Misfits in the margins transgression and transformation on the (South) African frontier
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2016
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458282 , vital:75729 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC190705
- Description: The story of the European encounter with Africa includes many liminal characters who mostly play little part in the larger sweep of events but everywhere suggest alternative scenarios that might have developed, or at least discordant readings of what did actually happen. They range from the Khoi interpreter Coree, who was taken to England in 1614, to a group of London women sent to Sierra Leone in the 1790s to marry local slave traders, or from various Cape avatars of Shakespeare's Caliban to several picturesque originals for Defoe's African eccentrics; from early African articulants of African independence and dignity, such as the Prince Naimbanna of Sierra Leone, to many intriguing individuals (both African and European) who emerge from the records of Portuguese shipwrecks along the southern African coast and the sixteenth-century Portuguese penetration of south-east Africa. Nor is the story short on the occasional African Queen and Sable Venus who not only enliven events but at times impact significantly on the developing politics of colonialism.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Rape and the Foundation of Nations in JM Coetzee's Disgrace
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458298 , vital:75730 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC156478
- Description: When J. M. Coetzee's last South African novel, Disgrace, was published in 1999 (he emigrated to Australia two years later), it drew some very sharp responses. Max du Preez wrote in the Star (21 Jan. 2000): "[The] message of Disgrace, crudely put, is that black South Africans are revengeful of whites; that whites are not welcome in Africa unless they pay for it every day; that black and white attitudes and lifestyles are incompatible" (cited in Kannemeyer 528). Athol Fugard was notoriously quoted in the London Sunday Times as believing that the novel was about "the rape of a white woman as a gesture to all of the evil we did in the past," an idea that he dismissed as "a load of bullshit" (cited in Attridge 164). One could go on, but what quickly became evident in the critical feeding frenzy that soon followed was that Coetzee's utilization of a stark realism - a new mode for him, tried out in his major fiction only once before, in parts of Age of Iron (1990) - as well as his invocation of a trope as sensationally shocking and topical as farm rape, and his evident concern with racial retribution, had made it very difficult for most readers to see beyond the features of politics and plot in the novel.
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- Date Issued: 2014
Seamus Heaney in Grahamstown tribute
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458311 , vital:75731 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC156479
- Description: Seamus Heaney, internationally celebrated poet of Ireland and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1995, died in Dublin on Friday 30 August 2013, aged 74. He and his wife Marie paid a memorable visit to South Africa in 2002 and what follows is a short account of the occasion.
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- Date Issued: 2014
The affections of a man of feeling in the midst of the wilderness: François Le Vaillant on the South African frontier Travels into the Interior of Africa via the Cape of Good Hope, François Le Vaillant
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458269 , vital:75728 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47984
- Description: Concluding his Introduction to the first volume of this welcome new translation of Le Vaillant's Travels, Ian Glenn declares: ''Le Vaillant is much more our contemporary than Schreiner or many later writers seem to be'' (lxiii). Earlier Glenn sums up the double disadvantage that has for decades militated against the proper recognition of Le Vaillant's importance in our literary traditions: ''Right-wing settler ideology disqualifies Le Vaillant as meddling creole Frenchman, or presents him [.. .] as simple adventurer and naturalist, while a later generation of anti-colonialist discourse critics is happy to present him in the right-wing's simplified, politically censored version [Glenn is referring particularly to the Library of Parliament's edition de luxe of 1973] to prove that there was only one mode of colonial Africanist discourse'' (lix) - a mode only and obviously Eurocentric to the core.
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- Date Issued: 2009
The Africa that Shakespeare imagined; or, notes for aspirant film makers
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457472 , vital:75640 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC48130
- Description: The slippery presence of African themes in Shakespeare's plays is a function of the mythic but rapidly changing image of Africa in the England and Europe of his time. In 1888 Gardiner Greene Hubbard, president of the American National Geographic Society, introduced the centenary celebrations of the Society with an address in which he said : "America was explored ; Africa was circumnavigated" (3). He could hardly have summed up the contrast between three to four centuries of American and African discovery more cogently. A few years later, in 1897, C. Raymond Beazley made a similar point about Africa and the East : "Men crept round Africa in face of the Atlantic storms because of the golden East beyond" (3.11). This creeping round and haunting of Africa's shores had, as far as the English were concerned, only developed during Shakespeare's lifetime. Thomas Wyndham, William Hawkins, John Lock and others performed the first English voyages to West Africa (and began the English slave trade) in the decades just before Shakespeare's birth. The first English visit to the Cape of Good Hope was apparently that of Thomas Stevens in 1579 (a year before Drake's visit), but regular English visits to the Cape only began right at the end of the sixteenth century. How much of all this did Shakespeare know about, and is it possible to detect traces of such familiarity in his plays? A tall order, but I think there are some clues.
