(2020). Editorial. Scrutiny2: Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 1-3.

Abstract This article, dedicated to the memory of the late Poet Laureate of South Africa and patron of the South African Poetry Project (ZAPP), Professor Keorapetse Kgositsile, situates itself within Kgositsile's struggle for cultural liberation through the arts and education. It is also located within the current South African project of decolonising the curriculum. The call to decolonise existing

(2020). Engaged Queerness in African Speculative Fiction. Scrutiny2: Vol. 25, Engaged Queerness in African Speculative Fiction, pp. 1-12.

(2020). “2070”, by Qintu Collab. Scrutiny2: Vol. 25, Engaged Queerness in African Speculative Fiction, pp. 13-22.

Abstract In this article, I go on a journey with Antjie Somers, a gender-nonconforming, Queer, stigmatised, witch-like figure well known among Afrikaans people. Bringing permutations of their story into conversation with writing about outcasts like witches and Queer people, I consider the parallels that might be drawn between the experiences and knowledge of such ostracised, unconventional figures

Abstract Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010) is a central edifice in the ever-growing genre of South African crime fiction. A decidedly post-apartheid literary trend (though not exclusive to it), crime fiction contributes to commentary on South African futurity, which is often portrayed as violent and almost always disappointing. Understanding the ways in which South African

Abstract The science fiction novel Triangulum (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2019) by Masande Ntshanga challenges both the association of the queer with the urban and the use of the city as symbol for the future in science fiction. The verisimilitude of the life of a queer teenager in the rural Eastern Cape of South Africa—a type of rural queer existence not often depicted in literature—is represented in the novel

(2020). Lauren Beukes discusses Afterland (2020) Scrutiny2: Vol. 25, Engaged Queerness in African Speculative Fiction, pp. 144-149.

(2020). Afterland. Scrutiny2: Vol. 25, Engaged Queerness in African Speculative Fiction, pp. 150-151.

Abstract This article examines Sindiwe Magona’s 2008 novel, Beauty’s Gift (Cape Town: Kwela), noting its significance as the first full-length work by a South African woman on the topic of HIV/AIDS. The article contends that the novel borrows elements from popular modes of African fiction, primarily through its valorisation of female friendship, to speak to the urgency of the country’s health crisis

Abstract This article explores the image of the queer cyborg in two works of speculative fiction about South Africa, Lauren Beukes's Moxyland (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008) and Nicky Drayden's The Prey of Gods (London: Harper Voyager, 2017). These queer cyborg characters inhabit imagined futures where the interface between human and technology is both a conduit for self-expression and a threat to their

Abstract This article connects theories of otherness with urban studies in order to map out interpretive routes in Lauren Beukes's fiction. The article discusses notions of identity and space, underlining how they relate to Beukes's writings. By focusing on definitions of otherness, it examines who the Other is in Beukes's novels. Moreover, by concentrating on urban dynamics, the article analyses city

(2020). Seeking Soul in Solitary States. Scrutiny2: Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 49-50.

Abstract The Ugandan literary canon is comparable to other regional postcolonial fiction in its obsession with verisimilitude in the representation of nationalist themes, as prominently reflected in the works of eminent Ugandan writers such as Okot p’Bitek, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Moses Isegawa. These authors’ seemingly neat and stable critique of Ugandan society through realistic modes of

Abstract In this article, I analyse the ways in which Nnedi Okorafor's Afrofuturist novel Lagoon (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014) challenges stable and so-called normative identities and ways of being. Lagoon narrates the story of aliens landing in Lagos, Nigeria. Through its presentation of shapeshifting aliens, as well as the use of a plurivocal narrative technique enmeshed with Nigerian folktales

Abstract In the short story “Princess” (Slipping: Stories, Essays and Other Writing. San Francisco: Tachyon, 2016), Lauren Beukes presents a tale of a princess who discovers her clitoris. Subsequent to this discovery, the princess's sexuality rapidly develops to encompass the pleasures derived from autoeroticism, as well as the sexual acts performed by her handmaid. Yet, the princess's sexual pleasure

Abstract Speculative fiction is one of the most diverse and complex genres of African literature today. While the genre is not new to the continent, it has recently acquired new energy. This is perhaps most evident in the abundance of short story publications. Short story authors working in this genre are based throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and the range of subject matter dealt with is striking. One

