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Cultured Violence
Cultured Violence explores contemporary South African culture as a test case for the achievement of democracy by constitutional means in the wake of prolonged and violent cultural conflict. Drawing on and juxtaposing narratives of profoundly different kinds—the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, public testimony form the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, documents from former Deputy President Jacob Zuma's rape trial, and personal interviews among them—in order to illuminate different cultural senses of the “state of the nation” and retrieve otherwise elusive descriptions of South African subjects taken from accounts of their individual lives.
Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing
The representation of pain and suffering in narrative form is an ongoing ethical issue in contemporary South African literature. Can violence be represented without sensationalistic effects, or, alternatively, without effects that tend to be conservative because they place the reader in a position of superiority over the victim or the perpetrator? Jolly looks at three primary South African authors -- André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee -- to consider violence in the context of apartheid and colonialism and their inherent patriarchies. Jolly also discusses the violence attendant upon the act of narration in the broader context of critiques of Kafka, Freud, Hegel, the postcolonial critics Jan Mohamed and Bhabha, and feminists such as Susan Suleiman.
Buried Secrets
Between the late 1970s and the mid 1980s, Guatemala was torn by a civil war which came to be known as La Violencia. During this time of mass terror and extreme violence, more than 600 massacres occurred in villages destroyed by the army, one and a half million people were displaced, and more than 200,000 civilians murdered. 83% of the victims were Maya, the indigenous people of Guatemala. Buried Secrets brings these chilling statistics to life as it chronicles the journey of Mayan survivors seeking truth, justice, and community healing and demonstrates that the Guatemalan army carried out a systematic and intentional genocide against the Maya. Victoria Sanford provides us with an insider's l...
The Short Story after Apartheid
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.
Bulletproof
In 1856 and 1857, in response to a prophet’s command, the Xhosa people of southern Africa killed their cattle and ceased planting crops; the resulting famine cost tens of thousands of lives. Much like other millenarian, anticolonial movements—such as the Ghost Dance in North America and the Birsa Munda uprising in India—these actions were meant to transform the world and liberate the Xhosa from oppression. Despite the movement’s momentous failure to achieve that goal, the event has continued to exert a powerful pull on the South African imagination ever since. It is these afterlives of the prophecy that Jennifer Wenzel explores in Bulletproof. Wenzel examines literary and historical texts to show how writers have manipulated images and ideas associated with the cattle killing—harvest, sacrifice, rebirth, devastation—to speak to their contemporary predicaments. Widening her lens, Wenzel also looks at how past failure can both inspire and constrain movements for justice in the present, and her brilliant insights into the cultural implications of prophecy will fascinate readers across a wide variety of disciplines.
Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture
This book explores the idea that art can enact small-scale resistances against the status quo in the social domain. These acts, which we call “little resistances,” determine the limited yet potentially powerful political impact of art. From different angles, seventeen authors consider the spaces where art events occur as “political spaces,” and explore how such spaces host events of disagreements in migratory culture. The newly coined word “migratory” refers to the sensate traces of the movements of migration that characterize contemporary culture. In other words, movement is not an exceptional occurrence in an otherwise stable world, but a normal, generalized process in a world that cannot be grasped in terms of any given notion of stability. Thus the book offers fresh reflections on art’s power to move people, in the double sense of that verb, and shows how it helps to illuminate migratory culture’s contributions to this process.
Between Illusionism and Anti-Illusionism
Between Illusionism and Anti-Illusionism: Self-Reflexivity in the Chosen Novels of J. M. Coetzee takes as its premise J. M. Coetzee’s distinction between “illusionism” and “anti-illusionism”: the realist and the self-reflexive traditions in prose fiction. The aim of this critical study is to demonstrate that these two traditions are not opposed, but rather complementary to each other, and enrich the novel as a genre. Based on Marek Pawlicki’s doctoral thesis, the book is a detailed analysis of Coetzee’s oeuvre, paying particular attention to the impact of the writer’s literary essays on his fiction. Insofar as it looks into the ways in which Coetzee’s work as a critic has a...
The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English Since 1945
From the outset, South Africa's history has been marked by division and conflict along racial and ethnic lines. From 1948 until 1994, this division was formalized in the National Party's policy of apartheid. Because apartheid intruded on every aspect of private and public life, South African literature was preoccupied with the politics of race and social engineering. Since the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990, South Africa has been a new nation-in-the-making, inspired by a nonracial idealism yet beset by poverty and violence. South African writers have responded in various ways to Njabulo Ndebele's call to "rediscover the ordinary." The result has been a kaleidoscope of texts in...
A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants"
A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
The Politics of Adaptation
This book explores contemporary African adaptations of classical Greek tragedies. Six South African and Nigerian dramatic texts – by Yael Farber, Mark Fleishman, Athol Fugard, Femi Osofisan, and Wole Soyinka – are analysed through the thematic lens of resistance, revolution, reconciliation, and mourning. The opening chapters focus on plays that mobilize Greek tragedy to inspire political change, discussing how Sophocles’ heroine Antigone is reconfigured as a freedom fighter and how Euripides’ Dionysos is transformed into a revolutionary leader. The later chapters shift the focus to plays that explore the costs and consequences of political change, examining how the cycle of violence ...
