Sue Kossew

Voicing the “Great Australian Silence„: Kate Grenville's Narrative of Settlement in The Secret River

This article examines the competing narratives of settlement in Kate Grenvilles 2005 novel, The Secret River. On the one hand are Aboriginal stories of violent encounters with settlers that are transmitted orally and are unwritten and, on the other, are those European historical accounts that seek to legitimate Australian settlement. In this novel, Grenville is trying to reconcile her own convict ancestors implication in acts of Indigenous dispossession, while simultaneously acknowledging the strength and courage of such acts of settlement. This paper argues that any such reconciliation is fraught with complexities, as a contemporary perspective on the past attempts to balance blame and admiration. Grenvilles novel itself is thus open to ambiguities and to accusations of “whitewashing” the past.

Re-reading the past: monuments, history and representation in short stories by Ivan Vladislavic and Zoë Wicomb

As representations of particular moments in history, monuments provide useful indices for processes of remembering and forgetting that accompany ‘regime change’. Their paradoxical representational instability and their exposure to multiple readings and counter-readings over time make monuments fascinating material for literary investigations of the unstable nature of representation itself. Both Ivan Vladislavić and Zoë Wicomb have used the trope of monuments in their short stories, enabling them to explore acts of reading that reveal a spectrum of interpretations, often ironically resistant to the authorised version of history being celebrated. This article argues that, in drawing attention to these particular cultural constructions, both writers are also underscoring the ironies inherent in the inability of cultural forms to ‘fix’ either the past or the present, particularly in transitional historical moments.

Reinventing history; reimagining the novel: The politics of reading André Brink's imaginings of Sand

Summary Andre Brinks most recent novel. Imaginings of Sand (1996b), enters into the politics of the novel in a number of important ways. His ideas of a post‐apartheid literature includes the need to “address the silences of the past” and to appropriate this past/history through “imaginative understanding” in the form of fiction. The implications of this link between the stories of fiction and those of history, and of his taking on the issue of the silenced womans voice through his female narrator, are relevant to the ongoing discussion of the direction and ideology of a post‐apartheid literature. This paper argues that these issues are in themselves problematic and that a novel which aims to address them necessarily becomes itself messily involved in these problems of reading and of possible exclusionary practices.

Cross-Cultural Conversations: Antjie Krog's Life Writing in Begging to be Black

Antjie Krogs Begging to be Black, published in 2009, uses the word ‘conversation’ a number of times in relation to its authors personal, philosophical and political interactions with people and texts. In the authors note that appears at the beginning of the text, she refers to the books ‘many conversations’ and to the text itself as an attempt to understand the ‘long conversation’ between black and white in South Africa. This essay argues that Krogs textualisation of interconnectedness enables her to explore the formation of self in negotiation with ‘difference’ across time, space and racial boundaries. It examines Krogs textual deployment of multiple conversations (literal and metaphorical) as a way of working through issues of postcolonial identity.

Re-framing South African Life Narratives

Of the seven essays and one review in this special issue of Life Writing, the first three emerge from the ‘Framing Lives’ Conference of the International Auto/ Biography Association (IABA) held in July 2012 at the Australian National University in Canberra, and convened by Professors Paul Arthur, Rosanne Kennedy and Gillian Whitlock. The conference was held in partnership with the Humanities Research Centre, the National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University, and the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. Its rubric drew attention to the ‘extraordinary turn to the visual in contemporary life narrative’ across a range of genres, including digital and social media. It also defined its use of the word ‘framing’ by suggesting ‘the ways that lives are lived, recorded and viewed through multiple frames including those of language, politics, place, gender, history and culture.’ This issue includes essays that range across and engage with all of these frames. Given the common concern of these essays with post-apartheid South African writing, and especially with the rapidly changing nature of identity-formations since the formal demise of apartheid, this special issue of Life Writing uses the term ‘re-framing’ rather than framing. There is also a noticeable shift to the visual or ‘autographics’, a term defined by Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti as ‘indicating from the first its attention to the multiple modes and media of autobiographical texts, and to the tensions between “auto” and “graph” in the rapidly changing visual and textual cultures of autobiography’ (‘Self-Regarding Art’, v). The changing nature of identity-formations has contributed much to the continued exploration of and experimentation in the generic forms of life writing, autobiography and memoir, as each of the essays collected here illustrates. We have not insisted on patrolling strict generic boundaries around the use of these terms, but it is useful to recall the expansiveness given the term by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, who consider ‘life writing’ to refer to written texts that take as their subject a life, either one’s own or another’s; and then, by Life Writing, 2014 Vol. 11, No. 2, 155–158, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2014.899728

Kate Grenville’s Transgressive Narratives

Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s foremost women writers whose fictional works have, since the early 1980s, tracked and charted aspects of Australian life. Her novels and short stories refigure literary and national spaces, particularly for women, but also in terms of cross-cultural interactions across the settler-Indigenous divide. Her most well-known and celebrated novels, Lilian’s Story (1985) and the international best-seller, The Secret River (2005) have rightly become classics in the field of Australian literature. This chapter analyses the ways in which Grenville’s narratives have explored the “dark places” of Australian life and have illuminated and teased out the tensions, inequalities and violence lurking below the surface of the “lucky country” and how they problematise the all-too-easily accepted story of white settlement.

Traditions in transit

South African academic David Attwell (now based at the University of York) is well known for his work on J M Coetzee, including J M Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing and the collection of essays by and interviews with Coetzee entitled Doubling the Point . Both of these works were concerned with providing a meticulously researched historiographical context for Coetzee’s literary and critical work. Attwell’s new book, Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History, similarly explores the close relationship between sociohistorical and political contexts and literature, in this case the emergence of a black South African literature from its colonial beginnings. For the scholar of postcolonial studies, Rewriting Modernity is a usefully nuanced study that Attwell situates as a kind of companion volume to Coetzee’s White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa , claiming a similar ‘tension, instability, and negotiation across a historical and cross-cultural divide’ for black writing (p 16) as did Coetzee’s book for white writing. Employing a methodology that incorporates historical detail, textual description and analysis, and literary theory, Attwell favours the theory of transculturation rather than what he suggests is the more ‘linear’ approach of postcolonial centre periphery binarism as a critical tool with which to dissect the ‘middle ground of rewriting’ (p 22). Positioning black South African literary production within a contemporary theoretical framework, Attwell argues for its reactive relationship to the pressures of modernity. The pull, familiar to scholars of African literatures, between preserving a ‘native’ tradition and also finding a literary voice with which to ‘speak Africa’ is played out, too, in black South African writing, which engages with wider debates in African literatures such as the choice of language and literary genre. Underlying these specific debates/arguments are of course broader questions: what is the most ‘authentic’ form in which African literature can reconcile both its oral and communal traditions with forms of modernity, in particular that most modern of literary genres, the novel? How, too, can such a literature assert both its difference from and