Rita Barnard

Coetzee in/and Afrikaans

Summary This article investigates Coetzees complex attitudes towards the Afrikaans language, and, by extension, his views on language, translation, and the potential and performative subject positions, or “fictions of the”–enacted in and determined by a given language. It reflects on relevant passages from Coetzees criticism (including “Achterbergs ‘Ballade van de Gasfitter’”, “Emerging from Censorship”, “What is a Classic?”, and “He and His Man”) and fiction (including In the Heart of the Country, Boyhood, Youth and Diary of a Bad Year). Partly concerned with the (auto)biographical, this essay also explores the idea of embarrassment (rather than the more frequently discussed shame) as a key affect in Coetzees oeuvre.

Beyond Rivalry: Literature/History, Fiction/Non‐Fiction

At the Cape Town Book Fair in 1987, during the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, J. M. Coetzee made one of his most provocative speeches. It is one that is frequently cited by the proliferating international army of Coetzee scholars—and often uncritically, as a kind of holy writ, a parable about the supremacy of fiction and storytelling. Coetzee described the intellectual climate in which he then operated as one in which fiction was being reduced to a mere supplement to history: a world in which the novelist was in danger of having his work red-pencilled by schoolmistresses for the moments where it failed to correspond to the real world, or worse yet, failed to illustrate the master narrative of the liberation struggle. Refusing this hierarchy, in which literature is relegated to the position of handmaiden to historiography, Coetzee resorted to an outrageous metaphor to describe the marginalization of the imaginative writer. He assumed the guise of an unfortunate indigene, forced by the colonizing powers-that-be to retreat into remote corners of the world, to inhospitable caves and crannies from which he would battle on with his outmoded bows and arrows. Though at the end of the essay Coetzee asserts that storytelling may well prove to be the very condition of the work of the historian and that the opposition he seems to set up is therefore untenable, we nevertheless are left, as Hedley Twidle remarks in the essay that opens this issue of Safundi, with a more binaristic afterimage: in refusing a position of supplementarity, the novelist seems to declare an outright rivalry between literature and history. Several of the essays collected in this special issue of Safundi have the salutary effect of sharpening and revivifying our sense of the intellectual context for Coetzee’s intervention (which was entitled, to underscore its locatedness and topicality, ‘‘The Novel Today’’). The issue as a whole is designed to complicate our sense of the

Ugly Feelings, Negative Dialectics: Reflections on Postapartheid Shame

On 14 July, 2011, Anton van Niekerk, a portly, silver-haired professor of Philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch, got beaten up in his office by a tall, burly fellow called Abel Malan, a former paratrooper, described in the papers as a businessman from Nelspruit and a member of an Afrikaner separatist group, the Volksraad Verkiesings Kommissie (Volksraad Election Commission). The two had an appointment, ostensibly to discuss a piece Van Niekerk had published in the newspapers Die Burger and Beeld, in which he raised the explosive question of white shame and observed that white South Africans are still saddled with enormous guilt about the past. This very notion enraged Malan, to the point where he overturned Van Niekerk’s desk, punched him in the face, broke his glasses, and was arrested by campus police. This is the most dramatic event in the public saga that moved me to write this essay; but the story doesn’t quite end or begin there. After his arrest, Abel Malan

An Introduction to Issue 23

This introduction summarizes the collective concerns of the essays in this volume and suggests that they are ultimately best captured in the notion of “deterritorialization”: a consideration of cultural products as they are exported or interpretively wrested away from their geographic origins and from their “natural” context in any sort of unilinear national narrative. It also describes the origins of this issue. The initial idea was create a counterpart to an earlier issue of Safundi, which featured reflections on the way South African history, culture, and politics is presented at U.S. universities. The editors therefore set out by asking a number of South African scholars, many of them in English departments, to reflect on the way in which U.S. culture was taught in South Africa. It soon emerged, however, that a strictly pedagogical focus was too constricting to generate a rich collection. While several of the articles in this issue do include reflections on pedagogy, the collection as a whole now presents a broader consideration of the nature of U.S.-South African cultural exchange. It leaves one with a sense that that the near-absence of American studies in the formal curriculum in South Africa has produced a need for methodological inventiveness and a desire to examine matters that are often ignored in academia. These include not only popular culture, but also the complicated, intimate, and often undisclosed relationship of the scholar to the subject of his or her research: the personal and political reasons behind his or her intellectual and imaginative engagement. This collection, in sum, approaches “America” and “South Africa” as diasporic and translational phenomena.