Browsing by Author "Brink, André P"

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    The dialectic between African and Black aesthetics in some South African short stories
    (1993) Nakasa, Dennis Sipho; Brink, André P
    Most current studies on 'African' and/or 'Black' literature in South Africa appear to ignore the contradictions underlying the valuative concepts 'African' and 'Black'. This (Jamesonian) unconsciousness has led, primarily, to a situation where writers and critics assume generally that the concepts 'African' and 'Black' are synonymous and interchangeable. This study argues that such an attitude either unconsciously represses an awareness of the distinctive aspects of the worldview connotations of these concepts or deliberately suppresses them. The theoretical and pragmatic approach which this study adopts to explore the distinctive aspects of the worldview connotations of these concepts takes the form, initially, of a critique of such assumptions and their connotations. It is argued that any misconceptions about the relations between the concepts 'African' and 'Black' can only be elucidated through a rigorous and distinct definition of each of these concepts and the respective world views embodied in them. Each of the variables of these definitions is also examined thoroughly through an application of, inter alia, Frederick Jameson's 'dialectical' theory of textual criticism, Pierre Macherey's 'theory of literary production' and also through the post-colonial notions of 'hybridity' and 'syncreticity' propounded by Bill Ashcroft et.al (eds). In this way the study examines the dialectical interplay between, for instance, such oppositional notions as 'African' and 'Western' (place-conscious), 'Black' and 'White' (race-conscious), and other forms of ideological 'dominance' and 'marginality' reflected in the 'African' and/or 'Black' writers' motivations for the acquisition, appropriation and uses of the language of the 'other' (i.e. English) and its literary discourse in South Africa, Africa and elsewhere in the world. A close textual reading of the stories in Mothobi Mutloatse's (ed) Forced Landing, Mbulelo Mzamane's (ed) Hungry Flames underlies an examination of the processes of anthologisation and their implications of aesthetic collectivism, reconstruction and world view monolithicism which repress the distinctive world outlooks of the stories in these anthologies. The notions of aesthetic monolithicism implicit in each of these anthologies are interrogated via the editors' truistic assumptions about the organic nature of the relations between the concepts 'African' and 'Black'. The notion of a monolithic 'African' and 'Black' aesthetic is further decentred through a close textual reading of the uses of the 'African' and 'Black' valuative concepts in the short story collections The Living and the Dead and In Corner B by Es'kia (formerly Ezekiel) Mphahlele. The humanistic pronouncements in Mphahlele' s critical and short story texts suggest various ways of resolving the racial demarcations in both the 'Black' and 'White' South African literary formations. According to Mphahlele, a predominant racial consciousness inherent in the racial capitalist mode of economic production has deprived South African literature and culture an opportunity of creating a national humanistic and 'Afrocentric' form of aesthetic consciousness. The logical consequence of such a deprivation has been that the racial impediments toward the formation of a single national literature will have to be dismantled before the vision of a humanistic and 'Afrocentric' aesthetic can be realised in South Africa. The dismantling of both the 'Black' and 'White' monolithic forms of consciousness may pave the way toward the attainment of a synthetic and place-centred humanistic aesthetic. Such a dismantling of racial monolithicism will, hopefully, stimulate a debate on the question of an equally humanistic economic mode of production.
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    Die desentralisasie van die subjek : 'n post-strukturalistiese beskouing van Breytan Breytenbach se Die Ysterkoei moet sweet en ("YK")
    (1995) Smuts, Susanna Elizabeth; Hambidge, Joan; Brink, André P
    The study attempts to indicate how frames of reading which presuppose a definable subject and a hierarchy of real poet and poem are problematized and transgressed by the Breytenbach texts. How these texts confront the normative, predetermined and rigid definitions of the subject and subject positions is one of the challenges faced in this work. It is argued that the texts under scrutiny depict literature as a terrain where stereotypical social codes are destroyed and recreated and where the symbolic order is challenged.
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    Fugues : seven short stories
    (2001) Watson, Mary; Brink, André P
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    Irony and otherness : a study of some recent South African narrative fiction
    (1999) Geertsema, Johan Hendrik; Brink, André P
    This study considers the relation between irony and otherness. Chapter 2 shows that there is little agreement on the politics of irony in critical discussions. Nevertheless, irony and otherness do appear to be linked in many of these discussions. Chapter 3 offers a consideration of Emmanuel Levinas's conception of ethics in terms of his understanding of the other as face and trace. The tendency of language to foreclose on otherness by reducing it must be interrupted, while otherness must, nonetheless, be Said. The chapter concludes with an attempt to relate Levinas's conception of otherness - as the interruption of conceptualising otherness - to Paul de Man's conception of irony as permanent parabasis in terms of the tropes of prosopopoeia and catachresis. Any representation of the other must be interrupted continually as it is a prosopopoeia of otherness (in that it gives otherness a face) and therefore a catachresis (for the other has no face and must be given one). The task with which the (reading) self is faced is ironic in that it consists at once of positing and interrupting the face given to the other. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are attempts at reading the interplay of irony and otherness in selected recent South African fiction. Van Heerden's Kikoejoe, as an allegory of the refusal to narrativise otherness, is read as being caught in the double bind of irony; Matlou's Life at Home is read as a text intimating an otherness at the heart of domesticity and within the reader; and, finally, Coetzee's Age of Iron is read as a text in which confession is the nexus of the relation between irony and otherness. This study brackets the political in order to examine the relationship between irony and otherness from the vantage point of Levinas's 'conception' of the other. The task remains to consider whether it is possible to approach irony ethically, or ethics ironically, and to consider the political ramifications of the relation between irony and otherness postulated in this study.
