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A Response English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Damon Galgut
Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 66, No. 2, 2023)
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Introduction: Damon Galgut’s The Promise and the Booker Prize Double Bind English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Sofia Kostelac
Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 66, No. 2, 2023)
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‘Good’ South African Literature: The Booker Prize, its Infatuation with the Postcolonial and Damon Galgut’s The Promise English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Helena van Urk
Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 66, No. 2, 2023)
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Brand Recognition: Damon Galgut’s The Promise as National Allegory Plus English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Elleke Boehmer
Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 66, No. 2, 2023)
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‘Is it a family saga or a farm novel?’ Reading Damon Galgut’s The Promise as a Foil for Metonymic Dispossession and Restitution in the Contemporary South African (Im)moral Economy English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Kirby Manià
Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 66, No. 2, 2023)
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White Moral Projects and the Impossibility of Racial Repair: A Reflection on White Shame and Black (Dis)Inheritance in Damon Galgut’s The Promise English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Aretha Phiri
Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 66, No. 2, 2023)
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Their Galgut, Our Galgut: A Complimentary Rant on the Booker Prize English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Robert Muponde
Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 66, No. 2, 2023)
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The Modern Tragic Animal in the Zoo: A Zoocritical Reading of The Hairy Ape English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2023-05-02 Cengiz Karagöz, Timuçin Buğra Edman
In The Hairy Ape, Eugene O’Neill depicts the shortcomings of an industrialized society: class distinctions are made stark as we witness the upper class occupying a financially superior and luxuriou...
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Relational Resilience in The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After and Call Me American: A Memoir English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2023-04-25 Lena Englund
Resilient autobiography emphasizes the relational aspect of life writing, drawing on human relationships that have added to the adversity in life recounted, but also builds on human connections tha...
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Sekhmet and the Shaman: Extinction, Ferality and Trans-species Connections in Henrietta Rose-Innes’ Green Lion English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Judith Simon
In her fourth novel, Green Lion (2015), Henrietta Rose-Innes depicts nature’s precariousness in a commercial-driven city. The novel focuses on how, in the Anthropocene epoch, destructive human acti...
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A Piece of My Self: The ‘Wound’ in the Writing of Richard Ford English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Gareth Cornwell
Malcolm Cowley’s hypothesis about the importance of Ernest Hemingway’s WWI wounding to an understanding of his work provides the point of departure for this essay. Richard Ford’s memoir, Between Th...
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Subtlety, Understatement and Omission in The Lord of the Rings English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Jamie McGregor
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings shows a remarkable tendency to withhold information from its readers, apparently as a deliberate narrative strategy that aims to reflect the limited point-of-...
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Notes on Contributors English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2023-01-12
Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 66, No. 1, 2023)
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Betty Molteno and the Creation of a South African Nineteenth-Century Lesbian Discourse English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-12-15 Lizelle Smit
Abstract There are lacunae in South African scholarship regarding nineteenth-century lesbianism. To address this gap in part, this article examines the sexual identity of Elizabeth Maria (Betty) Molteno (1852–1927) and her two partners, Sarah Hall and Alice Greene. Molteno, the eldest child of the first Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (South Africa), J.C. Molteno, was a teacher, poet, vegetarian
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Correction English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-11-18
Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 66, No. 1, 2023)
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‘[T]o Make us Complete as Human Beings’: Soil as the Bedrock of Collected Memories in Niq Mhlongo’s Paradise in Gaza English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-11-14 Sean James Bosman
Abstract Niq Mhlongo’s Paradise in Gaza (2020) uses images related to soil to emphasize the novel’s concern with the transmission of indigenous knowledge and the relationship between a sense of humanity and land ownership. Mhlongo’s novel not only explores the quotidian and practical relationship between its characters and the land they occupy and cultivate, but also suggests a transcendental and spiritual
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The Boda Boda (R)age: Economies of Affection in the Motorbike Taxis of Kenya English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-10-26 Joyce Nyairo
Abstract Nikushike namna gani? (How should I hold you?) The questions that women ask motorbike taxis operators are just one of the many ways that this new mode of transportation in both urban and rural Kenya have become a vehicle for laughter, outrage, (in)dignity and wealth. This paper focuses on moments of delight in the danger-filled work of motorbike taxi operators in Kenya. How much joy do boda
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Journeying through Nairobi: Mapping the City through Prize-Winning Stories English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Doseline Kiguru
Abstract Nairobi as a city has been a prominent feature in many literary works set in Kenya from the pre-independence period, when the city started taking form, to the present. The city has also continued its presence in futuristic literary representations from Kenya. This article is concerned with Nairobi as a city and its representations within short stories in the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing
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Street Art and the Reconfiguration of Civic Advocacy in Nairobi City English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Charles Kebaya
Abstract Over the last two decades, social protests in Kenya have shifted to using art. Social protests involving art, such as the ‘State-Burial-ballot-Revolution’ and ‘Occupy-Parliament Movement,’ among others, have been witnessed in the country in the recent past. These artistic productions interpellate the spaces they interact with – the street, parliament, buildings, perimeter fences and public
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Nairobi Street-Aesthetics: Distance and Proximity in the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Green City English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-10-20 Nicklas Hållén
