Schaffer & Smith

Chapter 3: Truth, Reconciliation, and the Traumatic Past of South Africa. 

from Human Rights and Narrated Lives: the Ethics of Recognition 

(Palgrave, 2004)

by Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith

In this chapter, Schaffer and Smith look at the impact of storytelling and narratives in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. They give an overview of works published during and after apartheid.

One of the more fascinating discussions in this chapter is the focus on the TRC mandate. Schaffer and Smith observe that the TRC focused on a truth "based on people's 'perceptions, stories, myths and memories'" (66). This really struck me as an exceptional feature of the South African TRC. The role that the TRC saw for itself was building a "consensus about what version of the past will be credited" (66). The focus on subjective truths and the testimony of "ordinary people" in building a national morality, as Krog mentions, differs from a South Africa defined by single figures, like Mandela and Tutu. 

I can't help but wonder how these ideas compare to the TRC on the Residential Schools in Canada. In some ways, the Canadian TRC doesn't treat the testimonies as those of "ordinary people," but rather a people of the past. The difference is also connected to the power dynamics in Canada as opposed to South Africa. Perhaps, here, the oppressed people are not looked as reclaiming their land or their culture.

I think this chapter was quite successful in exploring the many kinds of narratives that can arise from national struggles. Schaffer and Smith's analysis sheds a lot of light on Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull. I saw the two works as good complimentary pieces because they deal with essentially the same issues in an academic and creative way, respectively. 

The presentation posed a lot of difficulties for me because of the book's length, and I've since been able to give more thought to Krog's work. One topic that I've found very compelling is "grief and narrative."

In the book, Dead But Not Lost: Grief Narratives in Religious Traditions, Robert Goss and Dennis Klass have a chapter about politics, policing grief, and individual and cultural narrative. One interesting thing they say is that "narration is always political because individuals make meaning of their lives within a power structure" (189). This is an idea I'd like to further explore in terms of genre and how genre might work against this power structure (or support it).

Questions (follow-up from presentation):

1. When Krog talks about being a journalist during the TRC, she says that the South African journalists asked “fewer and fewer critical questions” as time went on, while the international journalists questioned the lack of judicial proceeding and objectivity during the TRC (45).
   How does the response from the international community impact the way that national myths might be read? 
   
   
   I have been thinking a lot about the international responses to South African issues in particular and postcolonial issues at large. This is especially true after the most recent readings on feminism. But I also realised that I haven't been thinking about the South African, or postcolonial, response to the international community. This is something that I would really like to explore more because I think it would provide an important perspective on how international sharing of ideas flows. 
   
   
2. In Schaffer and Smith's article, they discuss some critiques of Krog's work concerning the re-framing of the testimonies. Some people didn't respond positively to their testimony being used. Mark Libin suggests that Krog's “guilt and sorrow, as well as self-loathing... overflows, engulfs and finally overwhelms the testimony of witnesses she endeavours to record” (qtd. in Schaffer and Smith, 78).
   Do you think Libin is right? Is preservation of testimony Krog's main goal? Is this type of text useful for a myth-making/nation-building project?
   
   
   I don't agree with Libin at all. I think that Krog's goal was not to preserve the narratives. The archival function of the TRC has done something closer to an objective preservation than narrative ever could. At the end of they day, every telling of a story is a re-framing and it is not something that is necessarily the goal or even the point of a certain narrative. Of course, I'm not saying to ignore the framing or the context -- that would be dangerous and unproductive. What I'm saying is that it is important to look at why and how a person decided to frame a story. Krog's choice of framing is what is important. This is something that I would like to follow up on in the final essay: how does grief enter the narrative and what is the relationship between grief and narrative in Krog's work? What about in the work of the TRC more broadly? What is the effect of PTSD on narrative? How does genre present these issues and how is Krog using genres to portray different forms of grief or suffering?

Rebecca L. Walkowitz

"Introduction"


from Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation
(Columbia University Press, 2006)


by Rebecca L. Walkowitz



I found Walkowitz's overview of traditional and divergent modes of reading international modernism very helpful. I had not thought a lot about cosmopolianism so this was a good introduction for me. Walkowitz defines critical cosmopolitanism as "a type of international engagement that can be distinguished from 'planetary humanism' by two principal characteristics: an aversion to heroic tones of appropriation and progress, and a suspicion of epistemological privilege, views from above or from the center that assume a consistent distinction between who is seeing and what is seen" (2).

