You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Considering fiction from the colonial era to the present, State of Peril offers the first sustained, scholarly examination of rape narratives in the literature of a country that has extremely high levels of sexual violence.Lucy Graham demonstrates how, despite the fact that most incidents of rape in South Africa are not interracial, narratives of interracial rape have dominated the national imaginary. Seeking to understand this phenomenon, the study draws on Michel Foucault's ideas on sexuality and biopolitics, as well as Judith Butler's speculations on race and cultural melancholia. Historical analysis of the body politic provides the backdrop for careful, close readings of literature by Olive Schreiner, Sol Plaatje, Sarah Gertrude Millin, Njabulo Ndebele, J.M. Coetzee, Zoe Wicomb and others.Ultimately, State of Peril argues for ethically responsible interpretations that recognize high levels of sexual violence in South Africa while parsing the racialized inferences and assumptions implicit in literary representations of bodily violation.
The Short Story after Apartheid offers the first major study of the anglophone short story in South Africa since apartheid’s end. By focusing on the short story this book complicates models of South African literature dominated by the novel and contributes to a much-needed generic and formalist turn in postcolonial studies. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and these brief, fragmentary, elliptical, formally innovative stories offer perspectives that reframe or revise important concerns of post-apartheid literature: the aesthetics of engaged writing, the politics of the past, class and race, the legacies of violence, and the struggle over the land. Through an analysis of key texts from the period by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, this book assesses the place of the short story in post-apartheid writing and develops a fuller model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought.
Ever since it was first published in 1999, Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace has provoked controversy. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, it follows Prof. David Lurie as he encounters disgrace through his sexual exploitation of a student and then through the shocking gang-rape of his only daughter. The novel's uncompromising portrayal of the "new" South Africa outraged many, who found the book regressive, even racist. It also challenged readers worldwide to confront its hard questions. This first book of essays devoted to the novel ambitiously brings together criticism and pedagogy. The ten critical essays and eight essays on teaching Disgrace grapple with the ethical issues the...
Contains reflections on body, sexuality, and gender in African literary texts. While the sections 'Gifted Bodies' and 'Queered Bodies' show new developments in viewing body and sexuality as creative powers, the sections 'Tainted Bodies' and 'Violated Bodies' comprise essays that investigate the exposure of the body to physical aggression and other traumatic experiences.
Before the breakthrough of postcolonial studies, British science-fiction authors already saw the opportunity to discuss political and ethical issues of imperialism by projecting human history and behavior onto the alien 'Other.' In this thesis, the case studies of 15 novels of alien-encounter science fiction illuminate the treatment of colonial and postcolonial concepts - such as colonialism, neo-colonialism, Empire, paternalism, hybridity, mimicry and science and technology - as a means of conquest and resistance. The analysis also shows that the Empire is still a vital background for British science fiction. Thesis. (Series: Anglistik / Amerikanistik; English / American Studies - Vol. 35)
This book considers the political potential of affective experiences of desire as reflected in contemporary South African literature. Jason Price argues that definitions of desire deployed by capitalist and colonial culture maintain social inequality by managing relations to ensure a steady flow of capital and pleasure for the dominant classes, whereas affective encounters with animals reveal the nonhuman nature of desire, a biopower that, in its unpredictability, can frustrate regimes of management and control. Price wonders how animals’ different desires might enable new modes of thought to positively transform and resist the status quo. This book contends that South African literary works employ nonhuman desire and certain indigenous notions of desire to imagine a South Africa that can be markedly different from the past.
Preliminary Material -- Critical Appropriations and Hermeneutic Resistance -- Penetration: Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country -- Resistance: Waiting for the Barbarians -- Parasitism: Life and Times of Michael K and Age of Iron -- Visitation: Disgrace -- Secrecy: Foe -- (Un)belonging: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime -- Intrusion: The Master of Petersburg and Slow Man -- Fidelities: Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year -- Works Cited -- Index.
The night represents almost universally a special, liminal or "out of the ordinary" temporal zone with its own meanings, possibilities and dangers, and political, cultural, religious and social implications. Only in the modern era was the night systematically "colonised" and nocturnal activity "normalised," in terms of (industrial) labour and production processes. Although the globalised 24/7 economy is usually seen as the outcome of capitalist modernisation, development and expansion starting in the late nineteenth century, other consecutive and more recent political and economic systems adopted perpetual production systems as well, extending work into the night and forcing workers to work ...
This book highlights the use of art in human rights, specifically within Africa. It advances an innovative pattern of thinking that explores the intersection between art and human rights law. In recent years, art has become an important tool for engagement on several human rights issues. In view of its potency, and yet potential to be a danger when misused, this book seeks to articulate the use of arts in the human rights discourse in its different forms. Chapters cover how music, photography, literature, photojournalism, soap opera, commemorations, sculpting and theatre can be used as an expression of human rights. This book demonstrates how arts have become a formidable expression of thoughts and a means of articulating reality in a form that simplifies truth and congregates resolve to advance change.
This book shows how South African writing can help us to understand change after apartheid. It aims to shift the attention of literary criticism away from a narrow set of highbrow South African authors and towards a wider range of texts, including popular fiction. The object of analysis, at its largest level, is the South African polity as it veered between the hopeful optimism of the 'Rainbow nation' under Nelson Mandela, the murderous muddling of Thabo Mbeki, and the 'captured state' under Jacob Zuma. Questions of a political, economic, and sociological cast are central, with changes in the workplace, land reform, indigenous knowledge, xenophobia, corruption, and crime providing specific points of focus. Writing, Politics and Change in South Africa after Apartheid shows how creative literature of the post-apartheid period has a unique and powerful capacity to illuminate these issues and to intervene in our understanding of them.