Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970309
M. Chapman
In remembrance of Michael Wessels This article avers that just as Bleek and Lloyd's research on ‘Bushman voices’ has the potential to enrich South African literature so does Wessels's study, Bushman Letters: Interpreting |Xam Narrative. A meta-critical account of ‘Bushman Studies’, Wessels provokes discussion on what might constitute Bushman expression, where and when it arose, how it has travelled to us, and what it might mean. Is it ‘usable’? The question, in turn, raises contention about the translation of the oral voice, appropriation, and the reworking of texts. Is Bushman expression confined to a locality or has it a wider purchase? Wessels invokes a range of response from Propp's morphology of folktale to Derrida's metaphysics of presence. My literary history, Southern African Literatures, begins with “Bushman (San) Songs and Stories”. In the light of this, I acknowledge Michael Wessels's contribution to literary studies.
{"title":"Bushman Letters/Bushman Literature Usable and Unusable Pasts","authors":"M. Chapman","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970309","url":null,"abstract":" In remembrance of Michael Wessels This article avers that just as Bleek and Lloyd's research on ‘Bushman voices’ has the potential to enrich South African literature so does Wessels's study, Bushman Letters: Interpreting |Xam Narrative. A meta-critical account of ‘Bushman Studies’, Wessels provokes discussion on what might constitute Bushman expression, where and when it arose, how it has travelled to us, and what it might mean. Is it ‘usable’? The question, in turn, raises contention about the translation of the oral voice, appropriation, and the reworking of texts. Is Bushman expression confined to a locality or has it a wider purchase? Wessels invokes a range of response from Propp's morphology of folktale to Derrida's metaphysics of presence. My literary history, Southern African Literatures, begins with “Bushman (San) Songs and Stories”. In the light of this, I acknowledge Michael Wessels's contribution to literary studies.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41712631","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970357
T. Ndlovu
Most of Charles Mungoshi’s fiction was written within a context of militaristic masculinities pre- and post-independent Zimbabwe, when the strong and healthy male body was valorised in Zimbabwean writing and life. His portrayal of men with physical infirmities, particularly spinal injuries, challenges the Chimurenga (war of liberation) rhetoric with its hypermasculine script that privileges the tough and healthy male body in service of the family and nation. Mungoshi’s calling on the corporeality of men’s bodies and the limits of physical ability exposes the conflicts and anxieties of maleness at a time when such “unmanning” was problematic and continues to be for some critics of Zimbabwean literature. Such critics view Mungoshi’s focus on men with infirmities as devoid of literary value, pessimistic, of little value to the liberation struggle and nation-building in post-colonial Zimbabwe. Yet through the trope of male bodily incapacitation, this paper argues, Mungoshi challenges a masculinism that demands that men should have strong bodies they can deploy to control familial and national space. By paying attention to the two languages that Mungoshi wrote in – English and Shona – this paper unpacks one of Mungoshi’s least acknowledged but most telling contributions to Zimbabwean writing – images of male infirmity that attempt to re-envision Zimbabwean masculinities.