Abstract This article looks at the relatively recent tendency to aestheticize life in Nairobi’s working-class and informal neighbourhoods in different forms of art and media. It focuses on two case studies – Steve Bloom’s photobook, Trading Places: The Merchants of Nairobi (2009) and the first issue of the Kenyan literary magazine Kwani? (2003). These are compared to the collectively performed poem
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Literary Encounters: The Beat Generation, Poland and South Africa, 1948–1968 English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-10-19 Eva Kowalska
Abstract Despite geo-political distances, the Beat Generation writers, and individuals or groups within Polish and South African literature of the period 1948–1968, shared similar artistic outlooks, literary concerns, and thematic as well as formal experimentation in response to their socio-political situations and mainstream national literatures. In addition, there is evidence to suggest that they
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Acting Across Diaspora: Transnational Spaces and Voices in Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-10-12 Majed Aladylah
Abstract In The Arsonists’ City (2021), Arab American novelist Hala Alyan casts a piercing spotlight on how diasporic and transnational voices are burdened with cultural ambivalences, negative stereotypes, prejudices and discriminations. This paper shows how Hollywood cinema does not help the protagonist, Mazna, to remodel her diasporic identity to be a successful actress. A Syrian actress who has
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‘For a Further Union’: Conceptions of Unity in the Later W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-10-12 Charika Swanepoel
Abstract This paper considers the shared preoccupation with unity in the later works of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot with the aim of emphasizing the likeness in their thinking despite their vastly different theological stances. The unity strived for by both poets involves a dedicated resolution or transformation of contraries. Yeats scholars such as George Bornstein have termed Yeats’s dedication to all
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Elemental Humanity in Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-10-12 Eckard Smuts
Abstract In this essay I read Bessie Head’s novel When Rain Clouds Gather from a broadly eco-materialist perspective, arguing that the social transformation of the protagonist, Makhaya Maseko, is fundamentally bound up with the text’s nuanced descriptions of the physical environment. Charting Maseko’s departure from the toxic milieu of apartheid South Africa, and his gradual process of settling into
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Correction English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-08-23
Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 66, No. 1, 2023)
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Imprints of Indigenes and the Optics of Settlement: A Bifocal Reading of Summer on the Lakes and A Millimetre of Dust English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Cleo Beth Theron
Abstract This article is a comparative reading of Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844) and Julia Martin’s A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites (2008), travelogues that explore erstwhile frontier zones in view of a changing social landscape inflected with the rhetoric of democracy. The comparison is based on the thematic parallels between literature from the American Renaissance
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‘Home is Another Country’: A Foucauldian Reading of Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-07-27 John Henning
Abstract Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country is an intimate account of the lifelong search for ‘home’ by its autobiographical narrator, the child of exiled South African parents. My essay argues that Msimang’s figuring of a complicated, nationally-organized external realm through the exilic subjectivity of its narrator provides an opportunity to read a series of spaces in the text as what Michel
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‘I Am Powerful’: Agency, Autonomy and Audacity in Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Harry Olufunwa
Abstract This article examines Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference from the perspective of the novel’s seminal ‘I Am Powerful’ scene the multiple interpretations of which encapsulate the issues of feminine independence of thought and action which the novel portrays through Deola Bello, the main character. As aspiration, motto and model of ideal behaviour, ‘I Am Powerful’ is very significant to her situation
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In the Centre of the Cosmos: Sacred Spacetime in Niyi Osundare’s ‘A Song for Olosunta’ English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Chukwunwike Anolue
Abstract Time and nature are two intertwined concepts. They are so inseparable that there is a temporal index to every spatial event and vice versa. Nothing happens in a space except at a time; neither does anything happen at a time except in a space. For the Nigerian poet, Niyi Osundare, time and space occupy a prominent place in his oeuvre, but critics tend to privilege one and ignore the other in
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From the Politics of Forgetting to the Ethics of Remembering: The Postcolonial Sublime in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Mohsen Hanif, Tahereh Rezaei
J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians explores the possibility and limits of rationalizing and dominating the ‘other’ through an experience of dislocation. This article argues that the experience of topographic and aesthetic dislocation has the power to transform the Magistrate’s ethical standards in relation to the ‘other’. The novel unwinds a space in which to explore the postcolonial sublime
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Black Hamlet: A Script in Search of a Stage English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Laurence Wright
Abstract This article sets out the South African background to a previously unknown play by John Bright, the Hollywood scriptwriter, based on Wulf Sachs’s famous psycho-documentary Black Hamlet (1937) and written in conversation with him. The playscript appears as an Appendix to this number of English Studies in Africa. The aim is to provide pertinent information to enable international readers and
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“Black Hamlet” English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-07-27
Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 65, No. 2, 2022)
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Notes on Contributors English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-07-27
Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 65, No. 2, 2022)
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‘Too Uncompromising a Figure to be So Disposed of’: Virginia Woolf and/on Olive Schreiner English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Jade Munslow Ong
In her 1925 review of an edited collection of Olive Schreiner’s letters, Virginia Woolf described Schreiner as ‘too uncompromising a figure to be so disposed of’. Prompted by this intriguing comment, this article brings Woolf’s late-1920s writings into conversation with Schreiner’s novels and letters in order to trace personal and textual connections between the two authors. Comparative analysis of
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Introduction: South African and African Modernism – Beyond a Century, Beyond the Provisional English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Rick de Villiers
(2022). Introduction: South African and African Modernism – Beyond a Century, Beyond the Provisional. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 65, A Century of Modernism in South African Literature and Literary Culture. Guest Editor: Rick de Villiers, pp. 1-4.