Interestingly, even though my Honours work focuses on early modernism (Imagism, of all things), I'm finding a lot of the articles we've been reading eye-opening because of the focus on "the concept of style more broadly conceived - as attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness - is crucial to many of the other, nonliterary practices of cosmopolitanism whose study has transformed disciplines such as history, anthropology, sociology, transnational cultural studies, and media studies" (2). Modernism was not traditionally looked at in these terms (due largely to New Criticism), but I believe the influence of postcolonial studies and other related fields has forced modernist critics to re-read more "socio-critically."  Walkowitz states this explicitly, saying that Cosmopolitan Style "diverges from traditional accounts of international modernism by treating literary style politically" (6). I would love to have had this at my disposal at the beginning of my Honours work because of her methodology and way of re-defining terms.

Ato Quayson

"Feminism, Postcolonialism and the Contradictory Orders of Modernity"



by Ato Quayson



Quay discusses the importance of "discursive representation," which is most often collapsed into political representation with regard to Third World women (586). Quayson discusses Chandra Talpade Mohanty's thoughts on feminism and postcolonialism, most significantly the idea that the "discursively created, oppressed Third World woman is nothing but a homogenized creation of Western feminist discourses whose intent is to set up an object that can be the presumed Other of the Western female culturally, materially and discursively. I can see how difficult these issues can be to unpack. I am an editor on the Undergraduate Women's Studies journal at McGill and just recently there was a debate over one of our submissions that led to a long exploration of (self) representation and the many interpretations of these representations. I was actually shocked to discover how many preconceptions I still had (very unconsciously) about cross cultural experiences.

One thing I take issue with in this article is the opening quote by C.L.R. James. I don't disagree with his point, but I do feel it should not be as essentialising as Quayson presents it. James writes, "But the woman is called career woman because her 'career' in modern society demands she place herself in a subordinate position or even renounce normal life" (190). I think that this point is very interesting. The discussion about how something modern (a career) is something that is abnormal for women. Even though women (in the "First World Countries" -- I don't like this terminology but it's hard to avoid) are encouraged to have careers, they are also being painted as somehow "abnormal." I'm thinking of extreme situations where women must take jobs in order to survive. At what point does gender not play a major role anymore? Is there a point of economic and social strife that allows gender difference to be overlooked in some way?

I also have a difficult time understand where feminist issues can be applied to all women and where only to certain women. These are very difficult questions, but I'm often left wondering if there can be a two-way discourse in postcolonial and "western" feminism -- There are certain aspects of postcolonial thought that are necessarily paradoxical and it comes out quite a bit when discussing women's rights, which often shows the faults of many philosophical systems.

Christianity keeps coming up in these readings and in the fiction, and yet we have not discussed it much. I'm still very interested in the effects of Christian conversion on the postcolonial thought, because it is taking in a Western thought system.

Njabulo S. Ndebele

"The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa"


by Njabulo S. Ndebele



 I found Ndebele's discussion about the spectacle on a social level much more compelling than his discussion of literature. When I first read the article and the novel, I was very confused by the different centralisation of the "ordinary" in the two works. It's interesting that the writers that Ndebele pointed towards as models for future literature in the article are not studied anymore. I'd be interested to read some of Ndebele's earlier work to see how he treated the "ordinary."

The discussion in class shed a lot of light on why there was a disconnect between Ndebele's ideas of the ordinary in this article and in The Cry of Winnie Mandela. In "Rediscovery of the Ordinary," Ndebele defines the ordinary as "sobering rationality" and "the forcing of attention on necessary detail" (53). I think that his novel, as an experiment, is actually more captivating than what he mentions in the article. By inserting the "ordinary" into the spectacular framework, Ndebele is able to bring focus to the women's lives in very interesting way. That being said, I agree with others in the class who thought that the novel was reductive at points.


Some passages: 
 
"...the ordinary daily lives of people should be the direct focus of political interest because they constitute the very content of the struggle, for the struggle involves people not abstractions" (57).

