Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2020.1795343
Cheryl Stobie
{"title":"Editor’s Notes","authors":"Cheryl Stobie","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2020.1795343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2020.1795343","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1013929X.2020.1795343","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46034517","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 : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2020.1795351
K. Lipenga
Scholars are beginning to research the presence of disability in African literature, focusing on the way such portrayals either challenge or confirm various views about disability. In this article, the aim is to examine how Helon Habila deliberately links disability, precarity and narrative agency through the presentation of several disabled characters who are also incidentally presented as story-tellers in two novels, Waiting for an Angel (2003) and Measuring Time (2007). However, they do more than just tell stories – they also use the feature of disability as an anchor around which to construct their narratives. The article, therefore, advances the argument that, in the selected texts, Habila challenges the association of the disabled body with precarity, mainly through illustrating the agency accorded to that body through the narrativisation. Further, the setting of civil war in the two texts is highlighted as a particularly disabling environment, which Habila criticises through these characters.
{"title":"Reading Precarity, Disability and Narrative Agency in Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and Measuring Time","authors":"K. Lipenga","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2020.1795351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2020.1795351","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars are beginning to research the presence of disability in African literature, focusing on the way such portrayals either challenge or confirm various views about disability. In this article, the aim is to examine how Helon Habila deliberately links disability, precarity and narrative agency through the presentation of several disabled characters who are also incidentally presented as story-tellers in two novels, Waiting for an Angel (2003) and Measuring Time (2007). However, they do more than just tell stories – they also use the feature of disability as an anchor around which to construct their narratives. The article, therefore, advances the argument that, in the selected texts, Habila challenges the association of the disabled body with precarity, mainly through illustrating the agency accorded to that body through the narrativisation. Further, the setting of civil war in the two texts is highlighted as a particularly disabling environment, which Habila criticises through these characters.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1013929X.2020.1795351","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46003258","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 : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743030
S. Kostelac
This article analyses Damon Galgut’s 2008 novel, The Impostor, in light of recent critiques which argue that South African writing is beset by “repetition compulsions” (Boehmer 2018: 90) that betray the nation’s sublimated traumas and unhealable wounds. It argues that Galgut’s novel does not simply rehearse the tropes of South Africa’s literature of crisis, but rather subjects them to extended metafictional and ironic critique. Among the targets of Galgut’s satire is the state of petrified suspension that regualrly marks the white post-apartheid condition and which is undergirded, he shows, by a residual archive of pastoral and colonial scripts. These scripts make the realisation of what Paul Gilroy has called a “new cosmopolitanism” (2005: 287) in South Africa impossible, but they can be dispelled, the novel suggests, by cultivating modes of ironic self-awareness in which we come to understand our alterity as the very enabling condition of forming a life with others.
{"title":"The (Im)possibility of a New Cosmopolitanism? Damon Galgut’s Critique of Residual Cultural Scripts in The Impostor","authors":"S. Kostelac","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743030","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses Damon Galgut’s 2008 novel, The Impostor, in light of recent critiques which argue that South African writing is beset by “repetition compulsions” (Boehmer 2018: 90) that betray the nation’s sublimated traumas and unhealable wounds. It argues that Galgut’s novel does not simply rehearse the tropes of South Africa’s literature of crisis, but rather subjects them to extended metafictional and ironic critique. Among the targets of Galgut’s satire is the state of petrified suspension that regualrly marks the white post-apartheid condition and which is undergirded, he shows, by a residual archive of pastoral and colonial scripts. These scripts make the realisation of what Paul Gilroy has called a “new cosmopolitanism” (2005: 287) in South Africa impossible, but they can be dispelled, the novel suggests, by cultivating modes of ironic self-awareness in which we come to understand our alterity as the very enabling condition of forming a life with others.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743030","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44579624","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 : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929x.2020.1752521
{"title":"Call for Papers","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/1013929x.2020.1752521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929x.2020.1752521","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1013929x.2020.1752521","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46919797","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 : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743029
Sheena Goddard, K. Goddard
The paper explores the “unheimlich” (“unhomely”) in three South African novels: Gem Squash Tokoloshe, The Dream House and October. The novels use the trope of the house to represent the psychological and social traumas of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. They also use the mythopoeic cyclical journey to describe psychological responses to trauma. This is akin both to the psychoanalytic method and to the mythic journey back into the past to uncover repressed memories. Using Freudian psychoanalysis, we divide the exploration of this trauma into three different parts: deception, absence and substitution. Trauma is not contained in a single event. Its effects are felt in the deception which underpins the original event and furthered by the sense of absence that arises and which must then be alleviated by finding a substitute. This attempt is itself traumatic.
