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New perspectives in African literature: The case of Unity Dow and Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17535360712331393486

1753-5360

Fetson Kalua,

Urban and Rural Development Challenges

Abstract This article examines the ways in which the leitmotif of hybridity emerges as the dominant vision of selected fiction set in Botswana, in particular the works of Unity Dow and Alexander McCall Smith. To that end, the article employs Homi Bhabha's notion of liminality, the idea of the ‘in-betweenness’ or straddling two cultures, to show the extent to which these works offer fresh perspectives on African identity by reflecting a cross-cultural consciousness.The article argues that rather than flaunting the Afrocentric ideal of cultural purity, works by Dow and Smith pinpoint the indeterminate and shifting nature of African identity. Keywords: African writingAlexander McCall SmithBotswana in fictionHomi Bhabha's liminalityhybridityshifting identityUnity Dow Notes 1. Liminalityis a word derived from the Latin root -limen,meaning threshold. It was first used in ritual, or rites of passage to describe the middle of the three stages (namely pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal). Ritual liminality connotes a particular stage in the lives of initiates, characterized by conditions such as ambivalence, amorphousness, boundary straddling or in-betweenness. Homi Bhabha's appropriation of liminality in the postcolonial context suggests a condition of hybridity occasioned by, among other factors, colonialism, patriarchy, race, exile, refugeeism, and many other forms of dislocation and discrimination. Bhabha's formulation of the liminal identity as the dynamic of the postcolonial condition attempts to transcend the dichotomies that have been a common feature of European avante-garde literary and cultural practices for a long time. In this project, the idea and practice of liminality are likened to other related notions of hybridity, deconstruction, metonymy, marginality, and cultural translation. I use liminality in the works under consideration in order to show the folly of ‘nurturing] myths of African culture whose provenance lies in the pristine and exotic Africa uncontaminated by the larger world’ (Chennells and Veit-Wild Citation1999, xii, echoing Dambudzo Marechera). 2. Intertextuality - the notion that a work is often so variable that it cannot remain deter mined by being pinned down to one interpretation based on, say, a text or other reading codes in the text. Thus intertextual reading takes into account the fact that any textual meaning has an underlying subtext. 3. Afrocentrism - the belief in the efficacy of African systems of philosophy and knowledge, especially those forms that derive from belief systems, traditions and cultures regarded as pris tine and primordial. 4. Eurocentrism - the logic that European forms of cognition and epistemological systems are ‘universal’ and the only standard forms of knowledge. 5. Dialogism - Mikail Bhakhtin's term, which assumes an interpenetration of and between voices within a rich, complex and growing context of cultural meaning and values. I argue that Botswana becomes a dialogic arena for various identity formations.