Download or read book Soweto Poetry written by Michael J. F. Chapman and published by University of Kwazulu Natal Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology seeks to understand and appreciate a major phenomenon in South African literary and political life - the rise to prominence of a Black Consciousness poetry, called the New Black Poetry of the 1970s, or Soweto Poetry. The contributions, republished here 25 years later, gain resonance in retrospect. They draw on the insights of many leading literary commentators including Peter Abrahams, H.I.E Dhlomo, Nat Nakasa, Es'kia Mphahlele, James Matthews, Lionel Abrahams, Douglas Livingstone, Njabulo S. Ndebele, and Mbulelo Mzamane. They remind us of what editor Michael Chapman identifies as the inheritance of the Soweto voices, part of a global movement towards a non-elitist poetry of ethical power. The challenge of such an aesthetic, a poetry that is both simple and profound, lends continuing relevance to these perspectives. This collection was initially published in the revolutionary aftermath of Soweto '76 and is reprinted in this current edition.
Download or read book Black Consciousness and South Africa s National Literature written by Tom Penfold and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-14 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses Black Consciousness poetry and theatre from the 1970s through to the present. South Africa’s literature, like its history, has been beset by disagreement and contradiction, and has been consistently difficult to pin down as one, united entity. Much existing criticism on South Africa’s national literature has attempted to overcome these divisions by discussing material written from a variety of different subject positions together. This book argues that Black Consciousness desired a new South Africa where African and European cultures were valued equally, and writers could represent both as they wished. Thus, a body of literature was created that addressed a range of audiences and imagined the South African nation in different ways. This book explores Black Consciousness in order to demonstrate how South African writers have responded in various ways to the changing history and politics of their country.
Download or read book A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry written by Neil Roberts and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-06-09 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twentieth century more people spoke English and more people wrote poetry than in the whole of previous history, and this Companion strives to make sense of this crowded poetical era. The original contributions by leading international scholars and practising poets were written as the contributors adjusted to the idea that the possibilities of twentieth-century poetry were exhausted and finite. However, the volume also looks forward to the poetry and readings that the new century will bring. The Companion embraces the extraordinary development of poetry over the century in twenty English-speaking countries; a century which began with a bipolar transatlantic connection in modernism and ended with the decentred heterogeneity of post-colonialism. Representation of the 'canonical' and the 'marginal' is therefore balanced, including the full integration of women poets and feminist approaches and the in-depth treatment of post-colonial poets from various national traditions. Discussion of context, intertextualities and formal approaches illustrates the increasing self-consciousness and self-reflexivity of the period, whilst a 'Readings' section offers new readings of key selected texts. The volume as a whole offers critical and contextual coverage of the full range of English-language poetry in the last century.
Download or read book Soweto Poetry written by Michael J. F. Chapman and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Writing my Reading written by Peter Horn and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays are interventions in a cultural contestation in South Africa during the Seventies and Eighties. Some of them are more general in nature and were written in the first instance as public oral interventions in debates whose outcome contributed to the founding of South Africa's post-apartheid society. Other essays are more specifically aimed at poetic practices, particularly as these have been of crucial aesthetic and ultimately ethical importance in a critical phase of South Africa's painful development. Intimate knowledge of (and personal involvement in) the commitment of literature to concrete political situations informs these succinct and spirited essays, along with Horn's measured familiarity with European traditions of political, cultural and ideological thought. The topics covered include: the social context of South African poetry; poetry and apartheid; the praise-singing tradition and the liberation struggle; German documentary theatre and South African workers' theatre; the necessity of popular culture; post-Freudian readings and feminist aesthetics; censorship and society; and essays on individual South African poets (Jeremy Cronin; Wopko Jensma; Abduraghiem Johnstone; Mzwakhe Mbuli; Mongane Serote; Ari Sitas).
Download or read book Rewriting Modernity written by David Attwell and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.
Download or read book The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English Since 1945 written by Gareth Cornwell and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-13 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the outset, South Africa's history has been marked by division and conflict along racial and ethnic lines. From 1948 until 1994, this division was formalized in the National Party's policy of apartheid. Because apartheid intruded on every aspect of private and public life, South African literature was preoccupied with the politics of race and social engineering. Since the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990, South Africa has been a new nation-in-the-making, inspired by a nonracial idealism yet beset by poverty and violence. South African writers have responded in various ways to Njabulo Ndebele's call to "rediscover the ordinary." The result has been a kaleidoscope of texts in which evolving cultural forms and modes of identity are rearticulated and explored. An invaluable guide for general readers as well as scholars of African literary history, this comprehensive text celebrates the multiple traditions and exciting future of the South African voice. Although the South African Constitution of 1994 recognizes no fewer than eleven official languages, English has remained the country's literary lingua franca. This book offers a narrative overview of South African literary production in English from 1945 to the postapartheid present. An introduction identifies the most interesting and noteworthy writing from the period. Alphabetical entries provide accurate and objective information on genres and writers. An appendix lists essential authors published before 1945.
