Browsing by Author "Moji, Polo"

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    Becoming “so terribly altered”: Reading transformations of the self in “The Fall of the House of Usher”
    (2021) Rawoot, Bilqis; Anderson, Peter; Moji, Polo
    In this thesis, I try to situate the effects of the text, specifically on the reader, by looking at ideas of transformation. My primary investigation is to determine the extent of the effect on the reader and the reader's reality, and if it is possible to alter the reader by inducing a transformation. I argue that transformation is possible as a “becoming”. Transformation depends on the text's reflection and verisimilitude to reality, which aids introspection and the consequent transitioning toward a new identity. I confront these concerns via close analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Whereas critics have read Poe while considering authorial intent and biography, and while limiting effect to emotion, I argue that the reader determines meaning and effect which can impose on identity. This inquiry deals directly with the interaction between the text and the reader, while acknowledging language as the common ground and means of communicating meaning and effect between them. Arnold van Gennep's theory of liminality provides a framework for transition, which I apply to character and reader becoming. And, it explains the interstitial space between the textual realm and the reader's reality. My close analysis of Poe's characters elucidates these tasks as I engage the text as a reflection of the reader's development, and as the narrator's interactions with the Usher siblings mimics the reader's relation to the text. Mikhail Bakhtin's polyphonic theory depicts the text as life-like and appropriate for this exchange. I consider metafiction for its ability to dissemble illusory distinctions between the text and reality, and as it induces consciousness in the reader. I have also placed Poe in conversation with Julia Kristeva for her insights into the psychoanalytic process of abjection, and as she illustrates the revision of identity. Much of this project deals with finding unity and reconciling the inherently contradictory elements of human existence. Ultimately, I consider how the process of textual interaction contributes to potential reader “becoming”. And, I argue that becoming and identity are intimately dependent on selfconsciousness of the vastness of human potential, as well as the dissolution of the very borders designed to limit and make sense of that vastness.
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    Film adaptation of the post-apartheid South African novel: re-examining the aesthetics of creation of disgrace
    (2022) Sawadogo, Denis; Moji, Polo; Ouma, Christopher
    While many scholarships of the film adaptation of Disgrace have championed the fidelity rhetoric of the film with respect to J.M. Coetzee's novel, and in so doing, have advocated the axiomatic hierarchy of literature over cinema, this dissertation challenges the fidelity discourse about the film and proposes new tropes for adaptation criticism beyond the classical paradigm. Central to the thesis is the argument that a re-examination of Steve Jacobs's feature film Disgrace unveils the inconsistency and inadequacy of the fidelity rhetoric as a language for adaptation criticism, positions the film as an independent genre with its specificity and poeticity, and allows for an intertextual dialogue with other post-apartheid South African and postcolonial African cinematic productions as a means of promoting adaptation criticism beyond the fidelity model. While cementing the film's independent status vis-à-vis the novel, the intertextual critique also allows for a rewriting of Jacobs's Disgrace that addresses its shortcomings and controversies. Hence, drawing upon structural narratologists such as Gerard Genette, postcolonial scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Frantz Fanon, and adaptation critics including Linda Hutcheon, Robert Stam, Alexie Tcheuyap, and Lindiwe Dovey, the dissertation explores at a time formal and thematic aesthetics of the film adaptation to diversify its critical avenues not only but also to bridge epistemological gaps left by previous studies which are limited to thematic hermeneutics.
