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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'South African literature – 19th century – History and criticism'
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1
Smit, Lizelle. "Narrating (her)story : South African women’s life writing (1854-1948)." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/97034.
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Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University. 2015ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Seeking to explore modes of self-representation in women’s life writing and the ways in which these subjects manipulate the autobiographical ‘I’ to write about gender, the body, race and ethnic related issues, this thesis interrogates the autobiographies of three renegade women whose works were birthed out of the de/colonial South African context between 1854-1948. The chosen texts are: Marina King’s Sunrise to Evening Star: My Seventy Years in South Africa (1935), Melina Rorke’s Melina Rorke: Her Amazing Experiences in the Stormy Nineties of South-African History (1938), and two memoirs by Petronella van Heerden, Kerssnuitsels (1962) and Die 16de Koppie (1965). My analysis is underpinned by relevant life writing and feminist criticism, such as the notion of female autobiographical “embodiment” (239) and the ‘I’s reliance on “relationality” (248) as discussed in the work of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Reading Autobiography). I further draw on Judith Butler’s concept of “performativity” (Bodies that Matter 234) in my analysis in order to suggest that there is a performative aspect to the female ‘I’ in these texts. The aim of this thesis is to illustrate how these self-representations of women can be read as counter-conventional, speaking out against stereotypical perceptions and conventions of their time and in literatures (fiction and criticism) which cast women as tractable, compliant pertaining to patriarchal oversight, as narrow-minded and apathetic regarding achieving notoriety and prominence beyond their ascribed position in their separate societies. I argue that these works are representative of alternative female subjectivities and are examples of South African women’s life writing which lie ‘dusty’ and forgotten in archives; voices that are worthy of further scholarly research which would draw the stories of women’s lives back into the literary consciousness.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In ‘n poging om metodes van self-uitbeelding te bespreek en die manier waarop die ‘ek’ van vroulike ego-tekste manipuleer om sodoende te skryf oor geslagsrolle, die liggaam, ras en ander etniese kwessies, ondersoek hierdie verhandeling die outbiografieë van drie onkonvensionele vrouens se werk, gebore vanuit die de/koloniale konteks in Suid-Afrika tussen 1854-1948. Die ego-tekste wat in hierdie navorsingstuk ondersoek word, sluit in: Marina King se Sunrise to Evening Star: My Seventy Years in South Africa (1935), Melina Rorke se Melina Rorke: Her Amazing Experiences in the Stormy Nineties of South-African History (1938), en twee memoirs geskryf deur Petronella van Heerden, Kerssnuitsels (1962) en Die 16de Koppie (1965). My analise word ondersteun deur relevante kritici van feministiese en outobiografiese velde. Ek bespreek onder andere die idee dat die vroulike ‘ek’ liggaamlik “vergestalt” (239) is in outobiografie, asook die ‘ek’ se afhanklikheid van “relasionaliteit” (248) soos uiteengesit in die werk van Sidonie Smith en Julia Watson (Reading Autobiography). Verder stel ek voor, met verwysing na Judith Butler, dat daar ‘n “performative” (Bodies that Matter 234) aspek na vore kom in die vroulike ‘ek’ van Suid- Afrikaanse outobiografie. Die doel van hierdie tesis is om uit te lig dat hierdie selfvoorstellings van vroue gelees kan word as kontra-konvensioneel; dat die stereotipiese uitbeelding van vroue as skroomhartig, nougeset, gedweë ten opsigte van patriargale oorsig, en willoos om meer te vermag as wat hul onderskeie gemeenskappe vir hul voorskryf, weerspreek word deur hierdie ego-tekste. Die doel is om sodanige outobiografiese vertellings en -uitbeeldings te vergelyk en sodoende uiteenlopende vroulike subjektiwiteite gedurende die periode 1854-1948 te belig. Ek verwys deurlopend na voorbeelde van ander gemarginaliseerde Suid-Afrikaanse vroulike ego-tekse om aan te dui dat daar weliswaar ‘n magdom ‘vergete’ en ‘stof-bedekte’ vrouetekste geskryf is in die afgebakende periode. Ek voor aan dat die ‘stem’ van die vroulike ‘ek’ allermins stagneer het, en dat verdere bestudering waarskynlik nodig is.
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Nxasana, Thulani Litha. "The ambivalent engagement with Christianity in the writing of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Africans in the Eastern Cape." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002237.
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Until recently much of the literature recording the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Eastern Cape focused purely on frontier conflict and missionary activity, ignoring the evolving culture of the colonized people. But as Somande Fikeni declares, “[i]t is important when celebrating the country’s heritage to look beyond battle sites, monuments and wars and to pay attention to South Africa’s intellectuals and knowledge producers” (quoted in Hollands 4). This is indeed the central purpose of my research. This thesis seeks to examine the influence of Christianity on early South African writing by Africans and the ambivalence with which Christianity is often treated in their work. In South Africa, as elsewhere in Africa, Christianity played a central role in the development of African literature through the influence of mission schools and printing presses. Thus from the outset the development of written literature was inseparable from the spread of Christianity. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing by Africans reflects this: Christian idioms, biblical stories and images colour their work and yet are not employed unthinkingly. Each of the writers whom I will explore has a complex and at times ambivalent relationship with Christianity, and they use religious discourse for a variety of ends, some of them clearly at odds with their origins in the “civilizing mission” of Europe. According to Yunus Momoniat, “Their works . . . are the beginnings of an engagement not only with the world of words on a page, but also with the politics of literacy itself” (1). The subject of this research is three Xhosa writers from the Eastern Cape: the Reverend Tiyo Soga (1829-1871), the renowned novelist and “National Poet” S. E. K. Mqhayi (1875-1945), and the little-known poet Nontsizi Mgqwetho (Dates uknown, writings 1920-1929), who is described by Mbeki as “the most prolific woman Xhosa poet of the twentieth century” (6). The reason for focusing on the Eastern Cape is because the Xhosa “were the first Bantu people to be exposed to Christian proselytising and to receive a literate education” (Gerard 24). As a result much of the early literature in isiXhosa consisted of translations of the Bible and other Christian tracts, and such “improving” texts as Pilgrim’s Progress. In other words, it is in this work that the first roots of the influence of Christianity in southern Africa can be traced.
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Mbao, Wamuwi. "Imagined pasts, suspended presents South African literature in the contemporary moment." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002244.
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Scholarship on Post-Apartheid South African literature has engaged in various ways with the politics of identity, but its dominant mode has been to understand the literature through an anxious rupture-continuation paradigm in which the Apartheid past manifests itself in the present. However, in the contemporary moment, there are writers whose texts attempt to forge new paths in their depictions of identities both individual and collective. These texts are useful in contemplating how South Africans experience belonging and dislocation in various contexts. In this thesis, I consider a range of contemporary South African texts via the figure of lifewriting. My analysis demonstrates that, while many texts in the contemporary moment have displayed new and more complex registers of perception concerning the issue of ‘race’, there is a need for more expansive and fluid conceptions of crafting identity, as regards the politics of space and how this intersects with issues of belonging and identity. That is, much South African literature still continues along familiar trajectories of meaning, ones which are not well-equipped to understand issues that bedevil the country at this particular historical moment, which are grounded in the political compromises that came to pass during the ‘time of transition’. These issues include the recent spate of xenophobia attacks, which have yet to be comprehensively and critically analysed in the critical domain, despite the work of theorists such as David Coplan. Such events indicate the need for more layered and intricate understandings of how our national identity is structured: Who may belong? Who is excluded? In what situations? This thesis engages with these questions in order to determine how systems of power are constructed, reified, mediated, reproduced and/or resisted in the country’s literature. To do this, I perform an attentive reading of the mosaic image of South African culture that emerges through a selection of contemporary works of literature. The texts I have selected are notable for the ways in which they engage with the epistemic protocol of coming to know the Other and the self through the lens of the Apartheid past. That engagement may take the form of a reassertion, reclamation, displacement, or complication of selfhood. Given that South African identities are overinscribed in paradigms in which the Apartheid past is primary, what potentials and limits are presently encountered when writing of the self/selves is attempted? My study goes beyond simply asserting that not all groups have equal access to representation. Rather, I demonstrate that the linear shaping of the South African culture of letters imposes certain restrictions on who may work within it. Here, the politics of publishing and the increasing focus on urban spaces, such that other spaces become marginalized in ways that reflect the proclivities of the reading public, are subjected to close scrutiny. Overall, my thesis aims to promote a rethinking of South African culture, and how that culture is represented in, and defined through, our literature.
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Moth, Laura Eisabel. "Taking back the promised land : farm attacks in recent South African literature." Thesis, McGill University, 2006. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=99385.
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The phenomenon of the farm attack has engendered an angry debate in South Africa today. Controversially, the South African media has paid great attention to violence against white farmers amidst a seemingly endless flood of violence against black farm workers. The now commonplace tales of farm attacks incite racial tension and provoke paranoia, leading one to question why they are repeated at all. Recent works by South African authors have engaged this question, including Jonny Steinberg's Midlands (2002), J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), and Breyten Breytenbach's Dog Heart (1998). Critics have accused these works of perpetuating racism with their grim depictions of black-on-white violence but have failed to recognize the manner in which these authors contextualize the violence. I argue that each work registers the farm attack as a land claim, made in an era of failed land reform. Furthermore, these works reflexively explore the pragmatics of circulating the stories.