Charles Mungoshi的大部分小说都是在津巴布韦独立前后的军国主义男子气概背景下创作的，当时津巴布韦的写作和生活中都重视强壮健康的男性身体。他对身体虚弱，尤其是脊椎受伤的男性的刻画，以其超男性化的剧本挑战了Chimurenga（解放战争）的修辞，该剧本赋予坚韧健康的男性身体为家庭和国家服务的特权。Mungoshi对男性身体的实体性和体能极限的呼吁暴露了男性的冲突和焦虑，而在这种“不穿衣服”存在问题的时候，津巴布韦文学的一些批评者仍然存在这种问题。这些评论家认为，Mungoshi对体弱者的关注缺乏文学价值，悲观，对后殖民地津巴布韦的解放斗争和国家建设没有什么价值。然而，本文认为，通过男性身体丧失能力的比喻，Mungoshi挑战了一种男性主义，这种男性主义要求男性拥有强大的身体来控制家庭和国家空间。通过关注Mungoshi用英语和绍纳语写作的两种语言，本文揭示了Mungoshi对津巴布韦写作最不被认可但最能说明问题的贡献之一——试图重新想象津巴布韦男子气概的男性虚弱形象。
{"title":"Men with Broken Backs and Other Infirmities: Unsettling Masculinities in Charles Mungoshi’s Fiction","authors":"T. Ndlovu","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970357","url":null,"abstract":"Most of Charles Mungoshi’s fiction was written within a context of militaristic masculinities pre- and post-independent Zimbabwe, when the strong and healthy male body was valorised in Zimbabwean writing and life. His portrayal of men with physical infirmities, particularly spinal injuries, challenges the Chimurenga (war of liberation) rhetoric with its hypermasculine script that privileges the tough and healthy male body in service of the family and nation. Mungoshi’s calling on the corporeality of men’s bodies and the limits of physical ability exposes the conflicts and anxieties of maleness at a time when such “unmanning” was problematic and continues to be for some critics of Zimbabwean literature. Such critics view Mungoshi’s focus on men with infirmities as devoid of literary value, pessimistic, of little value to the liberation struggle and nation-building in post-colonial Zimbabwe. Yet through the trope of male bodily incapacitation, this paper argues, Mungoshi challenges a masculinism that demands that men should have strong bodies they can deploy to control familial and national space. By paying attention to the two languages that Mungoshi wrote in – English and Shona – this paper unpacks one of Mungoshi’s least acknowledged but most telling contributions to Zimbabwean writing – images of male infirmity that attempt to re-envision Zimbabwean masculinities.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47454406","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970308
I. Manase, C. Stobie
The tragic death of Michael Wessels, former Associate Professor of English and Head of Department at the University of the Western Cape, and Regional Chair of the Southern African Association for Commonwealth Literature and Languages (SAACLALS), in April 2018, robbed the research and academic community of a robust researcher, writer and affable giant of a human being. As the chair of the SAACLALS committee, Michael, together with Professor Shaun Viljoen and other colleagues, organised the successful 2016 Association for Commonwealth Literature and Languages Triennial Conference, held at Stellenbosch University. Michael also played a significant role in establishing networks between the South African academy and the global world, as noted in the South Africa–Canada research project on indigenous literatures and his participation in SAACLALS activities. It is thus befitting that this issue of Current Writing, the official journal of SAACLALS, should carry the publications that follow in his honour. Various aspects pertaining to the personal, academic research, and academic citizenship related to Michael’s worldview inform this Special Issue. His love for travelling, hiking and nature; the inspiration he derived from indigenous arts and various forms of spirituality; interest in and teaching of various literatures, and his growing literary creativity at the time of his death constitute some of the thematic focuses treated in the articles published in this volume. Michael Chapman’s article, drawing on interactions with Michael Wessels over the mountain rock art at Rosetta Stone on the Drakensberg Mountains, examines the significance of Michael’s book on Bushman Letters in the constitution of “Bushman Studies”. The article further examines Xam narratives documented in the Bleek and Lloyd archive and argues that these narratives and their people, the San and Khoi, play a significant role in South African literary cultural studies. Kobus Moolman’s article focuses on the creative side of Michael Wessels as a poet. Using Wordsworth’s “Prelude”, Moolman traces Michael’s creative journey, his yearning to be a poet and his poems that were published during his time and posthumously. The poem “Spots of Time” is critically linked into a framework of study that reflects the poem’s aesthetic and thematic beauty and documentation of Michael’s life experiences as a young man, traveller and ultimately the successful fulfilment of his longing to be a published poet. Itunu Ayodeji Bodunrin’s article focuses on contemporary San cultural productions. The article considers the history of and representations of the San from the precolonial to the postapartheid era and available scholarship on San literature and culture, by critics such as Michael Wessels, to establish the position of marginality occupied by the Xun and Khwe San youth from Platfontein, in Kimberley. The article further examines the way the San youth use hip hop music to sing about their experiences and thu
