Gerald Gaylard

Writing Madness: Borderlines of the Body in African Literature (review)

tradition nor pure modernity, his “theoretical” framework forces him to conclude that the work is hybrid. But in fact, the play is dealing with much more various and complicated issues. For example, even in terms of tradition itself, there are many different strains of Yoruba, Muslim, and Euro-Christian tradition; there are different attitudes toward tradition; there are different ways in which different traditions may be modernized and yet retain their ethical force or social implications. All this is occluded by such simple—and, in my view, nontheoretical—ideas as “hybridity.”

The death of the subject? : Subjectivity in post-apartheid literature : a symposium : article

Abstract It might appear intuitive that freedom, or at least the sense of freedom, in the post-apartheid era in South Africa would involve a wild celebration of individuality, and that in art this would mean the abandonment of social reportage and responsibility. However, whilst there are elements of this celebration in post-apartheid society and culture, the work of Ivan Vladislavić suggests that any change, far from extinguishing a sense of commitment, has reignited the question of arts social role and responsibility. The story “Curiouser” from The exploded view examines the issue of arts ability to have both a social role and to celebrate the individual as unique, even idiosyncratic. This metafictional examination of art ignites the central question of the individual subject and its value within a context of expanded freedom. In order to conduct this examination the paper ranges from an overview of contemporary theories on the individual subject to the application of these theories to postcolonial writing and culture globally, and then to a close reading of “Curiouser” as an exemplar of the way in which individuality is being represented in postcolonial literature today.

Postcolonial Satire: Ivan Vladislavic

Abstract This paper examines politics in postcolonialism in the form of satire, specifically focusing on the work of Ivan Vladislavic. Despite the ludic lightness of satire, it has been a useful literary tool for exposing and destabilising political regimes of various sorts. Vladislavic uses motifs throughout his fiction to create unity and coherence in his short story cycles, and many of these motifs centre around a satirical understanding of power as a monumentalising impulse. Vladislavic lampoons the monumental, and as with Foucaults analyses of the architectonics of power, this operates discursively as well as materially. Monumentalism pervades not only the material, as in a central character/narrator, architecture, design, space, place, sculpture; but also certain attitudes, tones and especially words. However, Vladislavics fiction is not confined to a systematic analysis of systematicity, for it is characterised by play; his antidote to monumental power is a dry witty irony, a playful insurrectionary iconoclasm, combined with a focus on the quirky and idiosyncratic. This paper finds that Vladislavic creates an answer to the question of postcolonial political commitment; the postcolonial cannot ignore the overtly political, but neither can it sacrifice the specific, apparently irrelevant, idiosyncratic or humourous to a cause. Vladislavics ludic lightness helps to create spaces in which freedom can be imagined, especially when such lightness is applied to the mechanical and monolithic.

Fossicking in the House of Love: Apartheid Masculinity in The Folly

Abstract This paper attempts to analyse a hitherto ignored aspect of Vladislavićs The Folly, and of Vladislavićs writing more generally: that of sexuality and gender, masculinity in particular. I argue that Vladislavićs novella is innovative in its linking of individual subjectivity and psycho‐sexuality with the apartheid state and its machineries. In this respect, Vladislavić was prepared to enter regions of the self and psyche and to take the fictional risk of abstract surrealism that few of his contemporaries were, and, I argue, the results were revelatory in their exhumation of buried complexes. In this novel Vladislavić shows that a key mechanism that held the apartheid state together was macho homosociality which soothed the troubled conscience of the white majority via the prosthetic conscience of the leader whose vision led the homosocial pack. Importantly, however, Vladislavić also embodied an alternative to this apartheid identity and its workings in the text.

Disgraceful metafiction: Intertextuality in the postcolony

Summary My aim in this paper is to examine J.M. Coetzees use of intertextuality in Disgrace (2002a), partly because many commentators have said something about some of the intertexts utilised in the novel, but nobody has made an attempt at a thoroughgoing analysis, particularly in terms of what intertextuality, or indeed postmodernism, means in postcolonialism today. I want to make the claim against those who see Disgrace as primarily a realist text that merely provides an avenue into discussing sociological issues in “the new South Africa” and that to read it in this way is to do a disservice to the novel, to Coetzees views on the value of literature and the imagination, and perhaps even to the relationship between literature and the nation. Disgrace is an ostensibly realist text that consists of a chain of provocations tempting the reader into realist interpretations, but a more careful reading of the novel shows how intertextual it is, and how subtle its analysis of cultural history is. This metafictional component then asks the question that Coetzee has been grappling with in his entire oeuvre, which is the question of the valency of complexity within sociohistorical contexts that tend to reduce complexity, sometimes to the extent of viewing it as an indulgence or even dangerous distraction within the new nation.

AFRICAN REALISM The Reception and Transculturation of Western Literary Realism in Africa

Abstract A study of the reception and utilization of realism in literature outside of Europe during and after the nineteenth century, the area and period of its prominence, grants us some insight into how theories, practices and cultures travel and change in the process. In particular, it allows us to see how realism has been relativized in such a way as to open up the possibilities of redefinition of the notion and practice and moving beyond them. For these reasons I am undertaking a short survey in this paper of the transculturation, after Fernando Ortiz, of realism in Africa, tracing its genesis from the primary mode of the western novel form to its utilization in anticolonial resistance literature and transmogrification into the magical realism and postmodernism of postcolonial experimental writing.

Post-dialectic: politics in postcolonial African fiction

Abstract The paper describes and analyses the political agenda of current African writers. These writers attempt to fill the lacuna of uncertainty about the political in the postcolonial era, when the clear enemy provided by colonialism and neo‐colonialism is not always quite so apparent. Their attempt to find political agency is via a rigorous critique of the Marxist dialectic utilised by African nationalism, a critique which, at the least, extends that dialectic into a constellation of multiple dialectics and consequently defamiliarises previous notions of the political. The politics of this fiction might be described as dissident, and its aesthetics is nothing if not inclusive.