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- Date Issued: 2009
Africa as Renaissance: grotesque John Skelton's 1485 version of Diodorus Siculus
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2001
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457446 , vital:75638 , https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA1011582X_161
- Description: Diodorus Siculus was a Sicilian Greek who round about the middle of the century before ChrISt'S birth began a mammoth history of the Mediterranean world that in its complete state of 40 books, mostly now lost, stretched from the legendary past down to Diodorus's own times. Of his Bibliotheca Historica, or Library of History, now only Books 1-5 and 11-20 survive, plus some fragments and paraphrases in other collections. The survival of the first five books, however, is particularly fortunate for my purposes, for this is the part in which Diodorus offers a seamless blend of legend and history to explain the origins of the peoples of the Mediterranean and adjacent parts.
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- Date Issued: 2001
Othello and the Narrative of Africa
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457457 , vital:75639 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/AJA1011582X_181
- Description: Although Othello is where I want to start and where I hope to end, my proper aim is the more general one of Africa as seen through Elizabe-than eyes. I shall use a particular moment in the playas a crux upon which to develop a broad-ranging examination of what Elizabethans knew about Africa, or what they thought they knew about Africa, or, bet-ter still, how they understood what they thought they knew about Africa. The incident is Othello's appearance before the Venetian court where, accused by Desdemona's father that he had suborned her judgement with" charms... conjuration... and mighty magic"(1.3. 91-92), Othello proposes to unfold" a round unvarnished tale" to prove his veracity, his nobility and, most importantly, his common humanity with the Vene-tians. The speech contains such" round unvarnished" matters as the cannibals that each other eat, The anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders.
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- Date Issued: 1990
What literature? : inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 1981
- Language: English
- Type: Text
- Identifier: vital:676 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020745 , ISBN 0868100692
- Description: Inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University , Rhodes University Libraries (Digitisation)
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- Date Issued: 1981
Drummer Hodge : the poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902)
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 1976
- Subjects: War poetry -- History and criticism South African War, 1899-1902 -- Literature and the war South African War, 1899-1902 -- Art and the war
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2252 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003919
- Description: From Preface: This is not a history of the Boer War; nor is it an exclusively literary study of the poetry of that war. If the work that follows has to be defined generically at all, it may be called an exercise in cultural history. It attempts to assess the impact of a particular war on the literary culture, especially the poetry, of both the participants and the observers, whether in South Africa, in Britain and the rest of the English-speaking world, or in Europe. An assumption made throughout this study is that war poetry is not only verse written by men who are or have been under fire. Just as 'War poetry is not to be confused with political, polemical, or patriotic verse, although it can contain elements of all of these, so it is also the work of observers at home as much as that of soldiers at the front. It follows that I have not allowed myself the academic luxury of selecting, on the basis of literary merit only, a handful of outstanding war poems for rigorous analysis and discussion. "Doggerel can express the heart" wrote one of these late-Victorian soldierly versifiers, and I have roamed widely in the attempt to assemble the material which, I believe, records the full range of the impact that the Boer War made not only on Briton and Boer, but on the worId at large. A major thesis of this study is that the Boer War marked the clear emergence of the kind of war poetry which we have come to associate almost exclusively with the First World War. Poems in the style and spirit of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" were written in profusion, but the work which serves as this study's masthead, Hardy's "Drummer Hodge," clearly has --like many of its contemporaries-- more in common with Owen's verse than with Tennyson's. The reasons for the appearance of such poetry are discussed in Chapter 1; the rest of the book provides the evidence of it.
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- Date Issued: 1976