South African Novels Research Articles

Peter Abrahams 100: Milestones in Literature, Media and Political Commentary

ABSTRACT This article establishes the political context for the observance of the centenary of the birth of South African and Jamaican novelist Peter Henry Abrahams. It tracks his career contributions in literature, broadcasting, print journalism and political activism in England and in Jamaica, following his early departure from his native South Africa. The article introduces the work of other contributors to this special edition marking the 100th anniversary of Abrahams' birth. It provides an entry point for new readers of his work and for scholars interested in understanding his 20th century humanist and pan-African perspectives that are still relevant today.

XENOPHOBIA AND CITIZENSHIP IN MEG VANDERMERWE’S ZEBRA CROSSING

Purpose of the study: In the past two decades several researchers have explored the concern of xenophobia in South African fiction. Studies sought to determine the reasons behind the prevalence of xenophobic violence in South Africa. Previous research on xenophobia claims that xenophobic violence is prevalent in the state is, in fact, due to economic and social reasons only. Yet, this article aims to correct the misconception of the Rainbow Nation that South Africa was supposed to have been achieved after 1994. 
 Methodology: The text Zebra Crossing (2013) by the South African novelist Meg Vandermerwe is under the focus. The concept of Michael Neocosmos of Citizenship from the postcolonial theory is applied to the selected text. A close reading of the text and qualitative research is the method of my analysis. The article will focus on the acts of violence reflected in the text in an attempt to find the reasons behind such acts. Neocosmos' valid conceptualization about the outbreaks of xenophobia in South Africa in the post-apartheid is applied to the selected text.
 Main Findings: the article will conclude that the notion of the rainbow nation in South Africa is no more than a dream due to the outbreaks of xenophobia and the ongoing violence against foreigners. It will also prove that the continuous xenophobic violence in South Africa is not because of social or economic reasons only yet, there is a political discourse that engenders and triggers the natives to be more xenophobic. Thus, the state politics of exclusion, indigeneity, and citizenship are the stimuli for citizens to be more aggressive and violent against foreigners.
 Applications of this study: the study will add new insight to the domain of English literature generally and the South African literature specifically. The study will be valuable in immigration literature as it deals with the plights of migrants in South Africa and their suffering from xenophobic violence. The study is located in the postcolonial approach.
 Novelty/Originality of this study: the study offers new insight towards xenophobia in South Africa. The concept applied in the study has not been explored so far in the selected text. Previous research claimed that xenophobia in South Africa is due to economic and social reasons but did not focus on the legacies of postcolonialism nor the new political system. The study is original and new as it discusses an ongoing and worldwide phenomenon utilizing a new concept.

The Seeds of Destruction: Naturalism, Hysteria, and the Beautiful Soul in Lewis Nkosi’sMating Birds

If V. S. Naipaul’s late fiction demonstrates the crisis of narrative in the arrested dialectic of what I have called postcolonial naturalism, then the work of South African novelist, playwright, and critic Lewis Nkosi epitomizes the intersection of postcolonial naturalism with the double-voiced discourse of the hysteric. Situated between a post-independence melancholy and the registration of globalization’s volatile new dispensation and refracted through the racial politics of apartheid and its end as well as the lived experience of exile, Nkosi’s apartheid-era debut novelMating Birdsarticulates in both form and content the noble self-exemption of Hegel’s “Beautiful Soul” and the subversive anxiety of the hysteric, to whom no satisfaction can be given. Such an accounting helps to reframe split critical appraisal of the novel by reading its complex of form and content as the living crystallization of historical processes.

Unhomely Homes: Trauma, Memory and the Loss of Home in Three South African Novels

The paper explores the “unheimlich” (“unhomely”) in three South African novels: Gem Squash Tokoloshe, The Dream House and October. The novels use the trope of the house to represent the psychological and social traumas of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. They also use the mythopoeic cyclical journey to describe psychological responses to trauma. This is akin both to the psychoanalytic method and to the mythic journey back into the past to uncover repressed memories. Using Freudian psychoanalysis, we divide the exploration of this trauma into three different parts: deception, absence and substitution. Trauma is not contained in a single event. Its effects are felt in the deception which underpins the original event and furthered by the sense of absence that arises and which must then be alleviated by finding a substitute. This attempt is itself traumatic.