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    Representations of deviant black british womxnhood in bernadine evaristo's girl, woman, other (2019): exploring aesthetic and narrative deviance in portraits of black diasporic womanhood through experimental fiction
    (2025) Mazibuko, Siphelele; Moji, Polo; Ouma, Christopher
    Bernardine Evaristo's 2019 novel, Girl, Woman, Other renders the portraits of twelve Black British womxn whose converging narratives span a distance of almost one hundred years. In this plurivocal experimental novel, the author's distinctive narrative style of fusion fiction, characterised by a free-flowing, punctuationless, prose poetic structure reconstructs and reimagines these twelve diasporic narratives through the form of the text. While the content of the overlapping and intersecting narratives offers deviant portraits of Black Womxn who live in opposition to traditional images of Black diasporic womxnhood from gendered, racialised and sexualised perspectives, this thesis aims to argue for the form of the novel and its narrative strategies as not just necessary but inevitable for the kind of deviance it renders. Through close critical analysis of the form and content of Girl, Woman, Other as well as comparative exercises with relevant diasporic literature, the development toward this experimental sub-genre of fusion fiction is traced alongside the development of Evaristo's corpus populated by a world of deviant womxn. Finally, by way of the complexity of the twelve Black British characters and the dimension created by the fusion fiction, Girl, Woman, Other is presented as not simply a re-construction and re-imagination of Black British womaxnhood through experimental fiction but as an aesthetic practice of liberation for Black diasporic women. This thesis contributes to the recognition of experimental Black woman authors who utilize their work to redefine and recover their narratives from within the rich margins of diaspora.
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    The anglophone problem in Francis Nyamnjoh's ethnographic fiction: negotiating nationalism, belonging and flexible Cameroonian citizenship
    (2025) Loombe, Leon Bomela; Ouma, Christopher; Moji, Polo
    The Anglophone Problem in Cameroon encapsulates deeply entrenched linguistic, cultural, and political tensions stemming from the historical marginalisation of Anglophones by the Francophone-dominated government. Despite official denials, Anglophone grievances are rooted in the government's failure to honour the 1961 Constitution, which established a federal structure recognising the equal status of Anglophone and Francophone regions (Konings & Nyamnjoh, 2003). The enforced unification of political parties into a single entity in 1966 (Ambanasom, 2013) and the abolition of federalism in 1972 contravened these constitutional principles, entrenching Francophone dominance. This marginalisation was further intensified in 1984 when a referendum rebranded the nation as “La République du Cameroun,” effectively erasing Anglophone identity as an equal partner in the union (Manjoh, 2028). Francis Beng Nyamnjoh is as an Anglophone Cameroonian writer and ethnographer. His ethnographic fiction portrays the shared struggles of individuals within a fragmented society, emphasising the dynamic and dialectical nature of their relationships. This study examines how Nyamnjoh addresses the complexities of belonging in this context, focusing on his eight novels: Mind Searching (1991), The Disillusioned African (1995), A Nose for Money (2006), Souls Forgotten (2008), The Travail of Dieudonné (2008), Married but Available (2009), Intimate Strangers (2010), and Homeless Waters (2011) through the lens of ethnographic fiction. It explores his depiction of the Anglophone issue, investigating themes of nationalism, belonging, and citizenship in Cameroon. By critically analysing the imaginary Mimboland setting of these novels as an allegory of Cameroon, and the allegorical citizenship of Mimbolanders, the study delves into the intricate process of identity formation and the socio-political challenges arising from Cameroon's postcolonial history, where Anglophone Cameroonians endeavour to secure their place within the broader national framework. Through this literary analysis, I argue that Anglophones must navigate a delicate balance of cultural loyalty, political alignment, and the pursuit of a more inclusive national citizenship. Nyamnjoh's fiction, in this context, reflects on contested concepts of belonging, national identity, and the fluid nature of citizenship within Cameroon's divided linguistic landscape. Ultimately, this dissertation sheds light on the ongoing quest for recognition and self-determination amidst the complex and evolving socio-political realities of Cameroon.