"Literature cannot give us lessons, but it can only provide a very compelling context to examine an infinite number of ethical issues which have a bearing on the sensitisation of people towards the development of the entire range of culture" (55).

Carole Boyce Davies

"Some Notes on African Feminism"



by Carole Boyce Davies


Some Notes on Davies' Notes


Davies gives an overview of the state of African feminism. The biggest take-away from this chapter is that African feminist thought cannot be taken in isolation, but rather as a part of a larger system of oppression. I think that this is true of feminism in all parts of the world, but it is much more pronounced in Africa due to the recent colonialism. I really like the idea of self-reliance as a response to oppression and the critique of "assuming a nature over culture posture for African women [which] denies her participation in the shaping of human culture and renders her an inert, unintelligent 'vessel,' not a creative person in her own right" (561). This reminds me again of Jane in Zoe Wicomb's stories. It would be interesting to read her through this feminist lens. I think that it's fascinating how the female characters in the texts we've been reading really stand apart in a surprising way.

To keep in mind:
Ogundipe-Leslie on African Women's "Mountains on the Back" (562):
1) oppression from outside
2) heritage of tradition
3) her own backwardness
4) her men
5) her race
6) her self

To keep in mind:
Davies' Summary of African Feminism (563-4):
1) Recognises a common struggle and does not antagonise African men.
2) Certain inequities existed in traditional societies. Colonialism secured some and introduced others.
3) Must address problems in society historically.
4) Does not simply import Western women's agendas, but examines how African institutions are of value or detriment to women.
5) African woman's self-reliance and liking of cooperative work and social organisation.
6) Look objectively at women's situation in a post-liberation, postwar, and social reconstruction.
7) Traditional and contemporary avenues of choice for women.

Comparing the Ogundipe article we read for today with the Davies article raises many issues of inclusiveness and essentialisation which really underlines the intersectionality of feminist issues.

Yogita Goyal

"Introduction: Romance and Diaspora"

from Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature 

by Yogita Goyal

Next to Ngugi wa Thiong'o's chapters on Globalectics, Goyal's introduction to Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature is my favourite reading so far in the term. I really enjoyed her evaluation of the "back-to-Africa" movement and Fanon's involvement in the Third World liberation movement. The look at the practical versus prophetic aspect of these movements really brought the the forefront the Romantic visions of Garvey's activism (2-3), which promised at "once both utopia and apocalypse" (3). Fanon on the other hand was rooted in realism, as he refused to "accept any romance of past greatness, any notion of a mystical black being" and turned to logic, rationality, and social justice (5). I think this idea intersects very nicely with Ngugi's notion of globalectics because Fanon didn't desire a "return," but rather an internationalism.

Goyal looks at how diaspora collapses "time and space" which is "impossible to represent within a realist framework" (23-4). I think that this is a fair assessment because diaspora causes people to live in a liminal space culturally and often emotionally.

I would love to read the rest of Goyal's book because I'm interested in the pervading Romanticism that has stayed part of literature and rhetoric and also how people work against these notions. She discusses the importance of treating literary style politically (14), which is what I am working on for my Honours thesis in a completely different literary movement.


Interesting Passages:

"... it is helpful to recall Benjamin's theory of of history as a catastrophe, a notion that permeates black Atlantic literature, countering the Enlightenment notion of history as progress" (15).

"To accomplish this redemptive task, the storyteller creates images that fuse past and present, images that make visible that which has been left out and must now be reclaimed. These dialectic images confront the experience of the past with the reality of the now, and momentarily achieve a halt in the progress of history" (15).

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

from Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing

(Columbia University Press)

by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

These sections from Globalectics may be my favourite readings this term. Ngugi wa Thiong'o raises many issues and ideas that have interested me for a long time. I especially enjoyed his discussion about language and the difficulty of defining the postcolonial. I've had this discussion with several people in the last little while. The idea of the postcolonial is very slippery before boundaries are set. 