西开普大学前英语副教授兼系主任、南部非洲英联邦文学与语言协会（SAACLALS）区域主席迈克尔·韦塞尔斯于2018年4月不幸去世，夺走了研究和学术界一位精力充沛的研究人员、作家和和蔼可亲的巨人。作为SAACLALS委员会主席，Michael与Shaun Viljoen教授和其他同事一起，在Stellenbosch大学成功组织了2016年英联邦文学和语言协会三年一度会议。迈克尔在建立南非学院与全球世界之间的网络方面也发挥了重要作用，正如他在南非-加拿大土著文学研究项目和参与SAACLALS活动中所指出的那样。因此，本期SAACLALS的官方期刊《当代写作》应该刊登以下纪念他的出版物。与迈克尔世界观相关的个人、学术研究和学术公民身份的各个方面为本期特刊提供了信息。他热爱旅行、徒步旅行和大自然；他从本土艺术和各种形式的精神中获得的灵感；对各种文学的兴趣和教学，以及他在去世时日益增长的文学创造力，构成了本卷文章中的一些主题焦点。迈克尔·查普曼（Michael Chapman）的文章借鉴了与迈克尔·韦塞尔斯（Michael Wessels）在德拉肯斯堡山脉罗塞塔石碑（Rosetta Stone on the Drakensberg Mountains）的山石艺术上的互动，探讨了迈克尔关于布什曼书信的书在“布什曼研究”构成中的意义。文章进一步研究了Bleek和Lloyd档案中记录的Xam叙事，并认为这些叙事及其人民San和Khoi在南非文学文化研究中发挥着重要作用。科布斯·穆尔曼的文章聚焦于迈克尔·韦塞尔斯作为诗人的创造性一面。Moolman用华兹华斯的《序曲》追溯了迈克尔的创作历程，他渴望成为一名诗人，以及他在生前和死后发表的诗歌。《时间的斑点》这首诗被批判性地连接到一个研究框架中，该框架反映了这首诗的美学和主题美，记录了迈克尔作为一个年轻人、旅行者的生活经历，并最终成功地实现了他成为一名出版诗人的愿望。Itunu Ayodeji Bodunren的文章聚焦于当代桑文化生产。本文考察了前殖民地到后种族隔离时代的桑人的历史和表现，以及迈克尔·韦塞尔斯等评论家对桑人文学和文化的现有研究，以确立来自金伯利Platfontein的荀和赫桑青年所占据的边缘地位。文章进一步探讨了三青年如何用嘻哈音乐来歌唱自己的经历，从而认为荀和可畏三青年的流行文化作品，如嘻哈，代表了他们的时代性和时代性
{"title":"Editors’ Notes","authors":"I. Manase, C. Stobie","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970308","url":null,"abstract":"The tragic death of Michael Wessels, former Associate Professor of English and Head of Department at the University of the Western Cape, and Regional Chair of the Southern African Association for Commonwealth Literature and Languages (SAACLALS), in April 2018, robbed the research and academic community of a robust researcher, writer and affable giant of a human being. As the chair of the SAACLALS committee, Michael, together with Professor Shaun Viljoen and other colleagues, organised the successful 2016 Association for Commonwealth Literature and Languages Triennial Conference, held at Stellenbosch University. Michael also played a significant role in establishing networks between the South African academy and the global world, as noted in the South Africa–Canada research project on indigenous literatures and his participation in SAACLALS activities. It is thus befitting that this issue of Current Writing, the official journal of SAACLALS, should carry the publications that follow in his honour. Various aspects pertaining to the personal, academic research, and academic citizenship related to Michael’s worldview inform this Special Issue. His love for travelling, hiking and nature; the inspiration he derived from indigenous arts and various forms of spirituality; interest in and teaching of various literatures, and his growing literary creativity at the time of his death constitute some of the thematic focuses treated in the articles published in this volume. Michael Chapman’s article, drawing on interactions with Michael Wessels over the mountain rock art at Rosetta Stone on the Drakensberg Mountains, examines the significance of Michael’s book on Bushman Letters in the constitution of “Bushman Studies”. The article further examines Xam narratives documented in the Bleek and Lloyd archive and argues that these narratives and their people, the San and Khoi, play a significant role in South African literary cultural studies. Kobus Moolman’s article focuses on the creative side of Michael Wessels as a poet. Using Wordsworth’s “Prelude”, Moolman traces Michael’s creative journey, his yearning to be a poet and his poems that were published during his time and posthumously. The poem “Spots of Time” is critically linked into a framework of study that reflects the poem’s aesthetic and thematic beauty and documentation of Michael’s life experiences as a young man, traveller and ultimately the successful fulfilment of his longing to be a published poet. Itunu Ayodeji Bodunrin’s article focuses on contemporary San cultural productions. The article considers the history of and representations of the San from the precolonial to the postapartheid era and available scholarship on San literature and culture, by critics such as Michael Wessels, to establish the position of marginality occupied by the Xun and Khwe San youth from Platfontein, in Kimberley. The article further examines the way the San youth use hip hop music to sing about their experiences and thu","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46482524","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970312
