Jochen Petzold

In Search of a New National History: Debunking Old Heroes in Robert Kirby's The Secret Letters of Jan van Riebeeck

Despite the fact that the “new”—postapartheid—South Africa is frequently called the “Rainbow Nation,” the applicability of the term “nation” is far from being unanimously accepted. For example, Robert Thornton argues that “most African countries today are countries, not nations, states or ethnic groups” (148), and he insists that South Africa is one of these countries, since there “is no fundamental identity that any South African clings to in common with all, or even most other South Africans” (150). Until the dismantling of apartheid as a political system, governmental policy decreed that “Whites,” “Blacks,” “Coloureds,” and “Indians” constituted separate nations (see Morse et al. 226). Thus, black homelands could be created and released into official “independence” in a move to strengthen the white claim to the largest portion of the land.1 By maintaining that different nations inhabited the geographical space called “South Africa,” government policy led to a situation in which rather than “serving as an overall uniting factor, nationalism in the South African context accentuated differences” (Green 45). The political context in South Africa, however, has altered dramatically over the last ten years. 1990 saw the unbanning of the ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela; a new constitution was debated and finally installed in 1994, and in the same year the first democratic elections were held. This created a political reality in which it is now at least possible to imagine South Africa as a “multicultural nation” that includes people of all skin colors. If the concept of the nation is to be kept distinct from that of the state,2 then the term nation would have to imply some sort of identity shared (at least to some extent) by all its members, a binding force that lets a seemingly heterogeneous group of people imagine themselves as a community (see Anderson), that lets them see themselves as a nation. In the case of South Africa, there seem to be very few possible sources for unity; even the common language and its standardization via “print capitalism” as emphasized by Benedict Anderson (see 44 ff.) does not apply, since South Africa’s constitution recognizes eleven official languages: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu (in alphabetical order). Within the critical debate on the origins of nationhood, there is some agreement that a common history is one possible aspect of such national identity. For example, Raymond Grew argues that “national identity is something constructed out of history” (35), Stuart Murray points out that nationalism writes history “to provide mythologies to strengthen the sense of a collective self” (10), and John Tosh notes that “history is probably a

John Gay's Polly and the Politics of 'Colonial Pastoral'

Abstract In recent years, a number of ‘postcolonial’ readings of John Gay’s Polly have appeared that treat the play as an anti-colonial text. The present essay argues that while colonial practices and ‘colonial discourse’ are satirised on a surface level, the text is less radical than it is sometimes taken to be. Its criticism has to be contextualised in Gay’s multi-levelled genre parody, particularly with regard to the pastoral tradition. Furthermore, Polly does not present Macheath as a race-conscious rebel; and finally, both plotstructure and ending undercut an anti-colonial reading.

Constructing and Deconstructing the Fantasy Hero: Joe Abercrombie’s “First Law” Trilogy

Using Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as template and applying the typology of heroic modes suggested in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, Petzold first establishes the importance of heroes in fantasy fiction. His chapter then analyses Joe Abercrombie’s First Law Trilogy (2006–2008), arguing that Abercrombie creates a postmodern fantasy world in which the heroic is simultaneously upheld and subverted, and that Abercrombie’s fictional world suggests multiple links to our own—links that range from the ‘devilish’ power of nuclear weapons to the manipulative power of financial institutions.

Introduction: The Disappearance of Utopia?

There seem to be about as many heralds to the end of utopia among the many postmodern obituaries as there are heralds insisting that utopia is quite alive. This is hardly surprising, since the opposition is a false one. Utopia is only dead, and rightly so, if understood in the classical (and modern) sense of a blueprint for perfection. The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century – both in their left-wing and right-wing manifestations – have claimed to posses such a blueprint and have – luckily – failed. It is this kind of utopia that Fredric Jameson attacks when pointing out that utopian thinking “lies not in helping us to imagine a better future but rather in demonstrating our utter incapacity to imagine such a future.” However, humans continue to dream about ‘possible worlds’ that are somehow better than the world they live in, without necessarily aspiring towards ultimate perfection. In this sense, as less than holistic, transgressive visions of what has previously been unimaginable, unimagined and ‘impossible,’ contemporary utopian thinking abounds, both in political theory and in literary and critical discourse: the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences lists 1.724 entries for ‘utopia’ or ‘utopian’ since the late 1960s, 533 of which appeared during the last five years; the MLA lists 4.446 entries, 738 of which appeared after 2001. Obviously, utopia is still a concept that appeals to political thinkers, literary authors and critics alike. Not surprisingly, then, the neo-conservative disputes in the U.S. over the world-wide installation of democratic political systems, the debates in the European Union about ideals of multicultural societies (e.g. the integration of ethnic minorities in the UK, the entry of Turkey into the EU) and the limits of tolerance and recognition (in legal terms), the ecological initiatives to counter global climate change, as well as the belligerent confrontations over the effects of globalization, all share the same questions that have been asked for thousands of years: What is the ideal or, less ambitiously, at least a better form of social order? How can humans live together harmoniously? What other political systems could exist beside the one we live in? How could life be different? How could it be better? It is ironic that these questions should often enough be denounced as ‘utopian’ in the predominant colloquial sense – as “unrealistic” (Collins COBUILD) or “impossibly or extravagantly ideal” (OED) and hence ‘too good to come true,’

The Disappearance of Utopia? An Interview with Ernest Callenbach on the Role and Function of Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Society

In light of the political, social, religious and economic developments around the world in the last decade (e.g. ‘new’ smaller-scale guerilla and civil wars with their propensity to ethnic ‘cleansing’, the ‘war’ on terror, rising religious and political fundamentalism on all sides, the devastating imbalance between rich and poor countries as well as the imbalance between rich and poor within countries) the meaning of utopia as ‘no place’ seems to predominate; it has become hard –some critics even claim questionable– to envision a ‘good place’ that could conceivably come true. It does not help that most utopian fiction after your Ecotopia seems to be what Ursula LeGuin in the subtitle to her The Dispossessed has famously called “ambiguous”. What would you say is the currency and necessity of utopian thought and fiction today?

No More Room in Hell: Utopian Moments in the Dystopia of '28 Days Later'

Abstract Focusing on the zombie-film 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle) may at first sight seem an odd choice in the context of utopian writing, but links to utopia can in fact be drawn on various levels. Zombies, like utopia itself, can function as a means to comment on or criticize present society; the creation of zombies in 28 Days Later is linked to an utopian ideal, the elimination of rage; and the film can be read as a quest for a utopian space in a pastoral setting. Thus, the film is discussed as a self-referential mixture of genres that combines dystopia with apocalypse, utopia with the pastoral, and that ironically undercuts all its generic statements.