South African literature and narrating the nation

Abstract

Summary Can one talk of a “South African (National) Literature”? Should the political construct of “one nationship” be extended to reading the various literatures in South Africa as one text? An epistemology will be necessary. The forms of knowledge identified by Michel Foucault for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are relevant to the first texts created in South Africa by European writers. The concept nation and nation‐ness is investigated briefly, as well as the various language discourses present at the moment. Writing and the text, the signifying practices of signifier and representation, especially regarding travel writing and missionary texts can be seen as seminal. Can we find in these early writings the genealogy of South African literatures, the creation of a nation? Various possibilities have to be taken into account in the writing of a “History of South African Literature”, but especially Benedict Anderson's view that the creation of a nation is the narrating of a nation, and Homi K. Bh...