ENGLISH IN AFRICA最新文献

{"title":"Drought and the South African Imagination: Selected Readings","authors":"T. Voss","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V46I1.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V46I1.1","url":null,"abstract":"Both the work of a number of poets and novelists and the popular discourse of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries epitomise the fascination which drought continues to hold for the South African imagination. They also embody the environmental humanities principle that “environment” is inseparable from “society.” If, as has recently been argued, our literature is continuous with San orature, then our memory of drought covers millennia. A selective account of texts from the 1820s to the early twentieth century illustrates this continuity, as well as the complexity and controversy of the issue. In conclusion, 1933 was in popular memory the year of a “great drought,” anticipated by Francis Carey Slater and responded to by W. A. Kingon, C. M. van den Heever and, most powerfully, Eugene Marais. Keywords : Drought, South African literature, Eugene Marais","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42600048","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}

{"title":"Review","authors":"A. Fick","doi":"10.4314/eia.v46i1.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v46i1.6","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48280087","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}

{"title":"Decolonization and popular poetics: from Soweto poetry to diasporic solidarity","authors":"Brendon Nicholls","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V45I3.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V45I3.3","url":null,"abstract":"This article reads Soweto poetry in terms of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness thought. I argue that Soweto poetry develops dialectically. It uses popular cultural theorizations of shared daily experience to formulate black solidarity, while remaining attuned to historical change as the Soweto uprising and the murders of Onkgopotse Tiro and Steve Biko unfold. The implication of Biko’s dialectic is that we need to consider Soweto poetry’s volumes not as settled texts in themselves, but as texts in history whose modes and values are constantly re-formed by the very environment of historical impermanence and political contestation from which they emerge. In line with Biko’s dialectic, I argue that Soweto poetry’s affinity with the wider black diaspora is in keeping with its project of developing a fuller humanity after Apartheid, and that its lasting influence on South African artists and poets is but one sign of its sublation. Biko’s dialectic, I argue, offers South African literary history a way of thinking a genuinely multiracial, transnational canon via a national experience of political conflict and contested cultural value. Moreover, I suggest, the presence of a suppressed women’s poetic tradition after Soweto 1976 means that we ought to complicate Biko’s thought by contemplating the South African literary canon via polythetic, intersecting dialectics. Keywords:  Steve Biko, Black Consciousness, dialectic, literary canon, Soweto poetry, Mongane Wally Serote, Oswald Mtshali, Mafika Gwala, Sipho Sepamla","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43426413","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}

{"title":"Temporal aftermaths and ruined spaces in the African Metropolis: Cairo in the crime fiction of Parker Bilal","authors":"T. Steiner","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V45I3.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V45I3.5","url":null,"abstract":"Literary narratives of Cairo imagine the complex social, economic and political life of its inhabitants as constituted by the spatial and temporal dimensions of contested urban spaces. This article investigates urban spatiotemporal cartography in the crime fiction of Parker Bilal, the pseudonym of the well-known Anglo-Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub, and the way in which his narratives portray crime in contemporary Cairo at the beginning of the 21 st century. I argue that the first novel of Bilal’s/ Mahjoub’s Makana series, Golden Scales (2012), presents contradictory and conflicting temporalities, with one strand of the narrative gesturing forward and with linear momentum towards the 2011 revolution and another narrative strand presenting the present, in David Scott’s term, as “ruined time”, resulting in a crisis of arrested teleology. This temporal paradox sheds light on an African metropolis as a contested space: it becomes the shifting ground of a society caught up in government repression, crime, revolution and the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. Despite its revolutionary potential, the narrative renders the metropolis a space where the future becomes unimaginable. Keywords:  African crime fiction, ruined time, urbanity, Cairo, Jamal Mahjoub/ Parker Bilal","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49627420","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}

{"title":"Niq Mhlongo told us #FeesMustFall, or why the surface matters in Dog Eat Dog","authors":"Minesh Dass","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V45I3.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V45I3.6","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I investigate some of the reasons for the relative paucity of scholarly attention given to Niq Mhlongo’s debut novel, Dog Eat Dog . I argue that this text anticipates and articulates themes that are vital to contemporary South African culture generally, and to the academic space of the university specifically. For this reason, I contend that it is a work worthy of consideration, both because of its unusual form (it is a novel of ordeal rather than a Bildungsroman ), and its prescient depiction of issues to do with institutional racism and academic exclusion – subjects which were central during the student-led protests on South African campuses in 2015 and 2016. A principal thesis of this article is that one of the reasons for literary study’s unwillingness to engage with the novel is the discipline’s predisposition to a hermeneutics of suspicion, a method of analysis that I show is unsuited to Mhlongo’s text. Instead, I argue for the use of surface reading as a valid and appropriate praxis given the form and the content of Dog Eat Dog . Keywords: Niq Mhlongo, Dog Eat Dog , surface reading, #FeesMustFall, Novel of Ordeal","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43072409","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}

