Monica Popescu

Waiting for the Russians: Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg and the Logic of Late Postcolonialism

Abstract JM Coetzees 1994 novel The Master of Petersburg has puzzled its readership with its geopolitical and temporal distance from the South African scene. I argue that the novel actually portrays some of the more salient features of the transition years, as it reflects on the position of the writer vis‐à‐vis a restructured field of political forces. A meditation on transition time and on the protracted dimension of waiting for a new world to be born, the novel also presents a model of connectivity between Russia and South Africa. It places post‐apartheid culture in a special relationship to postcolonialism and the global configuration born at the end of the Cold War.

Lewis Nkosi in Warsaw: Translating eastern European experiences for an African audience

This article discusses overlaps and dissimilarities between eastern Europeans’ and Africans’ subordinate position in relation to imperial powers from the perspective of a South African writer who lived in Poland. Lewis Nkosi’s subtle and ironic style outlines the burden of colonialism and cultural marginalization shared by Poles and South Africans, but also reveals the paternalism and condescension disguised by socialist slogans of solidarity with Third World nations. The complex relation between (post)colonial and eastern European cultures is informed by the Cold War.

Reading through a Cold War lens: apartheid-era literature and the global conflict

This article argues that apartheid-era literature was shaped by the Cold War cultural and political landscape. With genres and narrative structures shared with Western literary traditions (such as spy fiction) or Eastern Bloc literatures (such as socialist realism), apartheid-era literature nonetheless retained its local concerns and features. Starting from three initial topoi (the border as a real and mental topography, political and individual secrets, and narratives of revolution and transformation), this article contends that South African literature, like other cultural productions from the global South, brings an important contribution to a new and more nuanced understanding of the Cold War as a global conflict.

Aesthetic solidarities: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Cold War

Highlighting the absence of the Cold War from studies of postcolonial literature, this article focuses on the various levels at which the global conflict is reflected in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s work and its reception. Beyond direct and oblique references to the Cold War, Ngũgĩ’s choice of genre in Petals of Blood (historical novel in the socialist realist vein, at the expense of a discredited detective style of novel) speaks to the cultural solidarities Ngũgĩ forged across the Iron Curtain fault lines.

Licence for shooting

ABSTRACT The war in Angola represented one of the hot spots of the Cold War. Despite the length of the conflict and the number of warring parties involved, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which South African literature represented this conflict. This article focuses on the relationship between text and image, between literature and photojournalism. For Etienne van Heerden (“My Cuban” and “My Afrikaner”) and Mark Behr (The smell of apples), literature is capable of exposing ideological regimentation, the role of state apparatuses in creating a captive audience, and the mechanisms that perpetuated apartheid mentality and endorsed South African foreign policies. These literary works, and their relationship to war photography, are also indicative of the relatively marginal yet revealing position South African cultural texts hold in global mediascapes focused on the Cold War.

Voortrekkers of the Cold War: Enacting the South African Past and Present in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples

“Communism [is] the highest form of capitalism”—the head of the South African Security Branch, Major-General Hendrik van den Bergh declared in 1966, in a nonchalant statement that short-circuited the staple binaries of Cold War discourse (Bunting 1969).2 The officer’s political illiteracy aside, his oxymoronic formulation may actually unwittingly reveal points of convergence in the discursive strategies churned out by communism and capitalism supporters alike. Singular as it might seem, this curious little sentence speaks of a larger conundrum that placed South Africa in an uneasy ideological spot between the Scylla and Charybdis of the Cold War. With its uncomfortable position in relation to western capitalism and Soviet communism, South Africa becomes a privileged site for exploring Cold War contradictions. These contradictions become most explicit in the simplified ideological positions distilled for young Afrikaners, who were trained into proper citizens of the nation during the apartheid years. Surprisingly, there are not many literary texts written after the fall of the Iron Curtain that engage with the impact of the Cold War in South Africa.

Cold War and Hot Translation

A few months ago I went to see U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, Mark Dornford-May’s thrilling transposition of Bizet’s opera from Spain into the poor yet vibrant township near Cape Town and from French into the click-marked beat of isiXhosa singing. Returning from the movie theater, my thoughts turned to the question of translatability. Is South African culture at this moment particularly ripe for transposing and adapting (Western) narratives, or do the preferential flows established by globalization make its own cultural products more readily translatable for an international audience eager to receive the post-apartheid message of peace, reconciliation, and democracy? Is translation a more appropriate metaphor to represent post-Cold War culture than the preceding paradigms, or does it equally apply to the apartheid timeframe? The following is a meditation on translation of cultural paradigms and ideas between the United States and South Africa. The model on which I build my argument is that of a world engaged in a continuous flow of cultural and economic exchange, fast-paced at times (as today, with the intensified rhythms of globalization), slower at other times (as beneath the frozen political surfaces of the Cold War). But even then, with some trimming and adjustments, cultural texts, political ideas, or just slogans were still being translated from one geopolitical entity to another. Since the end of apartheid, the South African economy opened to the world market and the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) moved away from their traditional socialist, Eastern European affiliations and closer to the only one remaining superpower on the world scene: the United States. There is a lot of emphasis today on cultural exchange, and South Africa borrows