Department of English

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https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/45

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Discourses of poverty in literature : assessing representations of indigence in post-colonial texts from Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015-03) Butale, Phenyo; Steiner, Tina; Gagiano, Annie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis undertakes a comparative reading of post-colonial literature written in English in Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe to bring into focus the similarities and differences between fictional representations of poverty in these three countries. The thesis explores the unique way in which literature may contribute to the better understanding of poverty, a field that has hitherto been largely dominated by scholarship that relies on quantitative analysis as opposed to qualitative approaches. The thesis seeks to use examples from selected texts to illustrate that (as many social scientists have argued before) literature provides insights into the ‘lived realities’ of the poor and that with its vividly imagined specificities it illuminates the broad generalisations about poverty established in other (data-gathering) disciplines. Selected texts from the three countries destabilise the usual categories of gender, race and class which are often utilised in quantitative studies of poverty and by so doing show that experiences of poverty cut across and intersect all of these spheres and the experiences differ from one person to another regardless of which category they may fall within. The three main chapters focus primarily on local indigence as depicted by texts from the three countries. The selection of texts in the chapters follows a thematic approach and texts are discussed by means of selective focus on the ways in which they address the theme of poverty. Using three main theorists – Maria Pia Lara, Njabulo Ndebele and Amartya Sen – the thesis focuses centrally on how writers use varying literary devices and techniques to provide moving depictions of poverty that show rather than tell the reader of the unique experiences that different characters and different communities have of deprivation and shortage of basic needs.
Evocations of poverty in selected novels of Meja Mwangi and Roddy Doyle : a study of literary representation
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-12) Ticha, Ignatius Khan; Gagiano, Annie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The study explores fictional representations of poverty in selected novels of Meja Mwangi and Roddy Doyle, respectively Kenyan and Irish – examining techniques of literary representation and how the two authors make imaginative use of various stylistic techniques and verbal skills in a selection of their texts to achieve compelling representations of poverty. The study recognizes that poverty is one of the most recurrent subjects of discussion in the world, that it is a complex and multifaceted concept and condition and that it affects societal, political and economic dimensions of life. The study considers the (broad) United Nations definition of poverty as: “… a human condition characterised by the sustained or chronic deprivation of the resources, capabilities, choices, security and power necessary for the enjoyment of an adequate standard of living and other civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights” (United Nations High Commission for Human Rights, 2002). Rather than suggest that fiction replaces other approaches in the study of poverty, the study calls for a complementary “conversation” between fiction and the social sciences in depictions of the condition of poverty. However, the study notes the advantage that fiction has in its nuanced exploration of the subject of poverty. In fact, fiction reflects social reality in interestingly subversive but also empowering ways – showing a unique way of dealing with difficult situations. Fiction is equipped with the subtle instruments and complex power of literary devices to articulate multiple layers of possible meanings and human experiences and conditions vividly and movingly – in ways that are accessible to a variety of readers. While giving a voice to the voiceless – the poor – narrative fiction opens inner feelings and thoughts of the depicted poor and enables the reader to probe deeply into the inner feelings of characters depicted; allowing the reader to develop a deeper understanding of the condition of poverty, but also allowing the reader to bring his or her interpretation to bear on what is represented. The five main chapters of the thesis are thematically arranged, but the analysis draws on a variety of theoretical paradigms including but not limited to those of Maria Pia Lara and Mikhail Bakhtin. Significant to the study is Maria Pia Lara’s ideas of literature as a “frame for struggles of recognition and transformation” (Lara, 1998: 7) and of the “illocutionary force” (1998: 5) of literature – its ability to articulate aspects of a human condition (such as poverty) vividly and compellingly. Bakhtin’s suggestion that “language is not self-evident and not in itself incontestable” (Bakhtin, 2004: 332) is important – capturing the idea of a distinctive flexibility of discourse in the novel and rejecting simplistic ideas that there is a single truth concerning a particular situation such as poverty.
