Country Of My Skull Research Articles

Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons by Shanthini Naidoo

Reviewed by: Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons by Shanthini Naidoo Yoly Zentella Naidoo, Shanthini. Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons. Washington, DC: Just World Books, 2021. Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons honors the women who survived imprisonment during the movement to end South African apartheid. It recognizes women as dedicated freedom fighters playing key roles of leadership in the struggle, and a documentation of herstories from which, in much of the literature, save for narratives on legendary figures like Winnie Madikizela Mandela and Miriam Makeba, women are absent. It also sheds light on prisons as a space for political struggle. [End Page 220] Naidoo's style of writing, easy flowing but penetrating, makes the book suitable for the average reader. It is an invaluable teaching tool at the university level among the disciplines of history, ethnic studies, South African studies, women's studies, and mental health. Readers interested in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the aftermath of apartheid will also find this book an excellent companion to Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid (2003) and Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (1998). It is also suitable reading for high school classes on social justice and anti-apartheid activists. The author, Shanthini Naidoo experienced the tail end of apartheid as a youth. Later, while studying for a master's degree in journalism, her reporting on the of death and funeral of Winnie Mandela in 2018 motivated her to seek out the six women incarcerated with Mandela, defendants in the less-well-known Trial of Twenty-Two in 1969. Her first book, Women in Solidarity: Inside the Female Resistance to Apartheid (2020), which was published in South Africa, was the product of subsequent conversations with the four remaining survivors. That book was subsequently published in the United States, which is the title under review. Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons is an emotionally difficult journey for the reader, yet the underlying theme of the universal desire for freedom and human rights made possible by activists makes this a necessary read. The book's twelve chapters pivot around chapter 3, "The Trial." In 1969 South Africa's government arrested twenty-two activists—fifteen men and seven women—and accused them of terrorism, and twenty-one charges were levied under the Suppression of Communism Act. The arrests appeared orchestrated to break the anti-apartheid movement and the African National Congress (ANC). Despite brutal torture, solitary confinement, and threats of violence toward their families, the seven women refused to testify against their comrades and the prosecution crumbled. The twenty-two were released in the fall of 1970. While covering the death of Winnie Mandela, Naidoo sought to learn more about the women who survived imprisonment. Chapters 4–7 focus on the four survivors: journalist Joyce Sikhakhane-Rankin, trade unionists Shanthie Naidoo and Rita Ndzanga, and activist Nondwe Mankahla. Deeply troubling is the brutality that emerges from the interviews, the survivors' unresolved trauma resurfacing as raw, open wounds passed on to younger generations, and reflected [End Page 221] in South African society today. Intricately connected to these sections is chapter 12, addressing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Of focus is the lack of specificity in documenting gender-based violence against women, instead characterizing such brutality as "serious ill treatment" (175). This flaw is critical, as violence against Black women under apartheid continues in other forms and contexts in postapartheid South Africa, described as parallel to entanglement in the cycle of poverty, lack of resources, economic instability, and unhealed trauma. An open-air prison. The book's strengths are in the author's interaction with the reader, sharing her thoughts and emotional responses as a journalist during the time of Winnie's death, and in her desire to explore unspoken events surrounding the imprisoned women, Winnie's comrades. Naidoo's approach to the survivor's experiences and the impact of the barbarity of apartheid, during and after, makes for an informed, compassionate journalism that can be extended to other populations presently under siege. Journalism can expose injustice, acknowledge its occurrence, and motivate...

The race for reparation(s), the (im)possibility of repair in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull

ABSTRACTDemands for reparations led by African American communities for centuries of enslavement parallel calls by the South African state for the reparation of socioeconomic disadvantage rooted in colonial and apartheid pasts. Where such appeals are necessary and legitimate within a broader context of social redress and reconciliation, a comparative, relational reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) extends normative ideologies of reparations to include a critical engagement with existential reparation. This paper offers a literary exploration of the efficacy of reparations in overcoming legacies of racial discrimination and disadvantage. It argues further argues that Beloved and Country of My Skull’s creative representations of the tension between healing/repair and irreparable woundedness do not just engage chronic black ontological precarity; their narrative interrogation of (the possibility of) existential reparation problematizes (historically) conventional identitarian processes and advances morally responsive and socially transformative ways of being in the world.