Abstract The inadequate English language proficiency (LP) of multilingual first-year students on a university campus in South Africa has proved to be an obstacle to successful academic literacy and performance. English is the medium of instruction at university, but not a home language for any of these students. There might be several reasons and solutions for this problem; however, this study focuses

Abstract Studies continue to be conducted on translanguaging as a concept, a phenomenon, a practice, or a strategy at both theoretical and pedagogical levels. However, there is not much research that has studied translanguaging through the dual prism of decoloniality and the Global South. Nor are there integrative review studies that have explored the triple concepts of translanguaging, decoloniality

Abstract Online discussion forums (ODFs), a type of computer-mediated communication (CMC), are sites of language use and multilingual practices where students communicate in web forum communities. There is limited research on the multilingual practices of students learning English for academic purposes (EAP) through ODFs. Drawing on discourse-centred online ethnography (DCOE) and discourse analysis

Abstract This article traces aspects of the history of translation, familiar both in critical works that address South African literature and in South African literary texts, in relation to two poems by the black South African poets Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile. It considers their insinuation of untranslated or translated Afrikaans into an English text as a radical poetic strategy that both

This article examines the depiction of the relationship between HIV/AIDS, gender, and identity in Phillip Chidavaenzi's The Haunted Trail (Harare: Longman, 2006). HIV/AIDS is transforming the way w...

Zimbabwe’s post-independence political and economic crises continue to be a subject of intense fictional and non-fictional representation. However, none of the recent fictional representations has ...

John Berger’s Into Their Labours trilogy is a depiction of the condition of the peasant class in Western Europe over the course of the twentieth century. Several critical responses to Berger’s work...

Cloud Atlas, published in 2004 (London: Sceptre), is British author David Mitchell’s third and arguably best-known novel, one that has attracted significant critical attention. At the heart of such...

This article considers the first novel of the Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968, Oxford: Heinemann) in terms of the novel’s references to British popular cul...

The influence of the Anthropocene has required a reconsideration of how humanity relates to, depends on, and interacts with the world. This, according to Jeremy Davies, summons towards it a re-imag...

ABSTRACTThe Zomba Mental Hospital in Malawi has gained mythical connotations in the history of its existence, both through its association with political detention and through serving as a reminder...

With increased mobility enabled by evolving technology, the world experiences higher rates of migration and globalisation than ever before. This phenomenon has led, in recent years, to a high volume of literature about migration and diaspora, i.e. literature which deals with the general theme of transnationalism. The term transnational, in its simplest guise, refers to the relations between citizens

ABSTRACT The argument that I make in this article is that in leaving the prison house of apartheid, South Africa generated exclusive categories of belonging (framed around multiracial nationalism and citizenship) at the expense of a pan-African politics. By reading South African engagements with the African diaspora as a signifier of disavowed solidarities, this article does a number of things. It

In the context of the current age of transnationalism, which is characterised by global movements such as migration, diaspora studies is an ever-growing discipline. Broadly speaking, transnationalism refers to “multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states” (Vertovec 1999, 447). The term “diaspora” was originally used with reference to movements of

ABSTRACT The article discusses three contemporary works about and by first- and second-generation South African exiles. In Lauretta Ngcobo's collection of memoirs, Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South African Women in Exile (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012), 17 South African women present their personal accounts of political exile. In Sisonke Msimang's Always Another Country: A

ABSTRACT This article is concerned with the gendered aspect of the diaspora as portrayed in Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake (London: HarperCollins, 2003). It explores how Lahiri charts a mother's experience of (dis)location and the simultaneous confrontation of a series of contradictions, namely homeland and host land, tradition and transformation, remembering and remaking home. Reading the novel

Abstract Luis Alberto Urrea's Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993) provides a harrowing perspective on the struggles of a group of mainly indigenous refugees and migrants who live in one of Tijuana's many colonias—informal settlements with no utilities or public services—where they barely survive by picking trash. Written from notes that Urrea compiled while he was a translator

