David Attwell

The Cambridge History of South African Literature

South Africa’s unique history has produced literatures in many languages, in oral and written forms, reflecting the diversity in the cultural histories and experience of its peoples. The Cambridge History offers a comprehensive, multi-authored history of South African literature in all the country’s eleven official languages (and more minor ones), produced by a team of over forty international experts, including contributors drawn from all of the major regions and language groups of South Africa. It will provide a complete portrait of South Africa’s literary production, organised as a chronological history from the oral traditions existing before colonial settlement to the post-apartheid revision of the past. In a field marked by controversy, this volume is more fully representative than any existing account of South Africa’s literary history. It will make a unique contribution to Commonwealth, international and postcolonial studies, and serve as a definitive reference work for decades to come.

Race In Disgrace

This essay raises questions about the authorship and representativeness of the ANCs response to Disgrace in its submission to the South African Human Rights Commissions hearings into racism in the media. It shows that this response, or the putative reading it is taken to represent, racializes events in the novel in ways that are not supported in the text; it then explores how Disgrace actually deals with racial discourse. It concludes by showing that the novel absorbs race into other, arguably more encompassing, categories of historical and ethical meaning.

J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of Africa

Summary The debate over representations of Africa in J.M. Coetzees fiction tends to collapse into two irreconcilable positions: (a) he is either uninterested in the African subject or represents it as diminished, or (b) this accusation is naïve and oblivious to the autotelic qualities of Coetzees fiction. This article seeks to move beyond these positions by looking at moments in Coetzees writing when he actually does deploy Africa as sign. Analysis of these moments reveals that the sign of Africa in Coetzee is frequently rendered potent, mysterious and obscure – occulted – in order to achieve certain aesthetic effects. These effects are consistent with his efforts to enable fiction to reprise prevailing historical discourses.

Mastering authority: J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year

J.M. Coetzee’s fiction has, from its inception, parodied language which claims to speak as the public use of reason. Diary of a Bad Year departs from this position to some degree by offering a series of public reflections on the times; however, these reflections are embedded within a narrative structure which disallows us from taking them at face value. Such narrative framing raises the question of authority: not only the authority of the reflections themselves, but the authority of the voice and the voice in the text. The relationship between fiction and the public sphere is such that fiction foregrounds the problem of authority in public discourse and seeks to capture the position of authority through heightened forms of mimesis and self‐consciousness.

New African modernity and the New African movement

In the early years of the twentieth century African people were confronted with the hegemony of European modernity, which had violently entered African history through the social formation of capitalism and the political systems of imperialism and colonialism. They came to the gradual realisation that colonial modernity, which was a variation of European modernity, had to be engaged with, even if principally in opposition, since modernity as a worldly experience was a ‘historical necessity’, as Jameson was to argue in several of his writings in the closing years of the twentieth century where he retroactively traced the historical passageways frommodernity to postmodernity ( Postmodernism and A Singular Modernity ). Since Europeanmodernity in the form of imperialism had jettisoned African people from African history into European history, the historical challenge for them became how to revert back to African history, as Amilcar Cabral astutely observed in the revolutionary decade of the 1960s ( Return to the Source ). In this era of social upheaval, Cabral postulated the national liberation struggle as an effective instrument for reversion back to African history. In contrast to the moment of Cabral, in the early decades of that century, when imperialism and colonialism were hegemonic and consequently had the monopoly of power regarding state violence, many New African intellectuals sought to master the complexity of European modernity with the intent of subverting it to a form of modernity that would emerge from the democratic imperatives of African history.

