Elleke Boehmer

Not Saying Sorry, Not Speaking Pain: Gender Implications in Disgrace

This essay considers the personal political ramifications of the refusal to make a confession, twice enacted in J. M. Coetzees Disgrace . Professor David Lurie refuses officially to apologize for sexually abusing a student; and, later, his daughter Lucy, the victim of a gang rape, refuses to lay charges or speak of what has happened. In a context informed by the recent experience of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, the novel thus raises the question of what it is to come to terms with a history of terror and subjection, both for the perpetrator and for the victim. It proposes, as an alternative to a Christianized confession, a secular atonement - in effect, a physical abjection, a dogged acceptance of humiliation - the forms of which are conventionally feminine, or at least emasculating. The essay examines the gender significations of this abjective alternative, especially in a situation where an ethic of unstinting love requires the elision and/or subjection of the body of the woman.

ACHEBE AND HIS INFLUENCE IN SOME CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN WRITING

The influence of Chinua Achebe on African writing since 1958 when Things Fall Apart appeared is almost incalculable. With that novel he bequeathed a whole new catalogue of cultural historical stories to readers across the globe, for whom Nigeria till then was a remote, unimagined space: he gave ‘permission’, as Chimamanda Adichie has anecdotally commented and did so vis-à-vis his own country and the globe (Kessel 2003). Though Things Fall Apart was not the first anglophone novel by a black African to be published that honour goes, arguably, to Solomon Plaatje’s Mhudi (1930) the book decisively told an African story from within an African frame of cultural reference. Moreover, it did so within a mode, that of tragedy, to which a range of different audiences both in Africa and the West could relate. So it was entirely appropriate that it was this novel, reissued within a few years of its first publication, that launched the Heinemann African Writers’ Series as its inaugural text (Currey 2008: 2, 27). With Things Fall Apart and the novels that followed in the next decade No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966) Achebe offered a way of writing Africa that would prove influential, not to say

Indian arrivals 1870-1915 : networks of British Empire

INTRODUCTION: INDIAN ARRIVAL-ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN INDIANS AND BRITONS, 1870-1915 1: PASSAGES TO ENGLAND: SUEZ, THE INDIAN PATHWAY 2: THE SPASM OF THE FAMILIAR: INDIANS IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY LONDON 3: LOTUS ARTISTS: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND DECADENCE 4: EDWARDIAN EXTREMES AND EXTREMISTS, 1901-13 5: CODA-INDIAN SALIENTS 6: WORKS CITED

Coetzee's Queer body

Summary The first half of this essay explores the lineaments of dissident or queer desire which Coetzees work traces post‐1989, almost as if in response to the “liberation” of the discourse of love that was meant to follow the fall of apartheid. In its second half the essay suggests that, far from being liberatory, queer desire in the later Coetzee, and especially in Elizabeth Costello (2004), baulks from an identification with otherness, especially where that otherness takes on womanly form, instead collaborating with misogyny.

Literature, planning and infrastructure: Investigating the southern city through postcolonial texts

This article explores the ways in which postcolonial literary and other cultural texts navigate, decode and in some cases re-imagine the infrastructures that organize urban life, particularly in the postcolonial cities of Johannesburg, London and Delhi. Readings of Ivan Vladislavić, Mark Gevisser Brian Chikwava, Selma Dabbagh, Rana Dasgupta and Manju Kapur consider the constantly shifting relationship between urban planning, the organization of public space, and various other forms of human intervention, and suggest that the ways in which urban spaces are mapped in creative practice can explore, negotiate and at times disrupt and reconstruct that relationship.

The world, the text and the author: Coetzee and untranslatability

Abstract This essay analyses Coetzee’s success as a world literary author, from two distinct angles. The first stems from his non-European ‘southern’ position (and self-positioning) as a South African and then Australian writer with South American links, and his subscription to an ‘imaginary of the South’. The second looks beyond the colonial indebtedness to Europe, focusing instead on some of the ‘minor’ European cultures to which the oeuvre refers, and then on the ways in which it evokes Asia. As will be seen, Coetzee’s work from the very start acknowledges the pivotal role of Asia in the formation of Western identity.

The World and the Postcolonial

This article examines the increasing competition in the academic market between conventional terms such as postcolonial and anglophone literature and their cognates, and the newly current term world literature . Even in postcolonial studies circles, world literature is increasingly taken to refer not only to ‘the best ever written’, as before, but to literature produced within and in response to a globalizing world. The paper explores the different valences of this shift, and the tensions and contradictions it has generated within the wider anglophone literary field.

Doubling the Writer: DAVID ATTWELL ON HIS TEXTUAL DIALOGUE WITH J M COETZEE

A autora apresenta nessa entrevista, na qual ela e David Attwell investigam a natureza da verdade, da realidade e da escrita como interpretada por Coetzee em seu trabalho, cresceram ate se tornaram a colecao de ensaios, comentarios e dialogos Doubling the Point , de 1992 (algo como Duplicando o Ponto , sem traducao em portugues). Como todos os leitores de Coetzee devem saber, Doubling the Poing tem sido massivamente influente em moldar as definicoes e as dimensoes do pensamento critico da obra de Coetzee. Em especial, talvez, em moldar o entendimento critico da contida auto-reflexao e do envolvimento comprometido com as complexidades da representacao, elementos que perpassam todo o trabalho de Coetzee.

Poetics and Persistence: Chinua Achebe’s Shaping Influence

With its accent on newness contrasting sharply with chapter 5’s on repetition, chapter 6, ‘Poetics and persistence’, moves to a consideration of genealogical poetics. The discussion explores how Chinua Achebe’s writing, in particular Things Fall Apart, staked out a new field of creative and literary possibility for a younger generation of African and especially Nigerian writers: most prominently, Ben Okri, Diana Evans, Helen Oyeyemi, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Whether implicitly or explicitly, Achebe’s second- and third-generation inheritors in their different ways acknowledged his influence upon their work precisely through their poetics; specifically, through how they adopted and deployed characteristic figures from his fiction. These writers use motifs Achebe had himself drawn from Igbo oral tradition to create channels of transference from his work into their own: in particular, the device of the ogbanje, abiku, or returning baby, and the story of the cursed twins. These figures of anomaly and taboo, of either reduced or of excessive reproduction (respectively, of ogbanje or of twins), they simultaneously developed into meta-textual devices through which to reflect on their own creative practice as writers, and on the process of influence reception and transmission itself.

Questions of Postcolonial Poetics

The second chapter, ‘Questions of postcolonial poetics’, considers some of the theoretical, structural, and technical dimensions of the term poetics when applied within postcolonial criticism. In particular, it asks whether an emphasis on literary structures and techniques requires an active separation from the politicized debates that have tended to define the postcolonial field: are there certain purposive, symbolic, and communicative features of postcolonial writing that we might call definitively postcolonial? Drawing on essays by Ben Okri, and fictional prose by Manju Kapur, Achmat Dangor, and Yvonne Vera, the discussion explores the ‘creative principles’ that might inform the construction and composition of a postcolonial poetics (according to the OED definition that stands as the chapter’s epigraph). It also continues the discussion of a pragmatic approach to poetics opened in the introduction, by asking whether it might be possible ‘deductively to identify a piece of writing as postcolonial according to its structural, generic, or metaphoric features’?