ABSTRACT This article examines elements of the vocabulary of migration in one film and two works of literature, considering how representations of Mexican migrants and their migrations can either support or resist anachronistic nationalist frameworks of citizenship. The first example, from the animated film Coco (dir. Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina. Pixar/Walt Disney, 2017), focuses on the trope of

Abstract In “Remembering War, Dreaming Peace”, Viet Thanh Nguyen describes popular American stories about the Vietnam War as “melodramas of traumatized white manhood” (Japanese Journal of American Studies 20 [2009]: 152). These limit the compassion available for non-American characters by way of compulsory empathy for the figure of the beleaguered American soldier. He argues that greater cosmopolitanism

ABSTRACT This article explores representations of complex diasporic subjectivities that resist, or attempt to resist, obsolete nationalist notions of citizenship and identity by crossing the US– Mexico border (and, in so doing, crossing other intangible borders) in search of a better life. Two examples of border literature, Luis Alberto Urrea's Into the Beautiful North (2009) and Graciela Limón's The

ABSTRACT This article comments on Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle (1963) and makes brief reference to Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) in terms of how these fictional works provide us with insights into apocalyptic events. Vonnegut's work is initially approached from an ecocritical perspective, referencing the work of Greg Garrard, Arne Naess, and Val Plumwood. There is also an engagement with religious

ABSTRACT The imagery of violence, specifically to the face and head, is a recurring motif in Wopko Jensma's poetry. In this article I present a discussion of the poems in which he makes extensive use of such brutal imagery. I describe the development of his use of violence, from its figuration of an ambivalent political symbol to its signification of subjective fragmentation or loss. In doing so I

ABSTRACT In this article, I utilise Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison design and Michel Foucault's derived notion of panopticism to examine the depiction of surveillance, power, and resistance in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1982). Both Colonel Joll and the Magistrate, I argue, employ techniques of panoptic surveillance to dominate and control the “barbarian” girl, the former by physically

ABSTRACT Debates on many university campuses call for a refocused or “decolonised” university curriculum. These demands reject curricula that are considered narrow and unreformed and cultures that position many in the university as unwelcome outsiders. In response to these calls, there have been attempts at a renewal of the South African higher education system, and several universities are currently

ABSTRACT Movement, or travel, characterises the life of Lindiwe Bishop, the main character and narrator in Irene Sabatini’s debut novel, The Boy Next Door. In this paper I examine how Lindiwe’s movements, and experiences in Zimbabwe’s major cities, Harare and Bulawayo, contribute to her construction of a city-dweller’s and a Coloured identity. I also examine how, as places, the cities are related to

Abstract This paper provides a reading, through a decolonial lens, of the debut work of two recently published South African poets, Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese and Koleka Putuma. In the work of both poets, the reader encounters contemporary South African black womxn subjects, constructed in the matrix of global coloniality. The works articulate issues of identity and belonging, with which many young South

ABSTRACT Since 2000, a large number of memoirs by white Zimbabwean writers have emerged, often focusing on the complex relationship between history and the present, between personal and collective identity, and on displacement and nostalgia. One such memoir is Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller (published in 2002). Recent criticism has focused on the discourse in the memoir, arguing

ABSTRACT In this article I seek to reflect on the progression of Antjie Krog’s use of the tropes of “the voice”, “the body”, and “the skin” over the course of her three literary journalism texts, Country of My Skull (2002), A Change of Tongue (2004), and Begging to Be Black (2009). I use the term “literary journalism” to foreground the generic instability of Krog’s texts, which weave together journalism

ABSTRACT This article questions the meanings ascribed to memory and reconciliation after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa. It discusses these meanings through an analysis of the subjectivities projected in John Kani's play Nothing but the Truth (published in 2002). This play is one of the few theatrical projects that boldly address the elastic concepts of (dis)locations

ABSTRACT Zoo City's (2010) author, Lauren Beukes, claims to have written her novel in response to widespread xenophobic attitudes towards refugees in South Africa. The frequent attacks made by crocodiles on these people as they attempt to enter the country by crossing the Limpopo River are a fitting, if gruesome, metaphor for such prejudice. Against this background, I read Zoo City's own crocodile

