Alert! Michael Chapman, Professor of English and Dean of Human Sciences at UKZN – and a noted critic and anthologiser – has published his lengthy introduction to the new issue of Current Writing, “Conjectures on South African Literature”, in full on his website.
Taking his cue from Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature”, Chapman wonders aloud whether “[if] the 1990s identified the challenge of “difference”, the challenge now might be “connection”. Is literature in South Africa today post-apartheid or post-postapartheid?”
Read his meaty take:
My title alludes of course to Franco Moretti’s influential article, “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000), in which he makes the point that world literature is not so much an object as a problem: a problem that asks for new perspectives and critical method. His point is germane to this 21st anniversary issue of Current Writing, thematically entitled “Beyond 2000: South African Literature Today”.
Our impulse to look beyond 2000 was spurred by Leon de Kock’s article, “Does South African Literature Still Exist..?” (2005). It is a question that is applicable not only to the essays in this double issue, but also to several of the critical works and articles of the last decade to which I shall refer in this Introduction. How do we delineate a field, ‘South African Literature’, in relation to descriptive and definitional terms that have begun to be used with some persistence: post-apartheid literature; South African literature in/after the transition; South African literary culture ‘now’ as distinct from ‘then’; South African literature in the transnational moment, the “transnational” being the formulation of Bill Ashford (2007) and others before him to denote the nation caught in movement – possibly transformational movement – “in-between” local and global demands. If post-apartheid usually means after the unbannings of 1990, or after the first democratic elections of 1994, or in/after the transition, then beyond 2000 begins to mark a quantitative and qualitative shift from the immediate ‘post’ years of the 1990s to another ‘phase’.1 It is a phase in which books tangential to heavy politics, or even to local interest, have begun to receive national recognition. An example is the double prize-winning novel, The Rowing Lesson (US 2007; SA 2008),2 by Anne Landsman, in which a father-daughter relationship exceeds the shaping force of any local scene. There is also, prominent on the shortlists, Michiel Heyns’s Bodies Politic (2008),3 a novel set in early 20th-century suffragette England. It is a phase in which the dominant figure of the 1990s, J M Coetzee, in his quieter, suburban Australian novels (2005; 2007), appears to have gone beyond his traumatised vision of his home country: that is, beyond Disgrace (1999). As I place Coetzee beyond Disgrace, however, the film version of his novel is about to be released on the South African cinema circuit (August 2009). If Landsman or Heyns inhabits a landscape outside of any apartheid/anti-apartheid narrative, the winning book in the Sunday Times-Alan Paton Prize category for non-fiction, Peter Harris’s In a Different Time (2008), returns us to the trial of the Delmas Four: ANC Mkhonto we Sizwe operatives who, in the late 1980s, militarily opposed the apartheid state. As the lawyer who defended the Four – at times against their own reluctance to grant the charges or the court even a modicum of legitimacy – Harris’s vivid ‘translation’ of legalities into human drama alerts us not only to a recurrent feature of literature from this country – its genre-crossing potential – but also to the fact that ‘then ‘ and ‘now’ retain a power of symbiotic memory. Phases of chronology are ordering conveniences rather than neatly separable entities.
Book details
- Omnibus of a Century of South African Short Stories edited by Michael Chapman
EAN: 9780868522333
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
- The New Century of South African Poetry edited by Michael Chapman
EAN: 9780868522418
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
- New Century of South African Short Stories edited by Michael Chapman
EAN: 9780868522272
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Photo courtesy CCA