Postcolonial criticism and cognitive literary studies: A new formalist approach to Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull

ABSTRACTThis article argues that it is productive to combine cognitive literary studies and postcolonial criticism, and that this constitutes a new formalist approach. Drawing on insights from cognitive science, it describes how Antjie Krog’s 1998 book Country of My Skull facilitates processes of empathetic engagement and identification. It proposes that postcolonial writing, because it is often particularly experimental, is a crucial area of focus for cognitive literary studies, inviting elaboration of existing models about the phenomenology of reading. Moreover, the article argues that attention to the way narrative strategies are linked to cognitive processes allows us to form scientifically grounded and contextually situated hypotheses about how postcolonial texts function as agents in their socio-historical contexts, and to show how their formal, aesthetic dimension is crucial for their ethical, critical, and political force.

Writing White at the Fault Line: Some Reflections on South African Literary Journalism

By exploring the literary journalism of Rian Malan (My Traitor’s Heart), Antje Krog (Country of My Skull and Begging to Be Black), Jonny Steinberg (Midlands) and Kevin Bloom (Ways of Staying), I seek to reflect upon the ways in which these writers are able to use the uncertainties and contradictions inherent in this genre to reveal the complexities of identity formation and negotiation within contemporary South African society. They are very often writing at times of political and social flux, and by writing at the unstable boundaries of literature and journalism these authors not only mirror the volatility of their social setting but also endeavour to find new narrative forms through which to address the complexities of white South African identity. By working at the fault line of literature and journalism, Krog, Bloom, Malan and Steinberg are seeking those points of intersection and interpenetration that create narrative instability and fluidity, in order simultaneously to reveal the inherent anxiety and possibility of the “inbetween.” Finally, I suggest that the instability and liminality of “skin” offers a space in which white South African identities can become fluid rather than fixed, and in which whiteness can begin to move out from under the umbrella of its global sanctity and into “folded-togetherness” with its many “others”

Struggles Over Voice: Polyphony, Appropriation, and the Construction of Truth in Country of My Skull

Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull, the first major retrospective on the TRC, has, on the one hand, been praised for its deeply passionate, literary take on a subject entangled in the discourses of politics and social science. On the other, the book has been the site of fierce controversy: Krog, a privileged Afrikaner, engages directly with her beneficiary status while simultaneously appropriating the voices of victims in her narrative. Since the book's publication, debate about the relationships between identity, voice, memory, and truth, has only become more heated. In this article, I return to Krog's seminal text as a case study of such struggles over voice, analysing Krog's engagement with multiple voices through the lenses of narrative theory and memory studies. Particularly, I apply Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of “heteroglossia” and “polyphony” and Michael Rothberg's concept of “multidirectional memory” in order to reframe the scholarly debate over the book and its ethics of memory. I contend that, though Krog tests ethical boundaries, Country's ability to confound standards of genre with a diverse set of voices and styles is both a major aesthetic feat and an act of democratisation.

Voice/Body/Skin: (Dis)locating Belonging in Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, A Change of Tongue, and Begging to Be Black

ABSTRACTIn this article I seek to reflect on the progression of Antjie Krog’s use of the tropes of “the voice”, “the body”, and “the skin” over the course of her three literary journalism texts, Country of My Skull (2002), A Change of Tongue (2004), and Begging to Be Black (2009). I use the term “literary journalism” to foreground the generic instability of Krog’s texts, which weave together journalism, memoir, travel writing, social commentary, the poetic, and fictional elements. In Krog’s writing, the form, style, and structure of her texts are as important in the process of creating meaning as her language choices and content. By writing at the messy, contested border between literature and journalism, Krog is able to explore the intangible and affective aspects of identity and belonging. I conclude by suggesting that, as Krog moves from a preoccupation with “the voice” and “the body” to the concept of “skin”, she is able to draw on the notion of the “in-between” to address her most pressing concerns surrounding questions of white identity and national belonging.

