Browsing by Author "Mkhize, Khwezi"

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    Bildung beyond the borders: racial ambiguity and subjectivity in three post-apartheid bildungsromane
    (2019) Gamedze, Londiwe Hannah; Ouma, Christopher; Mkhize, Khwezi
    This dissertation examines the subject formation of racially ambiguous protagonists in K Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents, (2001), Yewande Omotoso’s Bom Boy (2011) and Zoe Wicomb’s Playing in the Light (2006), three Bildungsromane set in post-apartheid Cape Town—the mother city—whose violent, racist histories of colonial encounters, slavery and apartheid have led to a strong social sense of racial group belonging and racial exclusion. It is between and among these strictly policed racial groups that these novels’ protagonists seek belonging and a place in society from which to act and speak. Although different aspects of racial ambiguity are foregrounded in these novels—namely phenotypical, cultural and political—these protagonists are all socially marginalised and they must form their identities and subjectivities at the intersections of social trauma and personal trauma brought about and catalyzed by the racist history and current socio-cultural formations in South Africa. Across the two socioscapes of society and family, this trauma is manifest as a gap in language—there is no affirming or cogent racial subject position for these figures from which to speak—and at the level of the body, where circulations of feeling produce the racially ambiguous body as abject or non-existent. As a sub-genre, the post-colonial Bildungsroman has been widely appraised as reconfiguring the thematic, structural and narrative traditions of its classical European counterpart, and my dissertation argues that these novels support this understanding. I also claim that they trace their racially ambiguous protagonists’ subject formation not from an initial subject position of self-centered, willful childhood innocence and ignorance but from a state of non-subjectivity into existence itself—proposing that the trajectories of the novels trace an ontological rather than ideological shift.
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    (Dis)Remembering the slave mother: shame, trauma, and identity in the novels of Michelle Cliff and Zoë Wicomb
    (2016) Dressler, Mercedes Angelina; Mkhize, Khwezi
    The 'new' nationalisms that have developed in postcolonial Jamaica and South Africa invite the reclamation of the slave mother, while simultaneously 'cleansing' her body of slavery's atrocities for the purpose of national healing. Michelle Cliff's Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven, and Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and Playing in the Light, reveal this national practice of elision, and especially how the disremembering of slavery factors into personal identity formation. A deeper glance into this process exposes the lingering white supremacist, patriarchal symbolic at the centre of these nations, which maintains its centrality through the erasure of the slave mother and the disavowal of rape - two things which inevitably obscure the intersection of race and sex. The colonial residue of shame and trauma, left uninterrogated in the national script, imprints itself on women of colour and affects our legibility in society today. This dissertation evaluates the exclusion of slavery and the slave mother from the national script, and highlights this exclusion in postcolonial literature to reveal its impact on an intimate level. In my analysis, I interrogate the Lacanian symbolic to showcase the white male universality it employs, which alongside the intersecting discourses of race and sex, render women of colour illegible. Furthermore, in burying the slave past, the traumatic histories of rape are buried with it. Without a platform to excavate this trauma in the national space, there is a resulting disidentification with the nation among the women of colour it fails to represent. Additionally, I suggest that the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders that undeniably ensued postslavery, including Rape Trauma Syndrome (RTS) and what Joy DeGruy calls Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS), are ultimately undealt with and therefore have potentially intergenerational, melancholic ramifications. In narrating the lives of mixed-race characters, both Cliff and Wicomb reveal shame's transgenerational chokehold, resulting from neglected legacies of trauma. For the protagonists' ancestors, shame results in the denial of blackness, which manifests as a lost ideal among their descendants. As the search for identity collapses with ethnognesis and the reclamation of the black mother, Clare Savage's, Marion Campbell's, and David Dirkse's trauma remains unresolved, leading to a state of melancholia and unbelonging. Because the national scripts in Jamaica and South Africa are so exclusive, it becomes necessary to invent alternative modes of belonging. The projects of rememory and memory justice have the power to engender this sense of belonging, and therefore also create a platform for past trauma to be reconciled. In conclusion, I posit that the mining of folklore is crucial in the search for slave memory and collective healing, but also, when the erasure of slave memory has rendered these stories hidden, it is important to generate our own stories, memories, and truths.
