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Editor’s notes Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19
Published in Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa (Vol. 35, No. 2, 2023)
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Anecdotes, Colonial History and Planetarity: Revisiting Decolonial Grammar with Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Saswat Samay Das, Ananya Roy Pratihar, Dipra Sarkhel
In our article, we consider the current ethics of planetarity and decolonial grammatology in the light of Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse. We begin by showing how Ghosh creates a form of anecdota...
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Protest, Erotism, and Subversive Innuendo: ‘Radical Rudeness’ Poetics in Stella Nyanzi’s No Roses from My Mouth Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Niyi Akingbe
This article identifies the trope of impoliteness, otherwise called ‘radical rudeness’, in Stella Nyanzi’s collection of poetry, No Roses from My Mouth. When does impoliteness or sarcasm become rad...
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Delinking the Capitalist Episteme: Empathy and the Decolonial Turn in Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Goutam Karmakar, Rajendra Chetty
Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban (2021), a graphic verse, is a symbolic depiction of the repercussions of the capitalist episteme that sanctions resource extraction, ecological ...
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The Paradox of ‘Impersonal Autobiography’: Albert Luthuli’s Let My People Go Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Judith Coullie
Autobiographies are about selves, and one can reasonably expect that in writing an autobiography the authorial subject is making a claim of personal significance, and is, in the text, engaging in s...
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Gender-Based Violence, the Sophiatown Shebeens, and Presentism in Can Themba’s Stories Beyond ‘The Suit’ Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Michael Chapman
The last decade or so has seen a renewed interest in Can Themba, writer on Drum magazine of the 1950s. Interest has centred on the story, ‘The Suit’: a story that taps what is a current scourge in ...
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Thin Slices: Focussing the Lens, Review of Caitlin Stobie’s Thin Slices (Verve Poetry Press, 2022) Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19 David Mann
Caitlin Stobie's collection of poems, Thin Slices, is an experiment in form, literature, philosophy, science, and nature. In science, thin slicing is a method of preparing samples for observation i...
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The Poetics of ‘Sensuous Knowledge’ in Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Sadia Zulfiqar
Through a focus on Mariam Bâ’s So Long a Letter, this paper argues for the importance of indigenous feminist theories in interpreting the work of African women writers. I argue that western systems...
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Editor’s Notes Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-04-20
Published in Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa (Vol. 35, No. 1, 2023)
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Jane Austen and Her Diverse Daughters: Muslim Women Re-reading and Re-writing Pride and Prejudice from South Africa and Beyond Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Aneesa Bodiat, Antoinette Pretorius
Jane Austen and her depiction of courtship during the Regency Period is particularly relevant to South African Indian Muslim women due to the similarities between contemporary Muslim engagement rituals and Austen’s representation of courtship. This can be seen in Riding the Samoosa Express (eds Jeena and Asvat 2014), a non-fiction collection of essays by South African Muslim women, relating to courtship
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The ‘Write’ Approach in Three Twenty-First-Century Studies Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Rosemary Gray
This review article seeks to trace connections among three contemporary texts that all, in their different ways, attempt to trace a new path to the future, and throw some light upon the darkness that defines quotidian reality. All three turn on comparable authoritative probity. It begins with Achile Membe’s Out of the Dark Night, a collection of essays on decolonisation that points the way to recovery
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Cultural Entanglement, Displacement and Contemporary Durban in Imraan Coovadia’s High Low In-between Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Alan Muller
This article focuses on Imraan Coovadia’s High Low In-between and investigates how the novel’s join protagonists, Nafisa and Shakeer, navigate their contemporary Durban. The mother and son, I point out, present two disparate subjectivities that engage with both the urban milieu of the city and a globalised world in very different ways. Both experience a sense of displacement in the city, but, as thew
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‘The Options were Shrinking. Choices were Being Removed’: Selected Literary Representations of the Consequence of Climate Change Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Jessica Murray
