Ralph Goodman

De-scribing the centre : satiric and postcolonial strategies in The Madonna of Excelsior

Summary In The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) Zakes Mda makes use of both satiric and postcoloniai strategies to create discursive fissures within colonial discourses, with a strong focus on issues of race and the Immorality Act in particular. This essay explores the nature of both satire and postcolonialism as dialogic, heteroglossic textual forms which serve to liberate the subject from the power of hegemonic language, contrasting satire and postcolonialism, and looking at the praxis and the ethics of both discourses in relation to Mdas novel. The essay also points to important contrasts between the two discourses, particularly in the way they deal with identity and language, each of them engaging with social and linguistic issues in ways that evoke differing narratives. It is suggested that postcoloniai discourse differs from satiric discourse in the specificity of its commitment to ethical issues, while satires stance is a less well‐defined one, more detached because of the ironic weight which satire carries. Satiric theorists mirror this by showing a detachment which differentiates their narratives from the theoretical discourses of postcolonialism, which are often marked by differences and tensions between various theorists.

Textuality and transformation in South African parodic-travestying texts: Welcome to our hillbrow

The boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, between literature and nonliterature and so forth are not laid up in heaven. Every specific situation is historical. And the growth of literature is not merely development and change within the fixed boundaries of any given definition; the boundaries themselves are constantly changing. Bakhtin 1981:33

Ivan Vladislavić's The exploded view: space and place in transitional South Africa

Abstract This essay discusses Ivan Vladislavićs The exploded view as a satirical text about the construction of space in post-1994 South Africa. The text consists of four sections, each of which foregrounds attempts to grapple with and represent various South African spaces, both literal and figurative. The census-taker in section one, the town-planner in section two, the trendy artist in section three and the philosophizing erector of billboards in section four all encounter the unstable quality of the material world which defies their efforts to define and limit it. All of these protagonists struggle to define space and place — whether inner or outer — in ways which bring satisfactory order and meaning to their lives. This essay takes the theoretical position that space is a construct underpinned by social and economic ideologies, and is given significant meaning only by a consciousness of the forces underlying its construction.

Boundary issues and beyond: the secret life of monsters

ABSTRACT This article is written primarily within the Derridean frame of différance, his composite term which alludes to both “deferral” and “difference” and challenges Ferdinand Saussure’s notion of language, which the latter saw as stable. In its place Jacques Derrida offers another convention – of engaged delay between signifier and referent – a “form of critical dialogue” with language (Johnson1997: 53), from which more significant meaning (and action) may flow. Derrida speaks of “oscillation between possibilities” (Derrida 1988: 148), indicating that the interplay between signifier and referent is continuous and confirming the denial of ontological certainty, which is central to postmodern thought. This article opens with a theoretical section on the issue of monsters in general, and then moves to a discussion of two texts, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ridley Scott’s Blade runner. These texts, which are closely related, both raise current issues about the potential intelligence of robotic entities, which is causing growing unease in many quarters.

The Man, the Woman and the Whale: Exploring the Politics of the Possible in Zakes Mda’s "The Whale Caller"

Abstract Zakes Mdas The Whale Caller is set in the Western Cape village of Hermanus, which proves to be an idyllic place only for tourists and rich South Africans, framing a story of doomed love for its three chief protagonists, Saluni, the otherwise nameless Whale Caller, and Sharisha, a female whale. The Whale Caller revolves around a love story with a timely narrative which, at a point in South African history when some influential voices have been suggesting that we draw a line below the list of past wrongs, serves as a reminder of the work still to be done, at a local level, in facing the effects of apartheid. The liminal figure that creates The Whale Caller is, on one level, the story of a love triangle with, whimsically, a whale as one of the parties involved. On another level it interrogates the past by focusing on two people whose relationship has been scarred by their marginalised status within the South African context. As so often in Mdas work, his satire is misleadingly mild, his whimsicality a stalking horse for his unwavering focus on the texture of life in the often forgotten interstices of our society. The violent ending of the narrative, with the death of two of the three main “characters”, is Mdas dark reminder of how unaddressed dysfunctionality may eventually resolve itself.