A NATION BECOMING? MEDIATING POST-APARTHEID IDENTITIES IN ANTJIE KROG’S COUNTRY OF MY SKULL

 In this paper I use postmodernism to explore Antjie Krog’s engagement with post-Apartheid identities in Country of My Skull. These identities, often complex and multiple, are mediated in the process of nation-building. I take the exercise of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as metonymy for the nation-building project, and I argue that Krog quite deliberately chose an ambiguous and complex genre to represent equally ambiguous and complex identities. One of the salient features of postmodernism is its anti-systemic, anti-form impulse, and the form that Krog uses refuses to be conscripted into any single conventional form. Dominated by testimonies of victims and perpetrators of apartheid violence, the form also bears aspects of autobiography, novel, poetry and journalistic snippets interlaced with quotes from psychoanalysts and philosophers. From time to time, anecdotes, fairytales, myths and legends are interpolated into the narrative to remind the reader of the porous borders between fiction and reality.

Poetic devices as part of the trauma narrative in Country of My Skull

This article investigates the role of poetic devices in a trauma narrative like Country of My Skull. The nature and characteristics of a trauma narrative are described with reference to Country of My Skull and Antjie Krog's style as poet and journalist. The theory and role of figurative language in trauma narratives suggest an attempt to describe that which is indescribable and unrepresentable about traumatic events and experiences like Krog attempts to do in Country of My Skull. Different tropes like skull, language, body, sounds and landscape or country are identified and followed through the text as part of the working through of a traumatic experience. Krog is the narrator in this 'highly personal account', describing the traumatic testimonies of witnesses during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She is confronted with her own traumatic experience as secondary witness to these events as a reporter, journalist, and translator-interpreter of stories of unspeakable horror. The broadening of perspective in the different tropes shows signs of the working through of this trauma and the process of healing to the reintegration of a divided, fragmented identity and agency.

Guilt, shame and the politics of moral change in Antjie Krog’s and Zoë Wicomb’s literary responses to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

This article argues that Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story (2000) attempt to lift feelings of guilt and shame from the victims of apartheid and to instil these feelings in those who ought to feel them: in the perpetrators, but also in the majority of whites and some coloureds who benefited from apartheid in one way or another. Both authors stress the value of moral shame for reforming South Africa’s society and focus on the body in their literary representations of shame. Country of My Skull describes how Krog’s body resonates with the pain of the victims when it shows physical symptoms of shame and guilt. Wicomb’s novel David’s Story, on the other hand, pictures the coloured body as a site of shame concerning the coloureds’ ancestral origins. The majority of coloureds ought to shed this unnecessary shame, Wicomb’s novel suggests, while those who were complicit with apartheid should acknowledge it as moral shame. Both texts complicate the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)’s differentiation between legally verified “forensic truth” and “narrative truth” that allowed the victims to privilege the particularities of their individual experience. Country of My Skull suggests that the TRC hearings relied on a dynamic of narrative transference and substitution that made the voicing of shame and guilt possible in the first place. David’s Story suggests that the distinction between “forensic truth” and “narrative truth” obscures the fact that the hearings enabled perpetrators to suppress the truth and avoid legal punishment.

The National Question in Antjie Krog’s “Transformation Trilogy”*

SummaryThis article explores the claim that the South African writer Antjie Krog is in essence asking the National Question in what I have termed her “transformation trilogy”: Country of My Skull (1998); A Change of Tongue (2003); and Begging to Be Black (2009). In writing about issues like “race”, identity and belonging in these texts, Krog is asking, “[t]o whom does the South African nation belong?” – a question that was central to debates about the National Question by liberation movements during apartheid. Although the “new” South Africa arguably is very different from the new “nation” that had been imagined, the National Question remains of importance. A postcolonial reading of the transformation trilogy encourages a focus on the National Question and the factors that complicate it. Existing studies about the theme of nationhood in Krog’s work do not draw connections with older discourses on nation and nationalism in South Africa.

