Department of English

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Browsing Department of English by browse.metadata.advisor "Graham, Lucy"

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    The apartheid censors' responses to the works of Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral and Steve "Bantu" Biko
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Ross, Tamlyn Sue; Graham, Lucy; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis explores the ways in which the censors during the apartheid era responded to the works of three black liberation theorists; namely Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral and Steve Biko. Although other studies of apartheid‐era censorship have been published, this is the first to examine the censors’ reactions to the work of key African liberation writers. Apartheid in South Africa brought with it a stringent system of governance, which included a board of censors who would decide, according their interpretation of the laws of the time, whether a publication was considered to be “desirable” or “not undesirable.” One of the major themes examined in the thesis is the interface and tension between the specific and the transnational. As we shall see, all three liberation theorists put forward Pan‐African ideas of liberation, but often explicated upon the specificities of their particular liberation struggles. In a strange act of mirroring, while upholding the idea of South Africa as “a special case” (exempt from the norms of international human rights law), the apartheid‐era censors were concerned about the spread of Pan‐African theories of liberation. Beginning with Fanon, I speculate on the reason why Black Skin White Masks was not banned in South Africa, though Fanon’s later works to enter the country were banned. I also examine Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers, which was influenced by Fanon’s theories, and censorship, arguing that the “likely readers” or “likely viewers” of revolutionary material included not only possible revolutionaries, but also paranoid networks of counterinsurgency. I then move on to examine the apartheid censors’ responses to the works of Amilcar Cabral, outlining the interface and tension between local and continental as described above. The final chapter, which deals with the censors’ responses to Steve “Bantu” Biko’s I Write What I Like as well as Donald Wood’s Biko, the film Cry Freedom and other Biko related texts and memorabilia, has some surprises about the supposedly “liberal” censors’ responses to what they deemed to be “undesirable” and “not undesirable” literature.
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    Perspectives of estrangement : England and Englishness in the novels of Justin Cartwright
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Buchanan, Andrea Susan; Graham, Lucy; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis explores how Justin Cartwright’s perspective on Englishness, as a South Africanborn writer living and writing in England, is played out in his novels. Four of Cartwright’s novels with English settings are analysed: In Every Face I Meet (1995), The Promise of Happiness (2004), To Heaven by Water (2009) and Other People’s Money (2011). Cartwright’s position as a self-conscious observer of English life is revealed as eliciting a nuanced critique of Englishness. It is argued that Cartwright adopts something of an anthropological approach towards his English subjects, and that this troubles the traditional gaze of the Western anthropologist upon the “other”. At the same time, his protagonists are represented with humane sympathy, though this is often tempered with irony. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s ideas about race and multiculture in England and Robert J.C. Young’s The Idea of English Ethnicity, this thesis discusses Cartwright’s presentation of Englishness as both potentially inclusive and exclusive. Cartwright also sets England against America, and more significantly, against Africa. Cartwright’s portrayal of Africa is shown to reveal his somewhat ambivalent attitude towards his birthplace. Throughout the thesis, Cartwright’s novels are discussed with an awareness of the influence that the social philosopher Isaiah Berlin has had on the author, particularly with regard to his critique of idealism and his espousal of value pluralism and liberal humanism. Yet it is also suggested that Cartwright’s liberal humanism may be intertwined with his complex and ambivalent attitude towards Africa. Moreover, the ironic tone and postmodern, metafictional elements of these novels perform Cartwright’s belief in value pluralism in interesting ways. The relationship between literature, art and national fictions is furthermore discussed, in conversation with Benedict Anderson’s ideas about nationalism. This thesis provides a close-reading of the works of this under-researched author and examines the complexity of his “estranged” position towards Englishness.
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    Writing marginality : history, authorship and gender in the fiction of Zoe Wicomb and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Ngwira, Emmanuel Mzomera; Graham, Lucy; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis puts the fiction of Zoë Wicomb and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie into conversation with particular reference to three issues: authorship, history and gender. Apart from anything else, what Wicomb and Adichie have in common is an interest in the representation of marginalised or minority ethnic groups within the nation - the coloured people in the case of Wicomb, and the Igbo in the case of Adichie. Yet what both writers also have in common is that neither seems to advocate the reification of these ethnic groups in reformulations of nationalist discourse. The thesis argues that through their focus on various forms of marginality, both Wicomb and Adichie destabilise traditional notions of nation, authorship, history, gender identity, the boundary between domestic and public life, and the idea of “home”. The thesis focuses on four main topics, each of which is covered in a chapter: the question of authorial voice in relation to history; perspectives offered by women characters in relation to oppressive or traumatic historical moments; oppressive or traumatic histories intruding into the intimate domestic space; and the issue of transnational migration and its (un)homely effects. Employing concepts of metafiction and mise-en-abyme self-reflexivity, the study begins by considering the ways in which Wicomb’s David’s Story and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun both reflect on the idea of authorship. Focusing on the ways in which each text draws the reader into witnessing authorship, the thesis argues that the two novels can be put into conversation as they both stage dilemmas about authorship in relation to those marginalised by national histories. Following on from this idea of marginalisation by nationalist histories, the thesis then proceeds to examine both writers’ foregrounding of women’s stories that are set in oppressive and/or violent historical times – under apartheid in the case of Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, and during the Biafran war in the case of Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Utilising ideas about gender, history and literary history by Tiyambe Zeleza, Florence Stratton and Elleke Boehmer, the study analyses how, beginning with father-daughter relationships, Wicomb and Adichie wean their female characters from their fathers’ control so that they may begin telling their own stories that complicate and subvert the stories that their fathers represent. Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s theory of “the uncanny” and Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial reading of that theory, the study then turns to discuss the ways in which oppressive national histories become manifest in domestic spaces (that are usually marginalised in national histories), turning those spaces into unhomely homes, in Wicomb’s Playing in the Light and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. In both novels, purity (whether racial or religious) is cultivated in the family home, but this cultivation of purity, which is reflected symbolically in the kinds of gardens each family grows, evidently has “unhomely” effects that signal the return of the repressed, of that which is disavowed in discourses of purity. Since both Wicomb and Adichie are African-born women authors living abroad, and since the “unhomely” aspects of transnational existence are reflected upon in their fiction, the study finally considers the forms of marginality to the national posed by the migrant. Transnational migration is examined in Wicomb’s The One That Got Away and in Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck, placing stories from these two recently published sets of short stories into dialogue.