I. Bodunrin
The San or Bushmen of South Africa have been represented in popular literature and media as hunter-gatherer primitives who live nomadic lives and whose history predates that of all later immigrants to the country. While the ubiquitous representation and myth provide incentives in the form of cultural/ecotourism and engenders much international interest, it has rarely translated into any form of sustainable socioeconomic benefit for the impoverished Bushmen. Rather, it obfuscates accounts of modern acculturation, hinders the process of self-determination and contributes to a systemic socio-political and economic exclusion, repression, and marginalisation of contemporary San in South Africa. The San youth who seem to have suffered the most as a result of this essentialised representation are appropriating modern popular cultures (such as hip-hop) to project self-identity, counter-narratives, and position themselves as a modernised people. Using ethnographic methods of participant observation and informal interviews from 2014 to 2018, this article examines the complex, multi-layered composition of contemporary!Xun and Khwe San identity, which places the youth at the nexus of competing expectations thrown up by imperatives of social change, global influence, dominant social paradigms, poverty, joblessness, and indigeneity. The analysis of their identities in the late-modern South Africa, provokes the question whether contemporary Indigenous people are “indigenizing modernity or modernizing indigeneity.”
{"title":"Negotiating Contemporary Indigeneity: Cultural Aesthetic and Communicative Practices among Contemporary! Xun and Khwe San Youth of Platfontein, South Africa","authors":"I. Bodunrin","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970312","url":null,"abstract":"The San or Bushmen of South Africa have been represented in popular literature and media as hunter-gatherer primitives who live nomadic lives and whose history predates that of all later immigrants to the country. While the ubiquitous representation and myth provide incentives in the form of cultural/ecotourism and engenders much international interest, it has rarely translated into any form of sustainable socioeconomic benefit for the impoverished Bushmen. Rather, it obfuscates accounts of modern acculturation, hinders the process of self-determination and contributes to a systemic socio-political and economic exclusion, repression, and marginalisation of contemporary San in South Africa. The San youth who seem to have suffered the most as a result of this essentialised representation are appropriating modern popular cultures (such as hip-hop) to project self-identity, counter-narratives, and position themselves as a modernised people. Using ethnographic methods of participant observation and informal interviews from 2014 to 2018, this article examines the complex, multi-layered composition of contemporary!Xun and Khwe San identity, which places the youth at the nexus of competing expectations thrown up by imperatives of social change, global influence, dominant social paradigms, poverty, joblessness, and indigeneity. The analysis of their identities in the late-modern South Africa, provokes the question whether contemporary Indigenous people are “indigenizing modernity or modernizing indigeneity.”","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47323094","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970355
R. Field
Phenomenology and the poetry of Constantin Cavafy (1863–1933) seldom appear in the same sentence, and there are few such approaches to his work in English. Having set out the basis of phenomenology as proposed by Edmund Husserl and interpreted by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the article calls for critics to acknowledge their phenomenological influences more openly. It then examines early, late, published and suppressed poems and prose by Cavafy. Alongside its restrained and cerebral nature, Cavafy’s work sustains readings that place the body at the centre of experience, feeling and communication. It also notes the limits of this approach, particularly when a subjective history of the body closes it off to the other.