Mostly ‘black’ and ‘white’: ‘Race’, complicity and restitution in the non-fiction of Antjie Krog

This article analyses the role of ‘race’ in Antjie Krog’s non-fiction trilogy Country of My Skull (1998), A Change of Tongue (2003) and Begging to Be Black (2009). It explores her explicit use of terms such as ‘heart of whiteness’ and ‘heart of blackness’. Claims that Krog essentialises Africa and ‘black’ people are investigated. The article also addresses accusations of racism in Krog’s work. A partial answer to the persistent question of why Krog is so determinedly focused on ‘race’ is sought in the concept of complicity. There is definite specificity in the way Krog writes about ‘white’ perpetrators and ‘black’ victims in South Africa, but her trilogy should be read within the broader context of international restitution discourses, allowing for a somewhat different perspective on her contribution to the discussion of the issue of whether ‘white’ people belong in (South) Africa.

No Pain like My Own: Guilt in the Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Antjie Krog

Within political theory, it is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who is often associated with the idea that humans have an intrinsic response to the pain of others. Yet, this article argues that he should also be understood as a theorist of the paralyzing effects of guilt and that it was his guilt, not sympathy, which marked the most intense interpersonal moments in his life. As a counterpoint to Rousseau’s assessment, the second part examines the guilt felt by Afrikaner journalist Antjie Krog in her memoir of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country of My Skull. Her reflections on the guilt connected to apartheid and to the experience of an extra-marital affair reveal the dynamics of (1) pleasure and (2) paralysis through guilt that seem to animate Rousseau’s writing but that he fails to address directly. Moreover, Krog’s attention to the two variants of guilt and their relationships to the possibility of repair shed light on the gaps and silences in Rousseau’s writing.

Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions by Gillian Whitlock

Gillian Whitlock, Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford: Oxford up, 2015. Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures Series. 242 pp. The introduction of Gillian Whitlock's Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions immediately alerts readers to its impressive scope. The book successfully draws connections between life writing produced and read in disparate places at disparate times by disparate audiences in order to demonstrate the ways in which life writing can articulate the impact of conflicted human subjecthood on bodies, lives, and peoples. The book is into two parts along a temporal logic, but variations on the term divided are inappropriate descriptors for Whitlock's text, given its constant attention to unexpected connections between groups of texts. Part 1 focuses on what we might broadly call pre-contemporary case studies. Chapter 1 traces and compares the textual histories of two life narratives published in 1789: Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Watkin Tench's Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay. While the two texts are written from starkly different perspectives, those of an emancipated slave (Equiano) and a British Marine Officer (Tench), both offered an autobiographical account that gave witness to the previously unseen, and in turn called upon the reader to bear witness to unknown and scarcely imaginable scenes from the 'New World' (16). In chapter 2, Whitlock compares the two texts from chapter 1 to a 1796 letter from an Australian indigenous man, Woollawarre Bennelong, and argues that, similar to the first two narratives, the letter testifies to the individuality of Australian indigenous people and the dynamics of first contact. Chapter 3 analyzes Saartjie Bartman's (famed as the Hottentot Venus) 1810 argument that the freak shows in which she was featured were not exploitative but, rather, reflected her free will. This decision, in Whitlock's estimation, gives us insight into humanizing discourses in colonial modernity (36) because she refuses to be subject to discourses that frame humanitarian actions as necessarily compassionate (40). In chapter 4, Whitlock contrasts Mary Prince's 1837 History with Equiano and Bennelong's texts, arguing that the Prince's text reveals how gender and sexuality constrain the voice, embodiment, and agency that become available for women in the slave narrative (46). She further argues that Baartman and Prince's texts indicate that cultural discourses limit the extent to which women's bodies are legible in testimonial narrative. Chapter 5 turns to Susanna Moodie's Roughing it in the Bush, written between 1832 and 1852. Moodie's humanitarian sensibility and white civility reflect on her portraits of indigenous women, resulting in a portrait of the noble savage, which is implicated in discourses of indigenous peoples as a dying race (56). Chapter 6 reads what is usually identified as the first autobiography by a Canadian indigenous man, The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh (1847). Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh (known in English as George Copway) testifies to traditional practices and mobilizes the Christian language of suffering to demonstrate the negative impact of the eradication of these practices by settler colonialism. Chapter 7 takes stock of the whole of Part 1 and Rousseau's Confessions into conversation with these case studies. Here, Whitlock accurately summarizes Part 1's accomplishments in mapping the opportunities provided by life writing and suggesting the various texts' ideological (humanitarian, democratic, and recognition-based) proximities to one another. Part 2 consists of four chapters that tackle contemporary case studies. Chapter 8 considers texts produced in the aftermath of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc), anchoring its argument in Antjie Krog's trilogy of memoirs collectively known as Country of My Skull. …