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Wolfe, Andrea P. "Black mothers and the nation : claiming space and crafting signification for the black maternal body in American women's narratives of slavery, reconstruction, and segregation, 1852-2001." CardinalScholar 1.0, 2010. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1560845.
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“Black Mothers and the Nation” tracks the ways that texts produced by United States women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries position the black maternal body as subversive to the white patriarchal power structure for which it labored and that has acted in many ways to abject it from the national body. This study points to the ways in which the black mother’s subversive potential has been repeatedly, violently, and surreptitiously circumscribed in some quarters even as it succeeds in others. Several important thematic threads run throughout the chapters of this study, sometimes appearing in clear relationship to the texts discussed and sometimes underwriting their analysis in less obvious ways: the functioning of the black maternal body to both support the construction of and undermine white womanhood in slavery and in the years beyond; the reclamation of the maternal body as a site of subversion and nurturance as well as erotic empowerment; the resistance of black mother figures to oppressive discourses surrounding their bodies and reproduction; and, finally, the figurative and literal location of the black mother in a national body politic that has simultaneously used and abjected it over the course of centuries. Using these lenses, this study focuses on a grouping of women’s literature that depicts slavery and its legacy for black women and their bodies. The narratives discussed in this study explore the intersections of the issues outlined above in order to get at meaningful expressions of black maternal identity. By their very nature as representations of historical record and regional and national realities, these texts speak to the problematic placement of black maternal bodies within the nation, beginning in the antebellum era and continuing through the present; in other words, these slavery, Reconstruction, and segregation narratives connect personal and physical experiences of maternity to the national body.The subordination of embodied power : sentimental representations of the black maternal body in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the life of a slave girl -- Recuperating the body : the black mother's reclamation of embodied presence and her reintegration into the black community in Pauline Hopkins's Contending forces and Toni Morrison's Beloved -- The narrative power of the black maternal body : resisting and exceeding visual economies of discipline in Margaret Walker's Jubilee and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose -- Mapping black motherhood onto the nation : the black maternal body and the body politic in Lillian Smith's Strange fruit and Alice Randall's The wind done gone -- Michelle Obama in context.
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Department of English
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Lombard, Erica. "The profits of the past : nostalgic white writing of post-apartheid South Africa." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bb2c9ae1-e551-4931-9a44-3197fdc6e010.
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Drawing on relevant theory from memory studies, literary criticism, sociology, reception studies and book history, this thesis examines the prevalence of nostalgia in white South African writing of the post-apartheid period. It identifies the numerous and remarkably conventional texts by white authors that proliferated in this time which might be described as nostalgic, arguing that these constitute a key genre of post-apartheid South African literature. In seeking to offer an explanation for why these nostalgic forms predominated in this period, this study takes into consideration the full "communications circuit" of a book i.e. the life-cycle of a book from production to consumption. Consequently, it employs an interdisciplinary framework to examine nostalgic literature from the perspectives of both the producers and consumers of texts. It is argued, ultimately, that post-apartheid nostalgic writing was particularly involved in the protection of certain formulations and structures of whiteness at individual, collective and institutional levels. The argument unfolds in three phases, each of which explores the value of nostalgia and nostalgic white writing in a different but related sphere: namely, literature, memory, and the market. The first phase of the argument provides a literary critical reading of the generic hallmarks of these novels, considering a range of representative texts, including works by Mark Behr, André Brink, Justin Cartwright, J. M. Coetzee, Lisa Fugard, Christopher Hope, Jo-Anne Richards, and Rachel Zadok. The second examines the allure of nostalgia and nostalgic books for the writers and readers of this literature, drawing on sociological studies of post-apartheid white South African identity and reader-response theory to analyse a selection of online and print reviews by readers. In the third phase, the thesis utilises a book historical approach to investigate the influence of various literary markets and the publishing industry, both local and global, in shaping the nostalgia trend.
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Birge, Amy Anastasia. ""Mislike Me not for My Complexion": Shakespearean Intertextuality in the Works of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1996. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278175/.
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Caliban, the ultimate figure of linguistic and racial indeterminacy in The Tempest, became for African-American writers a symbol of colonial fears of rebellion against oppression and southern fears of black male sexual aggression. My dissertation thus explores what I call the "Calibanic Quadrangle" in essays and novels by Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. The figure of Caliban allows these authors to inflect the sentimental structure of the novel, to elevate Calibanic utterance to what Cooper calls "crude grandeur and exalted poesy," and to reveal the undercurrent of anxiety in nineteenth-century American attempts to draw rigid racial boundaries. The Calibanic Quadrangle enables this thorough critique because it allows the black woman writer to depict the oppression of the "Other," southern fears of black sexuality, the division between early black and white women's issues, and the enduring innocence of the progressive, educated, black female hero ~ all within the legitimized boundaries of the Shakespearean text, which provides literary authority to the minority writer. I call the resulting Shakespearean intertextuality a Quadrangle because in each of these African-American works a Caliban figure, a black man or "tragic mulatto" who was once "petted" and educated, struggles within a hostile environment of slavery and racism ruled by the Prospero figure, the wielder of "white magic," who controls reproduction, fears miscegenation, and enforces racial hierarchy. The Miranda figure, associated with the womb and threatened by the specter of miscegenation, advocates slavery and perpetuates the hostile structure. The Ariel figure, graceful and ephemeral, usually the "tragic mulatta" and a slave, desires her freedom and complements the Caliban figure. Each novel signals the presence of the paradigm by naming at least one character from The Tempest (Caliban in Cooper's A Voice from the South; "Mirandy" in Harper's Iola Leroy; Prospero in Hopkins's Contending Forces; and Ariel in Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter).
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Mukhopadhyay, Priyasha. "Unlikely readers : negotiating the book in colonial South Asia, c.1857-1914." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0650a300-d54f-438e-97bf-1a9e0feebe92.
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This thesis constructs a history of reading for South Asia (1857-1914) through an examination of the eccentric relationships that marginal colonial agents and subjects - soldiers, peasants, office clerks and women - developed with everyday forms of writing. Drawing on the methodologies of the history of the book, and literary and cultural histories, it creates a counterpoint to the dominant view of imperial self-fashioning as built on reading intensively and at length. Instead, it contends that the formation of identities in colonial South Asia, whether compliant or dissenting, was predicated on superficial forms of textual engagement, leaving the documents of empire most likely misread, unread, or simply read in part. I illustrate this argument through four chapters, each of which brings together extensive archival material and nonliterary texts, as well as both canonical and little-known literary works. The first two discuss the circulation of unread texts in colonial institutions: the army and the government office. I study Garnet Wolseley's pioneering war manual, The Soldier's Pocket-book for Field Service, a book that soldiers refused to read. This is juxtaposed, in the second study, with an examination of the reception of the bureaucratic document in illiterate peasant communities, explored through the colonial archive and ethnographic novels. In the third and fourth chapters, I focus on texts consumed in part. I turn to the Bengali Hindu almanac, a form that made the transition from manuscript to print in this period, and examine how it trained its new-found readership of English-educated office clerks to oscillate smoothly between British-bureaucratic and local forms of time, as well as to read quickly and selectively. I end with a study of The Indian Ladies' Magazine, and suggest that the cosmopolitan form of the periodical and editorial practices of extracting and summarising gave women unprecedented access to a network of global print.
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Mbao, Wamuwi. "Unavowable communities : mapping representational excess in South African literary culture, 2001-2011." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/80124.
