Browsing by Author "Boswell, Barbara-Anne"
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- ItemOpen AccessA Soft Landing(2021) Mushwana, Wisani; Boswell, Barbara-AnneFor Andzani, home has always been a trigger for unpleasant memories, it has become the site for anxiety. After completing his Accounting Degree at the University of Cape Town and securing employment after, Andzani minimizes his visits back home to evade those memories home allows to seep through and confront him. He fears what this remembering will do to him, undo in him. Then one morning he receives a phone call from his uncle, Sontaga, to come fetch his mother, Violet, and take her to a mental institution because her mental health is deteriorating. As if given a last chance, on this trip, long-repressed memories flood his head and dull his days in order to force him to pay attention to them, digest them. In Dorothy L. Pennington conceptualisation of memory as a helix, she states that “the past is an indispensable part of the present which participates in it, enlightens it, and gives it meaning.” Taking this assertion as a point of departure, ‘A Soft Landing' is a novel that explores the implications of a past not decisively dealt with. The novel explores how the past gives meaning to present identities and how new identity formations are negotiated within the eye of the past participating in the present.
- ItemOpen AccessRepresentations of post-apartheid black womanhood in the novels of Angela Makholwa and Kopano Matlwa(2025) Dass, Sadie; Boswell, Barbara-AnneThis thesis examines representations of post-apartheid Black womanhood in the selected novels of South African authors, Kopano Matlwa (2006 & 2016) and Angela Makholwa (2017/2018) by placing them within the context of the changes in South Africa from the time of apartheid to the present. This study shows how these women interpret, through writing, the experiences of women and how women are positioned both in the home, and out, as agents of change in a changing society. The key question driving this research is: In what way do the works of Matlwa and Makholwa illustrate the issues of class and race in relation to women in post-apartheid South Africa? The study aims to fill the gaps in the literature concerning the representation of women's experiences in contemporary South Africa. Previous work has not yet fully addressed the degree to which women writers manage to convey the ideas and realities of gender and social construction in a society recovering from apartheid. In response to the research question this thesis employs a textual analysis in order to study the selected literature. This thesis assesses how the respective authors and their bodies of work, Matlwa's Coconut (2006) and Period Pain (2016) and Makholwa's The Blessed Girl (2017/2018), construct the identities of their characters. To this end, in this way the study discusses the problems faced by these women in society. The evidence suggests that Matlwa and Makholwa, to a certain extent, represent women's lives and perspectives from the angles of struggle against patriarchy and systemic oppression, as well as demonstrating the agency of women and their resilience and strength of character as can be seen from the text.
- ItemOpen AccessThe representation of the Ghost in contemporary South African novels by black writers(2025) Dladla, Asakhe; Boswell, Barbara-Anne; Moji, PoloThe thesis reads the representations of the ghost in South African novels by black writers. The reading is specific to the context of the ghosts haunting South Africa. I ask: how has the ghost been represented by black South African novelists, and what does it signal/tell? The thesis finds that there is a relative paucity of critical studies on depictions of ghosts haunting South African novels as written by black writers. Depictions of ghosts by black South African novelists proliferated after 2000. Black South African novelists writing ghosts emerged as a proliferating current of novel writing after 2000. I account for the representational strategies, functions, effects, and meanings the novelists use to produce the vitality of the depictions of their ghosts to the novel's work. For this study, I read the uses of the ghost in Yvette Christiansë's Unconfessed (2006), Vera the Ghost in Kagiso Lesego Molope's This Book Betrays My Brother (2012), and Senami Tladi's ghost in Niq Mhlongo's Way Back Home (2013). It is in the ghost that I sustain a hermeneutic interest in the novels cited. It is an interest in what the ghost is doing to thinking, reading, and interpreting the work of the black novelist's text that it haunts. There is a sustained interest in the ghost commonality across the works, the ghost representations across the novel texts. These are corresponding efforts: to sustain the hermeneutic interest in the ghost, the interest in interpreting the particularity of the work through the depiction of the ghost that haunts it and sustaining the interest in the ghost commonality haunting across the novel works. The interpretative implications of the represented ghosts of the dead pulled me to say: I am watching the ghosts of the South African novel.
- ItemOpen AccessThe Secret Lives of Polygamous Wives: African Feminist Consciousness and Writing in Selected Nigerian Polygamous Narratives(2025) Gaffoor, Zainab; Boswell, Barbara-AnneThis dissertation considers three novels by Nigerian women writers, which grapple with patriarchy within the context of polygamous marriage. These novels are The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives (2010) by Lola Shoneyin, Stay with Me (2017) by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, and The Joys of Motherhood (1979) by Buchi Emecheta. This dissertation examines the ways in which Shoneyin, Adébáyọ̀ and Emecheta demonstrate African feminist theory and consciousness in writing women characters in these novels. These authors not only expose patriarchal systems but also write women characters in ways that distance them from past, static, and stereotypical representations by male writers of African literature. This recasting of women characters gives the women characters a sense of agency, room for potential friendships and releases them from the pressures of being blamed for infertility. Shoneyin, Adébáyọ̀ and Emecheta expose how patriarchal rule in these novels manifests in more than one way. Traditionally, this rule comes from the man or husband; however, it is also enacted by the other wives in the marriages represented, as well as the mothers of patriarchs. Since African feminism concerns the liberation of women, it is vital that polygamous marriage narratives such as these are investigated as these kinds of marriages are often considered patriarchal.
- ItemOpen Access(Un)Exceptional: Representations of the Marginalisation of Black Female Queer Desire in Chinelo Okparanta's “Under the Udala Trees” and Leona Beasley's “Something Better Than Home”(2022) Mosiakgabo, Gogontle Rorisang; Boswell, Barbara-Anne; Busuku, SindiswaThis thesis aims to assess the representations of Black same-sex desiring women, specifically in the contexts of the United States of America and Nigeria. The primary aim of this study is to explore and critique the notion of U.S. sexual exceptionalism and homonormativity as theorised by Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages. In doing so, I aim to show that while the United States of America positions itself as more progressive than countries that continue to criminalise and persecute same-sex desiring people, queer people in both contexts continue to be marginalised and face similar challenges that are a result or cause of this marginalisation. This comparative thesis of Chinelo Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees and Leona Beasley's Something Better Than Home examines the ways in which religion; notions of secrecy and censorship; as well as compulsory heterosexuality and homophobic violence contribute to the marginalisation of Black queer women in both the United States of America and Nigeria.