Forging a New South Africa: Plagiarism, Ventriloquism and the ‘Black Voice’ in Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull

This article returns to the controversial topic of Krog's alleged plagiarisms in her highly acclaimed account of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Country of My Skull, and connects Krog's borrowings with a less-noted feature of that work, that is her heavy editing (arguably, fictionalisation) of some of the testimonies reproduced by her in that book. Most critics read the testimonies presented in Country of My Skull as faithful versions of those given at the hearings, edited only for punctuation and readability (as Krog insists was her method), and many critics offer commentary on the TRC based on Krog's rendering of it. Catherine M. Cole1 has noted, though, in her book Performing South Africa's Truth Commission, that the changes are more substantive. Tracing these alterations alongside Krog's obscuring of authorship via various borrowings, I argue that the two phenomena work in tandem to ‘forge’ an indigenous South African voice, which Krog casts as specifically ‘black’. These observations I frame within a larger argument about the pressures of national authorship, and transcultural accountability and literary honour. In so doing, I discuss previously un-noted borrowings by Krog – from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and from the anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers.

THE POLITICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF JUSTICE: REVIEWING ANTJIE KROG’S COUNTRY OF MY SKULL AND THE APPLICATION OF AFRICAN JURISPRUDENCE

This research aims to prove that politics shapes the law and, as such, can act as a catalyst to shape the law in accordance with African jurisprudence and Ubuntu. I structure my approach by explaining the difference between general and restricted jurisprudence and their foundations with the natural and positive law, respectively. In addition, I attempt to show that law and politics are inherently interrelated and should be viewed through a general jurisprudential perspective. I will further elaborate on the character played by politics on the South African law, both pre-1994 and in the postapartheid era. I direct my literature review to Antjie Krog’s Country of my skull. Krog’s account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (hereinafter referred to as the TRC) provides a platform for observation and analysis of the influence politics exerted on the law (and law enforcement) during apartheid. Krog’s account of the TRC also acts as a grounding for emphasising the particular African jurisprudence portrayed by the TRC itself and, finally, showing that a political atmosphere which incorporates African jurisprudence and Ubuntu into its political agenda will allow for the reflection of such a jurisprudence in the legal sphere. Krog’s illustration of the political shaping of the law creates a clear perspective of the influence of politics over the law. Furthermore, in attempting to illustrate this inherent power politics holds, particularly focusing on apartheid policies shaping the law (pre-1994), I too aim to show the power that politics can still play in shaping the law today, in accordance with African philosophy.

Conditional Tense: Memory and vocabulary after the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Since the publication in 1998 of Country of My Skull, Antjie Krog has established herself internationally as the foremost journalistic commentator on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In this new book, Krog has collected together a number of published pieces written since Country of My Skull. Many readers will already have seen most of these, but anthologized together here they make clear why Krog is such an important interpreter of South Africa, to audiences both at home and abroad. The volume accurately reflects the preoccupations of Krog's writing and provides an excellent introduction to the uninitiated reader. Included alongside versions of published texts are framing notes, and in some cases Krog has revised the texts in order to provide a context. Whereas readers new to her work are given a useful overview, readers familiar with her work will be surprised by the new perspectives provided in the way the material is presented.