Introduction – Zoë Wicomb: Texts and Histories

The five articles in this first published collection of essays focusing on the work of Zoë Wicomb stem from a one-day colloquium, Zoë Wicomb: Texts & Histories, held in London in September 2008, jointly hosted by SOAS, the University of York and the Institute of English Studies, and generously supported by the Journal of Southern African Studies (JSAS). Conceived as a unique opportunity to bring together writers, critics and historians for a deliberately small but focused discussion on and around Wicomb’s writing, the London colloquium was composed of invited speakers and was the first of three events. The second was a follow-up conference held at the University of Stellenbosch in April 2010, and a third is planned for York in 2012. The London colloquium and the present cluster that flows from it inaugurate a new critical prospectus of Wicomb scholarship (to date, articles have appeared sporadically in disparate journals) and go some way towards fostering a genuine interdisciplinary exchange on history and contemporary literary writing in South Africa. Whilst the articles published here are all by scholars who are primarily literary critics, the colloquium and its follow-up conference in Stellenbosch in 2010 have both had significant support and involvement from delegates and participants in other disciplines. The absence of essays by historians in this particular cluster should not be seen as evidence of their marginality in the enterprise: it is expected that two forthcoming special issues of Safundi and Current Writing in 2011 (from papers given at the Stellenbosch conference) will address this gap. The audience of JSAS combined with our own conference theme has required a rigorous interdisciplinary approach and the conferences have been organised without parallel sessions so as to encourage as cohesive a discussion as possible. In fact, JSAS’s hosting of an interdisciplinary inquiry across history and literary studies reaches back at least fifteen years, and the present cluster is the third of such projects. Special issues appeared in 1995 and in 2004, the latter organised around ‘South African Writing in the Transition’, although both of the earlier events from which these sets of articles emanated had as their remit a larger focus on cultural forms and history in post-transition South Africa. What is the rationale for and what are the benefits of a more specific, author-based selection such as this one? Why focus on the work of Wicomb – a writer who straddles South Africa and Scotland (or the Cape and Glasgow) – to consider the possibilities for innovative, interdisciplinary dialogue in southern African studies? What do we mean by ‘texts and histories’, how are these terms implicated in one another, and how might this cluster expand and engage with current debates in South African history and fiction now, trans-nationally, regionally, and locally?

TRIBUTE TO NADINE GORDIMER

en years ago, in 1994, Nadine Gordimer published a novel called None to Accompany Me. In its closing paragraphs the heroine, Vera Stark, T goes outside in the small hours of a winter night in Johannesburg to close off a leaking water main. By this stage, she is renting the annexe of a house belonging to a friend and colleague, Zeph Rapulana. She has abandoned a failing marriage and a shadow-life of bad affairs to devote herself to her legal work, which involves drafting protocols for the new constitution. Under the highveld stars she has a moment of what Freud would have called the uncanny, when the familiar becomes strange, and the strange, familiar:

Writing settlement and empire: the Cape after 1820

The period from the 1820s to the 1870s is a problematic one for South African literary history written in English. With the notable exception of the poetry of Thomas Pringle, not much happens in the official genres and no single literary work survives as anything other than a period piece. If, however, one broadens the boundaries of literary history to include a variety of genres conventionally overlooked or marginalised by it – diaries/journals, letters, articles in the periodical press, politically motivated writing, for example – then the ‘field’ enlarges significantly. Envisaged in this way, literary history also intersects with the expanding civic infrastructure of schools, libraries, art galleries, museums, learned societies, newspapers and periodicals. In effect, since early colonial literary activity is simply too sporadic to generate those forms of continuity which we associate with a national literature, it is necessary to expand the remit of literary history to include diverse forms of print production and cultural practice. For similar reasons, the work of outsiders commenting on South African affairs may be regarded as indigenous insofar as these writers enter into the currents of intellectual life and contribute to the formation of colonial identity. The best known and most influential of these works was Anthony Trollopes two-volume South Africa , an account of a five month visit to the country published in 1878. The book provoked widespread debate among colonial readers – in itself an indication that colonial South Africans were beginning to conceive of themselves as a distinctive national group rather than merely a province of empire.

Writing in exile

Nineteen years I’ve roamed the continents / Renting one glasshouse after another / whence I’ve gazed and gazed / upon the wilderness of exile / all around me . . . / still turning round in circles / sowing seed / on borrowed land / for crops we’ll always have to leave behind. (Es’kia Mphahlele, ‘A Prayer’) The initial impetus for exile by a South African writer was provided Peter Abrahamss decision in 1939 to skip the country in order to live a more ful-filling life in Britain. Abrahamss poignant ending of his memoir, Tell Freedom (1954), at a time when he is barely 21, touches on the core reasons why autobiographical writing seems to be especially made for the South African situation: alienation. Well before apartheid became state policy in May of 1948, the alienating effects of living in a racialising world touched on people such as Abrahams, presenting physical exile as a better option. He writes: ‘I needed, not friends, not gestures, but my manhood . And the need was desperate … Also, there was a need to write, to tell freedom, and for this I needed to be personally free ’ ( Tell Freedom , p. 311, emphasis added). The reader is drawn to a sense of emasculation that the alienated youth feels, as much as to the sense of a quest to be free by any means possible in order to be able to speak truth to power. He was actually shunned for being ‘a dangerous radical’ by newspapers such as Bantu World and Umteteli wa Bantu and, as he narrates, he was at one point ‘homeless and near starvation’ ( Return to Goli , p. 14). In a sense, Abrahamss needs for exile provide the template within which to view much writing from the exilic condition: a repressed personality suffering from insistent infantilisation through racism and a sense of personhood.