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    'The end of the world as we know it': imagining new possibilities for the Anthropocene through a study of Nigerian Africanfuturism
    (2023) Young, Lisbeth; Moji, Polo
    The imaginary of the Anthropocene as an environmental apocalypse facing the planet and calls for ecological literature from the perspective of the Global North masks the current environmental crisis in parts of the world that are “already living the apocalypse”. Likewise, science fiction has been historically centred in the West in its interrogation of apocalyptic scenarios. This thesis examines how Africanfuturism, a term coined by Nnedi Okorafor in 2019 to define a new African-focussed science fiction, reframes the imaginaries of the Anthropocene as a global environmental apocalypse from the perspective of the Global South. This study combines an analysis of Africanfuturist science fiction tropes and narrative strategies with an ecocritical reading informed by Rob Nixon's notion of “slow violence” to re-frame the urgency of climate change within the context of postcolonial Nigeria. Reading beyond representations of the current environmental crisis through genres such as petro-fiction, I concentrate on Tade Thompson's Wormwood trilogy (2018–2019), in conversation with other contemporary Africanfuturist novels set in Nigeria, namely Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon (2014), After the Flare (2017) by Deji Bryce Olukotun and Suyi Davies Okungbowa's David Mogo, Godhunter (2019). I argue that Africanfuturism allows for the re-imagination of the ecological crisis through depictions of the entanglement of the posthuman and nonhuman and the setting of a post-apocalyptic world providing a mechanism through which the extent of the crisis can be realised.
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    The representation of the Ghost in contemporary South African novels by black writers
    (2025) Dladla, Asakhe; Boswell, Barbara-Anne; Moji, Polo
    The 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.
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    (Un)Homely in Cape Town: contested space and the post-apartheid urban narrative
    (2021) Mahatey, Ayesha; Moji, Polo
    Negotiation of urban space is particularly pertinent to South African history as a site of social and spatial conflict resulting from the legislative practices and social engineering of the apartheid government in the form of the Group Areas Act (1950). As a postcolonial and post-apartheid city, Cape Town has the distinction of evolving from pre-apartheid's least segregated city to apartheid's most segregated city, with many of the injustices of the past perpetuated in the post-apartheid era by its current neoliberal order. Yet, in The Rediscovery of the Ordinary (1991), South African writer Njabulo Ndebele asserts that Johannesburg has always been, the centre of South African resistance and “spectacle” – and the object of studies such as Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2008). Located at the intersection of urban and postcolonial studies, this study is grounded by the framework of ‘critical urban theory' (Michel De Certeau, Henri Lefevre, Neil Brenner), which frames urban space as a “site, medium and outcome” of histories of social power. It therefore reads the post-apartheid narratives of The Woman Next Door (2016) by Yewande Omotoso, Thirteen Cents (2001) by Sello Duiker and Living Coloured: Because Black and White Were Taken (2019) by Yusuf Daniels, as representations of the city as “politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested and therefore malleable” space, by drawing on Sarah Nuttall's assumption of place – specifically the city – as a constitutive subject of certain narratives as well as Homi Bhabha's notion of the “unhomely”. The concepts of home, unhoming and homelessness are therefore used to establish how history and space collide to create a palimpsestic reading of Cape Town. Thus, the study maps spatial contestation in central and peripheral locations of the city and raises questions of racialised and class-based (un)belonging as representative of the post-apartheid South African city.
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    Writing the Lagosian Homeland: the ambiguous and precarious African urban in Chris Abani's GraceLand (2004)
    (2025) Ohajunwa, Dionne; Moji, Polo
    Located at the intersection of Urban Geographies and Literary Studies, this study focuses on urban geographical considerations as they are applied to the depiction of the city of Lagos, Nigeria in Chris Abani's novel GraceLand published in 2004. While exploring the cartographies of urban space in the novel, the study applies principles and theories of Southern Urbanisms, notably AbdouMaliq Simone, Ato Quayson, Edgar Pieterse and so much more to reading Lagos as a representation of the African urban. The study offers a critical exploration of the ways that the city of Lagos is mapped by the diasporic author - firstly, on the Noir genre and any possible connections to be made to the novel; secondly on the perception of the homeland and how this feeds into the mapping of the city in the text; thirdly on the lived experiences of those who reside in the city, particularly the perspective of the main character who presents as a type of flaneur within it. The study ultimately hopes to highlight inherent complexities and ambiguities and contribute towards a modification of global perceptions of the African urban