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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2013.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis takes as its subject matter a small field of activity in South African fiction in English, a field which I provisionally title the post-transitional moment. It brings together several works of literature that were published between 2004 and 2011. In so doing, it recognises that there can be no delineation of the field except in the most tenuous of senses: as Michael Chapman asserts, such “phases of chronology are ordering conveniences rather than neatly separable entities” (South African Literature 2). In attempting to take a reading of this field, I draw on discussions of the innumerable post-transitional flows and trajectories of meaning advanced by critical scholars such as Ashraf Jamal, Sarah Nuttall, Louise Bethlehem and others. In this thesis, I trace the “enigmatic and acategorical” (Jamal, “Bullet Through the Church” 11) dimension of this field through several works by South African authors. These works are at once singular and communal in their expression: they are singular in the sense that they are unique literary events1; they are communal because they share a particular force in their writing, a force that resists thematic bestowing. The schism between these conflicting/contiguous poles forms the basis of this thesis. I examine the works of a diverse selection of South African authors, finding in them a common, if discontinuous, seam in their treatment of excess, by which I mean the irreducible surplus that always demarcates the limits of representation. I find that these works each engage a movement towards the aporetic moment opened up by their characters’ experience of the traumatic. To be sure, these particular works of literature are notable for their exploration of ideas of alterity, loss and the capacity for survival in the routines of ‘South African’ lives. I use literature as the primary site of navigation for this enquiry because, as the scholars cited above have observed, literature is often a generator of meanings and a space where complex ideas about identity are explored and played out through the medium of the everyday. I recognise here that in the post-transitional moment, literature’s affective capacity in the world of action is limited – in Simon Critchley’s terms, it is ‘almost nothing.’ My thesis seizes this almost as the site of exploration. Taking as its starting point the existential question ‘have we learnt to imagine ourselves in other ways?’ I propose a number of positions from which these post-transitional works of literature might be read. The first chapter attempts to give account of the theoretical problem that attends to the reading of that which exceeds language’s capacity to invest with meaning. I use works by Diane Awerbuck, Annelie Botes, Shaun Johnson and Kgebetli Moele to inform my argument. In the next chapter, I explicate the problem of excess via a reading of Mark Behr’s Kings of the Water (2009). I then trace the aporetic nature of Otherness as it occurs in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime (2009), paying particular attention to the ways in which that novel performs a refusal of meaning. Finally, I read Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret (2005) as a work that posits the failure of alterity as a launching point for future ethical action. The burden of this thesis, as I see it, lies in the apophastic nature of its subject matter. In embarking upon an exploration of the incommensurable, my argument is for an ethics of reading that seeks to explicate the ways in which literature works by thinking through its affective capacity the better to affirm its performative dimensions.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die onderwerp van hierdie proefskrif behels ‘n klein veld in Engelse Suid-Afrikaanse fiksie wat ek voorlopig met die term “post-oorgangsmoment” sal aandui. Dit bring verskeie letterkundige werke byeen wat tussen 2004 en 2011 gepubliseer is. Hierdie kunsmatige afbakening hou rekening met Michael Chapman se stelling dat “phrases of chronology are ordering conveniences rather than neatly separable entities” (South African Writing 2). In ‘n poging om hierdie aangeduide veld te lees, put ek heelwat uit besprekings wat tans gevoer word oor die ontelbare betekenistrajekte van die post-oorgangsmoment deur kritici soos Meg Samuelson, Leon de Kock, Ashraf Jamal, Sarah Nuttall, Louise Bethlehem en andere. In hierdie proefskrif skets ek die “enigmatic and acategorical” (Jamall, “Bullet” 11) aspekte van die aangeduide veld soos dit uiting vind in verskeie werke van Suid-Afrkaanse outeurs. Hierdie werke is terselfdertyd alleenstaande en gemeenskaplik in hul uitdrukking: hulle is alleenstaande omdat hulle unieke literêre gebeurtenisse verteenwoordig en gemeenskaplik omdat hulle ‘n spesifieke impuls deel, ‘n impuls wat tematiese kategorisering teenstaan. Die kloof tussen hierdie opponderende/naburige pole vorm die grondslag van hierdie proefskrif. Ek ondersoek die werk van ‘n diverse seleksie Suid-Afrikaanse outeurs en vind ‘n gemene, dog diskontinue, soom in die manier waarop hulle oorskot hanteer, dit wil sê, die onreduseerbare surplus wat alle representasie begrens. Ek vind dat hierdie werke elkeen ‘n weg na die aporetiese moment oopskryf deur die karakters se ervarings van trauma. Hierdie letterkundige werke word ook gekenmerk deur hulle verkenning van idees soos alteriteit, verlies en die oorlewingskapasiteit in die roetines van ‘Suid-Afrikaanse’ lewens. Ek gebruik literêre werke as die primêre navorsingsveld vir hierdie ondersoek aangesien die letterkunde dikwels as ‘n genereerder van betekenis dien en as ‘n ruimte funksioneer waar komplekse idees rondom identiteit deur die medium van die alledaagse verken kan word. Ek is bewus dat die letterkunde ‘n beperkte affektiewe kapasiteit in die wêreld van handeling in die post-oorgangsmoment besit – dit is bykans niks, soos Simon Critchley dit stel. My proefskrif betrek hierdie bykans as brandpunt vir die ondersoek. Ek stel verskeie posisies voor vanwaar hierdie post-oorgang literêre werke gelees kan word deur die beantwoording van die eksistensiële vraag of ons geleer het om onsself op ander maniere te verbeel as uitgangspunt te gebruik. Die eerste hoofstuk poog om die teoretiese probleem te omskryf wat ontstaan as ‘n mens probeer om die oorskot van taal se betekenisgewende vermoë te lees. In die daaropvolgende hoofstuk belig ek die probleem van oorskot deur Mark Behr se Kings of the Water (2009) te lees. Daarna skets ek die aporetiese aard van Andersheid soos dit in JM Coetzee se Summertime (2009) voorkom, deur spesifiek ook aandag te skenk aan die maniere waarop die roman ‘n weiering van betekenis aanbied. Laastens lees ek Ishtiyaq Shukri se The Silent Minaret (2005) as ‘n werk wat die mislukking van alteriteit as ‘n beginpunt gebruik om toekomstige etiese handelings te rig. Die hooftema van hierdie proefskrif lê myns insiens in die apofastiese aard van die onderwerpsmateriaal. Deur ‘n ondersoek na die onmeetbare te onderneem, staan ek ook ‘n bevrydings-etiek van lees voor wat poog om die manier waarop literêre tekste werk te verhelder deur die affektiewe vermoë van literêre tekste te bedink.
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Mde, Vukani. ""Effulgent in the firmament" the politics of representation and the politics of reception in South Africa's 'poetry of commitment', 1968-1983." Thesis, University of Port Elizabeth, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10948/288.
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This dissertation re-examines an era in the production and reception of English language poetry in South Africa by black writers. Intellectually the 1970's was the Black Consciousness phase of South African history and very few aspects of life in the country were untouched by the intellectual movement led by Steve Biko and other young black student leaders. The aesthetic and literary output of the time, like all other facets of South African life, exhibited the influence and pressures brought to bear by Black Consciousness. Moreover, the Black Consciousness poets introduced the most vibrant and innovative phase for English language poetry produced in South Africa. It is my contention, however, that such vibrancy and innovation has consistently been compromised by unsympathetic, often hostile, and almost-always ill-informed criticism. The dissertation offers a critique of the academic and journalistic practice of criticism in South Africa. I argue that critical practice in South Africa has been engaged throughout the twentieth century in the discursive enforcement of ‘discipline’. In his Discipline and Punish (1977) the French post-structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault demonstrated how power is wielded against oppressed/suppressed groups through self regulated proscriptions, and argued that power is a discursive rather than a corporeal phenomenon. My dissertation follows Foucault in reading the critical reception of Black Consciousness poetry as the practice of disciplinary power. The dissertation also engages critically with the poetry of Oswald Mtshali, Mongane Serote and Sipho Sepamla, and argues that their work is the inscription of black subjectivity into the literary and cultural mainstream. It situates their work within wider 6 societal debates and definitions of ‘blackness’. In this regard use is made again of Michel Foucault’s insights and methodology of discourse analysis as shown in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). I argue that Oswald Mtshali’s work is a failed attempt at a dissection of apartheid and colonialism from a broadly Christian and humanist perspective. In my reading of Mongane Serote I explore the relationship between women’s bodies and the practice of representation. It is my contention that Serote is most concerned with claims of belonging, and this is shown through his extensive use of the trope of ‘Mother’. My discussion of the poetry of Sipho Sepamla focuses on language and (self- )representation, particularly the use of practices of naming in constructing subjectivity. My contention is that Sepamla ultimately abandons attempts at representation in favour of oppositional self-construction in language. In the concluding chapter I defend the thesis that the politics of discipline have prevented the broad critical establishment from gaining access to these discursive constructions of blackness in the committed poetry of South Africa.
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Hjul, Lauren Martha. "The family in Shakespeare's plays: a study of South African revisions." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001832.
