Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa最新文献

{"title":"Jane Austen and Her Diverse Daughters: Muslim Women Re-reading and Re-writing Pride and Prejudice from South Africa and Beyond","authors":"Aneesa Bodiat, Antoinette Pretorius","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2023.2167400","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2023.2167400","url":null,"abstract":"Jane Austen and her depiction of courtship during the Regency Period is particularly relevant to South African Indian Muslim women due to the similarities between contemporary Muslim engagement rituals and Austen’s representation of courtship. This can be seen in Riding the Samoosa Express (eds Jeena and Asvat 2014), a non-fiction collection of essays by South African Muslim women, relating to courtship and marriage. In examining some of the essays in that anthology, as well as the novel Ayesha at Last (Jalaluddin 2018), we explore the continued desire of Muslim women not only to re-read Austen, but to read culturally adapted versions of her classics as well. Revisiting Pride and Prejudice and its adaptations provides a window into some of the issues surrounding re-writing the canon for diversity and the representation of specific cultural contexts. These adaptations expand Austen’s universe to allow for inclusion of varying types of complex identities, inviting different types of readers to engage in the original and its adaptations in a meaningful way.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41319996","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":"Cultural Entanglement, Displacement and Contemporary Durban in Imraan Coovadia’s High Low In-between","authors":"Alana Muller","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2023.2167402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2023.2167402","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on Imraan Coovadia’s High Low In-between and investigates how the novel’s join protagonists, Nafisa and Shakeer, navigate their contemporary Durban. The mother and son, I point out, present two disparate subjectivities that engage with both the urban milieu of the city and a globalised world in very different ways. Both experience a sense of displacement in the city, but, as thew novel progresses, they manage to embrace Durban’s contemporary cultural entanglements and feel more at home. Nafisa, a doctor in the inner city, learns to engage with the city through walking its streets while Shakeer, a globe-trotting photographer, discovers his ability to notice Durban’s local specificity and entanglement of places, people, and cultures.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46997475","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":"Interrogating the Self: Colonialism and Female Identity in Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives","authors":"Rose Symonds","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2023.2167409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2023.2167409","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses the representation of identity in Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives. It is an autobiographical text focusing on issues of guilt, complicity and entanglement that resonates with a literature of shame, as recently identified in postcolonial studies. Vita, the protagonist, expresses how she is creatively blocked by her guilt as a beneficiary of apartheid and this is mirrored in her relationship with Royce where she is a beneficiary of his powerful and wealthy patronage. Vita’s story, highlighting feminist issues of complicity, is also a metafictional device that represents the writer’s feelings about her post-apartheid, colonial identity. In a series of confessional letters between herself and Royce, Vita maps her journey to selfhood. My paper critically examines the literary and deconstructive features of Dovey’s text in which a rite of passage is represented as a textual interrogation of self.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49195219","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":"An Art of Nothing, an Art of Something: The Local in the Global or the Global in the Local?","authors":"Greg Streak","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2023.2167408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2023.2167408","url":null,"abstract":"The solo exhibition, Nothing Matters, was installed on the mezzanine floor of an industrial panel beater warehouse at 400 Sydney Road, Durban, South Africa. The exhibition was open to the public from September-December 2021. The objective of the exhibition was to create ‘something’ of conceptual and aesthetic compulsion from a language of nothingness, whether it is ‘found’ in the surrounding temper of the public space or, in art, in various manifestations of the ‘dematerialised object’: the void; the empty canvas or gallery; the ‘invisible’ work; or the detritus of the everyday? The following is a dialogue between literary critic Michael Chapman and artist Greg Streak regarding the exhibition.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49567603","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":"The Nigerian Civil War and the Politics of Creative Remembrance: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy","authors":"S. Zulfiqar","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2023.2167411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2023.2167411","url":null,"abstract":"Through a discussion of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy (2005) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), this article argues that the creative remembrance of the Nigerian Civil War and the re-visioning of the nation state has tended to focus on the Hausa and Igbos, excluding other ethnic minorities, especially the Ogoni of the Niger Delta. Adichie and Saro-Wiwa remember and creatively evoke the war differently, and this difference facilitates the production of more complex histories. This, in turn, enables us better to comprehend the conflict’s historical wounds; it reveals that a refashioning of this history through minority narratives can produce deeper understanding. Through such historical reconstruction, the tragic past is evoked without losing sight of current realities or indulging in misplaced optimism regarding the future. Moreover, I argue, to create narratives that enable genuine healing, engagement with both peripheral and central viewpoints is crucial; what is needed are narratives that assist in the dismantling of ethnic hegemonic structures.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47973178","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":"The ‘Write’ Approach in Three Twenty-First-Century Studies","authors":"R. Gray","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2023.2167401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2023.2167401","url":null,"abstract":"This review article seeks to trace connections among three contemporary texts that all, in their different ways, attempt to trace a new path to the future, and throw some light upon the darkness that defines quotidian reality. All three turn on comparable authoritative probity. It begins with Achile Membe’s Out of the Dark Night, a collection of essays on decolonisation that points the way to recovery via ‘Afropolitanism’. Fetson Kalua’s Re-imagining African Identity in the Twenty-First Century likewise erases racially based borders or notions of ‘otherness’, be it colour-based or cultural. Kalua deploys the term ‘intermediality’ signifying tolerance of difference, in his exploration, homing in on African identity. Yuval Noah Harari’s earlier 21 Lessons for the 21st Century has a broader cultural and technological lens. Yet all three explore what it means to be human and, by extension, why writers write as they do, implicitly interrogating what constitutes humanity and the purpose of art in the ‘write’ approach.