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

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}