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This thesis provides a detailed consideration of the family in Shakespeare’s canon and the engagement therewith in three South African novels: Hill of Fools (1976) by R. L. Peteni, My Son’s Story (1990) by Nadine Gordimer, and Disgrace (1999) by J. M. Coetzee. The study is divided into an introduction, three chapters each addressing one of the South African novels and its relationship with a Shakespeare text or texts, and a conclusion. The introductory chapter provides an analysis of the two strands of criticism in which the thesis is situated – studies of the family in Shakespeare and studies of appropriations of Shakespeare – and discusses the ways in which these two strands may be combined through a detailed discussion of the presence of power dynamics in the relationship between parent and child in all of the texts considered. The three chapters each contextualise the South African text and provide detailed discussions of the family dynamics within the relevant texts, with particular reference to questions of authority and autonomy. The focus in each chapter is determined by the nature of the intertextual relationship between the South African novel and the Shakespearean text being discussed. Thus, the first chapter, “The Dissolution of Familial Structures in Hill of Fools” considers power dynamics in the family as an inherent part of the Romeo and Juliet genre, of which William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is but a part. Similarly, the impact of a socio-political identity, and the secrecy it necessitates, is the focus of the second chapter, “Fathers, Sons and Legacy in My Son’s Story” as is the role of Shakespeare and literature within South Africa. These concerns are connected to the novel’s use of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, King Lear, and Hamlet. In the third chapter, “Reclaiming Agency through the Daughter in Disgrace and The Tempest”, I expand on Laurence Wright’s argument that Disgrace is an engagement with The Tempest and consider ways in which the altered power dynamic between father and daughter results in the reconciliation of the father figure with society. The thesis thus addresses the tension between parental bonds and parental bondage
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de, Beer Amanda Erika. "„Wo ist der Junge aus dem Urwald?“ Abenteuer und koloniales Afrika in der Jugendliteratur." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/96813.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2015AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING : Hierdie proefskrif is ’n ondersoek na die wyse waarvolgens Duitse jeugboekskrywers die koloniale periode in Afrika uitbeeld. Duitse avontuurliteratuur speel dikwels af in die koloniale periode in Afrika. Motiewe in die avontuurroman stem egter nie altyd ooreen met die historiese konteks en geografiese ruimtes nie. Dit skep die indruk dat so ’n verhaal tyd- en ruimteloos is en dat die historiese en geografiese konteks bloot die afstand tussen Afrika en Europa beklemtoon. In die lig van die feit dat Afrika en sy historiese konteks dikwels as eksotiese agtergrond dien, bespreek die studie die problematiek rondom die manier waarvolgens skrywers die koloniale periode in die avontuurliteratuur ontleed. Vervolgens word die vraag gestel tot watter mate die uitbeelding van Afrika sedert 1945 verander het. Die wyse waarop die koloniale periode in Afrika in Duitse jeugliteratuur uitgebeeld word, behoort dus ondersoek te word binne die konteks van die tradisionele avontuurliteratuur. Deurdat die studie gesentreer is rondom die avontuurliteratuur voor 1945 en avontuurboeke na 1945, stel die dissertasie ondersoek in tot watter mate jeugboeke en hulle uitbeelding van die koloniale periode verander het en in hoeverre die tradisionele avontuurliteratuur aan hierdie boeke ontleen is. In hierdie proefskrif word avontuurverhale en avontuurlike jeugverhale wat tydens die koloniale periode in Afrika afspeel, vervolgens ontleed. Die studie fokus op vier periodes: Eerstens word tradisionele avontuurstories en motiewe wat ’n belangrike rol speel in die uitbeelding van Afrika, geïdentifiseer. Die volgende tekste word ontleed: C.Falkenhorst se Der Baumtöter (1894), Gustav Frenssen se Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest (1906), Josef S. Viera se Bana Sikukuu (1924) en Gust in der Klemme (1933), Max Mezger se Aufruhr auf Madagaskar (1930) en Rolf Italiaander se Wüstenfüchse (1934). Tweedens ondersoek die studie die rol wat avontuurmotiewe – inisiasie, weerstand en verowering – speel in jeugboeke wat in die Federale Republiek van Duitsland gepubliseer is. Die volgende tekste word onder die loep geneem: Kurt Lütgen se ...die Katzen von Sansibar zählen (1962), Rolf Italiaander se Mubange, der Junge aus dem Urwald (1957), Herbert Kaufmann se Der Teufel tanzt im Ju-Ju-Busch en sy historiese roman Des Königs Krokodil (1959). Derdens ondersoek die studie watter rol avontuurmotiewe – die edel barbaar (edle Wilde), antiheld en die tweegeveg – speel in jeugboeke wat in die Duitse Demokratiese Republiek gepubliseer is. Die volgende tekste word analiseer: Ferdinand May se roman Sturm über Südwest-Afrika (1962) en Götz R. Richter se Savvytrilogie (1955 – 1963) en Die Löwen kommen (1969). Laastens stel die studie die vraag tot watter mate die kontemporêre avontuurliteratuur – soos Hermann Schultz se sendingroman Auf den Strom (1998) ’n nuwe ontwikkeling toon wat van die tradisionele avontuurliteratuur van die 19de en 20ste eeu afwyk.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT : This dissertation investigates how the African colonial period is portrayed in German youth literature. German adventure literature is often set in the African colonial period. However, motifs in the adventure novel do not always correspond with historical themes and geographical spaces. This gives the impression that such novels stand outside of time and space and that the historical and geographical context merely emphasize the distance between Africa and Europe. In light of the fact that Africa and its historical context are often reduced to an exotic backdrop, questions are raised about the way authors examine the colonial period in the adventure literature and how the portrayal of Africa has changed since 1945. The question how the African colonial period is portrayed in German youth literature is therefore examined within the context of the traditional adventure literature. Reflecting on adventure literature before 1945 on the one hand and adventure stories after 1945 on the other, this study examines to what extent youth books and their portrayal of the colonial period have changed and how these books relate back to the traditional adventure literature. For this purpose, adventure stories and adventurous youth stories and –novels that are set in the colonial period in Africa are analysed and the study focuses on four periods: Firstly, traditional adventure stories and motifs that play an important role in the portrayal of Africa are identified. The following are analysed: C. Falkenhorst’s Der Baumtöter (1894), Gustav Frenssen’s Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest (1906), Josef S. Viera’s Bana Sikukuu (1924) and Gust in der Klemme (1933), Max Mezger’s Aufruhr auf Madagaskar (1930) and Rolf Italiaander’s Wüstenfüchse (1934). Secondly, the dissertation investigates what role adventure motifs – initiation, resistance and conquest – play in the youth literature of the Federal Republic of Germany. The following are analysed: Kurt Lütgen’s …die Katzen von Sansibar zählen (1962), Rolf Italiaander’s Mubange, der Junge aus dem Urwald (1957), Herbert Kaufmann’s Der Teufel tanzt im Ju-Ju-Busch and his historical novel Des Königs Krokodil (1959). Thirdly, the study examines adventure motifs – noble savage (edle Wilde), anti-hero and the duel – in the literature published in the German Democratic Republic. These are Ferdinand May’s novel Sturm über Südwest-Afrika (1962) and Götz R. Richter’s Savvy-Trilogie (1955-1963) and Die Löwen kommen (1969). Lastly, the dissertation poses the question to what extent the contemporary adventure literature – like Hermann Schulz’ missionary novel Auf dem Strom (1998) – shows a new development which deviates from the traditional adventure literature of the 19th and 20th century.
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Letcher, Valerie Helen. "Trespassing beyond the borders Harriet Ward as writer and commentator on the Eastern Cape frontier." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002283.
Full textAbstract:
The aim of this thesis is to provide an introduction to the work of writer and journalist Harriet Ward, resident in the Eastern Cape from 1842 to 1848. She was a prolific correspondent to various periodicals published both in South Africa and in London. It would be true to say, to judge from the evidence, that she fulfilled a need felt by the British public for information on life and events in South Africa, and that she became the trusted guide of the middle-class reader. Her range covers reports from the frontiers of war, journalistic articles, memoirs, short stories, novels, autobiography, and editions of other writers' work. After the publication of her articles on the Seventh Frontier War (1846-7), she was recognised and respected as a commentator on the situation at the Eastern Cape, an unusual role for a woman at this time. She was also amongst the foremost victorian women writers published from the early eighteen forties until the end of the eighteen-fifties. Harriet Ward has left a vivid historical and sociological account of the Cape frontier, and her observations and judgements provide a hitherto virtually unknown perspective on an important part of South African history and letters. What makes her even more interesting, as this study seeks to show, is that she was far from conventional in her response to her new environment, both as as a woman and as a representative of a colonialist power. The record she has left of her thoughts on the people, landscape and situations of the time has the capacity to surprise the post-colonial literary critic and historian. Her struggle to find a discursive mode in which to express her consciousness of the oppression, patriarchal and colonial, of the marginalised, whether woman, indigene, Afrikaner, or creole, reveals a significantly transgressive or subversive response to the issues of the day. In re-discovering Harriet Ward, we are forced to reassess our assumptions regarding the period of colonial history to which she was a witness.
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Midgley, Henry Peter. "Author, ideology and publisher a symbiotic relationship : Lovedale Missionary Press and early Black writing in South Africa: with specific reference to the critical writings of H.I.E. Dlomo." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002284.
Full textAbstract:
The specific instances of R.H.W. Shepherd and H.I.E. Dhlomo are used in this thesis to investigate some of the many factors that influence the formation of a colonial literature, such as politics, social structures and personal ideals. By isolating the Lovedale Mission Press ~s a "contact zone" - a·place where the cultures of the colonizer and the colonized come into direct contact with each other - it is possible to trace how the interaction between these cultures shaped the writing of a particular African writer, H.I.E. Dhlomo. This is done through an analysis of historical factors that shaped the policy of the Lovedale Mission Press in the twentieth century: the development of liberalism in South Africa, the·role of the missionary in African education, the function ofa liberal magazine such as The South African Outlook and the appointment of an ambitious missionary, R.I.W. Shepherd, to the position of Director of Publications. This necessarily included a study of Shepherd's vision of African literature. On the other hand, this study takes cognisance of the factors that shaped Herbert Dhlomo's vision of literature: the development of African nationalism, the entrenchment of segregation as a politial doctrine, and most importantly, his struggle to have his creative writing published by the Lovedale Press. It is shown how Shepherd's vision of what African literature should entail contrasted with Dhlomo's, and how, as a result, Dhlomo deliberately structured his critical writing as a response to Shepherd's Eurocentric approach to African literature.
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O'Brien, Lauren Leigh. "Self, family and society in Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter, Rachel Zadok's Gem Squash Tokoloshe, and Doris Lessings's The Grass is Singing." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006771.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation examines Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe, and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. It focuses on the development of each of the protagonists’ identities in three realms: the individual, the familial and the societal. Additionally, it is concerned with the specific socio-political contexts in which the novels are set. It employs psychoanalytic and historical materialist frameworks in order to engage with the disparate areas of identity with which it is concerned. The introduction establishes the analytical perspective of the dissertation and explores the network of theoretical frames on which the dissertation relies. Additionally, it contextualises each of the novels, within their historical contexts, as well as in relation to the theory. The first chapter examines Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter. It focuses on the protagonist’s assertion of an identity independent of her father’s role as a political activist, and her eventual acceptance of the universal difficulty in negotiating a life which is both private and political. The second chapter, on Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe, examines the relationship between the protagonist’s traumatic experiences as a child and her inability to assert an identity as an adult. The similarities between the protagonist’s attempts to address her traumas and thereby create herself anew and South Africa’s employment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a means to acknowledge and engage with its traumatic history is of import. The third chapter which deals with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing traces the life of its protagonist, whose identifications remain childish as a result of having witnessed her parents’ difficult relationship. Her understanding of the world is informed by a rigid, binary understanding, which is ultimately disrupted by her relationship with a black employee. She is incapable of readjusting her frame of reference, however, and ultimately goes mad. I conclude that, while my focus has been on personal, familial and social identifications, the standard terms in which identity is examined, namely, race, class, and gender, are present in each of the three tiers of identity with which I have been concerned.