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46848581","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":"Poetry in South Africa: Towards a Language of Aesthetic Response","authors":"M. Chapman","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2022.2114142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2022.2114142","url":null,"abstract":"This article has two interrelated aims: first, to offer readers a critical survey of poetry production in South Africa over the last 30 years, the 30-year period being preceded by a consideration of key markers in the poetry of the 1970s and 1980s; second, to engage in debates on distinctions between the poetry of the high mimetic and the low mimetic; on poetry of the page and the stage; and on women’s poetry and the womanist poem. With consideration of women’s poetry having raised debates among US-based poet-critics on Lyric/L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. Poetics, the overarching objective is to pursue a language of criticism that is responsive to the aesthetic range and variety of poetry in South Africa.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44389199","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":"Rocks and Streams and Love and Liberation – Dialogues with Ecology and Buddhist Practice in Gary Snyder’s Love Poems","authors":"Julia Martin","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2022.2114150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2022.2114150","url":null,"abstract":"After 1990, and increasingly in recent years, it became possible in South Africa to extend our focus in teaching and writing about literature to consider how the project of social liberation might relate to ecological awareness, or even spiritual experience. This essay is about some of the poetry by the North American writer Gary Snyder that I’ve found inspirational in this regard. His work embodies a lifetime’s lively conversation between ecological engagement and Buddhist practice and invokes the idea of liberation at many levels. At the heart of this is an image of the interconnected, nondual reality he calls in one poem ‘rocks and streams.’ This aspect of Snyder’s work is fairly well known, but how does it relate to the love poetry he has continued to write since the 1950s? What, if anything, do the poems about the love of a partner have to do with spiritual practice, and the core eco-Buddhist insights that have defined his writing? These are the questions that interest me here.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46675162","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":"Ghosts of Books: Rereading Thomas Pringle’s African Sketches, with Matthew Shum’s Improvisations of Empire and Zoë Wicomb’s Still Life","authors":"Dirk Klopper","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2022.2114149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2022.2114149","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing on the figures of Makanna, the ‘Bushman’, Vytjé Vaal, Hinza Marossi, Arend Plessis, and Johannes van der Kemp in Thomas Pringle’s African Sketches, the paper traces their refiguration in Matthew Shum’s Improvisations of Empire: Thomas Pringle in Scotland, the Cape Colony and London, 1789–1834 and Zoë Wicomb’s Still Life. The figures make interesting company. While Makanna and the ‘Bushman’ resist colonial rule and denounce the hypocrisy of the Christian faith by which this rule was justified, Vytjé Vaal and Hinza Marossi are assimilated into the colonial order as Khoikhoi servant and adopted Motswana boy, respectively. The young renegade Boer, Arend Plessis, elopes with a Khoikhoi servant girl, and Van der Kemp’s missionary work offers an instructive perspective on Pringle’s colonial positioning.","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48528256","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":"Editor's Notes","authors":"M. Chapman","doi":"10.1080/1013929X.2022.2114140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2022.2114140","url":null,"abstract":"This is the second of two issues on ‘Literature in South Africa: The Last 30 Years, Looking Back, Going Forward.’ The first issue (Current Writing 34.1. 2022) focused on prose fiction; this issue planned to focus on poetry. It does focus on poetry, albeit in somewhat unexpected ways. Chapman’s article offers a critical overview and a particular response to the contemporary and near-contemporary poetry scene in South Africa. He draws selectively on key developments that both anticipated and did not anticipate directions in the 1990s and up to today: from the Soweto poets of the 1970s, through modernist and anti-poetry pursuits, to poetry that explores women’s voices, both written and oral, while considering the local influence of US-based L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. Poetics. Quite differently, Klopper returns to a figure who, in the 1820s, sought to adapt, intermittently at least, his inheritance – the Scottish Enlightenment; a revival of European Romanticism – to his settler condition on the eastern frontier of the then British Cape Colony. Thomas Pringle, both as poet and social commentator, continues to stir controversy. Did this ‘1820 Settler’ push the boundaries of new indigenous concerns or did he remain trapped in a metropolitan, classicalliberal worldview that was at odds with the harsh and divisive politics of frontier? The landing in 1820 of parties of settlers had been celebrated by many English-speaking South Africans as securing the English language, church, education, and trade in the colony; the landing, however, hardly received notice on its 200th anniversary in 2020. Yet the year 2020 saw the publication of Matthew Shum’s study of Pringle, Improvisations of Empire, while Zoë Wicomb published Still Life, a ‘postcolonial’ novel of Pringle’s life or afterlife, or still life. It is these two books that provoke Klopper’s fresh perspective on Pringle’s ‘ghosts’ of the colony. If Pringle helped focus the local environment to a wider world, such a turn is reflected in the formulation of the title of these two ‘theme’ issues: not South African Literature, but literature in South Africa. As in other ex-, or post-, colonies, the metropolitan ideas, conventions, fashions, and publishing interests retain a hold on South Africa. It is not books on South Africa or by South African authors that strike the book browser in the much-reduced bookshop outlets particularly since COVID-19; rather, the book browser is confronted by shelves of the latest bestsellers from London and New York. Avoiding the ‘bestseller’ allure, Martin confirms that reading interests in South Africa are not confined to any locality. She extends considerations of poetry beyond apartheid or post-apartheid; beyond what the new (post-1990) South Africa has achieved or failed to achieve. (‘Can South Africa Survive?’ is a thread in many books of non-fiction.) It is the North American poet, Gary Snyder, who accompanies Martin on a journey, both ecological and spiritual, on the possibilities of","PeriodicalId":52015,"journal":{"name":"Current Writing-Text and Reception in Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48833836","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}