Browsing by Author "Croeser, Chantelle Claire"

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    Born with the caul : a fictocritical revisiting of race-d and queer(ed) his/stories
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-03) Croeser, Chantelle Claire; Sanger, Nadia; Murray, Sally-Ann; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Using fictocriticism, a mode that b(l)ends creative and critical writing, in this thesis I am led on a winding journey in which I explore elusive, intersectional accounts of various kinds of queer and Queer belonging. These are stories from the margins, and they coax me to engage the unsettled relations of my own white, Queer, Afrikaner identities. In so doing I come face-to-face with personal and cultural ghosts, who emerge from disparate clusters of history, story, interview, verse, folk tale, song lyrics, and scholarship. Divided (and yet assembled) into various entries, the thesis begins by contending with the haunting loss of much of my original interview archive with Queer womxn, conducted for a previous project, material I had intended to consider again, more critically, in respect of my own conflicted autoethnographic role in the interview process. For the present study, my point of departure in addressing this now missing archive takes a specific focus on an Afrikaans folk tale known as “The Curse of Boontjieskraal” and “The Curse of the De Wets”. I inventively (re)write and (re)read this material and the speculated aftermath of the curse as a queer story, and thinking around about (B)orderlands, queerness, hospitality, Afrikaner identity, and my growing awareness of the necessarily incomplete archive, I consider what this story can tell us about the politics of inclusion and exclusion, presence and absence. Here, I also write toward expanding the term ‘queer’ beyond the umbrella term for the LGBTQIAP+ community and therefore use ‘Queer’ to signify the LGBTQIAP+ community and ‘queer’ to signify the expanded term. The second path I follow traces the spiritual powers of being gebore met die helm, meaning 'born with a caul'. Using Achmat Dangor’s short story ‘Waiting for Leila’ (2001) and Chris Barnard’s film Paljas (1998), I delve into the queer abilities of caul bearers as receptive to haunting and boundary-blurring. Seeking the experience of haunting as a means of meeting my ghosts, I use folklore as a means to consider what it might look like to retrieve the insight of my helm via the narrative power of queer Afrikaner stories. The final path is one I take with Antjie Somers, a Queer, stigmatised, witch-like figure well-known among Afrikaans people. By bringing permutations of their story into conversation with writing about outcasts like witches and Queer people, I consider the parallels that might be drawn between the experiences and knowledge of such ostracised, unconventional figures. I also consider how Antjie’s story and the story of other queer figures might be able to guide us in the present toward a powerfully recuperative language of storytelling.
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    Queerly uncanny Afrikaner nationalism(s) : an affectively attuned queer reading of selected twentieth-century uncanny Afrikaans short stories
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-12) Croeser, Chantelle Claire; Viljoen, Louise; Du Toit, Catherine (Professor); Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Modern Foreign Languages.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT : In this dissertation I apply an affectively attuned queer comparative and close reading to selected uncanny Afrikaans tales that emerged as some of the first of their kind in written Afrikaans. The characters in the stories, the manner in which the stories are told, and the spaces in which they are set create an uncanny affective environment and can be productively (re)read at a queer angle. To explore these elements, I sketch the historical landscape and socio-political context in which these stories emerge. I situate my exploration within a bricolage of methodology and/as theory framework which consists of queer, affect, and Gordonian spectrality theory. For my consideration of the affective role of setting, I traverse the various haunted houses, land- and farmscapes in Eugène Marais’ “Die huis van die vier winde” and “Isaak Slyk” (1927), and C.J. Langenhoven’s “Volksraadlid Duiwenal se verhaal: Die bouval op Wilgerdal” (1972/1924). Staying with spaces I turn my body toward the queer characters that populate these spaces by looking at C. Louis Leipoldt’s “Die Koranna se kopbeen” (1927), C.J Langenhoven’s “Ds. Enkeldoorn se verhaal: Die hangende gedaantes” (1972/1924), and Eugène Marais’ “Isaak Slyk” (1927). I then consider the queer manner in which these stories are told by comparing “Die huis van die vier winde” and C.J. Langenhoven’s “Die hangende gedaantes” (1972/1924) to the embedded structure of Guy De Maupassant’s “Mother of Monsters” (2004/1883), and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1960/1839). I also compare the selected tales to the /Xam tales “Nag en duisternis en hulle drie dogters”, “Vlakte is die tweede dogter”, “Hoe B— stories vertel”, “Berge is die oudste dogter” (2009/1919) as well as “Kraai se vernedering”, and “’n Kommando teen B—” (2010/1921) as retold by G.R Von Wielligh. In particular, I show that the selected Afrikaans tales queer the embedded storytelling modes by incorporating elements of /Xam stories, situating themselves within Southern African storytelling traditions rather than purely Western uncanny traditions. I conclude my study by showing that the ghosts who speak affectively through these stories are all born from the terror enacted by the establishment and expansion of Afrikaner identity as imagined by Afrikaner nationalists. These ghosts signal that these authors and their contexts were haunted by the white Afrikaner’s tenuous relationship with the land (most prominently in the form of the plaas); the survival of the Afrikaner family unit as means to maintain ownership of the land through the heteronormative marriage’s successful continuation of the Afrikaner lineage; the violent construction of borders that attempt to isolate the Afrikaner (family) physically, culturally, and linguistically from Black and Brown people under of the guise of protection; the brutal and genocidal enforcement of the denial of the central role of indigenous people in the creation of the Afrikaans language and culture; and the very affects that are involved in, shape, and through which each of these operate. Finally, I speculate about and show the ways in which these ghosts continue to haunt Afrikaners today.