Imagining the city in Zimbabwean literature 1949 to 2009
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-12) Muchemwa, Kizito Zhiradzago; Samuelson, Meg; Gagiano, Annie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: My thesis is on the literary imagining of the city in Zimbabwean literature that emerges as a re-visioning and contestation of its colonial and postcolonial manifestations. Throughout the seven chapters of the thesis I conduct a close reading of literary texts engaged in literary (re)creations of the city. I focus on texts by selected authors from 1949 to 2009 in order to trace the key aspects of this city imagining and their historical situatedness. In the first chapter, I argue the case for the inclusions and exclusions that are evident. In this historical span, I read the Zimbabwean canon and the city that is figured in it as palimpsests in order to analyse (dis)connections. This theoretical frame brings out wider relationships and connections that emerge in the (re)writing of both the canon and city. I adopt approaches that emphasise how spaces and temporalities ‗overlap and interlace‘ to provoke new ways of thinking about the city and the construction of identity. I argue for the country-city connection as an important dynamic in the various (re)imaginings of the city. Space is politicized along lines of race, ethnicity, gender and class in regimes of politics and aesthetics of inclusion and exclusion that are refuted by the focal texts of the thesis. I analyse the fragmentation of rural and urban space in the literary texts and how country and city house politico-aesthetic regimes of domination, exclusion and marginalisation. Using tropes of the house, music and train, I analyse how connections in the city are imagined. These tropes are connected to the travel motif found in all the chapters of the thesis. Travel is in most of the texts offered as a form of escape from the country represented as a site of essentialism or nativism. Both settlers and nationalists, from different ideological positions, invest the land and the city with symbolic political and cultural values. Both figure the city as alien to the colonised, a figuration that is contested in most of the focal texts of the thesis. Travel from the country to the city through halfway houses is presented as a way of negotiating location in new spaces, finding new identities and contending with the multiple connections found in the city. The relentless (un)housing in Marechera‘s writing expresses a refusal to be bounded by aesthetic, nationalist and racial houses as they are constructed in the city. In Vera‘s fiction, travel – in multifarious directions and in a re-racing of the quest narrative in Lessing – becomes a critical search for a re-scripting of gender and woman‘s demand for a right to the city. The nomadism in Vera‘s fiction is re-configured in the portrayal of the marginalised as the parvenus and pariahs of the city in the fiction of Chinodya and Tagwira. In the chapter on Chikwava and Gappah, in the contexts of spatial displacement and expansion, the nationalist nativist construction of self, city and nation comes under stress. I interrogate how ideologies of space shape politico-aesthetic regimes in both the country and the city throughout the different historical phases of the city. In this regard I adopt theoretical approaches that engage with questions of aesthetic equality as they relate to the contestation of spatial partitioning based on categories of race, gender and class. In city re-imaginings this re-claiming of aesthetic power to imagine the city is invoked and in all the texts it emerges as a reclaiming of the right to the city by the colonised, women, immigrants and all the marginalised. I adopt those approaches that lend themselves to the deconstruction of hegemonic figuration, disempowerment and silencing of the marginalised, especially women, in re-imagining the city and their identities in it.
Narrative enablement : constructions of disability in contemporary African imaginaries
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014-04) Lipenga, Ken Junior; Musila, Grace A.; Gagiano, Annie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis examines depictions of disability in selected African films, novels and memoirs. Central to the thesis is the concept of narrative enablement, which is discussed as a property that texts have for enabling the recognition of disability by the reader or viewer. In the thesis, I investigate the ways in which narrative enablement manifests in the texts. The motivation for the study comes from the recognition of several trends in current literary disability studies. Firstly, the study attempts to expand the theoretical base of current literary disability studies, which consists of ideas formed from a narrow epistemic archive. Similarly, the study also recognises that scholarship in the field mostly relies on a limited canon of texts, almost wholly drawn from the Western world. This study therefore allows a glimpse at an under-acknowledged archive of disability representation, which is then used to suggest the possibility of alternative ways of understanding disablement on the African continent and globally. The first chapter is meant as an entry point into some of the complex lives depicted in the thesis. In this chapter, I explore the intersection that the texts draw between disability and masculinity, illustrating the way this intersection evokes questions about how we understand the relationship between the two concepts. In the second chapter, I examine the way socio-political violence on the continent is represented as a cause of both disablement and disenablement. This chapter is an exploration of how disability is enmeshed with other social realities in people’s lives. The term disenablement is employed in order to capture the presentation of disablement amidst various forms of violent oppression. As it is portrayed in the majority of the texts studied in the thesis, disablement is a factor of social attitudes. My third chapter examines how these texts create dis/ability zones, areas where the reader/viewer witnesses the fluidity of socially constructed disablement in particular societies. As it is portrayed in the texts, and discussed in the thesis, this zone is a space where disabled characters encounter the ableist world. It is a space that allows the destabilization of entrenched notions about disability, and consequent recognition of disabled characters. The most explicit manifestation of narrative enablement occurs through creative intervention, which is the focus in the fourth chapter. In this chapter, I examine the role of various forms of creativity as they are enacted by the characters, arguing that they are manifestations of the characters making use of narrative enablement. In the texts, the disabled characters use unique modes of storytelling – not exclusively verbal – to narrate their story, but also to assert their belonging to particular familial, cultural, as well as national worlds.
