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Thomas Mofolo's Chaka was first published in Sesotho in 1925 by the Morija Sesuto Book Depot under the auspices of the Societé des missions évangéliques de Paris. It has been translated into several languages, including English, French and German. In this article, I present a reading of the multiple stagings of Mofolo's novel by assessing the changes in the material and paratextual production of the text. By following the fortunes of Mofolo's Chaka, I elucidate the various shapes it has taken and meanings it has accrued on its journey through time and space. Four distinct lineages of Mofolo's Chaka are identified: the mission text, the English colonial text, the French colonial production and the post-colonial text; thus tracing the historical passage of an African-authored text through colonial, apartheid, post-colonial and post-apartheid contexts. The article sheds light on the particular ways in which the novel and African literature more generally have been made to signify, what interpretive frames have been privileged, and what kinds of genre categorisation have predominated. In advancing the notion of 'history by paratext', I also argue for the shifting paratext as an important historical index of the tensions, contradictions and inconsistencies of particular historical contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent histories of South Africa and Brazil share many commonalities. Most obviously, both have experienced a shared political history of democratic transition. Two somewhat similar forms of socio-political oppression and manipulation -- military rule in Brazil (ended 1985) and South African apartheid (ended 1994) -- have been replaced by democratic regimes and exceedingly optimistic hopes for the future. Yet neither transition has been as smooth as expected. Consequently, a liminal situation has been created, where past and present discourses compete for space. This has recently been explored in each country's respective literatures: K. Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams and Rodrigo de Souza Leão's All Dogs Are Blue are just two examples. This article will explore the common theme of madness in these novels to highlight liminality. In particular, I argue that the treatment of insanity denies the patient's individuality and replicates the identity politics of the colonial situation. This, I suggest, reveals how postcolonial modernity in Brazil and South Africa relies on a continuing and normalised psycho-politics of otherness. Further, I will consider questions revolving around language, reliability and everyday emotions, focusing on the uncomfortable juxtaposition of global, national and local in both countries as they struggle to enter the modern world order. Ultimately, the only way we can alleviate madness and harness the social benefits of modernity and globalisation comes through accepting difference and understanding the specific individual circumstances of those we call 'mad'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concerns African Christians’ attempts to accommodate traditional practices – in this instance male initiation – within their evolving Christianity. It speaks to an on-going concern around the place of custom in modern Africa and the uses to which custom and its invocation are put. Contrary to the literature, which locates the adaption of custom by Christians in the independent or Zionist churches, educated African Christians in the historic mainstream churches were also staunch defenders of customs antithetical to the white missionary establishment. Using a range of unexamined and Xhosa sources, the article considers how African Christians publicly contested initiation. Black South Africans used their literacy, writing ethnographies and letters to newspapers to debate custom and establish themselves as purveyors and readers of, firstly, locally circulated and, later, ethnographic knowledge. Christians engaged in spirited and learned discussions of circumcision, using a range of arguments based on custom and Biblical precedent. Xhosa men, in particular, called on ideas about initiation to defend masculine moral authority. Their arguments in defence of initiation point to anxieties over manhood and power in the context of an increasingly modern society. While initiation had particular meaning for Xhosa men, men across South Africa debated, defended and, at times, incorporated Christianised forms of initiation into their own symbolic repertoires. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Towards the end of her writing life, Nadine Gordimer’s style became increasingly marked by characteristics that Theodor Adorno and Edward Said have attributed to ‘late style’: syntactic and interpretational difficulty, structural fracture, and a heightened degree of self-reflexivity. I discuss some of the critical formulations that have developed around late style, then analyse Gordimer’s individual late style in the titular stories from her three transition and post-apartheid collections:Jump(1991),Loot(2003), andBeethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black(2007). While examining the technical characteristics of her late style, I argue that she invokes a trinity of renowned late stylists – Samuel Beckett, William Shakespeare, and Ludwig van Beethoven – to determine the aesthetic co-ordinates of her work. Gordimer’s stylistic experimentation in these stories builds on and revises her prior strategies for political writing, showing the temporal contingency of forms of engagement, and laying down the gauntlet of political authorship to those who write in her wake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores significant patterns in Nadine Gordimer’s fiction through a focus on the concept of pathology. The idea is to trace how some of the characteristic pathologies in her work are generated and structured. By way of conceptual clarification, some of the claims and liabilities of surface reading are evaluated. The