{"title":"Unhomely Homes: Trauma, Memory and the Loss of Home in Three South African Novels","authors":"Sheena Goddard, K. Goddard","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743029","url":null,"abstract":"The paper explores the “unheimlich” (“unhomely”) in three South African novels: Gem Squash Tokoloshe, The Dream House and October. The novels use the trope of the house to represent the psychological and social traumas of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. They also use the mythopoeic cyclical journey to describe psychological responses to trauma. This is akin both to the psychoanalytic method and to the mythic journey back into the past to uncover repressed memories. Using Freudian psychoanalysis, we divide the exploration of this trauma into three different parts: deception, absence and substitution. Trauma is not contained in a single event. Its effects are felt in the deception which underpins the original event and furthered by the sense of absence that arises and which must then be alleviated by finding a substitute. This attempt is itself traumatic.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743029","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45874456","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 : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743033
G. Fincham
Starting with the premise that postcolonial writers are increasingly interested in aspects of indigenous thinking, this paper draws on recent ecocriticism to analyse Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller. In this novel, Llosa dramatises in fictional form the worldview of the Machiguenga Indians of Peru. He constructs the voices of two university friends in Lima: those of Saúl Zuratas and an unnamed narrator. Chapter by chapter, through their juxtaposed conversations, visits to the remote jungles of Cusco and Madre de Dios in eastern Peru, and Saúl’s narration of the stories he tells the Machiguengas, the reader encounters the worldview of this small isolated tribe. Their cosmology values and customs are revealed to be ecologically sensitive, offering an interconnected communal vision on which the survival of the ecosphere depends.
{"title":"Towards a New Environmentalism: Indigeneity, Ethics and Ecology in Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller and Two Recent Ecocritical Studies","authors":"G. Fincham","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743033","url":null,"abstract":"Starting with the premise that postcolonial writers are increasingly interested in aspects of indigenous thinking, this paper draws on recent ecocriticism to analyse Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller. In this novel, Llosa dramatises in fictional form the worldview of the Machiguenga Indians of Peru. He constructs the voices of two university friends in Lima: those of Saúl Zuratas and an unnamed narrator. Chapter by chapter, through their juxtaposed conversations, visits to the remote jungles of Cusco and Madre de Dios in eastern Peru, and Saúl’s narration of the stories he tells the Machiguengas, the reader encounters the worldview of this small isolated tribe. Their cosmology values and customs are revealed to be ecologically sensitive, offering an interconnected communal vision on which the survival of the ecosphere depends.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743033","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45565103","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 : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743028
A. Duvenage
Underpinned by Leonard Praeg’s notion of “ontological betrayal” in ubuntu as lived-praxis, this article argues that post-apartheid “city writing” by Phaswane Mpe, K Sello Duiker, Kgebetli Moele and Lauren Beukes humanises “migrants” (those who journey to the South African city from rural South Africa) while neglecting “immigrants”, or black-African arrivals from outside the borders of South Africa. Consequently, a re-examination of the structure and function of ubuntu as a tool for social cohesion is necessary to counter negrophobic and xenophobic versions of an authentic “African” identity.
{"title":"Re-examining Ubuntu as a Tool for Social Cohesion: The Silenced Immigrant Voice and Unjustifiable “Moral Arrival” of the Migrant in Post-apartheid City Writing by Mpe, Duiker, Moele, and Beukes","authors":"A. Duvenage","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743028","url":null,"abstract":"Underpinned by Leonard Praeg’s notion of “ontological betrayal” in ubuntu as lived-praxis, this article argues that post-apartheid “city writing” by Phaswane Mpe, K Sello Duiker, Kgebetli Moele and Lauren Beukes humanises “migrants” (those who journey to the South African city from rural South Africa) while neglecting “immigrants”, or black-African arrivals from outside the borders of South Africa. Consequently, a re-examination of the structure and function of ubuntu as a tool for social cohesion is necessary to counter negrophobic and xenophobic versions of an authentic “African” identity.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743028","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43312872","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 : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743027
Ileana Dimitriu
The article considers the concept of ‘home’ and its experiential application in relation to Michiel Heyns’s novel, Lost Ground. A prize-winning novel in South Africa, Lost Ground has taxed interpretation. Is it a detective novel, a novel of ‘gay’ relationships, or a novel of oblique rather than direct political observations on ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa? I argue that the novel is all the above, but tangentially. More centrally, I argue that Lost Ground explores commitment and non-commitment to both a home place and a place of exile; that Heyns is too subtle a novelist to promote an either/or response to a situation which, at least in the narrative, subjects despair to a muted redemption. If the protagonist does not find a home on his ‘home visit,’ neither does he find equanimity in his thoughts of a return to London. Yet, his experience in his brief return to the town of his earlier life grants him fresh insight into his own vulnerability.
{"title":"Whose ‘Lost Ground’? Facets of Outsiderhood","authors":"Ileana Dimitriu","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743027","url":null,"abstract":"The article considers the concept of ‘home’ and its experiential application in relation to Michiel Heyns’s novel, Lost Ground. A prize-winning novel in South Africa, Lost Ground has taxed interpretation. Is it a detective novel, a novel of ‘gay’ relationships, or a novel of oblique rather than direct political observations on ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa? I argue that the novel is all the above, but tangentially. More centrally, I argue that Lost Ground explores commitment and non-commitment to both a home place and a place of exile; that Heyns is too subtle a novelist to promote an either/or response to a situation which, at least in the narrative, subjects despair to a muted redemption. If the protagonist does not find a home on his ‘home visit,’ neither does he find equanimity in his thoughts of a return to London. Yet, his experience in his brief return to the town of his earlier life grants him fresh insight into his own vulnerability.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1013929X.2020.1743027","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46650531","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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