{"title":"“Remember, Body”: A Phenomenological Approach to the Poetry of Constantin Cavafy","authors":"R. Field","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970355","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970355","url":null,"abstract":"Phenomenology and the poetry of Constantin Cavafy (1863–1933) seldom appear in the same sentence, and there are few such approaches to his work in English. Having set out the basis of phenomenology as proposed by Edmund Husserl and interpreted by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the article calls for critics to acknowledge their phenomenological influences more openly. It then examines early, late, published and suppressed poems and prose by Cavafy. Alongside its restrained and cerebral nature, Cavafy’s work sustains readings that place the body at the centre of experience, feeling and communication. It also notes the limits of this approach, particularly when a subjective history of the body closes it off to the other.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48102723","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970313
Jean. Rossmann
This article focusses on Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006 [2004] trans. Michiel Heyns) and its fabulation of the magical Overberg of the south-western Cape. While the mother–child bond has received much scholarly attention, what deserves closer examination is the tentacular imbrication of the creaturely world into this dynamic. Adopting a posthuman, ecocritical lens, this article highlights the intermediary role played by creatures in these complex intimacies. In particular, I focus on Agaat’s ‘kin-making’ with the Emperor Butterfly which serves as a mediator between Milla and Agaat. Elucidating the chthonic themes in the novel, I turn to Haraway’s Living with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), which calls for making “kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present” (2016: 1). I argue that the multispecies kinship practices presented in Agaat provide a “response-able” approach to living on a damaged earth, planting seeds for “worldings committed to partial healing, modest rehabilitation, and still possible resurgence” in these hard times of planetary crises (71).
本文主要关注Marlene van Niekerk的《Agaat》(2006[2004]译)。迈克尔·海恩斯)和它对西南开普省神奇的奥弗堡的虚构。虽然母子关系受到了很多学者的关注，但值得更深入研究的是生物世界与这种动态的触手交织。本文采用后人类、生态批判的视角，强调了生物在这些复杂的亲密关系中所扮演的中介角色。我特别关注阿加特与皇帝蝴蝶的“亲缘关系”，它是米拉和阿加特之间的调解人。为了阐明小说中的民族主题，我转向哈拉威的《与麻烦一起生活:在克苏鲁塞尼制造亲属》(2016)，该书呼吁“在创造性的联系中制造亲属，作为一种学习在厚厚的现在中彼此生与死的实践”(2016)。1)我认为，在Agaat中提出的多物种亲缘关系实践提供了一种“负责任的”方法，可以在受损的地球上生活，为在地球危机的艰难时期“致力于部分治愈、适度恢复和仍有可能复苏的世界”播下种子(71)。
{"title":"Charaxes and Collaborative Becoming in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat","authors":"Jean. Rossmann","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970313","url":null,"abstract":"This article focusses on Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006 [2004] trans. Michiel Heyns) and its fabulation of the magical Overberg of the south-western Cape. While the mother–child bond has received much scholarly attention, what deserves closer examination is the tentacular imbrication of the creaturely world into this dynamic. Adopting a posthuman, ecocritical lens, this article highlights the intermediary role played by creatures in these complex intimacies. In particular, I focus on Agaat’s ‘kin-making’ with the Emperor Butterfly which serves as a mediator between Milla and Agaat. Elucidating the chthonic themes in the novel, I turn to Haraway’s Living with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), which calls for making “kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present” (2016: 1). I argue that the multispecies kinship practices presented in Agaat provide a “response-able” approach to living on a damaged earth, planting seeds for “worldings committed to partial healing, modest rehabilitation, and still possible resurgence” in these hard times of planetary crises (71).","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41646619","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970356
Godwin Makaudze
The emergence in Zimbabwe today of organisations and the promulgation of many pieces of legislation all meant to protect various aspects of the environment do not imply that Zimbabwean societies have never kept a positive eye on their environments. Traditional societies, the Shona in this case, have largely been particular about and enjoyed a sound relationship between the people and their environment. This article is an eco-critical exegesis of Shona taboos, known as zviera, with intent to lay bare the positive attitudes and approaches that traditional societies pay to, and inculcate in members towards various aspects of the environment. It observed that traditional Shona societies use taboos as one of the most powerful environmental awareness and conservation genres, wherein human life is shown as hinged on the animal, vegetative and physical environments which are then supposed to be identified, named, meaningfully and economically exploited and safeguarded from pollution, over-extraction and depletion for the well-being of humanity. These findings have a strong bearing on the positives inherent in Shona traditional ways of achieving environmental awareness even in the contemporary world, and on further research.