This article considers the ways in which selected contemporary novels represent the limitation of options as a primary consequence of climate change. I will offer an ecocritical literary analysis of the following four novels by female authors: The New Wilderness (2020) by Diane Cook, A Children’s Bible (2020) by Lydia Millet, Weather (2020) by Jenny Offill and The Last Migration (2021) by Charlotte
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J M Coetzee’s ‘Jesus’ Trilogy: A Search for Answers Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Hania A. M. Nashef
The 2019 novel by the South African-Australian Nobel laureate, J M Coetzee, The Death of Jesus, is a third book in a sequence that includes Jesus in its title; like its predecessors it follows the lives of a recently constructed family in the dystopian Spanish-speaking towns of Novilla and Estrella. The surreal trilogy, which began with The Childhood of Jesus (2013), and then The Schooldays of Jesus
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An Art of Nothing, an Art of Something: The Local in the Global or the Global in the Local? Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Greg Streak
The solo exhibition, Nothing Matters, was installed on the mezzanine floor of an industrial panel beater warehouse at 400 Sydney Road, Durban, South Africa. The exhibition was open to the public from September-December 2021. The objective of the exhibition was to create ‘something’ of conceptual and aesthetic compulsion from a language of nothingness, whether it is ‘found’ in the surrounding temper
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Interrogating the Self: Colonialism and Female Identity in Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Rose Symonds
This article analyses the representation of identity in Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives. It is an autobiographical text focusing on issues of guilt, complicity and entanglement that resonates with a literature of shame, as recently identified in postcolonial studies. Vita, the protagonist, expresses how she is creatively blocked by her guilt as a beneficiary of apartheid and this is
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The Nigerian Civil War and the Politics of Creative Remembrance: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Sadia Zulfiqar
Through a discussion of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy (2005) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), this article argues that the creative remembrance of the Nigerian Civil War and the re-visioning of the nation state has tended to focus on the Hausa and Igbos, excluding other ethnic minorities, especially the Ogoni of the Niger Delta. Adichie and Saro-Wiwa remember and creatively evoke
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Editor's Notes Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2022-10-18 Michael Chapman
Published in Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa (Vol. 34, No. 2, 2022)
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Poetry in South Africa: Towards a Language of Aesthetic Response Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2022-10-18 Michael Chapman
This article has two interrelated aims: first, to offer readers a critical survey of poetry production in South Africa over the last 30 years, the 30-year period being preceded by a consideration of key markers in the poetry of the 1970s and 1980s; second, to engage in debates on distinctions between the poetry of the high mimetic and the low mimetic; on poetry of the page and the stage; and on women’s
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Ghosts of Books: Rereading Thomas Pringle’s African Sketches, with Matthew Shum’s Improvisations of Empire and Zoë Wicomb’s Still Life Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2022-10-18 Dirk Klopper
Focusing on the figures of Makanna, the ‘Bushman’, Vytjé Vaal, Hinza Marossi, Arend Plessis, and Johannes van der Kemp in Thomas Pringle’s African Sketches, the paper traces their refiguration in Matthew Shum’s Improvisations of Empire: Thomas Pringle in Scotland, the Cape Colony and London, 1789–1834 and Zoë Wicomb’s Still Life. The figures make interesting company. While Makanna and the ‘Bushman’
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Rocks and Streams and Love and Liberation – Dialogues with Ecology and Buddhist Practice in Gary Snyder’s Love Poems Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2022-10-18 Julia Martin
After 1990, and increasingly in recent years, it became possible in South Africa to extend our focus in teaching and writing about literature to consider how the project of social liberation might relate to ecological awareness, or even spiritual experience. This essay is about some of the poetry by the North American writer Gary Snyder that I’ve found inspirational in this regard. His work embodies
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J M Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus - Considerations of Living and Dying Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2022-10-18 Ileana Dimitriu
The article focuses on Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus while referring also to the earlier two novels in what is called the ‘Jesus trilogy’. Instead of pursuing the trail of literary studies – novels of migration, of the postcolonies of the South, of whether in their formal representation the novels are allegories or not allegories – I turn towards religious studies. As the novels do, I grant significance
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Margaret Daymond 1940–2021 Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-11 Michael Chapman
(2022). Margaret Daymond 1940–2021. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 2-3.