key here is to understand a transactional relationship between ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ readings, particularly in the differential space of the boundary that Gordimer’s work inhabits. Partly this generates dynamics that apply to her characters, but also to her fiction in general: pathology is not only its subject, but also what it is subject to. In this vein, the article traces other patterns – for instance, a mobile dialectic across the course of Gordimer’s career between vertical and horizontal versions of the uncanny. This has implications not only for the transition from the apartheid to post-apartheid periods in South Africa, but also to more globalised settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article charts the tropes through which the Cape-as-port is rendered across five and a half centuries: Sea-Mountain, Cape of Storms and Cape of Good Hope. These tropes coalesce and draw apart in the monstrous manifestation of the promontory and its tempests that takes the shape of the epic figure of Adamastor. They are found to encode an ambivalent orientation between African and maritime, and Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, and are suggestive of a formative worlding of the local literary scene from offshore. The article proceeds to propose that the intersecting portal comprising the Cape – at the seam of the world-system and the boundary of Africa – provides an entry point into current debates on world literature, and invites modes of reading that are simultaneously close and distant, local and global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ad hoc, illegal and invisible links between the coasts and countries of the Indian Ocean persist in the late 20th and 21st centuries. These can be discerned, from the perspective of South Africa, through a reading of their fictional traces. Rather than considering the more established canon of South African Indian writing, which elaborates familial and migratory links to south Asia, I discuss connections of illegality that appear in the resurging genre of South African crime fiction. Trevor Corbett’sAllegiance(2012) and Mike Nicol and Joanne Hichens’Out to Score(2009) map Durban and Cape Town, respectively, as deeply oceanic, port-dominated cities, connected through networks of smuggling and terror to distant Indian Ocean coasts. They reveal the flip side to the Indian Ocean carceral archipelago – networks of crime implied by networks of punishment. In so doing, producing, alongside the legal Indian Ocean world of trade and travel, the figure of an Indian Ocean underworld. Indian Ocean fiction from further afield – Lindsey Collen’sBoy(2005) and Abdulrazak Gurnah’sThe Last Gift(2012) – set up the Indian Ocean underworld as a critical lens through which the South African crime fiction can be read. Focusing on the underworld therefore provides a way not only of uncovering recent Indian Ocean history, but also of drawing together Indian Ocean with southern African studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photocomics were widely popular in South Africa in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, yet they have received little critical attention. This article has two goals. First, it seeks to contextualise the production and consumption of photocomics during apartheid. Second, focusing on one popular form of the photocomic - the Western - I look at how narrative and aesthetic conventions of the form reinforced, yet simultaneously disturbed, the apartheid state's fantasy of total segregation. Reading practices fostered interracial contact in the imaginative and affective spheres even while apartheid doctrine attempted to prevent it. Conjoining text and photograph, sequence and still, mimesis, fantasy, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, the photocomic is not just an outmoded form of popular entertainment, but instead connects readings in popular culture with the formation of complex political subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 Vladislavic 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outburst of xenophobic violence that shook South Africa in May 2008 severely damaged the belief in a multicultural society. This article re-reads three early twenty-first century South African novels - Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit (2001), Kabelo Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), and Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret (2005) - in the context of the May 2008 events. It is argued that the figure of the foreigner, apparently marginal in all three narratives, is in fact central to their ethical project, which seeks redemption, renewal and redefinition of the South African identity through an identification with the foreign other. The affective impulses of hospitality and friendship directed towards the foreigner in Dangor, Duiker and Shukri are read not merely as accepting or welcoming alterity, but as instances of self-othering - becoming strange in one's own domain. Expressing disillusionment with the liberatory potential of the narrative of the anti-apartheid struggle, they provide access to alternative sites of memory borrowed from the stranger that become sources for re-imagining South African history. In the context of the various racial and ethnic identity politics that have emerged in the New South Africa, such de-centred understanding of identity has radical implications for notions of nationhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author discusses the relationship between history, narrative and the recent past in South Africa as depicted in works of literary criticism produced in that country. At issue are the human stories that were recounted through the hearings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The author examines the writings of a number of authors including Njabulo Ndebele, André Brink, Mark Sanders and Meg Samuelson. The author finds fault with the book "African Pasts," by Tim Woods.