A tree full of hillbillies: grotesque humor in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf

ABSTRACTThis paper explores humor in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf, a novel radically different from other South African novels of the 1990s. In fact, Triomf recalls works by American Southern grotesque writers, for example the incest and devolution of families and cultures in Faulkner. Even more compelling is the resemblance between Van Niekerk’s novel and Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. In comparing Van Niekerk’s singular achievement to the effects of O’Connor’s fiction, I want to differentiate effects of the grotesque. Using similar techniques—grotesque bodies, racism, misogyny, violence, criminality, and corrosive humor—both writers create discomfort for the reader, but with a much different effect. We laugh at the white-trash Afrikaner Benades in Triomf, but we also laugh with them; they are abjectly corporeal characters set in a wickedly ironic social and political allegory. Skillfully using humor, Van Niekerk maintains the perfect proximity, enabling readers to get close enough to understand the Benades while preventing a false, simplistic empathy.

Populism vs. the Popular in South African Literature

While the damage done by populist leaders to the social fabric and aspirations of ordinary citizens is a staple of postcolonial African fiction across the continent, the subject is still relatively under-explored in South African novels written since the end of apartheid. There is a substantial and ever-growing body of dystopian writing focusing on the disappointments of everyday life in the rainbow nation, but the question of leadership has yet to emerge as the subject of serious or sustained attention. The anomaly is doubly curious, given that leaders are sharply scrutinized in the political press, in print and online. With reference to Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason, the essay takes a long view of a century of South African writing and proposes that there is a fault-line between populism, as a manipulative and sectarian appeal to ‘the people,’ and the popular, as an ethically credible and often necessary rallying point. The essay teases out this tension in some key historical fictions of the New African period and then examines further, nuanced elaborations in A.C. Jordan’s Ingqumbo Yeminyana (The Wrath of the Ancestors), Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, correspondence between Mongane Serote and Lionel Abrahams, and later fiction and poetry. The essay reaches the obvious but nevertheless polemical conclusion that the very power and durability of the popular throughout the decades of apartheid might also be the impediment that has to be overcome if the dangers of populism are to be squarely confronted.

Danyela Demir. Reading Loss: Post-Apartheid Melancholia in Contemporary South African Novels

Danyela Demir. <i>Reading Loss: Post-Apartheid Melancholia in Contemporary South African Novels</i>

Cormac McCarthy and the South Africans

In his well-known interview with Richard Woodward, Cormac McCarthy had occasion to remark: “The ugly fact is books are made out of books” (Woodward). Using his words as the point of departure for a detailed investigation of a multi-stranded case of intertextuality, I examine the influence of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian on three South African novels – Mike Nicol’s Horseman, Damon Galgut’s The Quarry and James Whyle’s The Book of War – in a way that I hope sheds light on the provenance, literariness and meaning of these texts.Keywords: Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Damon Galgut, Mike Nicol, James Whyle

Post-Liberation Temporalities, Utopian Afterlives and Three South African Novels by Masande Ntshanga, Mohale Mashigo and Niq Mhlongo

Exploring the ordinary has been a central concern in South African literary and cultural studies. The ordinary or everyday relies on the lived experience of time – on temporalities defined as the way we experience and imagine the relation between past, present, and future. My central argument in this article is that the lived experience of a systemic shift (which is an ordinary experience in post-apartheid South Africa), coupled with the utopian ideals that attended the liberation movement, has shaped South African temporalities in ways that endure. It is within this framework of how we imagine and experience time that I read three novels: Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home (2013) Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), and Mohale Mashigo’s The Yearning (2016). I argue that all three texts articulate post-apartheid temporalities as a type of post-liberation consciousness, or afterlife, born out of a successful revolution in South Africa. In much the same way that apartheid prejudice did not disappear after independence, nor did the inclusive ideologies of the broad-based anti-apartheid or liberation movement that can be seen in all aspects of South African cultural life. By afterlives, I mean how certain aspects of the past reside in the present, and specifically how the utopian discourses that shaped the anti-apartheid resistance movements live on in current post-liberation fiction.