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Writing, Interpreting Fiction in South Africa: The Last 30 Years Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-11 Michael Chapman
Responding to the theme of this issue, ‘The Last 30 Years: Looking Back, Going Forward’, the article assesses the work of several writers of fiction who have garnered attention in both South African-based literary journals and literary journals abroad: Vladislavić, Wicomb, Van Niekerk, Krog, Mda, and, under the grouping ‘“A Tumultuous Urbanism”, and More’, Mhlongo, Mpe, Duiker, Galgut, Beukes, and
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The Graces of Disgrace Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-11 Kevin Goddard
This article explores aspects of what JM Coetzee might mean by ‘grace’ in his novel Disgrace (1999). It suggests that the primary definition of grace in the novel is the traditional one of ‘love,’ but more importantly, selfless love. As a result, the novel’s focus is on the close association between the physical and the spiritual, particularly in David Lurie’s ‘spiritual’ journey. At the foundation
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No Time Like the Present: The Ambiguous Aesthetics of Nadine Gordimer’s Late Style Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-11 Laura A. Zander
For over 60 years, Nadine Gordimer has chronicled South Africa’s changing political climate. Her final novel, No Time Like the Present (2012), has therefore been received primarily as fictionalised historiography that traces and reflects on the woes and the accomplishments of the young democracy. However, so far, this narrow emphasis on historical reality has led to the neglect of the imaginative vision
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Autocratic Fatherhood, Violent Sexuality, and Critique in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-11 Edgar Nabutanyi
The recurrence of the theme of sexual violence in recent South African fiction has elevated sexual violence to a symbol of apartheid’s legacy of patriarchy. Although texts that feature sexual violence are often analysed as allegories of the legacy of apartheid’s patriarchal control and racial domination, I argue that texts like Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples de-allegorise and/or de-politicise sexual
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Reflecting on Anglophone (Post)Apartheid Literature Beyond 2000: A ‘World-Literary’ Perspective Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-11 Danyela Dimakatso Demir, Olivier Moreillon
Anglophone South African Literature after 2000 has, Michael Chapman, argues, both quantitatively and qualitatively departed from South Africa’s literary output in the preceding decade. This development has been tentatively labelled as the beginning of the ‘post-transitional’ phase within South African Literature by Ronit Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie. Conceiving of it as a temporal marker rather than
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Futures Forestalled … for Now: South African Science Fiction and Futurism Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-11 Alan Muller
While the term ‘Afrofuturism’ has entered the global popular lexicon and is appropriately used to describe films like Black Panther, the term’s descriptive potential is necessarily culturally bound. In this article, I argue that the term is bound to an African-American context and that it cannot slip shoddily be applied to futuristic texts by African creatives in Africa. To problematise the term’s
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Feeling towards the Contemporary: Judging New South African Fiction Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-11 Wamuwi Mbao
The awarding of a prize to a work of art is meant to convey something about the value of that work in the world. But art prizes always provoke questions that evade easy answering: what purpose do prizes serve? What visions of life are promoted when we choose one book over another? How do the judges arrive at their choices? This response tells a partial story about the process of judging a literary
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Editor's Notes Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-11
(2022). Editor's Notes. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 1-1.
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Editors’ Notes Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Irikidzayi Manase, Cheryl Stobie
(2021). Editors’ Notes. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 33, In Honour of Michael Wessels, pp. 75-77.
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Bushman Letters/Bushman Literature Usable and Unusable Pasts Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Michael Chapman
In remembrance of Michael Wessels This article avers that just as Bleek and Lloyd's research on ‘Bushman voices’ has the potential to enrich South African literature so does Wessels's study, Bushman Letters: Interpreting |Xam Narrative. A meta-critical account of ‘Bushman Studies’, Wessels provokes discussion on what might constitute Bushman expression, where and when it arose, how it has travelled
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“Spots of Time” – Michael Wessels and the Imaginative Reinterpretation of Identity Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Kobus Moolman
For Linzi, Akira and Tao While much of Michael Wessels’s work on reading San oral literature, the politics of indigeneity and ecocriticism was acknowledged during his life, there is another dimension to his research that has been overlooked. Michael Wessels always had a deep love of poetry, and toward the end of his life, he had begun to focus more on his writing and to publish. In this article, I
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Negotiating Contemporary Indigeneity: Cultural Aesthetic and Communicative Practices among Contemporary! Xun and Khwe San Youth of Platfontein, South Africa Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Itunu Ayodeji Bodunrin
The San or Bushmen of South Africa have been represented in popular literature and media as hunter-gatherer primitives who live nomadic lives and whose history predates that of all later immigrants to the country. While the ubiquitous representation and myth provide incentives in the form of cultural/ecotourism and engenders much international interest, it has rarely translated into any form of sustainable
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Charaxes and Collaborative Becoming in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Jean Rossmann
This article focusses on Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006 [2004] trans. Michiel Heyns) and its fabulation of the magical Overberg of the south-western Cape. While the mother–child bond has received much scholarly attention, what deserves closer examination is the tentacular imbrication of the creaturely world into this dynamic. Adopting a posthuman, ecocritical lens, this article highlights the intermediary