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Millenarian Modernism in H. I. E. Dhlomo’s The Girl who Killed to Save English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Arthur Rose
Abstract This essay takes as its starting point the final scene of H. I. E. Dhlomo’s The Girl who Killed to Save (1935). Ostensibly an account of ‘Nongqause the Liberator,’ the prophet behind the Cattle Killing of 1856–1857, Dhlomo’s play presents ‘not merely a work of historical recovery or a reflection of increasing segregation but also an engagement with the full range of nationalist imaginings
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Near Symmetries: The Transnational Modernism of Edward Wolfe and William Plomer English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Michelle Adler
Focusing on the transnational lives of William Plomer (1903–1973) and the artist Edward Wolfe (1897–1982), this paper considers the formative influences of their South African heritage on their creative development, as well as the impact of European modernism on their work. In particular, a connection is made between Wolfe’s immersion in modernism and the Bloomsbury Group, and his subsequent influence
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Paying Homage to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: Revision and Reversion in Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Sofia Kostelac
This article examines Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg (2017), a novel which pays homage to Virginia Woolf’s canonical work of literary modernism, Mrs Dalloway (1925). Yet the Johannesburg of Melrose’s novel is devoid of the transforming cosmopolitanism that characterizes Woolf’s London and which allows for new social relations to be imagined across historically entrenched boundaries. While the implicit
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Criteria of Embarrassment: J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Jesus Trilogy’ and the Legacy of Modernist Difficulty English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Rick de Villiers
This article takes as its starting point the divergent responses that J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy (The Childhood of Jesus [2013], The Schooldays of Jesus [2016] and The Death of Jesus [2019]) has drawn from reviewers and scholars respectively. Where reviewers have generally regarded these works’ difficulty as obstructive, scholars have taken their difficulty as both the justification and catalyst
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Modernisms and Modernities in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Russell West-Pavlov
Abstract In this article I argue that Nigerian author Chinua Achebe ostentatiously co-opted Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’ in the title of his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart to mobilize a modernist gesture in order to bookend what is in fact primarily a rehearsal of markers of modernity (realist narration, the structure of the historical novel as defined by Lukács). The latter rehearsal was central
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Notes on Contributors English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2022-04-28
(2022). Notes on Contributors. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 65, A Century of Modernism in South African Literature and Literary Culture. Guest Editor: Rick de Villiers, pp. 87-88.
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The Plague Years: An Introduction English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Michael Titlestad, Grace A. Musila, Karl van Wyk
(2021). The Plague Years: An Introduction. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 64, The Plague Years, pp. 1-3.
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Masked Masterpieces: in R≡lational Folds English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Sally Ann Murray
This paper creatively re-thinks Masked Masterpieces, a COVID-19 public art fundraising initiative for financially at-risk students, organized by Stellenbosch University (SU) and underwritten by donors. The project features five portraits by famous South African artists, re-purposed with protective masks, and installed in large-scale reproductions around Stellenbosch town. In the paper, Masked Masterpieces
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‘As others feel pain in their lungs’: Albert Camus’s The Plague English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Hedley Twidle
This is an account of reading Albert Camus's The Plague in the wake of various real-world epidemics, and from a place, South Africa, that emerges as a kind of mirror image of the north Africa in which the novel is set. It suggests that what seems at first like a simple story is in fact a deeply complex, even contradictory work: one that that absorbs and reflects back as much history and difficulty
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Self/Isolation English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Dan Wylie
(2021). Self/Isolation. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 64, The Plague Years, pp. 41-46.