Download or read book On Literary Attachment in South Africa written by Michael Chapman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reflects on the "literary" in literature. Less ideologically construed, more affirmative of literary attachment, the study adopts a style of intimacy – its "tough love" – in a correlation between the creative work and the critical act. Instead of configuring literary works to "state-of-the-nation" issues – the usual approach to literature from South Africa – the chapters keep alive a space for conversation, whether accented inwards to locality or outwards to the Anglophone world: the world to which literature in South Africa continues to belong, albeit as a "problem child". A postcolony that is not quite a postcolony, South Africa is richly but frustratingly textured between Africa and the West, or the South and the North. Its literature – hovering on the cusp of its locality and its global reach – raises peculiar questions of reader reception, epistemological and aesthetic frame, and archival use. Are the Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee local writers or global writers? Is the novel or the short story the more appropriate form at the edges of metropolitan cultures? Given language, race, and culture contestation, how do we recover Bushman expression for contemporary use? How to consider the aesthetic appeal of two contemporaneous works, one in English the other in isiXhosa, the one indebted to Bloomsbury modernism the other to African custom? How does Douglas Livingstone attach the Third World to the First World in both science and poetry? What has a "born free" novelist, Kopano Matlwa, got to do with the Bard of Avon? In a time of theorisation, is it permissible for Lewis Nkosi to embody literary criticism in an autobiographical journey? How to read the rupturing event – the statue of Rhodes must fall – through a literary sensibility? Alert to the influence of critique, the study is equally alert to the "limits of critique". Reflecting on several writers, works, and events that do not feature in current publications, On Literary Attachment in South Africa releases literature to speak to us today, within the contours of its originating energy.
Download or read book Free lancers and Literary Biography in South Africa written by Stephen Gray and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1999 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection is concerned with the problems and pleasures of writing literary biography in the context of South African writing. Stephen Gray's introduction outlines the choice faced by the researcher: between writing revisionist history (à la Strachey) and the personal bias the portraitist must take into account when conducting the retrieval especially of lost and enigmatic figures (à la Symons). Concentrating on the unattached irregulars of the arts in South Africa - often the arts of their times - Gray stresses the value of the free-lance figure in the formation of an evolving colonial and post-colonial literature. Subjects included are: Charles Maclean, alias John Ross, who recorded his experiences of the Zulu King Shaka in Natal's first captivity narrative; Douglas Blackburn, rated as the successor of Swift for his satires of the Anglo-Boer War conflict; Beatrice Hastings, polymath journalist whose lovers included Katherine Mansfield and Amedeo Modigliani; Stephen Black, founder of indigenous South African drama in English; Edward Wolfe, the Bloomsbury painter who began as a child-actor in the mining town of Johannesburg; Bessie Head, who became the Botswana-based wise-woman of African literature before her untimely death in 1986, yet never knew her own origins; Etienne Leroux, the Free State rancher who, in Afrikaans, wrote much-banned postmodernist novels; Mary Renault whose bestselling novels set in Ancient Greece peculiarly represented the shutdown of democracy in apartheid South Africa; Sipho Sepamla, stalwart of the Soweto Poetry school which came to prominence after the 1976 Soweto uprising; and Richard Rive, novelist, cultural commentator and liberation icon, murdered in his prime. The portrait gallery of the figures who have shaped and defined the role of literature in South Africa is both revealing and provocative, showing the route taken by some lesser-known talents in their struggle to establish the rights of authors in an often indifferent or repressive state.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Literature and Politics written by Christos Hadjiyiannis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a long time, people had been schooled to think of modern literature's relationship to politics as indirect or obscure, and often to find the politics of literature deep within its unconsciously ideological structures and forms. But twentieth-century writers were directly involved in political parties and causes, and many viewed their writing as part of their activism. This Companion tell a story of the rich and diverse ways in which literature and politics over the twentieth century coincided, overlapped – and also clashed. Covering some of the century's most influential political ideas, moments, and movements, nineteen academic experts uncover new ways of thinking about the relationship between literature and politics. Liberalism, communism, fascism, suffragism, pacifism, federalism, different nationalisms, civil rights, women's rights, sexual rights, Indigenous rights, environmentalism, neoliberalism: twentieth-century authors wrote in direct response to political movements, ideas, events, and campaigns.
Download or read book Imperial Leather written by Anne Mcclintock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.
