Afrikaans Literature in / and the World Republic of Letters: The Case of Koos Prinsloo and S.J. Naudé

Abstract

SummaryThis article deals with the position of Afrikaans literature as a small literature in the world, with specific reference to some of Pascale Casanova’s most provocative statements on the position of small literatures in her book La République Mondiale des Lettres (1999), translated into English as The World Republic of Letters (2004). The article first looks at the different meanings of the term “world literature” and the notion of a “world republic of letters” from the perspective of the small literature Afrikaans. The article then engages with Casanova’s discussion of the way in which writers in small literatures position themselves in literary space through strategies of assimilation (integration through the dilution of original differences), différentiation (the insertion of difference), the (de)politicization of literature and translation. The article also devotes attention to the ideas of the most important critics of her work such as Prendergast and Ganguly. The article then proceeds to discuss the way in which works by the Afrikaans authors Koos Prinsloo and S.J. Naudé, who both question patriarchal and heteronormative conventions of their time, reveal the limitations of Casanova’s description of small literatures. Prinsloo’s short stories, published in the 1980s and 1990s, do not fit into a national tradition; they are experimental, aesthetically refined and transgressive, even though they did not circulate beyond Afrikaans. In his turn S.J. Naudé, who started publishing in Afrikaans almost thirty years after Prinsloo’s debut, develops a radical, anti-nostalgic queer aesthetic which questions both the national and the global as legitimate frameworks for writing. Both these writers problematise Casanova’s description of small literatures in the larger world context.