{"title":"An Eco-critical Exegesis of Shona Taboos","authors":"Godwin Makaudze","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970356","url":null,"abstract":"The emergence in Zimbabwe today of organisations and the promulgation of many pieces of legislation all meant to protect various aspects of the environment do not imply that Zimbabwean societies have never kept a positive eye on their environments. Traditional societies, the Shona in this case, have largely been particular about and enjoyed a sound relationship between the people and their environment. This article is an eco-critical exegesis of Shona taboos, known as zviera, with intent to lay bare the positive attitudes and approaches that traditional societies pay to, and inculcate in members towards various aspects of the environment. It observed that traditional Shona societies use taboos as one of the most powerful environmental awareness and conservation genres, wherein human life is shown as hinged on the animal, vegetative and physical environments which are then supposed to be identified, named, meaningfully and economically exploited and safeguarded from pollution, over-extraction and depletion for the well-being of humanity. These findings have a strong bearing on the positives inherent in Shona traditional ways of achieving environmental awareness even in the contemporary world, and on further research.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43467317","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970310
Kobus Moolman
For Linzi, Akira and Tao While much of Michael Wessels’s work on reading San oral literature, the politics of indigeneity and ecocriticism was acknowledged during his life, there is another dimension to his research that has been overlooked. Michael Wessels always had a deep love of poetry, and toward the end of his life, he had begun to focus more on his writing and to publish. In this article, I explore Wessels’s key long poem published as “Cannibal Time,” but subsequently changed to “Spots of Time” (as I will refer to it), in which he constructs an imaginative autobiography that includes travel writing, short prose and poetry. Drawing upon Wordsworth’s The Prelude, I employ both a critical and creative methodology to argue that the subject of Wessels’s poem is less ‘my life’ in a factual and historical sense, and rather more ‘the making of a poet’.
{"title":"“Spots of Time” – Michael Wessels and the Imaginative Reinterpretation of Identity","authors":"Kobus Moolman","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970310","url":null,"abstract":"For Linzi, Akira and Tao While much of Michael Wessels’s work on reading San oral literature, the politics of indigeneity and ecocriticism was acknowledged during his life, there is another dimension to his research that has been overlooked. Michael Wessels always had a deep love of poetry, and toward the end of his life, he had begun to focus more on his writing and to publish. In this article, I explore Wessels’s key long poem published as “Cannibal Time,” but subsequently changed to “Spots of Time” (as I will refer to it), in which he constructs an imaginative autobiography that includes travel writing, short prose and poetry. Drawing upon Wordsworth’s The Prelude, I employ both a critical and creative methodology to argue that the subject of Wessels’s poem is less ‘my life’ in a factual and historical sense, and rather more ‘the making of a poet’.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46517519","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929x.2021.1970359
Julia Martín
{"title":"Salmon Waters","authors":"Julia Martín","doi":"10.1080/1013929x.2021.1970359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929x.2021.1970359","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43082405","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970353
Maureen Amimo
Postcolonial forms of countertravel writing are sites through which previously marginalised subjects such as women and queer others produce agency. This article examines Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room as a countertravel narrative that imagines journeys as a negotiation of fractures within the self. I utilise the idea of travel to locate crossings and or contemplation of boundaries both physical and metaphysical. Galgut’s In a Strange Room explores geospatiality, race, sexuality and narratology as sites of journeys to locate multiplicity as an inherent quality of the self. Galgut fashions ‘queer travel’ and ‘queer narratology’ as producing allowances for confronting anxieties within the self and the self’s relation with others. The narrative demonstrates that in constantly confronting the fractures of ‘being-out-of-place’ subjects redefine the fluid sense of being-in-place and in the world.
{"title":"Travel and the Framing of Multiplicities in Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room","authors":"Maureen Amimo","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970353","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2021.1970353","url":null,"abstract":"Postcolonial forms of countertravel writing are sites through which previously marginalised subjects such as women and queer others produce agency. This article examines Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room as a countertravel narrative that imagines journeys as a negotiation of fractures within the self. I utilise the idea of travel to locate crossings and or contemplation of boundaries both physical and metaphysical. Galgut’s In a Strange Room explores geospatiality, race, sexuality and narratology as sites of journeys to locate multiplicity as an inherent quality of the self. Galgut fashions ‘queer travel’ and ‘queer narratology’ as producing allowances for confronting anxieties within the self and the self’s relation with others. The narrative demonstrates that in constantly confronting the fractures of ‘being-out-of-place’ subjects redefine the fluid sense of being-in-place and in the world.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42104559","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：