"Introduction"

Ngugi introduces his notion of "poor theory." This seems like a very strong and important stance to take because, as Ngugi says, "without the luxury of excess, the poor do the most with the least" (2). It also plays to love of simplicity: "Poor theory may... provide an antidote to the tendency of theory... to substitute density of words for that of thought, a kind of modern scholasticism" (2)

I like that Ngugi defines poor as "being extremely creative and experimental in order to survive" (3). This has many implications for theoretical work but also for the concept of economical poverty. Through this definition, Ngugi gives more agency to the poor, instead of pure victimisation. I can't help but think of Jane in Wicomb's short stories and the necessity of being creative in order to stay out of the bad weather and also find a way to relieve the poverty of her marriage to Drew.

I also think back to Zoe Wicomb's "Shame and Identity" when Ngugi speaks about the body:
"Some of the poor actually carry theory on their bodies. We have pictures of kids in ghettos around the world wearing worn-out T-shirts or caps bearing the logos of various corporations... A logo in such a setting and context is no longer a commercial, advertising a product, but a pointer to a connection between the two extremes of ghetto poverty and corporate power" (4) "Inadvertently he was making a connection"
The body, in this sense, is very susceptible to ironic undermining. The poor in this context are inadvertently undermining the capitalist symbols; however, at the same time, the symbols impress certain ideas onto the people.

We have looked at this connection between land and body quite a bit at this point. What's more ambitious about Ngugi's work is his belief in "the liberation of literature from its straightjackets of nationalism" (8). His idea of globalectics "embraces wholeness, interconnectedness, equality of potentiality of parts, tension, and motion" (8). It's interesting to me how so many writers and critics think in these terms in the postcolonial context, compared to recent Western thought which shies away from interconnectedness and wholeness. 

"Globalectical Imagination"


Ngugi's conception of "globalectics" makes sense as the world increasingly becomes a "global village" with the "intensified communication system" (46). He says that "reading globaletically is a way of approaching any text from whatever times and places to allow its content and themes form a free conversation with other texts of one's time and place, the better to make it yield its maximum to the human" (60)

My thoughts always seem to go back to the TRC, but the global exchange of ideas of oppression and reconciliation interest me a lot, because it is a sharing of ideas that raises so many broader issues. That the South African Apartheid was inspired in part by the Canadian reserve system and that the Canadian TRC was inspired by the South African TRC shows the extent of this globalised reality. Ngugi's focus here, however, is literature.

One idea that I find particularly salient is that "the cultural creations of individual nations become common property" (48). He claims, quite optimistically, that "national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a wold literature" (48).

Although he seems quite optimistic, Ngugi asserts that world literature is a process (49) and that there needs to be a balance struck between the national and global (57). Like many others, he raises the question of how we should read: "do we want to welcome [the text] or do we want to put it back into prison - or even a new prison?" (58) Ways of reading interest me because of my modernist background, which concerns itself with how to read the aesthetics and literary devices. I think that Ngugi's discussion on reading really highlights the subjectivity of how we want to understand something and "what baggage we bring to it" (60).

In a lot of ways, I feel that "world literature" has less to do with the literature that is produced and more to do with how literature is read and applied. Of course, postcolonial literature is global in a more literal sense but, as Ngugi says, "translation is the language of languages" (61) and having the ability to discuss literature with the "other" is what will erase the designation of an "other."

Molara Ogundipe-Leslie

"Stiwanism: Feminism in an African Context"



by Molara Ogundipe-Leslie



 I really liked the passionate and personal aspect of this essay. Molara outlines the main attitudes towards feminism in Africa. Not only that, she outlines the problems in defining feminism and the "African context," because of the diversity of thought around the two concepts. Two major strands of thoughts about feminism in Africa, according to Molara, are:

1 - African women have never been oppressed
or
2 - there are two levels of oppression: colonial history and gender

The aspect of her essay that I found most interesting is the discussion about "essentialised blackness" (543-4). Although she presents it in very totalising ways ("I am now talking about the peasant majority Africans" (544)), Molara's deliberate push against what she sees as a flawed search for colour purity (543) is quite productive. She talks about not identifying as a "black woman" because she wasn't socialised to describe herself in those terms. This is a really important point because it emphasises the need to redefine social categories.