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Zideba-Thomas, Cynthia Daniswa. "Normative value systems as portrayed by V.N.M. Swaartbooi and V. Magadla." Thesis, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10948/650.
Full textAbstract:
This study will focus on norms and value systems as portrayed by two female Xhosa writers. The aim of this study is to show how normative value systems are represented by two female Xhosa female writers. It also aims to show the effects of these systems on women. The method of research will be based on survey of Xhosa literature focusing on the following two books, Inzol ‘enkundleni, by V. Magadla and UMandisa by V.N.M. Swaartbooi.
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Young, Cheryl Ann. "A study of the personal literature written in the Eastern Cape in the nineteenth century." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002274.
Full textAbstract:
The evidence of these diaries, all written in the nineteenth century, reveals the heterogeneous nature of early settler society in the Eastern Cape. Generalizations can only be of the most tenuous kind in such a small sample; but women tend to dwell on the domestic, the men on their public lives, the most reticent about their private lives are the soldiers. There is one diary which can be described as personal; the diarists did not regard their diaries as appropriate repositories of their personal triumphs and failures. The perceptions formed in Britain about the land and people of Africa are not drastically modified upon arrival unless the diarist experiences a prolongued contact with either.
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Wyrill, Beth Alexandra. "The interface of history and fiction in Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the plagues, Ingrid Winterbach’s To hell With Cronjé, and Etienne van Heerden’s The long silence of Mario Salviati." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015517.
Full textAbstract:
Both historiographical and literary practices have undergone revision in recent years in attempting to address the inheritance of nineteenth-century realism. Since the object of realist stylistics, employed in both the writing of fiction and history, is to render authorship authoritative or even invisible, the ideological import of these narratives is often such that the constructedness of the historical record and its absences are veiled. In developments beginning in the 1980s with the advent of ‘New Historicism’ and with the emergence of postmodern literary techniques, the interface of literature and history became of seminal importance, since both were now credited as being products of narrative and discourse, and hence, to varying degrees, of the literary imagination. This movement intersects interestingly with developments in postcolonial studies, since it is the voices of the marginalized and disempowered colonized peoples that are routinely co-opted and excised from nineteenth-century realist histories. These concerns are now being fully explored in the literature of the contemporary post-transitional South African moment, since authors in this country seemingly now feel freed up to look back to histories that precede the immediate traumas of apartheid. The concern, in relation to apartheid developments but also on a broader universal scale, is this: if history is viewed as perpetual emergences of modernities, then one of the great absences in the record is the historical determinants of any given epistemology. The attempt to recreate such an epistemological genealogy is thus simultaneously postcolonial, historiographical, and literary. Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues (2005), Ingrid Winterbach’s To Hell with Cronjé (2010), and Etienne van Heerden’s The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (2002) attempt to bridge this gap in the recorded sensibilities of any historical moment by representing a ‘lived experience’ of the past, and in the process imaginatively recreating the cultural, historical and psychological locations of the proponents of an emerging modernity. This study concerns itself with the ways in which these authors address the influence of realist historiography through the use of literary innovations that allow for the departure from realist stylistics. Most commonly, all three authors draw on forms of magic realism, but multiple refigurings and recombinations of notions of temporality, narrative, and characterization likewise work to defamiliarize the once stable discourse of history.
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Mfune, Damazio Laston. "My other - my self: post-Cartesian ontological possibilities in the fiction of J M Coetzee." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002289.
Full textAbstract:
The central argument of my study is that, among other matters, in his works, J.M. Coetzee could be said to demonstrate that the known Self is an embodied being and is not autonomous. With regard to the latter contention, Coetzee intimates that any two Subjects are implicated in each other’s subjectivities in a reciprocal process that involves what Derek Attridge has called “irruptions of otherness” (2005: xii) into the Subject’s subjectivity. These irruptions, which happen during the encounter, lead to a double loss of autonomy for each Subject and this phenomenon renders the relationship between Subjects non-dichotomus or non-binaric. In other words, the Subject does not produce the contents of his or her consciousness in a sui generis and ex nihilo fashion, and his or her ontological indebtedness to the Other constitutes his or her first loss of autonomy. As for those Others that do possess consciousness, the Subject is implicated in their consciousness and this constitutes the Subject’s second loss of autonomy. These losses counter the near solipsistic Nagelian neo-Cartesianism and paves the way for imagining both intra- and inter-species “intersubjectivity”. It is my view that this double loss of autonomy accounts for the sympathetic and empathetic imagination that we encounter in Coetzee’s fiction. Following Coetzee’s intimations of intersubjectivity through irruptions of otherness, what I see as my contribution to studies on this author’s work through this study is the link I have established between the physicalist strain within the philosophy of mind (whose central thesis is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon) and a modified Kantian “metaphysics”, especially Immanuel Kant’s conception of concepts as comprising form and content. I have deployed this conception in demonstrating the Subject’s ontological indebtedness to external sources of the content part of consciousness. And, through the Husserlian concept of intentionality, and Kant’s (1929: 27) observation that we cannot have appearances without something that appears, I have linked the Subject to the sources of his or her content and thereby also demonstrated that the Subject is not eternally separated or alienated from those sources. Instead, the Subject is not simply contiguous but coterminous and co-extensive, albeit in a mediated way, with the external sources of the content part of his or her consciousness. Thus, while accepting the thesis of the Other’s radical otherness, I modify the thesis of the Other’s radical exteriority. Ultimately, then, ontologically speaking, the Coetzeean project could be described as one of embodying and grounding the supposedly autonomous, solipsistic and freefloating/disembodied Cartesian Subject. This he does by alerting this Subject, first and foremost, to its embodiedness and, further to that, pointing out its ontological indebtedness to its Others and its implication in the Others’s consciousnesses and so prevent it from continuing with its imperialistic and ecological barbarities. However, ethically speaking, beyond the reciprocal ethics that arises from mutual ontological indebtedness and implication, it is the selflessness that characterises a cruciform logic that comes across as the epitome of Coetzeean ethics.
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Lewis, Darcy Hudelson. "Xenotopia: Death and Displacement in the Landscape of Nineteenth-Century American Authorship." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2017. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1062864/.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation is an examination of the interiority of American authorship from 1815–1866, an era of political, social, and economic instability in the United States. Without a well-defined historical narrative or an established literary lineage, writers drew upon death and the American landscape as tropes of unity and identification in an effort to define the nation and its literary future. Instead of representing nationalism or collectivism, however, the authors in this study drew on landscapes and death to mediate the crises of authorial displacement through what I term "xenotopia," strange places wherein a venerated American landscape has been disrupted or defamiliarized and inscribed with death or mourning. As opposed to the idealized settings of utopia or the environmental degradation of dystopia, which reflect the positive or negative social currents of a writer's milieu, xenotopia record the contingencies and potential problems that have not yet played out in a nation in the process of self-definition. Beyond this, however, xenotopia register as an assertion of agency and literary definition, a way to record each writer's individual and psychological experience of authorship while answering the call for a new definition of American literature in an indeterminate and undefined space.
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Bentley, Colene. "Constituting political interest : community, citizenship, and the British novel, 1832-1867." Thesis, McGill University, 2001. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=36875.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation asserts a strong connection between democratic culture and the novel form in the period 1832--1867. As England debated constitutional reform and the extension of the franchise, novelists Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot endeavoured to define human communities on democratic terms. Drawing on work of contemporary political philosopher John Rawls to develop a methodology that considers constitutions and novelistic representations as analogous contexts for reasoning about shared political values and citizenship, this study provides readings of Bleak House, North and South, and Felix Holt that emphasize each novel's contribution to the period's ongoing deliberations about pluralism, justice, and the meaning of membership in democratic life. When read alongside Bentham's work on legislative reform, Bleak House offers a parallel model of social interaction that weighs the values of diversity of thought, security from coercion, and the nature of harmful actions. Felix Holt and North and South are novelistic contributions to defining and contesting the attributes of the new liberal citizen. Through their central characters, as well as in their respective novelistic practices, Eliot and Gaskell highlight the difficulty of uniting autonomous individuals with collective social groups, and this was as much a problem for literary practice in the period as it was for constitutional reform.
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De, Wagter Caroline. "Mouths on fire with songs: negotiating multi-ethnic identities on the contemporary North american stage." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/210237.
Full textAbstract:
A travers une étude interculturelle détaillée et comparée de la production théâtrale minoritaire canadienne et américaine, ma thèse cherche à mettre en lumière les les apports thématiques et esthétiques du théâtre multi-ethnicque nord-américain contemporain à la tradition anglo-américaine du 20ème siècle. Les communautés asiatiques, africaines et aborigènes sont retenues comme poste d'observation privilégié de l'expression esthétique de la condition multiculturelle postcoloniale dans le théâtre nord-américain de la période allant de 1972 à nos jours. Sur base d'un corpus de pièces de théâtre, ma recherche m'a permis de redéfinir les grandes articulations des notions d'hybridité, d'identité et de communauté/nation postcoloniale.Through a detailed cross-cultural approach of the English Canadian and American minority theatrical production, my thesis aims to identify the thematic and aesthetic contributions of multi-ethnic North American drama to the Anglo-American tradition of the 20th century. My study examines North American drama from the vantage points of African, Asian, and Native communities from 1972 until today. Relying on a number of case studies, my research opened up new avenues for rethinking the notions of hybridity and identity in relation to the postcolonial community/nation.