This article attempts to play off a much-celebrated 'post-apartheid' novel, Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow, against what was arguably the pre-eminent literary text arising out of the first formation of South Africa as a single political entity, Sol Plaatje's Mhudi. These works are brought together through their common concern with translation, both literal and metaphorical, as a key element for a national vision forged in a non-essentialist environment. The article thus sets the novels against South Africa's complex and in many ways compromised multilingual language policy. It uses the history of that policy (loaded as it is with the dominance of English and the problems associated with standardising the African languages) as a material expression of the fraught nature of a non-exclusionary South African-ness, and investigates both Plaatje and Mpe's explicit engagement with that history. In particular, it focuses on the measured and guarded utopian drive behind Mhudi and the relation of this to the typically non-'national' spin of Welcome to Our Hillbrow's post-apartheid concern with identity, xenophobia, language, and AIDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Epic' is a controversial category in the study of both oral record and performance and literature in South Africa, although the form has achieved a variety of manifestations. This article examines two early twentieth-century South African poems, Roy Campbell's The Flaming Terrapin (1924) and Herbert Dhlomo's Valley of a Thousand Hills: A Poem (1942), arguing that both can be identified as 'brief epic', a form crucial to modernism. While both are post-Romantic, the two poets engage with the form in different ways: Dhlomo's is Wordsworthian, while Campbell's tends to the neo-Miltonic and is part of early modernism's re-discovery of myth. As regards the communal energy of epic, Dhlomo's poem is national in its implications, while Campbell's is mundane and individualistic. Yet the co-incidence of form and mode, as well as the poets' historical contiguity, suggest that both may be read as contributing to South African literature as a coherent order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gcina Mhlophe's 1986 play Have You Seen Zandile? is the story of a young South African girl kidnapped by her estranged mother and separated from her loving grandmother, and is based on the playwright's own childhood experiences. Widely criticised in apartheid South Africa for being apolitical, the play continues to be denounced as light and sentimental. These criticisms are largely a response to the play's nostalgia, the longing for the stories and games of childhood felt by both the main character and the author. But amidst the trauma and violence of apartheid South Africa, how is nostalgia possible? In this article I argue that nostalgia is not only possible, it is vital to Mhlophe's subtle and community-based anti-apartheid politics. I argue that nostalgia represents a feature of the ‘ordinary’ that Njabulo Ndebele claimed needed to be ‘rediscovered’ in South African literature. As a universal human emotion, nostalgia defies the spectacular rhetoric of victimhood that threatens to define the black South African, and reveals instead the everyday complexity of all South Africans. I analyse the function of nostalgic moments within the play to reveal the usefulness of nostalgia in the broader South African context. I show that in apartheid South Africa, nostalgia was fundamental to the survival of trauma, by maintaining the psychological connection between the past and the present. As the play continues to be studied in post-apartheid South Africa, it can be reread as part of the ‘community-building’ process, an endeavour that emphasises the individual lives and experiences of its members, rather than the homogenised narrative of traumatic memory associated with the new nation and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). This article sheds light on the under-theorised phenomenon of nostalgia and why it remains such a pervasive human emotion in traumatic times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The culture of environmentalism in South Africa changed through the 1990s, influenced by the country's transition to democratic government. Environmentalism during the apartheid era retained features of an earlier colonial interest in conservation, but with the political change, tendencies have emerged that link environmental and social well-being in ways that are ‘people-centred’. This new culture can be understood as developing a postcolonial understanding of ecology, one that grasps the continued influence of colonialism as well as the present positioning of South Africa within a global order dominated by countries of the North (and in particular the United States). Ecology in this context is deeply implicated in a postcolonial politics. This article reads two recent works of prose fiction by South African writers, J.M. Coetzee and Zakes Mda, against these developments in the environmental culture, claiming that they develop a similar implication for ecology. Drawing on postmodern strategies to destabilise meaning, they articulate a carefully circumscribed value for ecology within current social and cultural orders. The article suggests that South Africa's emerging environmental culture can also provide ways of reading limits to the works of fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the international reception of the fiction of South African novelist and critic, J. M. Coetzee, in order to examine the institutional and rhetorical conventions which shaped the selection and circulation of particular forms of writing as exemplars of 'South African literature' from the 1970s through to the 1990s. The representation of Coetzee's novels in two reading-formations is critically addressed: in non-academic literary reviews; and in the emergent academic paradigm of post-colonial literary theory. It is argued that in both cases, South African literary writing has often been re-inscribed into new contexts according to abstract and moralised understandings of the nature of apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores hybridity and carnival in the post colonial works of Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Merechera and South African poet Lesego Rampolokeng. Subversive quality of syncretic, carnivalesque art which aims at decentering dominant discourses; Multi-layered and complex perception; Syncreticism as a mixing of styles and cultural traditions; Preference for metaphor and myth.

Examines the arguments about the social function of literature in South Africa. Literature as a proselytizing aid; Utilitarian view which sees literature of limited use value in the emergent capitalist social order; Literature as a repository of profound spiritual truths; Imperial view of literature.

Examines the literature that surrounds the essence of Sophiatown in South Africa in the 1950s as well as its writers symbolizing the new urban black generation. Background on Sophiatown; Population and history; Sophiatown's complex reality; Generation of writers that matured after the National Party gained power in 1948; Writing styles; Viability of extra-parliamentary opposition.

Presents an introduction to the June 2005 issue of "The Journal of Southern African Studies."