Browsing by Author "Misbach, Abdul Waghied"

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    Postcolonial minoritarian characters : transformative strategies for re-mediating raced marginalisation in South African English fiction
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-03) Misbach, Abdul Waghied; Murray, Sally-Ann; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation consists of a research component titled “Speak, Love” and a creative component, the original novel Time Will Tell. The research essay is informed by strategic postcolonial imperatives and explores selected literary transformative strategies for remediating raced and related marginalisations to advance a social justice agenda. In adopting a minoritarian theoretical approach to fiction writing, it engages with silences of race, gender, belief and class. The creative manuscript, Time Will Tell, adopts certain narrative devices (among them the counterfactual, satirical and fabulist) to narrow the distance between minority and dominant ideologies. The research component emphasises a humanistic thinking that seeks to develop affinity, rather than divisions, between cultures, much like Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur, or World Literature. The research draws on postcolonial ideas in an attempt to understand and dissect the manner in which certain canonical texts in English, including those of J.M. Coetzee, continue to effect social divisions rather than encourage unity. The study offers original insight that (in an approach not yet seen in Coetzee scholarship), argues for a clear link between Disgrace and Chaim Potok’s 1975 novel In the Beginning, whose protagonist is also named David Lurie. In my doctoral novel manuscript, I suggest that the much-lauded Coetzee harbours Orientalist and Islamophobic tendencies, supported and promoted by influential members of the academy and publishing. My discussion demonstrates, additionally via the novels of other authors, how deep-rooted prejudicial attitudes have sedimented, even among seemingly progressive thinkers and publishers. The creative part of the dissertation, Time Will Tell, employs absurdist and fabulist narrative devices to comment on the state of South African society, with the ‘reawakening’ of various historical figures into a tense, divided nation marked by malevolent machinations and counter-strategising. My main characters include Nelson Mandela (renamed Atallah in an allusion to Shakespeare’s Othello), Will (a version of William Shakespeare and The Tempest’s Prospero), Zarqa (a figuration of Sycorax and the mythical Arabian prophetess Zarqa Al-Yamamah), and Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd (renamed Henry Farwood). We also have Adolf Hitler (renamed Adi Hiedler), and Leni Riefenstahl (renamed Hélène Stahl). The primary inspiration for my novel is Timur Vermes’ Look Who’s Back (2014), a popular work which reanimates Adolf Hitler as a mass media celebrity in contemporary Germany. Through what might at first appear a preposterous premise (as in the Vermes novel), my narrative uses satirically layered storytelling methods to prompt trenchant questions about such issues as economic exploitation, systemic racism, and entrenched historical privilege. My novel reminds us, as scholars Heynders and Bax have noted, of the efficacy of a “provocative realist setting” which may serve “as an obvious imaginary construct” in order to give a narrative “an innovative specific urgency” via a premise that “critiques actual events and concerns”. One of the dissertation’s key research questions expressed in the novel is the reimagining of canonical works (combining homage and critique) from the perspective of minor, marginalised characters. I effect this through a literary-imaginative disrupting of received Historical Truths and inherited (life) stories.