I think the poem was my favourite aspect of Molara's analysis. She mentions the use of the possessive "I" and how this turns the writer into a Prometheus figure who "does not yet have time for women's rights" (546). All the while he describes the world as his, I couldn't help notice the manipulative use of the plural pronoun "us" and "you and I":

Why should they be allowed
to come between us?
You and I were slaves together
uprooted and humiliated together
Rapes and lynchings... (546)

The women are included in the suffering but are made to look as if they're ungrateful for wanting to heal from this suffering and grow as a community. I think this is the most powerful way that Molara could have expressed her desire for Stiwanism.

It would be interesting to look back on the texts we've read for this course and trace the instances of Stiwanism. The one example that comes to mind is Aila, and her rise to the political sphere. Gordimer presents this as a very private and silent rise, which raises a lot of questions about what is necessary for this cultural dynamism that Molara puts forth as an important aspect of feminism (547)? Is it rallies or is it a deliberate reshaping of the private sphere in order to include the public? Where is the line drawn between the private and the public? Molara rightly says that gender roles are not only about sharing the washing of dishes (545). Aila is able to move into this sphere without the equal distribution of traditional domestic roles.

One aspect of the essay that troubles me deeply is Molara's essentialisation of Africans. She mainly refers to Africans as a singular force and it makes it read more as a manifesto than a critical work. Although I understand her need to position herself as an African woman, it seems to border on creating a view of Africa that is just as totalising as colonial views. This undermines her argument in many ways, especially when  compared to the issues between the "you" and the "we" in the poem she discusses. 

Mbembe & Nuttall

"Writing the World from an African Metropolis"


from Public Culture 16.3 (2004)


by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall



I really enjoyed this article because Mbembe and Nuttall give a historical overview of urban theories and conceptions about African urban development. They point out that "the social" is still understood "as a matter of order and contract rather than as the locus of experiment and artifice" (349). This is an idea that goes beyond their South African example. I feel that most people see society, and especially the urban society, as order.

Although I feel that the social can rightly be seen as a "contract," I like the addition of experiment and artifice to the discussion is very productive. I was definitely confused as to why "order and contract" were placed in opposition to "experiment and artifice" -- I don't see those two sets as mutually exclusive. However, this is one issue with reading just introductions.

Mbembe and Nutall's main drive is to look at Africa beyond the tropes of "difference" and "uniqueness," as anthropology and development studies do (350). They write: "Though the work of difference has performed important functions in the scholarly practice that sought to undercut imperial paradigms, it is clearly time, in the case of Africa, to revisit the frontiers of commonality and the potential of sameness-as-worldiness. This is a far cry from a proposition that would aim at rehabilitating facile assumptions about universality and practicality" (351).

The dynamic of sameness and otherness naturally plays out in all of the texts that we are reading. My Son's Story and Country of My Skull both show characters who have to negotiate the changing definitions of otherness and sameness. I can't help but wonder how Mpe's novel addresses these issues. An example of this issue happens right at the beginning of Welcome to Our Hillbrow, when the narrator talks about the homeless man being wheeled away: "In the five years you had known him, you had become friends without ever saying anything to each other, except for the mutually warm greetings" (16). This is contrasted with the sense of alienation on the next page when the narrator talks about Bafana Bafana's defeat: "You often accused him of being a hypocrite, because his vocal support for black non-South African teams, whenever they played against European clubs, contrasted so glaringly with his prejudice towards black foreigners the rest of the time" (17). I think this is very important in the context of an urban setting. In Hillbrow, experiment and artifice happens at the level of nationality and economics (the foreigners "stealing" jobs); however, there is still a certain order and contract (like with the homeless man). It would be really interesting to apply Mbembe & Nuttall's ideas through the course of the novel and see what this amounts to in Mpe's message.

Monica Popescu

"Of Masters, Scholars, and the Global Prize Economy"


by Monica Popescu




So for in this course, the thing that surprised me the most is the global applicability of South African issues. I thought that I knew about South Africa, but I now realise that it was very rudimentary  knowledge. The issue of authorship and national literature is something that interests me a lot because of the similar Canadian problems I've been thinking about for a long time. The "old colonial yardstick" for measuring the quality of literature through "internationally recognized prizes, always held up to the standards and logic of global recognition and a putative universal quality," is a very topical issue here in Canada (which is somewhat funny if we're talking about a desire to move away from a global comparison).

