Rewriting Modernity

by Attwell, David

• ISBN13: 9780821417126
• ISBN10: 0821417126
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-10-30
• Publisher: Ohio Univ Pr

Summary

Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africafrom the nineteenth-century writing of Tiyo Soga to Zakes Mda in the twenty-first centuryto international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. David Attwell provides a welcome complication of the linear black literary historyliterature as a reflection of the process of political emancipationthat is so often presented. He focuses on cultural transactions in a series of key moments and argues that black writers in South Africa have used print culture to map themselves onto modernity as contemporary subjects, to negotiate, counteract, reinvent, and recast their positioning within colonialism, apartheid, and the context of democracy.

Author Biography

David Attwell is Chair of Modern Literature (postcolonial studies) in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, United Kingdom. His previous work includes Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews and J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vi
Preface	ix
Introduction	1	(26)
1 The transculturation of enlightenment: The Journal of Tiyo Soga	27	(24)
2 Time and narrative: Writing at the mission	51	(26)
3 Modernising tradition: The Dhlomo-Vilakazi dispute	77	(34)
4 Fugitive pieces: Es'kia Mphahlele in the diaspora	111	(26)
5 Lyric and epic: The ideology of form in Soweto poetry	137	(32)
6 The experimental turn: Experimentalism in contemporary fiction	169	(36)
Notes	205	(10)
Select bibliography	215	(14)
Index	229