Poor whitism: The fictional volksmoeder in South African novels, 1920s-1940s

Poor whitism: The fictional volksmoeder in South African novels, 1920s-1940s

The Modern Girl and the Lady: Negotiating Modern Womanhood in a South African Magazine, 1910–1920

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of how the definition of the ideal ‘modern’ woman changed in South Africa for white middle- and upper-class women. Many of the changes in the definition of the ideal woman were appropriated from Britain, but the definition also differed. In general, these differences have been overlooked by academia as there is a prevailing assumption that South African women’s views on gender either reflected British trends or differed only in terms of the suffrage movement and racial views. I argue that studying popular magazines and literature at the time will provide a clearer indication of how women negotiated their roles as these are polyphonic texts that do not merely reflect one author’s view. Using an intertextual approach this study looks at a popular magazine from the time, the South African Lady’s Pictorial and Home Journal, as well as several of the South African novels reviewed in the magazine to trace the conversation over the period in question. Through discourse analysis, major trends and changes in those trends have been identified to show how white English-speaking women defined womanhood at a time when there were great changes and challenges to gender norms.

Socio-historical impulse in literature: a study of Peter Abrahams' &lt;i&gt;Mine Boy&lt;/i&gt;

Peter Abrahams is one of the popular South African novelists whose novels are read not only for mere entertainment but for the information they come with. It is a fact that one of the functions of literature is to offer entertainment to the reader. However, if the sole aim of the writer in a particular work of art is to entertain, then such work should not be taken very serious. Works of imagination are usually the author’s weapon to fight certain abnormalities in a given society. This is why it is believed that fiction is a mirror through which a society is seen. Peter Abrahams is one of those who believe that with fiction, certain abnormalities in a society can be remedied thus Mine Boy albeitseen by some as a journalistic history of the South African society, like other works of art, is pure fiction, whose inspiration comes by what happens around the author. Our interest in this paper therefore, is to explore Peter Abrahams Mine Boy and find out how adequately Abrahams has managed his facts in the writing of Mine Boy as to qualify the novel as fiction rather than history.Keywords: Literature, Abrahams, protest literature, fact and fiction, South Africa

Plagiarism, Parody, and Pastiche: Eliza Haywood writes back to Daniel Defoe and J. M. Coetzee

Through an examination of the politics of print culture that contributed to the 1740 continuation of Daniel Defoe’s 1724 Roxana, this essay brings the historical 18th- century playwright, novelist, and political pamphleteer Eliza Haywood into conversation with South African novelist J.M. Coetzee’s metafictional reworking of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roxana, Foe (1986). This essay places Haywood – whose novel The British Recluse (1722) is one of at least seven pre- existing texts that make up the “pastiche” (Seager, 2009, p. 370) that constitutes the 1740 Roxana – alongside Foe’s narrator Susan Barton, a character who constitutes “a pastiche of 18th-century heroines” (Maher 39), a woman who is “doubt itself” (Coetzee 133), uncertain of who controls the truth of her narrative, yet a woman who writes back to and against the narrative established for her by her male counterparts. Susan’s story of her life as a castaway on Cruso’s island is taken from her by Foe, Coetzee’s fictionalization of Daniel Defoe, who, instead of writing her requested The Female Castaway, writes her out of the narrative that becomes Robinson Crusoe, turning her instead into the narrator of Roxana. Spivak asks, “who is the female narrator of Robinson Crusoe?” And I answer: in a somewhat playful feminist act of resurrection, Eliza Haywood.