It seems to be a "colony problem," or rather an "ex-colony problem." There is an anxiety about national literature. In countries that are rich in histories of oppression and domination, the idea of a "national" literature is very contested. There seems to be, not so much an anxiety of influence, but an anxiety of a lack of influence. Coovadia's critique of the "Coetzee religion" illustrates this point quite well. Who should have the say when it comes to defining the problems of a country? It is the old argument of "what makes a ______ literature?"

 While I agree with Coovadia on many points, this debate makes me wonder at what point is an author allowed to transcend the role of a national writer? In Canada, this debate arises every 3 seconds. What makes a Canadian novel? What makes a Canadian writer? We try to claim as many writers as our own, no matter how small their connection to Canada is. But why do we need to measure Canadian literature against a long-established tradition, especially when this country is so different historically and culturally than most European countries or even the US. South Africa seems to have a lot of the same questions: what is "the role South African authors play in the global cultural imaginary"? I hope by the end of the course, I can begin to make some connections or conclusions, no matter how tentative or limited they are.

All of these issues make me wonder about Zoe Wicomb, who also left South Africa. How was her departure received and how has it impacted her reputation?

J.M. Coetzee

"Farm Novel and Plaasroman"


from White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa 
(Yale University Press, 1988)


by J.M. Coetzee


This article addresses the genre of the plaasroman, a distinctly Afrikaans novel concerned with "the farm and platteland (rural) society, with the Afrikaner's painful transition from farmer to townsman" (63). Coetzee looks at the works of Olive Schreiner and Pauline Smith and whether or not they written "farm novels," or the English equivalent to the plaasroman. Reading Coetzee's critical piece alongside his novel just begs for comparison.

I still haven't made sense of Disgrace. I can't understand why Lucy shuts David out completely. Actually, I don't understand why Lucy stays. I think the difficulty that the novel is pointing out is the divide between universality and particularity. While some experiences are universal, like rape, it's impossible to understand some experiences of rape, like that in South Africa, if you have not lived it. I can't help but think back to Mbembe and Nuttall's call for commonality. I feel that Coetzee isn't subscribing to that idea in this novel.

What's most infuriating to me about the novel is how all of the characters are fairly unlikable. This may be because of the purposefully myopic narrator. So, when I read Coetzee's article, I found it difficult to not think about Disgrace, and how Coetzee handles some of the ideas that he raises in Schreiner's and Smith's works.

Coetzee points to the "silence about the place of black labour" which is common to the "Afrikaans plaasroman, and represents a failure of imagination before he problem of how to integrate the dispossesed black man in the idyll... of African pastoralism" (71-2). He goes on say that Smith's "selective silence about hired labour, the labour obligations of sons, and the problems of inheritance suggests that she has not thought her way fully through the dynamics of peasant economy" (72). I wonder, then, why Coetzee refused to give Petrus a voice. He had an opportunity to show Petrus' side, but instead focused his narrative perspective on an aging, and despicable, white man. Perhaps this says a lot about the role of silence and unheard perspectives in the novel, but it's still confusing to me.

I find some of Coetzee's claims a bit troubling. He says that typical features of peasant culture are "suspicion of the new, conformism, anti-intellectualism, narrow materialism" as well as homogenous and conservative vales (73). It would be interesting to look at how Disgrace addresses these ideas. In the novel, David Lurie seems quite stuck in the past, while Petrus seems to look ahead to the future (he uses new technology and is a good businessman). Perhaps this answers the question of representing "black labour." Interestingly, David has an idyllic view of the pastoral, while Lucy recognises the new, capitalist "notions of the value of land" (79).

Michel de Certeau

"Walking in the City"

from The Cultural Studies Reader
(Routledge, 1993)


by Michel de Certeau



In this article, de Certeau writes,

"one can analyse the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization" (156).

The tension between the "collective administration" and "individual modes of reappropriation" (157) that de Certeau illustrates here reminded me of the "Tower of David" in Caracas, Venezuela (link to video below). The "Tower of David" is considered the tallest slum. It is housed in the Centro Financiero Confinanzas, which is a partly finished skyscraper, a result of a failed bank. 2,500 people live in the tower and contribute to communal amenities such as electricity and water. What's interesting about this slum is the attitude towards it of government officials compared to those who actually live there.