{"title":"Reading and roaming the racial city: R. R. R. Dhlomo and The Bantu World","authors":"C. Sandwith","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V45I3.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V45I3.2","url":null,"abstract":"Scholarship on the literary inscription of urban space in early twentiethcentury South Africa has tended to focus on Sophiatown and the writers of the 1950s ‘Drum generation’. In this reading, the idea of Johannesburg as it emerges in Drum magazine is seen to contrast sharply with earlier literary renditions of the city as a place of vice and moral decay. In this article, I draw attention to an important but little-known precursor to this emergent tradition of writing and claiming the modern city, namely journalist and writer, R. R. R. Dhlomo. As the author of a moralising fable about the depredations of city life, An African Tragedy (1928), Dhlomo is conventionally positioned as one of those writers whose reading of the city would inevitably be surpassed. This perspective ignores the significance of his popular satirical column, “R. Roamer Esq.” which appeared in the commercial African weekly The Bantu World over a period of ten years. Concerned in particular with the urban and peri-urban environments of late 1930s Johannesburg, the column maps out a detailed urban topography. Using the first-person perspective of an observing and observant urban street-walker/roamer, it calls attention to particular sites of engagement and encounter such as the court room, the train station and the street as well as the more intimate spaces encoding black urban marginality such as the backyard servant’s room. In this paper I consider what forms of the metropolis emerge from Roamer’s verbal mapping as well as what kinds of city figures, topographies, movements and interactions are inscribed. I argue that the column grants particular significance to the experience,  interpolation and movement of the black body in segregationist-era urban space, offering a striking early reading of the racial city as both a place of constraint and a zone of inventive resistance. The article makes a further claim for the importance of African print cultures as an index of urbanity, of African newspapers as significant but overlooked sites of city inscription and black urban life in which the boundaries between the ‘literary’ and the ‘journalistic’ are frequently breached.Keywords:  R. R. R. Dhlomo, The Bantu World, city literature, satire, African print cultures, African literature, South African literature, spatiality","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44235515","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}

{"title":"“Having it all”?: (Re) examining conspicuous consumption and pernicious masculinities in South African Chick-Lit","authors":"L. Spencer","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V45I3.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V45I3.4","url":null,"abstract":"A number of South African women writers have taken up chick-lit as a form of writing that enables them to reflect on the experiences of the modern woman in post-apartheid South Africa. The protagonists portrayed in chicklit narratives occupy ambiguous positions: they may have benefitted from feminist politics, which has opened new possibilities for them; however, underlying this emancipation is an implicit collusion with patriarchy. Chicklit refuses to offer a clear-cut construct of women’s lives; instead, it suggests a problematic terrain that is inherently ambiguous and contradictory, simultaneously empowering and oppressing women. It depicts a realistic world where contemporary women critique patriarchy and attempt to break free of its stranglehold by finding new methods of self-realisation. In this article, I argue that as a genre chick-lit offers a space of recognition and reflection for women who share a similar world view and emotional knowledge that stems from a common historical experience. Chick-lit also allows women writers to reveal that, for the modern woman, “having it all” comes with the conflicting pressures of negotiating professional careers and consumer culture, thus exposing women’s collusion with patriarchy in an increasingly neoliberal world as they attempt to construct new femininities. The article begins by offering an overview of the origins of chick-lit and how it has gone on to become a global phenomenon. This introduction is followed by a discussion of “the trope of the New South African Woman”,  “women’s culture’”, and lastly, an analysis of the depiction of consumerism and romantic relationships in South African chick-lit. Keywords:  South African chick-lit, consumerism, toxic masculinities, new femininities","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48593835","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}

{"title":"Introduction","authors":"L. Spencer, Minesh Dass","doi":"10.4314/eia.v45i3.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v45i3.1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43761580","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}

{"title":"Book Review: A Survey of South African Crime Fiction. Critical Analysis and Publishing History","authors":"Claudia Drawe","doi":"10.4314/EIA.V45I3.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/EIA.V45I3.7","url":null,"abstract":"Book Title:  A Survey of South African Crime Fiction. Critical Analysis and Publishing History Book Authors:  Sam Naidu & Elizabeth Le Roux Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press 2017; 200pp. ISBN/EAN: 978-1- 86914-355-8.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44300063","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}

{"title":"Finding the bird in the bush, or, “the material that appears”: rethinking the ‘creative’ in teaching ‘creative writing’","authors":"P. Wessels","doi":"10.4314/eia.v45i2.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v45i2.8","url":null,"abstract":"If we want to bring assessment into alignment with teaching and learning practices in creative writing, we will need to change our conceptions of teaching and learning themselves. I believe there is a precedent for a changed conception of teaching and learning and will sketch the outline of such a change. I will do so via a practical example of a course I teach in creative writing, as well as via theoretical interventions from current educational theorists. I take my lead from a call made from within the imperilled waters of creativity such as it exists in creative writing today, that we need to pay attention to ontological and ethical issues if our conception of creativity is to survive the slide into the hyper-cynical discourse of advertising. Without changing our understanding of the “what” of education we will never arrive at the how or the why.Keywords: Assessment, creativity, creative writing, ethics, Hughes Mearns, Gilles Deleuze","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48745087","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}