ABSTRACT On July 8, 2010, the Botswana National Assembly resolved, in accordance with the provisions of the Standing Order 60(2), to allow the then Member of Parliament for Gaborone Central, Hon. Dumelang Saleshando, to bring before Parliament a Private Member’s Bill that would allow for the enactment of a Freedom of Information Act. The bill was intended to extend the right of members of the public

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on Kenyan writer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o's paradoxical engagement with Christianity and its topology. Against his increasingly hostile attitude towards the Christian establishment in a post-colonial space, the paper interrogates how this writer, who has been dubbed a “religious writer,” deploys Christianity and its topology as a conduit for his subversion in his fiction. Partly

ABSTRACT In desiring to constitute herself independently of any unitary subject, Emily Dickinson apostrophises—and simulates—the aberrant complexities of mortality. Her texts— closed systems within which grammatical and semantic conventions are atomised by ellipsis and parataxis—calibrate measures of disorder which signal irreversible changes in consciousness, perception, and experience. By bringing

ABSTRACT While critics over the years have paid attention to Smith’s formalism, certain authoritative voices (I think in particular of J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer) focus on ideological aspects of her writing, which minimise or overlook its quality and its own particular character. If we could appreciate that Smith was writing within a modernist sphere of influence— however much filtered by her

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to articulate the reasons behind the structure and style John Eppel employs in his novel Absent: The English Teacher. Approaches to John Eppel's creative works have been myopic and slight. Attention has not been paid to the technical achievements and the deliberate construction that Eppel uses in his novel Absent: The English Teacher. This paper eschews prior readings of this

ABSTRACT The Victorian writer Lafcadio Hearn has been credited with being one of the first Westerners to adopt “Eastern”, specifically Buddhist, ideas about reality. The effect of Hearn's neo-Buddhist, quasi-scientific vision is to deconstruct Victorian certainties and generate new ways of thinking – new metaphors for constructing an understanding of the world. Hearn's engagement with Buddhism and

ABSTRACT In this study of Wicomb's fiction, I investigate the depiction of women's oppression and resistance in three short stories from You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town and The One That Got Away. Judith Butler's model of gender performativity and Susan Bordo's work on the socio-historical construction of female bodies provide a useful framework within which to examine how “coloured” women in Wicomb's

ABSTRACT In this article, I analyse two recent African autobiographical works for the ways in which they provide counter-hegemonic national discourses in regard to Nigeria and South Africa. The texts are In the Shadow of a Saint (2001), Ken Wiwa's memoir and biographical homage to his father, the martyred Nigerian writer and activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Native Nostalgia (2009) by the South African

ABSTRACT Cristina Ali Farah's Little Mother is a fictional depiction of the lives of the Somali immigrant community displaced by civil war following the ousting from power of President Mohamed Siad Barre in Somalia in 1991. Drawing on key debates on literary representations of dislocation, this article considers Ali Farah's diasporic imagination as presenting the reader with a scenario where Somali

ABSTRACT This paper explores Keorapetse Kgositsile's re-ordering of time through his coined concepts of “NOW,” “future memory,” and the “coil of time” in his poetry. In his reckoning, colonial modernity's time imposed a temporal order that is not congruent with his African worldview and understanding of time and space. Further, being of South African descent and living in the diaspora meant occupying

ABSTRACT During feminism's second wave (circa 1960‒1980) a particular approach to time gained ground and was explored by many cultural feminist activists, thinkers and writers. This feminine time was conceived of as cyclical and organic rather than masculine, mechanistic and linear and developed out of the essentialist celebration of “Woman” that dominated cultural feminism during this period. These

ABSTRACT In South African writing, Johannesburg, as the economic centre of the country, has continuously been a topic for novels and poems throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the so-called “Jim comes to Jo’burg” genre, protagonists coming from a rural area are presented as being in danger of being seduced and swallowed by the corrupt ways of the city. Kgebetli Moele's Room 207 (2006)

ABSTRACT Very little has been written about Lauretta Ngcobo’s first novel, Cross of Gold. Ngcobo uses a historical moment in Cross of Gold where the novel follows the lives of those affected by the Sharpeville Massacre. Central in the novel is the displacement of Black people during apartheid as a result of the pass laws as well as the oppressive apartheid laws that forced Black people to leave their