In the video, a Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, Guillermo Barrios, says, "This is not a better or nice use of an abandoned structure" and that the real solution would be to build proper housing with public services for the people. Barrios is out of touch with the reality of the situation, which is that the country has a huge housing problem that isn't easily solved. The tenants of the "Tower of David" have been able to do what the government hadn't, which is provide housing in the first place. Obviously, this situation is far from ideal. However, it's also not "anti-housing" or "anti-residence" as Barrios puts it.

This example shows how an entire community and economy can arise in a city in a hectic and unplanned way. I think that de Certeau's article points to a lot of the misconceptions of the "city" and community that are obvious in the "Tower of David," just as with the gridlock highways and their street vendors.

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1p9jlQUW0k

Ania Loomba

"Hybridity"


from Colonialism-Postcolonialism 
(Routledge, 1998)


by Ania Loomba


I feel that one of the most important points that Loomba raises in the article is the arbitrary nature of social classification. The quote from Stuart Hall is very interesting: "the black subject and black experience are... [also] constructed historically, culturally, politically." Although it seems like a simple statement, it has so many implications in terms of how we look at "race." Loomba writes,

"The term 'ethnicity' has dominantly been used to indicate biologically and culturally stable identities, but Hall asks us to decouple it from its imperial, racist or nationalist deployment and to appropriate it to designate identity as a constructed process rather than a given essence"

The push towards "process" seems to be a fundamental step in reshaping the way that people view difference. It really makes me wonder about the state of post-apartheid poetry, since poetry is quite good for dealing with issues of process and liminality. I will have to read some of the South African poets!

The end of My Son's Story, with the switch in genre from prose to poetry, is interesting in terms of process and "in-betweenness." Ending in poetry, a more accessible form of writing during the struggle, Gordimer draws attention to the different functions of poetry and prose. In class we discussed how prose requires space, a "room of one's own." I like the idea this book being something that Will "can't publish" because it cannot represent identity. The family's coloured identity is not stable.

When we find out at the end that the entire story was constructed through Will's eyes, it changes the meaning of identity in the book. Loomba criticises Bhabha's idea that a hybrid identity is automatically subversive (177). I think that Gordimer also addresses this issue through the political activism in the novel. The black freedom fighters don't fully trust Sonny because he is coloured and associated with the whites. This idea of "in-betweenness" is complicated, as Loomba shows:

"The point, then is not to simply pit the themes of migrancy, exile and hybridity against rootedness, nation and authenticity, but to locate and evaluate their ideological, political and emotional valencies, as well as their intersections in the multiple histories of colonialism and postcoloniality" (183).

The coloured identity embodies liminality.

 

Zoe Wicomb

"Shame and Identity: the Case of the Coloured in South Africa"

from Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1996. 

(Cambridge University Press, 1998)

by Zoe Wicomb 

I read this article for ENGL 352 for the first time. It was interesting to read it again after actually reading My Son's Story. Since reading the novel, Wicomb's focus on the body becomes so much more interesting. In Gordimer's story, the body is an overwhelming image. I like how Gordimer uses the body in several ways: as a form of shame (being coloured and mistrusted); as a way of connecting (particularly through sex); as sacrifice (the dead at the funeral); and the list goes on.

Shame and the body have always been closely connected in Western tradition, and mainly policed through religious means. I'm very interested now in the attitudes towards the body in different African people before and after colonisation. The underlying force of Christianity is something that really grabs my attention when I engage with these texts, and through class discussions and films. Wicomb describes the identity of Saartje Baartman as a "Hottentot Venus," and then a symbol of postcolonialism, and then as someone who deserves a "decent Christian burial in her own country. I would love to read more about the connections between the body and spirituality and shame in postcolonial Africa.

I really like Wicomb's writing style. Her focus on the connections between the body and the text is really poignant. Although this isn't a new idea, I couldn't help but connect the "text" to the notion of text as something that exists as a process when it is interpreted. The body as text has a lot of implications in a country that institutionalised a certain reading of the body and used that reading for political and ideological means.