Judging Violent Resistances: Camus’s Artistic Sensibility and the Grey Zone of Rebellion

The article engages the grey zone of violent resistance – the morally ambiguous situations facing liberation activists that have generally fallen outside the grasp of transitional justice scholarship. For this purpose, it draws on Albert Camus’s artistic sensibility, reconstructing how his artistic appeal to the limits of rebellion can tackle the difficulty of judging violent resistance. The article demonstrates the relevance of Camus’s artistic sensibility on the case of the armed anti-apartheid struggle. It analyses two South African novels, Afrika’s The Innocents and Wicomb’s David’s Story, in an attempt to show how their literary insights can enrich the official vision of reconciliation as propounded by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Utopian envisioning: politics of belonging and the emergence of the first Indian South African and East African novels

ABSTRACTThe article examines the deployment utopianism in Ansuyah Singh’s Behold the Earth Mourns [Singh, Ansuyah R. 1960. Behold the Earth Mourns. Durban: Purfleet.] and Bahadur Tejani’ Day After Tomorrow [Tejani, Bahadur. 1971. Day After Tomorrow. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau.] as an anticipatory consciousness, which, in projecting visions of a better world, indicts contemporary realities and structures of domination against which the two narratives situate themselves. Written from national margins, utopianism emerges in the two works as an intercultural site for richer cultural significations and engagements between Africans and Indians, and for projecting visions of racial harmony and national formations that embrace Indians as free citizens of the emerging nation-states. Proceeding from the assumption that the fictive worlds that the two novels project are contiguous with – or even produced by – the horrors of the ‘real’ worlds against which they project themselves, I contend that the novels can be most productively read as products of their time of emergence and their meanings located in the interstice between two distinct sets of tropes – the historical and the utopian.

The Linguistics of Literature in Education: African Literature in African Universities

Teaching African Literature - the English text - would seem to be a replicable skill across continents and countries. Experience shows that understanding texts depends less on the lecturer’s skills and more on student perceptions. Since the inventions of the Gutenberg Press and subsequently of “Oral Man” the story of Africa has been the story about Africa. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) speaks of deliberate attempts “to destroy every last remnant of alternative ways of knowing and living, to obliterate collective identities and memories and to impose a new order” on the colonized. Education has been one of the chief instruments in this process, systematically alienating students from their cultural roots. Today as African writers learn to tell the story of Africa, African students are less able to relate to these literary texts than for example students in a German university. Even though texts reflect their own culture, they resist the “other ways of knowing” Tuhiwai Smith speaks about and force internalized perceptions of their own selves on to narrative texts. Careful linguistic analysis provides students with the opportunity to re-connect with the cultural values a foreign-based education system has attempted to abolish from their cultural memory. The tools provided by critical discourse analysis are invaluable in helping students understand differences in approach in literature; they become a means for students to hear the extent of cultural and personal alienation from their own selves, and to re-connect. This paper explores what happens when students are almost totally alienated from the culture as reflected in their own literature written in the colonizer’s language. It seeks an approach that makes fruitful learning possible as African students study the works of South African novelist Zakes Mda; Zanzibari novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah and Malian filmmaker Cheik Oumar Sissoko. Â

The Linguistics of Literature in Education: African Literature in African Universities

Teaching African Literature - the English text - would seem to be a replicable skill across continents and countries. Experience shows that understanding texts depends less on the lecturer’s skills and more on student perceptions. Since the inventions of the Gutenberg Press and subsequently of “Oral Man” the story of Africa has been the story about Africa. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) speaks of deliberate attempts “to destroy every last remnant of alternative ways of knowing and living, to obliterate collective identities and memories and to impose a new order” on the colonized. Education has been one of the chief instruments in this process, systematically alienating students from their cultural roots. Today as African writers learn to tell the story of Africa, African students are less able to relate to these literary texts than for example students in a German university. Even though texts reflect their own culture, they resist the “other ways of knowing” Tuhiwai Smith speaks about and force internalized perceptions of their own selves on to narrative texts. Careful linguistic analysis provides students with the opportunity to re-connect with the cultural values a foreign-based education system has attempted to abolish from their cultural memory. The tools provided by critical discourse analysis are invaluable in helping students understand differences in approach in literature; they become a means for students to hear the extent of cultural and personal alienation from their own selves, and to re-connect. This paper explores what happens when students are almost totally alienated from the culture as reflected in their own literature written in the colonizer’s language. It seeks an approach that makes fruitful learning possible as African students study the works of South African novelist Zakes Mda; Zanzibari novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah and Malian filmmaker Cheik Oumar Sissoko. Â