Download or read book Poems at the Edge of Differences written by Renate Papke and published by Universitätsverlag Göttingen. This book was released on 2008 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study consists of two parts. The first part offers an overview of feminism's theory of differences. The second part deals with the textual analysis of poems about 'mothering' by women from India, the Caribbean and Africa. Literary criticism has dealt with the representation of 'mothering' in prose texts. The exploration of lyrical texts has not yet come. Since the late 1970s, the acknowledgement of and the commitment to difference has been foundational for feminist theory and activism. This investigation promotes a differentiated, 'locational' feminism (Friedman). The comprehensive theoretical discussion of feminism's different concepts of 'gender', 'race', 'ethnicity' and 'mothering' builds the foundation for the main part: the presentation and analysis of the poems. The issue of 'mothering' foregrounds the communicative aspect of women's experience and wants to bridge the gap between theory and practice. This study, however, does not intend to specify 'mothering' as a universal and unique feminine characteristic. It underlines a metaphorical use and discusses the concepts of 'nurturing', 'maternal practice' and 'social parenthood'. Regarding the extensive material, this study understands itself as an explorative not concluding investigation placed at the intersections of gender studies, postcolonial and classical literary studies. Most of all, it aims at initiating a dialogue and interchange between scholars and students in the Western and the 'Third World'.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of African Literature written by Simon Gikandi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive reference work on African literature to date, this book covers all the key historical and cultural issues in the field. The Encyclopedia contains over 600 entries covering criticism and theory, African literature's development as a field of scholarship, and studies of established and lesser-known writers and their texts. While the greatest proportion of literary work in Africa has been a product of the twentieth century, the Encyclopedia also covers the literature back to the earliest eras of story-telling and oral transmission, making this a unique and valuable resource for those studying social sciences as well as humanities. This work includes cross-references, suggestions for further reading, and a comprehensive index.
Download or read book Stranger at Home written by Ashlee Neser and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the poetry, vision and deeply inhospitable context of one of South Africas most talented praise poets. The praise poet (imbongi) is a familiar cultural icon in contemporary South Africa. Public events as diverse as presidential inaugurations, openings of parliament, fashion shows and boxing contests begin with the rousing declamations of charismatic iimbongi. Yet until the institution of majority-rule, praise poets who sought to shock their audiences with dangerous truths could claim none of the prestige enjoyed by their present-day counterparts. Under apartheid, many praise poets either ceased to perform or abandoned the imbongi's duty to diagnose and criticize political and social ills. There was, however, one brilliant Xhosa imbongi called David Manisi, a poet widely acclaimed in his youth as the successor to the great SEK Mqhayi, who refused to capitulate to the ease of silence or complicity. As documented by Jeff Opland in The Dassie and the Hunter (UKZN Press), Manisi worked tirelessly and in embattled contexts to address his audiences with demands, criticisms and aspirations they frequently misunderstood. The author of five volumes of Xhosa poetry and performer of inspired and elegantly crafted izibongo (praise poems), Manisi saw himself as a man of multiple places, allegiances and identities at a time when these markers of self were rigidly policed. Manisi's entrance on the local Transkeian poetry scene was legendary. He was for a time the most famous poet in Kaiser Mathanzima's court. He also wrote the first published poem about Nelson Mandela in 1954, hailing him prophetically as 'Gleaming Road'. Despite these early accomplishments, Manisi ended his career as a lonely performer in American and South African universities. He never met Mandela, his hero of old. Ashlee Neser examines Manisi as an inventive negotiator of rural and urban spaces, modernity and tradition, performance and publication, the local and the foreign.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of South African Literature written by David Attwell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 1451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Africa's unique history has produced literatures in many languages, in both oral and written forms, reflecting the diversity in the cultural histories and experiences of its people. The Cambridge History offers a comprehensive, multi-authored history of South African literature in all eleven official languages (and more minor ones) of the country, produced by a team of over forty international experts, including contributors from all of the major regions and language groups of South Africa. It will provide a complete portrait of South Africa's literary production, organised as a chronological history from the oral traditions existing before colonial settlement, to the post-apartheid revision of the past. In a field marked by controversy, this volume is more fully representative than any existing account of South Africa's literary history. It will make a unique contribution to Commonwealth, international and postcolonial studies and serve as a definitive reference work for decades to come.
Download or read book Middle Passages written by Kamau Brathwaite and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1993 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kamau Brathwaite's poetry offers stunning collages devoted to the history, mythology, and language of the African diaspora, and has gained him a world reputation. Middle Passages, his most recent collection, is his sixteenth poetry volume, but his first with an American publisher. With notes of protest and lament, the fourteen poems of Middle Passages address the effects of the Middle Passage of slavery on the New World, and celebrate great musicians (Ellington, Bessie Smith), poets, heroes of the resistance, and Third World leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, and Nelson Mandela. And as the London Times Literary Supplement noted, it is "a poetry that moves between rage and tenderness, doubt and displacement to affirmation... Middle Passages is a potent and effective book, a work of passion and integrity."
Download or read book Postcolonial African Writers written by Siga Fatima Jagne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reference book surveys the richness of postcolonial African literature. The volume begins with an introductory essay on postcolonial criticism and African writing, then presents alphabetically arranged profiles of some 60 writers, including Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tahbar Ben Jelloun, among others. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes that appear in the author's writings, an overview of the critical response to the author's work, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. These profiles are written by expert contributors and reflect many different perspectives. The volume concludes with a selected general bibliography of the most important critical works on postcolonial African literature.