Doctorat en Langues et lettres
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished
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Bregin, Elana. "The identity of difference : a critical study of representations of the Bushmen." Thesis, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/2550.
Full textAbstract:
More than any other people, the Bushmen - like the Aborigines on the Australian continent - have epitomized the sub-human other in South African historiography. My primary concern in this study will be to interrogate the representations that gave rise to such entrenched notions of Bushman alterity, and the consequences these have had for Bushman lives. Through an assessment of the writings of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travellers, missionaries, settlers, colonial officials and scholars, I shall examine understandings of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’, and the ways in which alterity discourse opened up a space for the ensuing colonial policies of genocide and subjugation against the Bushmen. By allowing the Bushman ‘voices’ to talk back - through an exploration of verbal and visual forms of Bushman creative expression - I hope to present a more balanced sense of Bushman ‘identity’, and expose the fundamental intolerance of difference that lies at the heart of alterity discourse. I shall conclude the thesis with a problematization of contemporary trends of representation, an examination of how these often inadvertently continue the process of othering, and a consideration of their repercussions for present-day Bushman lives. Aside from the obvious relevance of such a study to an understanding of both the destructive events and representations of history, and the current traumatic circumstances of Bushman lives, the questions that this thesis raises can be seen to have more far-reaching implications. In a country such as South Africa, with its long history of segregation and discrimination, issues of otherness and difference take on a particularly compelling resonance. It seems crucial - especially at this point in our national progress - to interrogate our historical attitudes towards otherness, and posit more constructive ways of approaching difference, that allow others their distinct identity, without either demonizing or collapsing such difference; or, to phrase it in Homi Bhabha’s question: “How can the human world live its difference? how [sic] can a human being live Other-wise?” (1994:122).Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1998.
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Gordon-Chipembere, Natasha 1970. "From silence to speech, from object to subject: the body politic investigated in the trajectory between Sarah Baartman and contemporary circumcised African women's writing." Thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/1660.
Full textAbstract:
NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY: PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR AT indisunflower@yahoo.com OR CONSULT THE LIBRARY FOR THE FULL TEXT OF THIS THESIS....
This thesis investigates the trajectory traced from Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman exploited in Europe during the nineteenth century, to a contemporary writing workshop with circumcised, immigrant West African women in Harlem New York by way of a selection of African women's memoirs. The selected African women's texts used in this work create a new testimony of speech, fragmenting a historically dominant Euro-American gaze on African women's bodies. The excerpts form a discursive space for reclaiming self and as well as a defiant challenge to Western porno-erotic voyeurism. The central premise of this thesis is that while investigating Eurocentric (a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist and sexist development of European language employed not solely with Baartman, but contemporaneously upon the bodies of Black women of Africa and its Diaspora, focusing predominantly on the "anomaly of their hypersexual" genitals. This particular language applied to the bodies of Black women extends into the discourse of Western feminist movements against African female circumcision in the 21st century. Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian writer and activist and Aman, a Somali exile, write autobiographical texts which implode a western "silent/uninformed circumcised African woman" stereotype. It is through their documented life stories that these African women claim their bodies and articulate nationalist and cultural solidarity. This work shows that Western perceptions of Female Circumcision and African women will be juxtaposed with African women's perceptions of themselves. Ultimately, with the Nitiandika Writers Workshop in Harlem New York, the politicized outcome of the women who not only write their memoirs but claim a vibrant sexual (not mutilated or deficient) identity in partnership with their husbands, ask why Westerners are more interested in their genitals than how they are able to provide food, shelter and education for the their families, as immigrants to New York. The works of Saadawi, Aman and the Nitandika writers disrupt and ultimately destroy this trajectory of dehumanization through a direct movement from an assumed silence (about their bodies, their circumcisions and their status as women in Africa) to a directed, historically and culturally grounded "alter" speech of celebration and liberation.English Studies
D. Litt. et Phil.(English)
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Ngwenya, Thengamehlo Harold. "Ideology and form in South African autobiographical writing : a study of the autobiographies of five South Africa authors." Thesis, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/17577.
Full textAbstract:
Relying on Lucien Goldmann's theory of genetic structuralism, this study
examines the relationship between ideology (world vision) and the
autobiographical form in South African writing. The five autobiographers selected
for discussion represent different social groups in the South African social
formation. The central argument of this thesis is that there is a relationship
between autobiographical self-portraiture and the collective interests, values and
attitudes of particular social groups in South Africa. Therefore, most South
African autobiographies are more concerned with the articulation of collective
consciousness than with the celebration of individual talents and achievements.
Chapter 1 on Peter Abrahams explores the values underpinning the ideology of
liberal humanism and their influence on the process of self-representation within
the mode of autobiography. The second chapter examines the apparently
contradictory conceptions of self-identity in Bloke Modisane's autobiography.
Chapter three focuses on the conflict between Naboth Mokgatle's ethnic loyalty
to the Bafokeng tribe and his newly acquired radical working class consciousness.
The fourth chapter examines the liberal-Christian ideology in Alan Paton's two
volumes of autobiography. The fifth and final chapter explores counter hegemonic
modes of self-definition in Sindiwe Magona's two-volumed autobiography. In all
the five chapters there is an attempt to link the authors' self-presentation to specific
social classes or groups.
The thesis argues for a literary-sociological approach to the analysis of
autobiography and seeks to challenge the deconstructive theoretical perspectives
on autobiography which, by rejecting the validity of humanist assumptions
regarding human subjectivity, deny any possibility of meaningful socio-political
action.English Studies
D.Litt. et Phil. (English)
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Courau, Rogier Philippe. "States of nomadism, conditions of diaspora : studies in writing between South Africa and the United States, 1913-1936." Thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/162.
Full textAbstract:
Using the theoretical idea of ‘writing between’ to describe the condition
of the travelling subject, this study attempts to chart some of the literary,
intellectual and cultural connections that exist(ed) between black South
African intellectuals and writers, and the experiences of their African-
American counterparts in their common movements towards civil liberty,
enfranchisement and valorised consciousness. The years 1913-1936 saw
important historical events taking place in the United States, South Africa
and the world – and their effects on the peoples of the African diaspora
were signficant. Such events elicited unified black diasporic responses to
colonial hegemony. Using theories of transatlantic/transnational cultural
negotiation as a starting point, conceptualisations that map out, and give
context to, the connections between transcontinental black experiences of
slavery and subjugation, this study seeks to re-envisage such black South
African and African-American intellectual discourses through reading them
anew. These texts have been re-covered and re-situated, are both published
and unpublished, and engage the notion of travel and the instability of
transatlantic voyaging in the liminal state of ‘writing between’. With my
particular regional focus, I explore the cultural and intellectual politics of
these diasporic interrelations in the form of case studies of texts from several
genres, including fiction and autobiography. They are: the travel writings
of Xhosa intellectual, DDT Jabavu, with a focus on his 1913 journey to the
United States; an analysis of Ethelreda Lewis’s novel, Wild Deer (1933), which
imagines the visit of an African-American musician, Paul Robeson-like figure
to South Africa; and Eslanda Goode Robeson’s representation of her African
Journey (1945) to the country in 1936, and the traveller’s gaze as expressed
through the ethnographic imagination, or the anthropological ‘eye’ in the text.Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.
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Booth-Yudelman, Gillian Carol, and Gillian Carol Booth Yudelman. "South African political prison-literature between 1948 and 1990 : the prisoner as writer and political commentator." Thesis, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/15480.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines works written about imprisonment by
four South African political prison writers who were incarcerated
for political reasons. My Introduction focuses on current
research and literature available on the subject of political
prison-writing and it justifies the study to be undertaken.
Chapter One examines the National Party's policy pertaining to
the holding of political prisoners and discusses the work of
Michel Foucault on the subject of imprisonment as well as the
connection he makes between knowledge and power. This chapter
also considers the factors that motivate a prisoner to write.
Bearing in mind Foucault's findings, Chapters Two to Five
undertake detailed studies of La Guma's The Stone Country, Dennis
Brutus's Letters to Martha, Hugh Lewin's Bandiet and Breyten
Breytenbach's The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist,
respectively. Particular emphasis is placed on the reaction of
these writers against a repressive government. In addition,
Chapters Two to Five reflect on the way in which imprisonment
affected them from a psychological point of view, and on the
manner in which they were, paradoxically, empowered by their
prison experience. Chapters Four and Five also consider capital
punishment and Lewin and Breytenbach's response to living in a
hanging jail. I contemplate briefly the works of Frantz Fanon in
the conclusion in order to elaborate on the reasons for the
failure of the system of apartheid and the policy of political
imprisonment and to reinforce my argument.English Studies
D. Litt. et Phil. (English)
28
Gilfillan, Lynda 1948. "Theorising the counterhegemonic : a critical study of Black South African autobiography from 1954-1963." Thesis, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/3321.
Full textAbstract:
In this thesis, I examine a critical procedure appropriate to Black South African
autobiography of the 1950s and early 1960s. In particular, I examine these
autobiographies as examples of counterhegemonic writing in which the self counters the
hegemonic apartheid notion of identity, based on racial and cultural purity, and I propose
that the hybrid selves encoded in these narratives have the capacity to inform a new
South African nationhood.