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    Limited possibilities : agency and subaltern subjectivity in four South African allegories
    (1998) Fick, Angelo Carlo; Brink, André P
    This thesis examines the representation of the negotiation of black women's subjectivity in four South African allegorical novels. Using aspects of postmodern discourse, and feminist and postcolonial literary and cultural theories on identity formation and subjectivity, I propose that it is in the allegorical mode that the four writers are able to offer black women as female gendered subalterns the space to negotiate subjectivity and to assert agency. Given the history of sexism, racism and imperialism in South Africa, the politics of place impact crucially on the practice of writing literature, so that the tensions between the representation of others and self-representation becomes crucial in identity formation. Through the four texts, I propose that there is a spectrum of practices, and that each offers different possibilities for black women's subject formation: from the most limiting liberal discourses, through the interrogation of those discourses, to an autobiographical moment of self-reclamation.
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    Post-environmentalism, the deep ecology/ecofeminist debate, and Surfacing : rereading environmental theory
    (1993) Wells, Merna; Brink, André P
    I have taken my notion of 'Post-Environmentalism' from John Young's book of the same name which seemed to me to provide an eclectic and essentially deconstructive approach to the debate surrounding 'the environmentalist crisis'. As the term suggests, the debate is one subject to essentialist thinking which constitutes it as simple and singular. In particular I am interested in the ways in which that logic is one of specularity, forwarded by a scientific privileging of ocular epistemology. I therefore use the strategy of 'Post-Environmentalism' in so far as it provides a way of making use of the historical and political importance of all the discourses involved, in particular Deep-Ecology and Ecofeminism, without privileging one over another. However, I also point out ways in which this mapping project is subject to the same specular logic. In so far as Surfacing is a postmodernist text which constantly relativizes the discourses of, in particular but not exclusively, ecofeminism and science, it functions like 'Post-Environmentalism' to deconstruct the specific problems of each. In particular I look at the way in which the narrator uses metaphor to deconstruct rational masculinist thought and create the possibility of an empowering subject position for women, nature and fiction as a marginalized genre.
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    White discourse in post-independence Zimbabwean literature
    (1994) McClelland, Roderick William; Brink, André P
    Literally hundreds of novels were written by white Rhodesians during the U.D.I. era of the 1960s and 1970s. Since Independence, however, not much more than a handful of literary texts have been produced by whites in Zimbabwe. This dissertation, therefore, involves an interrogation of both white discourse and the (reduced) space for white discourse in postcolonial Zimbabwean society. In addition to the displaced moral space, and the removal of the economic and political power base, there has been an appropriation of control over the material means of production of any discourse and white discourse, which has become accustomed to its position of superiority due to its dominance and dominating tendencies, has struggled to come to terms with its new, non-hegemonic 'space'. In an attempt to come to some understanding of the literary silence and marginalisation of white discourse in post-independence Zimbabwe there has to be some understanding of the voice that was formed during the British South Africa Company's administration and which reached a crescendo of authoritarian self-assertion at the declaration of unilateral independence. Vital to this discussion (in Part I) is an uncovering of the myths that were intrinsic to white discourse in the way that they were created as justification for settlement and to propagandise the aggressive defence of that space that was forged in an alien landscape. These myths have not been easily cast aside and, hence, have made it so difficult for white discourse to adapt to post-colonial society. Most Rhodesian novels were extremely partisan and promulgated these myths. Part II, discusses ex post facto novels about the war (from the white perspective) to investigate whether white discourse is recognising the lies that make up so much of its belief system. This investigation of this particular perspective of the war, then, will help to define at what stage white Zimbabweans are at in the development of a national culture. Part III takes this discussion of acculturation and national unity further. Furthermore, through the discussion of a number of novels in this chapter, it is argued that white discourse is struggling to come to terms with its non-hegemonic position and is continuing to attempt to assert its control. The 'space' available to the early settlers' discourse for appropriation, however, has been removed and, in the reduced space available to white discourse, one continued area of possible control is that of conservation.