Nation in crisis : alternative literary representations of Zimbabwe Post-2000
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-12) Nyambi, Oliver; Gagiano, Annie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The last decade in Zimbabwe was characterised by an unprecedented economic and political crisis. As the crisis threatened to destabilise the political status quo, it prompted in governmental circles the perceived 'need‘ for political containment. The ensuing attempts to regulate the expressive sphere, censor alternative historiographies of the crisis and promote monolithic and self-serving perceptions of the crisis presented a real danger of the distortion of information about the situation. Representing the crisis therefore occupies a contested and discursive space in debates about the Zimbabwean crisis. It is important to explore the nature of cultural interventions in the urgent process of re-inscribing the crisis and extending what is known about Zimbabwe‘s so-called 'lost decade‘. The study analyses literary responses to state-imposed restrictions on information about the state of Zimbabwean society during the post-2000 economic and political crisis which reached the public sphere, with particular reference to creative literature by Zimbabwean authors published during the period 2000 to 2010. The primary concern of this thesis is to examine the efficacy of post-2000 Zimbabwean literature as constituting a significant archive of the present and also as sites for the articulation of dissenting views – alternative perspectives assessing, questioning and challenging the state‘s grand narrative of the crisis. Like most African literatures, Zimbabwean literature relates (directly and indirectly) to definite historical forces and processes underpinning the social, cultural and political production of space. The study mainly invokes Maria Pia Lara‘s theory about the ―moral texture‖ and disclosive nature of narratives by marginalised groups in order to explore the various ways through which such narratives revise hegemonically distorted representations of themselves and construct more inclusive discourses about the crisis. A key finding in this study is that through particular modes of representation, most of the literary works put a spotlight on some of the major talking points in the political and socio-economic debate about the post-2000 Zimbabwean crisis, while at the same time extending the contours of the debate beyond what is agreeable to the powerful. This potential in literary works to deconstruct and transform dominant elitist narratives of the crisis and offering instead, alternative and more representative narratives of the excluded groups‘ experiences, is made possible by their affective appeal. This affective dimension stems from the intimate and experiential nature of the narratives of these affected groups. However, another important finding in this study has been the advent of a distinct canon of hegemonic texts which covertly (and sometimes overtly) legitimate the state narrative of the crisis. The thesis ends with a suggestion that future scholarly enquiries look set to focus more closely on the contribution of creative literature to discourses on democratisation in contemporary Zimbabwe.
Representations of troubled childhoods in selected post-1990 African fiction in English
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Nabutanyi, Edgar Fred; Musila, Grace A.; Gagiano, Annie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The study explores representations of troubled childhoods in post-1990 African narratives. Defining troubled childhoods as the experiences of children exposed to different forms of violations including physical, psychological, sexual and emotional abuse, the study reflects on depictions of such experiences in a selection of contemporary African fictional texts in English. The study‘s central thesis is that, while particular authors‘ deployment of affective writing techniques offers implicit analysis of troubled childhoods, the knowledge about this reality that such literary texts produce and place in the public sphere resonates with readers because of the narrative textures that both make knowledge concerning such childhoods accessible and create a sense of the urgent plight of such children. They render troubled childhoods grieveable. The study delineates three attributes of the selected texts that explain why such fictions can be considered significant from both social and aesthetic perspectives: namely, their foregrounding of intertwined vectors of violation and/or vulnerability; their skilful use of multi-layered narrative voices and their creation of specific posttraumatic damage and survival tropes. The four main thesis chapters are organised thematically rather than conceptually or theoretically, because representations of troubled childhoods are contextually and experientially entangled. Using Maria Pia Lara‘s notion of ―illocutionary force‖ and specific aspects of trauma and affect theory, the study focuses centrally on how the units of narration construct persuasive and convincing depictions of troubled childhoods while using fiction to convene platforms for reflection on the phenomena of child victims of war violence, abusive parenting, sexual predation and sexual violation.
Writing black: the South African short story by black writers
(Stellenbosch: University of Stellenbosch, 2008-03) Gaylard, Rob; Gagiano, Annie; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
This study attempts a re-reading and re-evaluation of the work of black South African short story writers from R.R.R. Dhlomo (circa 1930) to Zoë Wicomb (at the end of the 1980s). The short story, along with the autobiography, was the dominant genre of black writing during this period, and the reasons for this are examined, as well as the ways in which black writers adapt or transform this familiar literary genre. The title – “Writing Black” – alludes to well-known works by Richard Rive (Writing Black) and J.M. Coetzee (White Writing), and foregrounds the issue of race and racialised identities. While one would not want to neglect other factors (class, gender), it is hardly possible to underestimate the impact of racial classification during the apartheid era. However, the difficulty of asserting the unproblematic existence of a homogeneous “black” identity also becomes evident. The approach adopted here reflects the need to recognise both the singularity of particular texts (their “literariness”) as well as their embeddedness in their particular place and time (their “worldliness” or their “circumstantiality”). Literary texts are complex verbal artefacts of an unusual kind, but they cannot be separated from their contexts of production and reception; black writing in this country would be largely incomprehensible if this were not taken into account. Close attention is given to the obvious spatial, temporal and ideological shifts in South African cultural production during this period, and to the two major phases of black writing (the Sophiatown and District Six writers of the 50s, and the Staffrider writers of the 70s and 80s). The work of these writers is not, however, subsumed into a political meta-narrative. In particular, this study resists the tendency to lump the work of black writers into one large, undifferentiated category (“protest writing” or “spectacular” representation). This approach has had the effect of flattening out or homogenising a body of work that is much more varied and interesting than many critical accounts would suggest. Finally, the contribution of three writers of the “interregnum” (Ndebele, Matlou, Wicomb) is explored. What is of particular interest is their break from established conventions of representation: their work reveals a willingness to resist over-simplification, to experiment, and to explore issues of identity and gender. By examining these texts from the vantage point of the post-apartheid present, one is able to arrive at an enhanced understanding of the form that black writing took under apartheid, and the pressures to which it was responding.

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