aesthetics and truth-values, that the reader is called upon to respond to imaginatively in order to challenge injustice. Such narratives represent the predicament of individuals marginalised by various issues such as poverty, childhood, gender, sexuality, albinism, ethnicity, xenophobia, and migrancy. The issue aims to contribute to a new wave of scholarship on the theme of precarity, which has a strong social relevance. Cheryl Stobie will edit this issue of the journal. A 200-word abstract and a brief biographical note are to be sent to stobiec@ukzn.ac.za by 31 October 2019. The deadline for submission of the article, of about 6 000 words, is 28 February 2020.
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