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Travel and the Framing of Multiplicities in Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Maureen Amimo
Postcolonial forms of countertravel writing are sites through which previously marginalised subjects such as women and queer others produce agency. This article examines Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room as a countertravel narrative that imagines journeys as a negotiation of fractures within the self. I utilise the idea of travel to locate crossings and or contemplation of boundaries both physical and
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“Remember, Body”: A Phenomenological Approach to the Poetry of Constantin Cavafy Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Roger Field
Phenomenology and the poetry of Constantin Cavafy (1863–1933) seldom appear in the same sentence, and there are few such approaches to his work in English. Having set out the basis of phenomenology as proposed by Edmund Husserl and interpreted by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the article calls for critics to acknowledge their phenomenological influences more openly. It then examines early, late, published
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An Eco-critical Exegesis of Shona Taboos Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Godwin Makaudze
The emergence in Zimbabwe today of organisations and the promulgation of many pieces of legislation all meant to protect various aspects of the environment do not imply that Zimbabwean societies have never kept a positive eye on their environments. Traditional societies, the Shona in this case, have largely been particular about and enjoyed a sound relationship between the people and their environment
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Men with Broken Backs and Other Infirmities: Unsettling Masculinities in Charles Mungoshi’s Fiction Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Thabisani Ndlovu
Most of Charles Mungoshi’s fiction was written within a context of militaristic masculinities pre- and post-independent Zimbabwe, when the strong and healthy male body was valorised in Zimbabwean writing and life. His portrayal of men with physical infirmities, particularly spinal injuries, challenges the Chimurenga (war of liberation) rhetoric with its hypermasculine script that privileges the tough
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Salmon Waters Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Julia Martin
(2021). Salmon Waters. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 33, In Honour of Michael Wessels, pp. 164-169.
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Introduction Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-07-02 Duncan Brown, Antjie Krog
(2021). Introduction. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 1-6.
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In Memory of Stephen Gray (1941–2020) Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-07-02 Michael Chapman
(2021). In Memory of Stephen Gray (1941–2020) Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 7-9.
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A ‘School' Person in a ‘Red' Blanket: The Case of SEK Mqhayi Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-07-02 Michael Chapman
The article considers the scope and purpose of the project, “Translating (South) African Literatures”, in relation to the early twentieth-century Xhosa writer, SEK Mqhayi, two of whose works have been translated into English in the project. Turning to the several prompts to reflection offered by the project, I evaluate Mqhayi's contribution to an ‘expanded' South African literary history. As does the
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At Home in Zulu and English: RRR Dhlomo’s Imaginative Writing Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-07-02 Nkosinathi Sithole
While RRR Dhlomo (Rolfes Robert Reginald Dhlomo) is known for being the first black South African to publish a novella in English, An African Tragedy (1928), and for having published English short stories in Sjambok and The Bantu World in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he made a greater impact on isiZulu literature as a historical and fictional novelist. In this essay I am concerned with Dhlomo’s
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A Vital Question for Contemporary South Africans: SM Mofokeng’s Senkatana Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-07-02 Chris Dunton
This article examines SM Mofokeng’s play Senkatana as a version of the legend of Kgodumodumo and Senkatana, earlier versions of which are summarised to provide comparative contextualisation and to clarify Mofokeng’s thematic priorities in constructing his text. The discussion of the play focuses on its dependence on oratory, but more especially on the way it projects parallels between Senkatana’s life
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Literary Space/Creative Practice: Reading Ityala Lamawele in English Today Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-07-02 Peter D McDonald
The new English translation of SEK Mqhayi's Ityala Lamawele (1914), The Lawsuit of the Twins (2018), is a major cultural event. Seen against the background of Ityala Lamawele's long and complex history as a published work, however, the new translation raises several important questions for readers today. Above all, by bringing the tensions between the intermediaries who shape the space of the literary
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“The Gwarrie Call that they Recognise”: An Analysis of the Translated Sesotho Poem “Ntwa ea Jeremane 1914” (War against Germany 1914) by BM Khaketla (1913–2001) Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-07-02 Antjie Krog
This essay looks at a recently translated poem, “Ntwa ea Jeremane 1914”, written by BM Khaketla, as a lens through which to approach the feelings and attitudes of people from Lesotho towards the world wars. A poem is sometimes described as a gathering of spoken or written words, arranged in such a way that it evokes an intense imaginative alertness around an issue, an emotion or an experience. Investigations
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Peace and Division: The Black Novel in South Africa Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-07-02 Ashraf Jamal
This analysis of black South African fiction, translated into English, pivots on a century-old aberration, the Natives Land Act of 1913, which assigned 90% of the land to a white minority. The fallout of this destructive legislation remains with us today. Indeed, landlessness, I argue, is the fundamental root of South Africa’s continued ills. Whether conceived under colonialism, apartheid, or the post-apartheid
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The Reluctant Storyteller: A Collection of Short Stories Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-07-02 Annie Gagiano
(2021). The Reluctant Storyteller: A Collection of Short Stories. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 70-72.
