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Ambiguous contagion the discourse of race in South African English writing, 1890-1930

- Cornwell, David Gareth Napier

  • Authors: Cornwell, David Gareth Napier
  • Date: 1996
  • Subjects: South African literature -- History and criticism Race in literature Race relations in literature Social classes in literature Ethnicity in literature Sex role in literature
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
  • Identifier: vital:2226 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002269
  • Description: This study explores representations of race and racial difference in the writing of white South Africans in English, between the years, approximately, of 1890 and 1930. The first chapter essays a theoretical and historical investigation of the concept of race and offers a narrative of the rise of Western racialism. Its conclusion, that race has functioned as a vehicle of displacement for other forms of difference in the competition for advantage among social groups, is qualified in Chapter Two by the postulate of an anthropologial absolute, the "ethnic imperative", to help account for the strategic emergence of racialism in specific historical circumstances. The role of the ethnic imperative in the moral economy of colonial South Africa in the years 1890-1930 is examined through the analysis of three representative texts. In Chapter Three, a wide range of primary material is canvassed for prevailing views on the "Native Question", the perceived social threat posed by the half-caste, and the "Black Peril", culminating in the detailed examination of a fictional text. A particular concern in both Chapters Two and Three is the imagery of disease and contagion in terms of which racial contact is typically represented. The following chapter situates the literary works discussed in the study in the context of the South African literary tradition, then uses the example of selected short stories to indicate some narratological problems encountered by the writer with a racialist agenda within the medium of realist fiction. Chapters Five and Six investigate, through the close reading of selected novels, thematic concerns rooted in the intersection of the discourse of race with those of gender and social class. The final chapter reveals how William Plomer's novel, Turbott Wolfe, represents a volatile synthesis of a standard discourse on social class, an acknowledgement of the ethnic imperative, the imagery of contagion, and a principled repudiation of racialism, in a multi-faceted, modernist, and partially self-aware fashion. The more salient conclusions reached by this study concern the inadequacy of purely materialist analysis to account for the phenomenon of racialism, the historically determined link between racial attitudes and sexuality, and the manifest incompatibility of racial ideology with the liberal humanism inscribed in the formal requirements of the realist work of fiction.
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  • Date Issued: 1996

White writers and Shaka Zulu

- Wylie, Dan

  • Authors: Wylie, Dan
  • Date: 1996
  • Subjects: Shaka, Zulu Chief, 1787?-1828 In literature Shaka, Zulu Chief, 1787?-1828 Zulu (African people) -- History
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
  • Identifier: vital:2233 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002276
  • Description: The figure of Shaka (c. 1780-1828) looms massively in the historical and symbolic landscapes of Southern Africa. He has been unquestioningly credited, in varying degrees, with creating the Zulu nation, murderous bloodlust, and military genius, so launching waves of violence across the subcontinent (the "mfecane"). The empirical evidence for this is slight and controversial. More importantly, however, Shaka has attained a mythical reputation on which not only Zulu self-conceptions, but to a significant degree white settler self-identifications have been built. This study describes as comprehensively as possible the genealogy of white Shakan literature, including eyewitness accounts, histories, fictions and poetry. The study argues that the vast majority of these works are characterised by a high degree of incestuous borrowing from one another, and by processes of mythologising catering primarily to the social-psychological needs of the writers. So coherent is this genealogy that the formation of an idealised notion of settler identity can be discerned, especially through the common use of particular textual "gestures". At the same time, while conforming largely to unquestioning modes of discourse such as popularised history and romance fiction, individual writers have attempted to adjust to socio-political circumstances; this study includes four close studies of individual texts. Such close stylistic attention serves to underline the textually-constructed nature of both the figure of Shaka and the "selves" of the writers. The study makes no attempt to reduce its explorations to a single Grand Unified Explanation, and takes eclectic theoretical positions, but it does seek throughout to explore the social-psychological meanings of textual productions of Shaka - in short, to explore the question, Why have white writers written about Shaka in these particular ways?
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  • Date Issued: 1996

A study of the personal literature written in the Eastern Cape in the nineteenth century

- Young, Cheryl Ann

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