Back to Search
Start Over
Between Transnational Socialism and White Privilege: Afrikaner Woman Worker's 'Library' in the 1930s and 1940s.
- Source :
- Dutch Crossing; Mar2023, Vol. 47 Issue 1, p63-76, 14p
- Publication Year :
- 2023
-
Abstract
- In this article, I set out to introduce the Garment Workers Union (GWU) prose as a neglected part of Afrikaans-language literature. I offer an overview of texts written or translated by the GWU members and published in the official trade union organ Die Klerewerker/The Garment Worker. The presented workers' reading list is divided into original Afrikaans writings and translations from English into Afrikaans. All these texts offered the newly created white working class a new identification, manoeuvring between belonging to the national imagined community of Afrikaners based on the concept of nation and whiteness, and to a transnational workers' community based on the category of class. Looking at the impact of the Dutch and English language traditions in South Africa, I propose that the way in which European conventions made their way to Afrikaans literature, was class-based. Textsrecognized as artistic, incorporated in the Afrikaans literary canon, drew heavily on Dutch tradition. The English language turned out to be the medium that also circulated a less elitist thought. Therefore, it was English that enabled the movement of texts from Europe and the United States to South Africa that shaped the South African white working-class, including its Afrikaner part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- SOCIALISM
TRANSNATIONALISM
AFRIKAANS literature
LABOR unions
TRANSLATIONS
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 03096564
- Volume :
- 47
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Dutch Crossing
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 161896461
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1080/03096564.2022.2144594