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Plague and Cultural Panic: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Laurence Wright
Abstract Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ turns on the paradox of a privileged elite succumbing to a plague that is ravaging society at large, and from which they believe themselves completely protected. The horror of the story consists not in the devastation of external society – that is taken for granted – but in the abject failure of the elite’s supposedly impregnable defences, their faith in
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Two Paintings English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Ingrid Winterbach
(2021). Two Paintings. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 64, The Plague Years, pp. 59-60.
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Will the COVID-19 Crisis Lead to a Fourth Wave of Neo-nationalism? English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Eirikur Bergmann
Abstract In this paper, I analyze whether the COVID-19 crisis might lead to a new wave of neo-nationalism. History teaches that socio-economic crises tend to pave the way for populist nationalists to seize the moment and place themselves as saviours of the people/nation against both an external threat and the domestic elite. In previous research, I detected three waves of nativist populism, emerging
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The Room English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Kobus Moolman
(2021). The Room. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 64, The Plague Years, pp. 110-113.
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Fever Dreams: Surveying the Representation of Plagues and Pandemics in South African Speculative Fiction English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Crystal Warren
Abstract This paper provides an overview of the representation of outbreaks of infectious disease in South African speculative fiction. The focus is on novels by South African authors (even if some are set in the US) which envision a future plague or pandemic, from AIDS to flu-like viruses to a zombie outbreak. This is not an in-depth analysis of individual texts but a survey of the ways in which future
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An End in Itself: Genre, Apocalypse and the Archive in Deon Meyer’s Fever English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Devin William Daniels
Abstract What are the affordances of reading apocalyptic fiction under apocalyptic conditions, when a realism without apocalypse hardly seems realistic at all? What does it mean that our attempts to imagine a future beyond capitalism seem tethered to such an apocalyptic event, and what might these attempts tell us about the present – and the past – from which they emerge? While apocalyptic fiction
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Plagues in Palimpsest: Historical Time and Narrative Time in Diane Awerbuck’s Home Remedies, Marcus Low’s Asylum and Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Beth Wyrill
This article takes as premise that the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has left South Africans, along with the rest of the world, feeling acutely aware of their own historicity. The idea of historical self-awareness coalescing around major social and historical shifts has been expertly theorized already, but I hope to offer a reading of this phenomenon through three post-2000 South African novels
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Hero English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 David Medalie
(2021). Hero. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 64, The Plague Years, pp. 146-151.
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COVID-19 and African Postage Stamps English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Damian Shaw
This paper investigates how African nations have portrayed the COVID-19 pandemic in their postage stamps. After an introduction, a timeline offering short descriptions of global editions of this theme from its inception until March 2021 will be established. The timeline will consider most issues to the above date, with the caveat that additional examples might still be found, and that more will no
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Green Dream English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Maren Bodenstein
(2021). Green Dream. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 64, The Plague Years, pp. 180-180.
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Sonification and Music: Science meets Art English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Chatradari ‘Chats’ Devroop, Michael Titlestad
The opposites, science and the arts, have always enjoyed a relationship. Recently, this relationship has been expressed in sonification, a branch of science seeking to add sound to data, giving data music-like intelligibility. Scientists believe that our aural capabilities are a potentially rich source of data that could assist in problem solving. In 2020, a sonic realization of the coronavirus was
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Memory Book as a New Genre of Illness Writing: How a Ugandan Mother Wrote about HIV English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Machiko Oike
Abstract A memory book is a therapeutic document and personal testament – a workbook written, most commonly, by a HIV-positive caregiver or parent for their child, about the family’s background and the parent’s life experiences, to guide the child in the parent’s absence. In Uganda, memory projects first emerged in 1998 as public health outreach for people with HIV. They encourage writers, often agrarian
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Two Poems by Phelelani Makhanya English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Phelelani Makhanya
(2021). Two Poems by Phelelani Makhanya. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 64, The Plague Years, pp. 209-211.
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Some Speculative Musings on COVID-19 Affectivity, Raymond Williams’ ‘Structure of Feeling’ and Zadie Smith’s Intimations English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Ronit Frenkel
Abstract Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays (2020) is a partial history of affectivity of the present, which I am speculatively positioning as a type of transnational archive of privileged pandemic-circumscribed life. Raymond Williams’ work on a ‘structure of feeling’ is useful here to understand new patterns of experience that have emerged during this pandemic. Williams uses the phrase a ‘structure
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Two Poems by Leanne Stillerman Zabow English Studies in Africa Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Leanne Stillerman Zabow
(2021). Two Poems by Leanne Stillerman Zabow. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 64, The Plague Years, pp. 223-224.