Chapter One necessitates an autocritique, in which I locate my own discourse within the
intersecting discursive strands of Western and local theory, an effort that is guided by the
imperatives that emerge from the autobiographies themselves. In Chapter Two, I suggest
that the postcolonial autos displaces Humanist, and appropriates postmodernist,
conceptions of the "I". Rewriting the terms of the autobiographical pact, the authority of
grapos is re-instated in counternarratives that give privileged status to the bios - to
lives that claim "I AM!" and selves that reconstruct identity. A related concern is the
relationship between autobiographical criticism in South Africa and hegemony.
In the chapters that follow, I examine the various ways in which counterhegemonic selves
are constructed in Tell freedom, Down Second Avenue, Drawn in colour: African
Contrasts and The Ochre People. Peter Abrahams's autobiography is discussed largely
in terms of Frantz Fanon's insights on identity construction and the notion of a "hybrid
I". Es'kia Mphahlek's (re)writing of the self - whose main feature is ambivalence - forms
the focus of Chapter Four. These notions are developed in the final chapter, which
focuses on Noni Jabavu's narratives that encode an "in-between" cultural identity and, as
in the autobiographies of Abrahams and Mphahlele, a metonymic "I".English Studies
D. Litt. et Phil. (English)
29
Obee, Ruth 1941. "A dialogue of two selves : themes of alienation and African humanism in the works of Es'kia Mphahlele." Diss., 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/15683.
Full textAbstract:
Es'kia Mphahlele's concept of African humanism was a seminal influence on Black Consciouness thought and provided the philosophical basis for a landmark body of South African criticism and aesthetics wilh roots in Africa. African humanism as a black ethos, combined with rich metaphoric speech, symbols, values and myths resurrected from the deep African past, afforded the author a powerful cultural weapon with which to criticize centuries of colonialism, racism, and state apartheid, related western industrial forces of economic
exploitation and alienation. Moreover, the counterweights of African humanism and alienation in the dialogue of two selves -- one that is Western-educated and colonized and the other African -- contribute key elements of realism, vitality, humour, insight, cultural identity, and characterization to Mphahlele's most effective protest writing which, in turn, has helped to shape a black nationalist vision which has surprising relevance to South Africa in the 1990s.English Studies
M.A. (English)
30
Paasche, Karin Ilona Mary. "Changing social consciousness in the South African English novel after World War II, with special reference to Peter Abrahams, Alan Paton, Es'kia Mphahlele and Nadine Gordimer." Diss., 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/15727.
Full textAbstract:
The changing social consciousness in South Africa during the twentieth century falls within a
political-historical framework of events: amongst others, World Wars I and II; the institution of the
Apartheid Laws in 1948; the declaration of a South African Republic in 1960; Nelson Mandela's release in
1992. The literary social consciousness of Abrahams, Paton, Mphahlele and Gordimer spans the time
before and after 1948. Their novels reflect the changing reality of a country whose racial and social
problems both pre-date and will outlive the apartheid ideology. These and other novelists' changing social
consciousness is an indication of the development of attitudes and reactions to issues which have their
roots in the human and in the economic spheres, as well as in the political, cultural and religious. Their
work interprets the history and the change in the South African social consciousness, and also gives some
indication of a possible future vision.English Studies
M.A. (English)
31
Scott, Claire. ""How do I understand myself in this text-tortured land?" : identity, belonging and textuality in Antjie Krog's A change of tongue, Down to my last skin and Body bereft." Thesis, 2006.
Find full textAbstract:
This thesis explores the question, “What literary strategies can be employed to allow as many people as possible to identify themselves positively with South Africa as a nation and a country?”. I focus in particular on the possibilities for identification open to white South African women, engaging with Antjie Krog's English texts, A Change of Tongue, Down to My Last Skin and Body Bereft.
I seek to identify the textual strategies, such as a fluid structure, shifts between genre and a multiplicity of points of view, which Krog employs to examine this topic, and to highlight the ways in which the literary text is able to facilitate a fuller engagement with issues of difference and belonging in society than other discursive forms. I also consider several theoretical concepts, namely supplementarity, displacement and diaspora, that I believe offer useful ways of understanding the transformation of individual subjectivity within a transitional society.
I then explore the ways in which women identify with, and thereby create their own space within, the nation. I investigate the ways in which Krog represents women in A Change of Tongue, and discuss how Krog uses „the body‟ as a theoretical site and a performative medium through which to explore the possibilities, and the limitations, for identification with the nation facing white South African women. I also propose that by writing „the body‟, Krog foregrounds her own act of writing thereby highlighting the construction and representation of her „self‟ through the text.
I proceed to consider Krog's use of poetry as a textual strategy that enables her to explore the nuances of these themes in ways which prose does not allow. I propose that lyric poetry, as a mode of expression which emphasises the allusive, the imaginative or the affective, has a capacity to render in language those experiences, emotions and sensations that are often considered intangible or elusive. Through a selection of poems from Down to My Last Skin and Body Bereft, I examine the way in which Krog constantly re-writes the themes of belonging and identity, as well as interrogate Krog's use of poetry as a strategy that permits both the writer and the reader access to new ways of understanding experiences, in particular the way apparently ephemeral experiences can be rooted in the body. I also briefly consider the significance of the act of translation in relation to the reading of Krog's poems.
I conclude by suggesting that in A Change of Tongue, Down to My Last Skin and Body Bereft Krog engages with the project of “[writing] the white female experience back into the body of South African literature” (Jacobson “No Woman” 18), and in so doing offers possible ways in which white South African women can claim a sense of belonging within society as well as ways in which they can challenge, resist, re-construct and create their identities both as women, and as South Africans.Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2006.
32
Xaba, Andile. "Temporality and the past: recollections of apartheid in selected South African novels in English." Diss., 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/19242.
Full textAbstract:
The study provides a theoretical account for the representation of apartheid in South African fiction. Narrative strategies employed in the post-apartheid novels The innocence of roast chicken (Richards, 1996), The smell of apples (Behr, 1996), All we have left unsaid (Case, 2006) and Thirteen cents (Duiker, 2011) reveal that depictions of the past contribute to narrative structure and the production of meaning. Genettean temporal relations, namely narrative order, duration and frequency are a systematic method to analyse the selected novels, since it enables a contrast between the narrative past as the histoire, and the narrative present as the récit. Retrospective events are constructed as memories, thereby are complemented by Bergson’s psychological and philosophical theory in the analysis and interpretation of the dualistic interaction between the apartheid and post-apartheid temporal centres adopted within the novels. The representation of apartheid may be seen as sub-themes and time as configurations of temporal zones.Afrikaans & Theory of Literature
M.A. (Theory of Literature)
33
Hooper, Myrtle Jane. "The silence at the interface : culture and narrative in selected twentieth-century Southern African novels in English." Thesis, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/8569.
Full textAbstract:
The primary intention of this study is to establish the theoretical
significance of silence within the sphere of the twentieth-century
Southern African novel in English. Clearly a feature of recent writing,
silence is less overtly thematised in earlier work. Since relatively
little critical and theoretical attention has been paid to silence as a
positive phenomenon, however, modes of reading it are sought within the
broader sphere of the social sciences, and specifically its tradition of
social constructionism. Care is taken to address the pressures of the
local context, identified in terms of the postcolonial paradigm as
relating to language and to culture. A deliberate theoretical innovation
is the renunciation of the trope of penetration in favour of the notion
of an interface between intact language-culture systems, given an
understanding of culture as existing between subjects in relations of
power. Fictional narrative which addresses cross-culturality is thus
read as a process of cultural translation, and the volitional deployment
of silence as an act of resistance to its power. The significance of
language is registered in the use of speech-act theory, in the
insistence on meaning as generated in spatially and temporally situated
conversation, and in the exploration of the influence of pronominal
relations on identity. Emerging from my investigation is a recognition
of the measure offered by silence of the autonomy of character as
subject, and a corresponding recognition of the constitutive capacity of
the reader to site the power of narration amongst the polyphonic voices
within the culture of the text. The postcolonial paradigm indicates the
need for a regional rather than a national perspective; thus the
interfaces considered in the case studies include, in Plaatje's Mhudi,
orality and literacy, tribal membership and non-sectarianism, Tswana and
English; in Paton's Too Late the Phalarope the private domain and
apartheid as public hegemonic discourse, narration as possession, and
the tragic as structuring textual relations; and in Head's Maru the
constitution of a postcolonial identity that resists and transcends the
discursive hostility of racism, and the dislocation, displacement and
alienation of exilic refuge from apartheid.Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1992.
34
Lemmer, Erika. "Ingrid Winterbach, 'n derde kultuur en die neo-Victoriaanse romantradisie (1984-2006)." Thesis, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/3889.
Full textAbstract:
This research report explores the link between the novels of Ingrid Winterbach / Lettie Viljoen, a third culture and the neo-Victorian novel. The study is therefore situated within the cultural-philosophical framework of a third culture, which implies that the two cultures of science and literature do not function as separate disciplines, but as an organic unit.
Researchers in the interdiscipline of literature and science identify the Age of Science (1879–1914) – including the Victorian era (1837–1901) – as a historical period where the existence of such a third culture was observed. This period was characterised by numerous scientific discoveries, and Darwin’s theory of evolution generated heated debates in Victorian society. Nineteenth-century literature (and specifically the Victorian novel) therefore reflects the spirit of an age where the interaction between science and literature was particularly evident.