J.M. Coetzee: Construction and Representation of Historical Reality (Effect)

South African novelist J.M. Coetzee has often been accused of refusing to engage with socio-political conflicts that mark his society. This paper will frame and analyse representation and conceptualization of history in Coetzee’s post-apartheid novels—Disgrace (2000) and Elizabeth Costello (2003). The central argument will be that, far from ignoring historical struggles and developments, Coetzee’s work engages with and encodes the same by using the grammar of novelistic discourse, which it positions as a rival to normative modern historical discourse.

Sakhumzi Restaurant: exploring new avenues

Subject area Entrepreneurship. Study level/applicability Postgraduate Management Diploma Masters of Business Administration. Case overview Sakhumzi Restaurant on Vilakazi Street, in Soweto’s Orlando West, had grown exponentially since it opened in October 2001. Vilakazi Street was named after a South African Zulu poet, novelist and educator, Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, who was the first black South African to obtain a PhD in 1946. The street was famous for housing two Nobel Peace Prize laureates – Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu – as well as for being the site of the shooting of Hector Pieterson during the Soweto Uprising. There were two museums in the vicinity that attracted thousands of tourists every year – Mandela House and the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum. The founder of Sakhumzi Restaurant, Sakhumzi Maqubela, had no experience of the hospitality industry but, nevertheless, had a “deep appreciation” of customer satisfaction, which he had learnt through his previous job in the banking sector. During the start-up phase of the restaurant, Maqubela immersed himself in books on business, focusing on leadership and communication. From such humble beginnings, the restaurant had become a thriving magnet for the tourist and local markets – tourists enjoyed sampling traditional Soweto fare, and for locals, Sakhumzi offered a culinary “home away from home”. Dressed smartly, Maqubela could be seen every day at his restaurant, mingling with patrons and greeting tour operators warmly. But what worried Maqubela was how to keep growing. Should he open another Sakhumzi? Would it work away from the tourist hub of Vilakazi Street? Or were there other options that he needed to explore? Expected learning outcomes The outcomes are as follows: evaluate the entrepreneurial mindset and how entrepreneurial opportunities are recognised, assess the individual-opportunity fit of an opportunity that is being pursued, navigate the entrepreneurial process, identify sources of entrepreneurial finance, identify and overcome resistance and obstacles to start-ups and growing the venture, rigorously analyse the potential of a new business opportunity/venture and assess the relevance of the practice of entrepreneurship to firms and society. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. Subject code CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

Representations of Xenophobia and Animalisation in Zebra Crossing, Zoo City and Wolf, Wolf

SummaryThis article explores the depiction of xenophobia and animalisation in three recent South African novels to determine whether these narratives offer ways of reimagining relations with others. It is specifically interested in the depiction of encounters with those dehumanised by xenophobic discourse as well as the ways in which animals figure in these texts. The texts under discussion are: Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra Crossing (2013), Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (2010) and Eben Venter’s Wolf, Wolf (2013). All three novels, in unusual ways, engage with xenophobia and employ animals, animal metaphors and animalised humans in their narratives. All trouble the boundaries between self and other and centre bodies as the place from which relations with others are conducted. This article will focus on the descriptions of African migrants in these texts, and the manner in which they are animalised. It will also question the extent to which writing embodied others – be they animal or foreigner – remains a way of writing about the embodied self. Finally, this article will consider whether the use of animal metaphors disrupts humanist exhortations against xenophobia.