This book analyses black Atlantic studies, colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, providing paradigms for understanding imperial literature, Englishness and black transnationalism. Its concerns range from the metropolitan centre of Conrad's Heart of Darkness to fatherhood in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; from the marketing of South African literature to cosmopolitanism in Achebe; and from utopian discourse in Parry to Jameson's theorisation of empire.
aesthetic values. She and I have a long-standing disagreement over the literary merits of Olive Schreiner’s work, and, more generally, over the aesthetic contributions made by anti-colonial and post-apartheid South African literatures. Parry’s own taste tends, I think, towards the modernist, although she has done a great deal, in her work on Forster and Wells, to extend the canon beyond the modernist monopolies presented by Edward Said and Fredric Jameson. Willing as she is to credit metropolitan mimetic modes of the Victorian, Edwardian and modern periods with literary
the peculiarly racialised nature of South African literature evident in works such as H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Yet the imperial adventure genre also provided opportunities for the ‘reappropriation of Zulu historiography’ by John Langalibalele Dube in the 1930s as well as providing a framework for Mhudi (1930) by Sol Plaatjie, who ‘adopted the style, and linguistic register’ of Haggard’s imperial romances, but nonetheless ‘adapted it for his own purposes, undermining and challenging many of [the genre’s] tenets’. 102 The ideas of adoption
metropolitan consuming subject. My book re-examines one example of this, namely the metropolitan marketing of South African literature. This was strikingly gendered as well as raced, and provided a comforting anti-racist self-image to the prospective white reader. This might appear to corroborate Rosemary Jolly’s arguments concerning Western constructions of South African apartheid. Discussing Jacques Derrida’s ‘identification of South Africa as the most spectacular criminal in a broad array of racist activity’, she suggests that the risk is that of rendering ‘South Africa
Rhodesia. Entering the University of Hull Extramural Department in 1958, I taught my adult classes Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in rural Lincolnshire soon after its appearance, and used South African literature to discuss apartheid. I had also developed an interest in Jamaica, which became independent in 1962. When I arrived on the Mona campus in 1963, what George
Wyk and Jean-Philippe Wade (eds.), Rethinking South African Literary History (Durban: Y Press, 1996), pp. 196–208. Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (London: Routledge, 1994). For discussions of US receptions of South African theatre, see Jeanne Colleran, ‘South African Theatre in the United States: The Allure of the Familiar and of the Exotic’, in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (eds.), Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 221