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Call for Papers Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2021-07-02
(2021). Call for Papers. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 73-73.
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Editor’s Notes Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2020-10-05 Cheryl Stobie
(2020). Editor’s Notes. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 32, Precarity in South/African Texts, pp. 99-100.
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Current Writing 33 (1) 2021 Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2020-10-05
(2020). Current Writing 33 (1) 2021. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 32, Precarity in South/African Texts, pp. 208-209.
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Current Writing 33 (2) 2021 Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2020-10-05
(2020). Current Writing 33 (2) 2021. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 32, Precarity in South/African Texts, pp. 210-210.
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Breaking the Chains of Slavery: Precarity, the Personal and the Political in Nkosinathi Sithole’s Hunger Eats a Man Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2020-07-02 Cheryl Stobie
This article offers a literary analysis of a prize-winning South African novel, Hunger Eats a Man (2015), by Nkosinathi Sithole. I analyse the political and cultural history and sexual politics represented in the novel by employing a theoretical nexus of precarity studies as it intersects with feminist, subaltern and postcolonial studies, enabling challenges to Eurocentric models of the precariat.
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Lucy’s Precarious Privilege in Fiona Snyckers’s Lacuna Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2020-07-02 Richard Alan Northover
The article applies both Judith Butler’s notion of precarity and her Freudian approach to an analysis of Fiona Snyckers’s novel Lacuna (2019a). Using Freudian psychoanalysis to analyse the structure of Lucy’s trauma and to trace the process of her healing, I argue that, although the process is uneven and its outcome partial, it traces a movement from the darkness of her trauma to the illumination,
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“LipServants” and Mutes: Experiencing Precarity Through the Commercial Control of Language in Tammy Baikie’s Critical Dystopia Selling LipService (2017) Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2020-07-02 Lynne Clarke
This article notes the relevance of Selling LipService by Tammy Baikie (2017) at the contemporary moment, as it deals with capitalism, consumerism, language, branding, communication and liberty. The novel’s dystopian setting reveals characters’ precarity caused by the commercial exploitation of language. The article deploys Judith Butler’s theories of precarity, amplified by reference to Achille Mbembe’s
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“To Grasp the Gaping Grave:” Blackness, Death, and the Afterlife of Slavery in Unathi Slasha’s Jah Hills Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2020-07-02 Marzia Milazzo
This essay reads Unathi Slasha’s Jah Hills (2019 [2017]) in light of Afropessimism to argue that the novel articulates a grammar of Black suffering and offers a staunch critique of antiblackness and white supremacy. Through the character of Jah Hills, who inhabits the limbo between life and death, the novel reflects upon how slavery continues to shape the ontological position and everyday lives of
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“All I can See of My Country”: Representations of Precarity in Selected Poems of Mxolisi Nyezwa Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2020-07-02 Kyle Allan
With poems that convey concisely the existential state of living in precarity, Mxolisi Nyezwa offers a unique and crucial voice in South African literature. This article discusses representations of precarity and related concepts of “slow death” (Berlant 2007), “slow violence” (Nixon 2011), and “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), focusing on several selected poems from Nyezwa’s (2011) volume Malikhanye
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Feminist Protest and the Disruptive Address of Naked Bodies Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2020-07-02 Sandra Young
The strategies with which a new generation of feminist activists have made visible the impact of gender-based violence have rendered bodies legible in the public discourses that challenge the social norms of everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa. This article considers the implications of public nakedness for an understanding of precarity not only as a condition but also as a resource for the