A History of South African Literature
2006; Boston University; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2326-3016
Autores Tópico(s)South African History and Culture
ResumoA History of South African Literature. By Christopher Heywood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xv, 296. $ 75.00. This historical study of South African literature from precolonial times to the close of the twentieth century takes on poetry, drama, and prose fiction as manifest in five ethnic traditions: Khoisan, Nguni-Sotho, Afrikaans, English, and Indian. Not all genres and ethnic groups receive equal treatment, yet the range is vast, from cosmogony of indigenous peoples of Southern Africa to orature among the amaZulu and amaXhosa, colonial war accounts by Afrikaner and English authors to the poetry of giants like Krune Mqhayi, H. I. E. Dhlomo, Benedict Vilakazi, Mazisi Kunene, and Jeremy Cronin, the usual suspects when it comes to novelists-Olive Schreiner, Sol T. Plaatje, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, and John Coetzee-to the theatre of Athol Fugard, Pieter-Dirk Uys, and Zakes Mda. Appropriately, the contents are organized around a series of historical turning points marking the violent entrance and establishment of modernity in South Africa. Of these, one pivotal episode forms the axis of the book: Sharpeville, its before and dividing the volume into two parts. An introduction identifies the subject of the volume as the merging of the five ethnic traditions mentioned above and places the emphasis on the shared African origin of the human species. In addition, a chronology, list of abbreviations, map of South Africa, and glossary help the reader navigate three-and-a-half centuries of cultural production. Starting from the premise that South Africa has one of the world's most extensively creolised (p. vii), eminent scholar Christopher Heywood invites us to view the country's literary history through one of Edouard Glissant's primordial tenets: metissage.1 Would only that this were possible. Glissant explored the mixture of cultures that have come to characterize the archipelago of islands in the Caribbean and declared as their foundational pillar the richness lent by such cross-fertilization. This he termed credite (creoleness). Metissage and creolite in the Francophone Antilles, mestizaje in the Spanish-speaking greater isles (and on the mainland), and hybridity in the West Indies have been at the heart of identity in the Americas since Europeans first encountered Amerindians in the fifteenth century-and the concept resonates in the context of postcolonial societies elsewhere. Glissant's theories arouse interest in South Africa at a time when identity politics increasingly overlaps with multiple and shifting political and social formations.2 Ten years after the advent of democracy, when contemporary calls for an African renaissance are being heeded, as the pressing need for transformation makes itself felt, it is understandable that Heywood would make use of creolization in his treatment of what has, to-date, not become a national literature-hence the five discrete ethnic traditions. …
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