Charlotte Baker

The myths surrounding people with albinism in South Africa and Zimbabwe

The myths associated with albinism in South Africa and Zimbabwe have a profound influence on the lives of people with the condition, from the moment of their birth until their death. The beliefs and superstitions surrounding the condition affect family life and interfere with access to education, employment and marriage. Drawing on a common interest in albinism, specialist research interests, and recent multi-disciplinary studies and research carried out in South Africa and Zimbabwe, we examine these myths and trace their impact on the lives of people with albinism. We trace the actuality of living with the condition in parts of present-day southern Africa, as reported in the first-hand accounts of people with albinism. We compare attitudes to albinism in different cultures and groups, and suggest ways in which the myths that have surrounded people with albinism for so long, which frequently have very negative connotations, can be challenged by a more scientific and culturally neutral explanation.

Imaginary Spaces of Power in Sub-Saharan Literatures and Films

a major postcolonial writer. Drawing on highly relevant postcolonial critics (Balibar, Gilroy, Silverman), Martin’s study of the complexity of the philosophical and ethical connections explored by Le Clézio suggests the possibility of a useful dialogue with the concepts of multidirectional memory (Rothberg, 2009) and palimpsestic memory (Silverman, 2013). Despite a few typographical errors in the French quotes, this book will do much to promote interest in Le Clézio’s work in the English-speaking world and offers a strong contribution to the field of postcolonial studies.

Fiction across borders: imagining the lives of others in late twentieth-century novels

At the turn of the new millennium, might it be possible to imagine another without doing violence to one’s object of description? In Fiction across Borders, Shameem Black sets out to explore this question, challenging the arguments of postcolonial theorists that novelists betray political and cultural anxieties when representing “the Other” to contend that “border-crossing” fiction represents socially diverse groups without resorting to stereotypes or idealization. The author applies the term “border-crossing” fiction to an emerging wave of novels published since 1980 that offer new approaches to the representation of social difference, or the many distinctions by which otherness is created, whether political, cultural, economic, linguistic or biological. Black defines border-crossing fiction by two criteria: “first, it foregrounds a dramatic dissonance between the subject and object of representation; second, it seeks to surmount these productions of social difference” (4). Black selects for study novels that portray very different worlds across three continents, but that all strive to develop nuanced responses to different kinds of alterity. In Chapter 1, the author asks why imagining others has been considered such a problem, identifying existing metanarratives in postcolonial, feminist and ethnic-minority theories that present representations of alterity as forms of discursive domination, and setting out an alternative theoretical account of an ethics of border crossing. Chapter 2 examines Japanese American writer Ruth Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats (1998), which focuses on the difficulties of conceptualizing the lives of others in an era of globalizing media. Of all the texts discussed, Ozeki’s offers the most limited vision of otherness in her portrayal of a community in which no one seems radically different from anyone else. Shifting the focus to more complex representations of alterity, Chapter 3 explores narratives by African American writer Charles Johnson and Chinese American novelist Gish Jen, which highlight through humour the unstable nature of the inequalities that mark social difference, and Chapter 4 focuses on two writers whose fiction deals more directly with objections to imaginative border crossing: Greek American writer Jeffrey Eugenides and Indian novelist Rupa Bajwa. Linguistic border crossing is the focus of Chapter 5, in which Black analyses two fictional works that exhibit even greater sensitivity to the pressures of alterity, namely The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004) by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. The final chapter then turns to J.M. Coetzee, who takes the imagination of social difference to its utmost limit by highlighting the impossibility of reliable representation. Black focuses on The Lives of Animals (1999) and Disgrace (1999) to contend that in their attempt to acknowledge the demands of others, Coetzee’s protagonists are forced to relinquish their own claims on individual selfhood. As Black concludes, although imagining alterity is often vexed, not writing about others ultimately exacts its own ethical price. Fiction Across Borders offers an insightful Journal of Postcolonial Writing Vol. 48, No. 1, February 2012, 104–111