Vertaling en/as abjeksie: Antjie Krog

Internasionaal bekroonde skrywer en digter Antjie Krog, skryf in Afrikaans, haar moedertaal, vertaal ander se werk (Nederlands en Vlaams) in Afrikaans, en vertaal haar eie werk (saam met ander vertalers) in Engels. As tweetalige en veeltalige skrywer werk Krog voortdurend op ’n dialogiese en heteroglossiese vlak binne ’n komplekse sosiokulturele en sosiolinguistiese omgewing. Met die skep van tekste wat twee- of veelstemmig is, stel Krog veranderende betekenisse en ontvanklikheid vir verskillende perspektiewe aan die leser bekend – ’n proses wat dikwels haarself, haar taal en ander se taal ontheem of vervreem. Hierdie artikel ondersoek die abjekte soos dit in Krog se teenwoordigheid as selfvertaler en vertaalde skrywer in die Suid- Afrikaanse literere veld manifesteer. Die abjekte – dit wat onvanpas en vuil is en die geordende sisteem bedreig – is die duidelikste teenwoordig in ons (as subjektiewe persone) reaksies op die fisiese liggaam en die moontlikhede van kontaminasie wat dit inhou. Die skryfproses en die inhoud daarvan, kan en behoort op soortgelyke wyse as ontwrigtende handelinge te funksioneer. Die konsep van die materialiteit van die teks is spesifiek relevant tot Krog se eie poesie, wat ’n abjekte, beliggaamde landskap voorstel. As skrywer bewoon ( inhabit ) Krog die teks – sy word die ritmes en artikulasies van die teks. Binne kulturele vertaling, vorm abjeksie en die mineuraanwending van taal ’n integrale deel van die konstruksie van identiteit en subjektiwiteit. Hierdie abjeksie funksioneer op twee vlakke: aan die een kant is Krog se teenwoordigheid binne die Engelse literere veld ambivalent, onstabiel en uitdagend van ’n skoon, geordende sisteem; aan die ander kant ondermyn sy die majeurtaal deur haarself met subversiwiteit te vertaal. Die doel van die artikel is om die konsepte abjeksie en mineurtaal te versoen in ’n poging om ’n vars perspektief te gee op die persepsie en resepsie van Krog se werk in die Suid-Afrikaanse literere veld. Sleutelwoorde : abjeksie, literere vertaling, vertaling en hibriditeit, Antjie Krog, mineurletterkunde, Kristeva, Deleuze en Guattari

Antjie Krog and the Autobiography of Postcolonial Becoming

Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998), A Change of Tongue (2003), and Begging to Black (2009) attempt to transform a postcolonial white beneficiary subject through the construction of an “I” that revises rather than reprises the sovereign agency usually associated with Western subjectivity. This iterational form of postcolonial autobiography moves from anti-colonial longing to postcolonial becoming as it rewrites developmental narrative form.

THE TRUTH-COMMISSION: PUBLIC DEBATE AND THE ROLE OF RELIGIOUS BODIES (AFRIKANER/DRC)

Unlike academics it is not my task to repeat what I have written. So I am deliberately moving away from the Truth Commission angle in “Country of my Skull” to use this opportunity to try and determine what kind of religious spaces are needed in the country, more especially in the rural areas and explore whether the churches and especially the Afrikaans Churches are or can be providing these spaces. In conclusion I would like us to consider whether South Africa can afford to be without such spaces.

Complicity, entanglement, and translation: Three English/Afrikaans texts

Using Mark Sanders’ definition, Afrikaans is a “complicit” language, both in terms of the assistance it has given to apartheid, and in the way it evidences cultural and linguistic entanglement. But the texts examined in this article, J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (1977), Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998), and A.H.M. Scholtz’s Vatmaar (1995), also show a keen awareness of English’s role as an instrument of cultural imperialism. They are not composed in, or translated into, English in an attempt to distance themselves from complicity so much as to reveal it. They also speak of the opportunities writing in a hybridized English, or in a mixture of English and Afrikaans, offers to those who wish to describe intimacies “gained”, “resisted”, “uninvited” or “ignored” in opposition to apartheid (Nuttall, 2009: 1). As Afrikaans-speaking writers writing in English and vice versa, Coetzee, Krog, and Scholtz complicate the relationship between language and identity that apartheid sought to codify and secure and which local and global literary markets often reinforce. Their texts tend to offer linguistic hybridity, if not always as a practice, at least as an ideal in the pursuit of which such fixed categories are destabilized, and the folded-togetherness of South African languages and identities can be realized in textual and material terms. In considering the interaction of textual studies, literary studies, and print culture around questions of translation and translingualism in South Africa, it is hoped that we might create more space for the publication and critical reception of texts that re-fashion national and personal histories in radically productive ways.