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    My name is Afrika: Setswana genealogies, trans-atlantic interlocutions, and NOW-time in Keorapetse Kgositsile's life and work
    (2016) Phalafala, Portia Mahlodi; Samuelson, Meg; Garuba, Harry; Mkhize, Khwezi
    South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile lived in extraordinary times marked by extraordinary challenges and changes. Born in 1938, exactly a decade before the draconian apartheid regime came into power, his life and work emerge from the milieus of British colonial South Africa, apartheid South Africa, civil rights America, anti-apartheid movements, anti-colonial wars in Africa, anti-imperialism in Asia, cold war politics, and the eventual demise of both the Berlin wall and the apartheid regime in South Africa. His poetry responds to these times in illuminating ways. His poetic influences point to his Tswanacentred upbringing, his encounter with Afro-American oral and literary traditions, the styles and poetics of Drum writers, the outpouring of African literature he received from the Makerere conference of Uganda, and anti-colonial critical thinkers from Africa and its diaspora. At age twenty three, post-Sharpeville massacres, he was sent into exile by the leadership of the ANC, and he took with him a corpus of Tswana literature which would in/form his poetic. He readily immersed himself in the oral and written tradition of Afro-America while in exile in the United States of America. His work interweaves the oral and literary traditions of black South Africa and black America, revealing a dynamic and complex relationship between the two geographical sites. Where oral traditions have largely been left out of the broader narrative of modernity, this study demonstrates how oral traditions remain alive and are reinvigorated, providing a resource that is then carried across the Atlantic and renewed in translation, rather than left behind to ossify. Kgositsile's prominent presence in black international periodicals and his collaborations with other diasporic cultural, political and musical figures there show that the relationship between the two geographical sites is more complex than its current positioning of Afro-America as a vanguard on which Africans model themselves. Through a reading of Kgositsile's revolutionary poetry, this study also shows how the indigenous resource base enables him to resolve the agonising temporal and spatial tensions presented by modernity's colonialism. He coins concepts that re-enchant the world through a poetic that fosters a dialogue between past and future, and traditional and modern in a simultaneous present he deems the NOW-time.
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    Whiteness as currency: colorism in contemporary fiction of the Anglophone Caribbean and the Cape
    (2019) Smit, Brittani Reniece; Mkhize, Khwezi; Ouma, Christopher
    People of colour are often expected to meet externally determined standards of whiteness in exchange for privileges and benefits. The specific details regarding how those standards are determined vary based on context and depend on a variety of socio-historical factors. Regardless of the context, meeting these standards typically requires rejection of indigenous ways of being in favour of foreign ideals. Colorism, which is discrimination based on skin tone, plays a significant role in determining the success of attempts at assimilation because of the long history of preferential treatment associated with light skin throughout slavery and colonialism which persists today. This dissertation is an investigation of the complex interplay between race, colour, class and gender in contexts characterised by colorist hierarchies in the shadow of the British Empire. It focuses primarily on texts written by and about women and foregrounds gendered experiences of race in the Cape region of South Africa and Anglophone Caribbean, highlighting the unique experiences of women of colour in relation to colorism and intersectional class-based discrimination in post-colonial/apartheid spaces. I examine the cultural, social and psychological impact of the classist and colorist ideologies born out of the similar histories of colonialism, slavery and indentured servitude in the Anglophone Caribbean and South Africa, specifically through the lens of contemporary literature written by authors whose work displays a particular sensitivity to these intersections. I am especially interested in the paradoxical relationship between derision and desire that accompanies aspirations towards whiteness and appropriations of European and particularly British cultural norms for people of colour in these contexts. The persistence of this tension as a trope in post-colonial/apartheid spaces resists the narrative of progression suggested by the political rhetoric of multicultural unity espoused by the governments of South Africa and the Caribbean and the retrospective writing analysed in this project functions as a palimpsest belying the optimism of current times.