In our information-driven society, the focus is once again on scientific discovery and dissemination of knowledge, prompting social critics to typify the current period as “neo-” or “retro-Victorian”. The contemporary imagination still problematises Darwin’s theory of evolution, and fiction such as Winterbach’s therefore not only renegotiates the fixed modernistic boundaries between science and literature, but also revisits the nineteenth- century genres simptomatic of a similar third culture.
Winterbach’s novels (1984–2006) display a distinctive predisposition towards natural history and Darwinistic principles and are therefore postmodern adaptations of nineteenth-century conventions. Darwinistic concepts such as growth, metamorphosis,transformation, evolution and the origin, naming and extinction of species are therefore accentuated. Winterbach’s fictionalisation of a nineteenth-century worldview can be linked to the work of her ancestors in the Afrikaans literary tradition, Eugène Marais and C. Louis Leipoldt (both amateur scientists). Her popularisation of scientific knowledge and revisitation of Victorian codes also link her to a neo-Victorian novelistic movement (a contemporary permutation of the Victorian tradition). Her oeuvre therefore also displays similarities to that of her British contemporary, A.S. Byatt, a prominent neo-Victorian novelist. An exploration of the natural world in this tradition, however, also implies an exploration of supernatural spheres, a trend which is equally evident in texts by congeners such as (George) Eliot, Marais, Leipoldt, Winterbach and Byatt.Afrikaans
D.Litt. et Phil. (Afrikaans and Theory of Literature)
35
Rothmann, Jan-Ben. "Outo-etnografie, apologie en belydenis in outobiografieë van Elsa Joubert, André P. Brink en Koos Kombuis." Diss., 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/21008.
Full textAbstract:
Text in Afrikaans’n Merkbare opbloei in die publikasie van literêre niefiksietekste wêreldwyd het gelei tot die klassifikasie van sodanige tekste as ’n vierde genre. Die politieke oorgang in Suid-Afrika in 1994 het gelei tot ’n soortgelyke toename in outobiografiese tekste waarin kommentaar gelewer word op die Suid-Afrikaanse politieke werklikheid deur die vertel van sowel persoonlike as kollektiewe geskiedenisse. Daymond en Visagie (2012) identifiseer outo-etnografie, apologie en belydenis as kenmerke van die Suid-Afrikaanse outobiografie ná 1994. In hierdie navorsingsverslag word enkele resente skrywersoutobiografieë van onderskeidelik Elsa Joubert (’n Wonderlike geweld: jeugherinneringe (2005); Reisiger (2009)), André P. Brink (’n Vurk in die pad (2009)) en Koos Kombuis (Seks & drugs & boeremusiek: die memoirs van ‘n volksverraaier (2000); Die tyd van die Kombi’s: ‘n persoonlike blik op die Afrikaanse rock-rebellie (2009)) gemeet aan die kriteria wat deur Daymond en Visagie voorgestel word. Die beskrywing en interpretasie van verskeie outo-etnografiese merkers lei daartoe dat hierdie outobiografieë as ’n vorm van kulturele introspeksie beskou kan word.
A marked proliferation in the publication of literary nonfiction globally led to the classification of such texts as a fourth genre. The political transition in South Africa in 1994 caused a similar increase in autobiographical texts in which commentary is offered on the South African political reality through the telling of both personal and collective histories. Daymond and Visagie (2012) identify autoethnography, apologia and confession as characteristics of post-1994 South African autobiographies. In this research report some contemporary writers’ autobiographies, respectively those of Elsa Joubert (’n Wonderlike geweld: jeugherinneringe (2005); Reisiger (2009)), André P. Brink (’n Vurkin die pad (2009)) and Koos Kombuis (Seks & drugs & boeremusiek: die memoirs van ‘n volksverraaier (2000); Die tyd van die Kombi’s: ‘n persoonlike blik op die Afrikaanse rock-rebellie (2009)) are evaluated using the criteria proposed by Daymond and Visagie. The description and interpretation of various autoethnographical markers confirm that these autobiographies can be considered a form of cultural introspection.
Afrikaans and Theory of Literature
M.A. (Afrikaans)
36
Nyhuis, Jeremiah E. ""A field lately ploughed" : the expressive landscapes of gender and race in the antebellum slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and William Grimes." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/3628.
Full textAbstract:
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)The complicated state wherein ex-slaves found themselves, as depicted in the narratives of Bibb, Jacobs, and others, problematizes the dualistic relationship between North and South that the genre’s structural components work to enforce, forging an odyssey that, although sometimes still spiritual in nature, does not offer the type of resolutions that might easily persuade fellow slaves to abandon their masters and seek a similarly ambiguous identity in the so-called “free” land of the North. For blacks and especially fugitive slaves, such restrictive legal provisions provided an “uncertain status” where, writes William Andrews, “the definition of freedom for black people remained open.” In those slave narratives that dare to depict the limits of liberty in the North, this “open” status is particularly reflected in the texts’ discursive terrain itself, which portends a series of candid observations and brutal details that actively work to deconstruct any sort of mythological pattern associated with the slave narrative genre, thereby offering a more expansive view of the experience for most fugitive slaves. The Life of William Grimes, a particularly frank and brutal diary of a man’s trials within and without slavery, is one such slave narrative, depicting a journey that, while more consistent with the general experience of ex-slaves in the antebellum U.S., often works outside the parameters of traditional, straight-forward slave narratives like Douglass’s. “I often was obliged to go off the road,” Grimes admits at one point in his autobiography, and although his remark refers to the cautious path he must tread as a fugitive slave, it might just as well describe the thematic and structural characteristics of his open-ended autobiography. Reputedly the first fugitive slave narrative, the publication of Grimes’s Life in 1825 initiated the beginning of a genre whose path had not yet been forged, which likely contributed to its fluid nature. At the time of his narrative’s publication, Grimes’s self-expressed testimony of injustice under slavery was about five years ahead of its time; it wouldn’t be until the 1830s that the U.S. antislavery movement would begin to consciously seek out ex-slaves to testify to their experience in bondage. Once this literary door was open, however, antislavery sentiment became for many early African American authors “a ready forum” for self-expression. Whereas in twenty years’ time Douglass would take full advantage of this opportunity by drawing inspiration from a number of already established narratives, Grimes as an author found himself singularly “off the road” and essentially alone in new literary territory, uncannily reflecting his sense of alienation and helplessness in the North after escaping from slavery aboard a cargo ship in 1815.
37
Oluwasuji, Olutoba Gboyega. "Re-imagining Ogun in selected Nigerian plays: a decolonial reading." Thesis, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/25490.
Full textAbstract:
Text in EnglishThrough an in-depth analysis of selected texts, this study engages with the ways in which Ogun is reimagined by recent selected Nigerian playwrights. Early writers from this country, influenced by their modernist education, misrepresented Ogun by presenting only his so-called negative attributes. Contemporary writers are reconceptualising him; it is the task of this thesis to demonstrate how they are doing so from a decolonial perspective. These alleged attributes represent Ogun as a wicked, bloodthirsty, arrogant and hot tempered god who only kills and makes no positive contribution to the Yoruba community. The thesis argues that the notion of an African god should be viewed from an Afrocentric perspective, not a Eurocentric one, which might lead to violence or misrepresentation of him. The dialogue in the plays conveys how the playwrights have constructed their main characters as Ogun representatives in their society. For example, Mojagbe and Morontonu present Balogun, the chief warlord of their different community; both characters exhibit Ogun features of defending their community. The chosen plays for this study are selected based on different notions of Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron and war, presented by the playwrights. A closer look at the primary materials this thesis explores suggests Ogun’s strong connection with rituals and cultural festivals. These plays exemplify African ritual theatre. Being a member of the Yoruba ethnic group, I have considerable knowledge of how festivals are performed. The Ogun festival is an annual celebration among the Yoruba, where African idioms of puppetry, masquerading, music, dance, mime, invocation, evocation and several elements of drama are incorporated into the performances. The selected plays critiqued in this thesis are Mojagbe (Ahmed Yerima, 2008), Battles of Pleasure (Peter Omoko, 2009), Hard Choice (Sunnie Ododo, 2011), and Morontonu (Alex Roy-Omoni, 2012). No in-depth exploration has previously been undertaken into the kinds of textual and ideological identities that Ogun adopts, especially in the selected plays. Therefore, using a decolonial epistemic perspective, this study offers a critical examination of how the selected Nigerian playwrights between the years 2008 and 2012 have constructed Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron. Such a perspective assists in delinking interpretations from the modernised notions mentioned above, in which Ogun is sometimes a paradoxical god. Coloniality is responsible for such misinterpretation; the employed theoretical framework is used to interrogate these notions. The research project begins with a general introduction locating Ogun in Yoruba mythology, which forms the background to how the god is being constructed in Yorubaland. Also included iii in this first chapter is a discussion on a decolonial perspective, the principles of coloniality, the aims and objective of the study, and the relevant literature review. Thereafter, chapter two focuses on Battles of Pleasure and argues that the play re-imagines Ogun as a god of peace and harvest as opposed to a god of war and destruction. Chapter three discusses how Ododo’s Hard Choice reconceptualises Ogun as a god of justice, in contrast to him being interpreted as a god who engages in reckless devastation of life. Chapter four explores Ogun’s representation in Yerima’s Mojagbe as a reformer who gives human beings ample time to change from their wayward course to a course that he approves. In chapter five, Ogun’s reconception as a remover of obstacles in Roy-Omoni’s Morontonu is examined. The study concludes with a discussion on how Africans should delink themselves from a modernist Eurocentric perspective and think from an Afrocentric locus of enunciation.
English Studies
D. Litt. et Phil.(English)