Introduction: Special issue

Abstract

This is second double-volume special issue devoted to Aspects of South African Literary Studies. It consists of nine articles by scholars working in this field. While first volume opened with an attempt to delineate field of South African literary studies and brought together a variety of essays concerned with post-apartheid literary institutions and forms of knowledge as embedded in literary texts and practices shaped by colonial and postcolonial exigencies, this volume is broadly concerned with issues of identity and ethics. These concerns, like those published in Part 1, emerged without any preconceptualisation, planning or directives to contributors. The publication of essays in separate editions is no more than a practical clustering of research currently produced by scholars. Part 2 thus opens with Fabrications and Question of a South African National Literature which interrogates claims made by scholars in recent past with regard to existence of South African national literature. It seeks to provide a theoretical basis for present and future discussions on phenomenon of a national literature against a discursive tradition in which concept has been enlisted in arbitrary, and frequently imprecise, fashions. It considers construction of national identities through literature and language by tracing adventures of term from ancient Greece to rise of modern nationalism to account for how nations are constructed. In light of this, it concluded that South Africa is a sovereign state consisting of a diversity of peoples, cultures and literatures. It cannot be said to either constitute a nation in possession of a national culture or a national literature. The essentialist and constructivist tropes which are called upon to account for nations, are of course also pertinent to other more specific and localised identity discourses. This is evident in Pamela Ryan's essay 'College Girls Don't Faint': The Legacy of Elsewhere. By means of archival retrievals and memory, essay traces inscriptions of Victorian codes of gender, religion, culture and militarism in construction of identities in colonial agenda in two private schools which valorised the fiction of Englishness in one instance and Christianity in other, over local and indigenous identities and identifications to produce self-regulating young women with subjectivities and body cultures subject to imperatives of a normative culture located elsewhere and reproduced locally by means of education to construct specific gendered identities congruent with those favoured by imperial culture. With regard to subjectivity and personal conduct, concept of in guise of bearing, deportment, demeanour and whatever approximates it is explicit in regimes of gender socialisation of two private schools which Ryan's essay investigates, is raised by David Medalie's essay 'What Dignity is There in That?': The Crisis of Dignity in Selected Late-Twentieth-Century Novels. He explains that dignity is related to identity as well as to interpersonal conduct. In a reading of two novels dealing with relationships between masters and servants, he reveals how in Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of Day and in Nadine Gordimer's July's People, this concept of dignity is not treated as a transhistorical human virtue but as an ethical value embedded in social relations fraught with inequalities of hierarchical societies. Ralph Goodman's essay De-scribing Centre: Satiric and Postcolonial Strategies in The Madonna of Excelsior provides, through a reading of Zakes Mda's novel, a reading of two forms of satire, that is, critical modes, which deal with kinds of identities colonialism and nationalism, as two competing forms of hegemonic power, are questioned and disrupted. He contrasts satire in general with satire in postcolonial discourse with regard to their praxis and ethics. …