Leon de Kock

Blanc De Blanc: Whiteness Studies-A South African Connection?

Summary Proposing a version of whiteness studies for South Africa, this article lays some of the groundwork for a research project that is yet to be comprehensively tackled. Over the past 30 or so years in progressive scholarship in and about South Africa, whiteness has become so deligitimised by virtue of its complicity with apartheid that it has often been rendered “blank”, a taken‐for‐granted negative essence, a place less looked‐into and a site of assumed uniformity. The essay suggests that if one were to reopen the category of South African whiteness and begin to de‐essentialise it, in all likelihood what one might call the “difference within” would both contradict assumptions of uniformity and prove interesting. The article summarises and analyses trends in whiteness studies in the US and suggests ways in which such a project might be differently tackled for South African purposes.Summary Proposing a version of whiteness studies for South Africa, this article lays some of the groundwork for a research project that is yet to be comprehensively tackled. Over the past 30 or so years in progressive scholarship in and about South Africa, whiteness has become so deligitimised by virtue of its complicity with apartheid that it has often been rendered “blank”, a taken‐for‐granted negative essence, a place less looked‐into and a site of assumed uniformity. The essay suggests that if one were to reopen the category of South African whiteness and begin to de‐essentialise it, in all likelihood what one might call the “difference within” would both contradict assumptions of uniformity and prove interesting. The article summarises and analyses trends in whiteness studies in the US and suggests ways in which such a project might be differently tackled for South African purposes.

English and the colonisation of form

Summary This article poses the question whether formal procedures of colonisation generated in the nineteenth century have been reproduced in the adoption, by critics of black South African literature, of the implicit assumption that the received generic forms of “imaginative literature” should form the basis of scholarship and enquiry. The article suggests that the context of “English” and “literature” should be sought in the broader signifying practices of colonialism, and seeks to describe the wider context in which black subjects of missionary teaching were compelled to negotiate identity in terms of a civilising colonialism founded in English as a master‐discourse.

Translating Triomf: The shifting limits of “ownership” in literary translation or: Never translate anyone but a dead author

Summary This essay teases out the paradoxes inherent in competing notions of (1) authorial “ownership” of a text and of its modes of signification in acts of translation, (2) the claims upon that text by a translator, and (3) the senses in which imaginative texts are “co‐owned” by readers, specialists, critics, teachers, reviewers and editors. Based on anecdotal evidence ‐ in this instance, an incomplete case‐history of translating the Afrikaans novel Triomf into English ‐ the essay builds an argument about the nature of translation in more general terms.

Splice of Life: Manipulations of the "Real" in South African English Literary Culture

Summary This essay employs the idea of a “splice” to look at ways in which South African writing in English has historically participated in a narrative move in which the category of the “real” is manipulated to lay claim to a greater purchase on authenticity of statement. The essay suggests that both fiction which poses as “more truthful” than confabulated nonfiction as well as nonfiction which pretends to be superior to fiction are playing a similar game. This game is seen as the desire to overcome a scene of near‐impossible heterogeneity by laying claim to a more singular truth and a more managable mode of truth‐telling.

Don't go Wessa, young man

ABSTRACT This article draws on a larger study into the discipline of English studies as manifested in the discourse published in academic journals over the period 1958–2004. More specifically, the article deals with a marked phenomenon in the discourse under review, namely imputations of doctrinal allegiance, where such imputation functions as a means of short-circuiting academic discussion and replacing it with curt dismissal.The example we use is the Wessa or Essa (White / English-speaking South African), identified in the discourse as a doctrinal group and often equated pejoratively with the doctrine of South African Liberalism. There has been a marked degree of ferment in South African literary discourse around this category, and the content of such spirited rhetorical manoeuvring reveals a great deal about power and restriction in the discourse under review.