Matsotsi: The Migrant Detective and the Postcolonial State

IF 0.3 3区 文学 0 LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM
Stephanie Bosch Santana
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Recent work on crime fiction has highlighted the genre’s increasingly transnational focus and the growing number of migrant detectives. Matsotsi, a little-known Nyanja text published in Zambia in the early 1960s, provides a much earlier example of this figure in Sergeant Balala, an Angolan detective fighting to contain the tsotsi menace in Johannesburg, South Africa. Matsotsi, however, does more than point to cross-border detection as a means of elucidating transnational relationships. Shonga and Zulu’s text manipulates the genres of the detective novel and the bildungsroman to tell a story about the relationships among the individual, the state, and the wider region at a key moment in southern African history, when Zambia and Malawi were on the cusp of independence. Although African language writing has often been considered too localized to be used for nationalist purposes, here it is mobilized for the purpose of state-making in a transnational context.
松子移民侦探与后殖民国家
近期有关犯罪小说的研究强调了这一体裁越来越多的跨国关注点和越来越多的移民侦探。Matsotsi 》是 20 世纪 60 年代初在赞比亚出版的一部鲜为人知的尼扬贾题材作品,它为巴拉拉警官提供了一个更早的例子,巴拉拉警官是一名安哥拉侦探,在南非约翰内斯堡为遏制 tsotsi 威胁而战斗。然而,《Matsotsi》不仅仅将跨境侦查作为阐释跨国关系的手段。Shonga 和 Zulu 的作品运用侦探小说和童话体裁,讲述了在赞比亚和马拉维处于独立边缘的南部非洲历史关键时刻,个人、国家和更广泛地区之间的关系。尽管非洲语言写作常常被认为过于本土化,不能用于民族主义目的,但在这里,它却被用于跨国背景下的国家建设目的。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.40
自引率
0.00%
发文量
37
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