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"South African literature 21st century History and criticism."
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Disability and Modern Fiction
Focusing on Faulkner, Morrison and Coetzee as authors, critics and Nobel Prize-winning intellectuals, this book explores shifting representations of disability in 20th and 21st century literature and proposes new ways of reading their works in relation to one another, whilst highlighting the ethical, aesthetic and imaginative challenges they pose.
eBook
Foundational African Writers
The essays in this collection were crafted in celebration of the centenaries, in 2019, of Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Cyril Lincoln Nyembezi and Es’kia Mphahlele, all of whom were born in 1919. All four centenarians lived rich and diverse lives across several continents. In the years following the Second World War they produced more than half a century of foundational creative writing and literary criticism, and made stellar contributions to institutions and repertoires of African and black arts and letters in South Africa and internationally.
The range of the centenarians' imaginations, critical analyses and social interventions spanned disciplinary divides. This volume, in the same spirit, draws on approaches that are equally transdisciplinary. Two aims thread through the contributors' reflections on the complexities of black existence and of intellectual and cultural life in the twentieth century. The first is the exploration of some of the centenarians' key texts and cultural projects that shaped their legacies. In doing so, the volume contributors trace a number of divergent intellectual and aesthetic lineages in their works and organisational activities. The second aim is a consideration of the ways in which these foundational writers' legacies continue to resonate today, confirming their status as crucial contributors to modern African and diasporic black arts and letters.
eBook
Pan-African American Literature
The twenty-first century is witnessing a dynamic broadening of how blackness signifies both in the U.S. and abroad. Literary writers of the new African diaspora are at the forefront of exploring these exciting approaches to what black subjectivity means. Pan-African American Literature is dedicated to charting the contours of literature by African born or identified authors centered around life in the United States. The texts examined here deliberately signify on the African American literary canon to encompass new experiences of immigration, assimilation and identification that challenge how blackness has been previously conceived. Though race often alienates and frustrates immigrants who are accustomed to living in all-black environments, Stephanie Li holds that it can also be a powerful form of community and political mobilization.
eBook
African Literature and the Politics of Culture
This book essentially negotiates African literature as a veritable site of artistic and cultural production and situates it within the dynamic of postcolonial cultural politics. It critically evaluates African literature as a contour of cultural contestation with the imperial politics of knowledge production about others and as an ideological strategy for knowing them. The books main contribution to the critical discourse on African literature and culture inheres in the fact that politics co.
eBook
African Intellectuals and Decolonization
Decades after independence for most African states, the struggle for decolonization is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the fact that Africa remains associated in many Western minds with chaos, illness, and disorder. African and non-African scholars alike still struggle to establish the idea of African humanity, in all its diversity, and to move Africa beyond its historical role as the foil to the West.As this book shows, Africa's decolonization is an ongoing process across a range of fronts, and intellectuals-both African and non-African-have significant roles to play in that process. The essays collected here examine issues such as representation and retrospection; the roles of intellectuals in the public sphere; and the fundamental question of how to decolonize African knowledges.African Intellectuals and Decolonizationoutlines ways in which intellectual practice can serve to de-link Africa from its global representation as a debased, subordinated, deviant, and inferior entity.ContributorsLesley Cowling,University of the WitwatersrandNicholas M. Creary,University at AlbanyMarlene De La Cruz,Ohio UniversityCarolyn Hamilton,University of Cape TownGeorge Hartley,Ohio UniversityJanet Hess,Sonoma State UniversityT. Spreelin McDonald,Ohio UniversityEbenezer Adebisi Olawuyi,University of IbadanSteve Odero Ouma,University of NairobiOyeronke Oyewumi,State University of New Yorkat Stony BrookTsenay Serequeberhan,Morgan State University
eBook
Reading The American Political Tradition in the 21st Century
Brilliantly written, powerfully argued, The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter, published in 1948, is flawed for readers today because of serious gaps and omissions, in particular its lack of reference to African American figures and sources. Late in his career, Hofstadter began to broaden his range of reference, calling attention in vivid prose to the horrors of slavery during the long period of American settlement and colonization. This later emphasis exposes all the more the shortcomings of The American Tradition, yet, at the same time, it does not diminish the rhetorical power and insight of this important book. It remains a significant work of American history but, even more, we should read and respond to it now as a major achievement, a distinguished act of writing, in the field of American literature.
Journal Article
Re-Imagining the Other: The Politics of Friendship in Three Twenty-First Century South African Novels
The outburst of xenophobic violence that shook South Africa in May 2008 severely damaged the belief in a multicultural society. This article re-reads three early twenty-first century South African novels - Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit (2001), Kabelo Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), and Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret (2005) - in the context of the May 2008 events. It is argued that the figure of the foreigner, apparently marginal in all three narratives, is in fact central to their ethical project, which seeks redemption, renewal and redefinition of the South African identity through an identification with the foreign other. The affective impulses of hospitality and friendship directed towards the foreigner in Dangor, Duiker and Shukri are read not merely as accepting or welcoming alterity, but as instances of self-othering - becoming strange in one's own domain. Expressing disillusionment with the liberatory potential of the narrative of the anti-apartheid struggle, they provide access to alternative sites of memory borrowed from the stranger that become sources for re-imagining South African history. In the context of the various racial and ethnic identity politics that have emerged in the New South Africa, such de-centred understanding of identity has radical implications for notions of nationhood.
Journal Article