Against Normalization

O'Brien Anthony O'Brien

Description

At the end of apartheid, under pressure from local and transnational capital and the hegemony of Western-style parliamentary democracy, South Africans felt called upon to normalize their conceptions of economics, politics, and culture in line with these Western models. In Against Normalization, however, Anthony O'Brien examines recent South African literature and theoretical debate which take a different line, resisting this neocolonial outcome, and investigating the role of culture in the formation of a more radically democratic society.O'Brien brings together an unusual array of contemporary South African writing: cultural theory and debate, worker poetry, black and white feminist writing, Black Consciousness drama, the letters of exiled writers, and postapartheid fiction and film. Paying subtle attention to well-known figures like Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, and Njabulo Ndebele, but also foregrounding less-studied writers like Ingrid de Kok, Nise Malange, Maishe Maponya, and the Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera, he reveals in their work the construction of a political aesthetic more radically democratic than the current normalization of nationalism, ballot-box democracy, and liberal humanism in culture could imagine. Juxtaposing his readings of these writers with the theoretical traditions of postcolonial thinkers about race, gender, and nation like Paul Gilroy, bell hooks, and Gayatri Spivak, and with others such as Samuel Beckett and Vaclav Havel, O'Brien adopts a uniquely comparatist and internationalist approach to understanding South African writing and its relationship to the cultural settlement after apartheid.With its appeal to specialists in South African fiction, poetry, history, and politics, to other Africanists, and to those in the fields of colonial, postcolonial, race, and gender studies, Against Normalization will make a significant intervention in the debates about cultural production in the postcolonial areas of global capitalism.

Sujets

• Republic of South Africa
• África
• South Africa
• Africa
• Afrique du Sud

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 13 avril 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822380634
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson

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Writing Radical Democracy in South Africa

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Anthony O’Brien

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©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

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Normalization or Radical Democracy

Radical Democracy and the Electoral Sublime

Njabulo Ndebele and Radical-Democratic Culture

Against Normalization: Cultural Identity from Below

Staging Whiteness: Beckett, Havel, Maponya

Locations of Feminism: Ingrid de Kok’sFamiliar Ground

No Turning Back: Nise Malange and the Onset of Workers’ Culture

Lines of Flight: Bessie Head, Arthur Nortje, Dambudzo Marechera

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Post-Apartheid Narratives:The House GunandFools

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I would like to thank my colleagues at Queens College of the City University of New York, most warmly Charles Molesworth and Bette Weid- man for many years of ‘‘the real work’’ together and for their unswerv- ing support, and Bill Wilson for his example of the life of the intellectual; and, for their critical reading and encouragement in the early stages of this project, Ali Jimale Ahmed, Thomas Frosch, George Held, David Klein- bard, Maureen Waters, and Gordon Whatley. Other Queens colleagues who have provoked and sustained the writing include the Theory Group in the English Department, especially Nancy Comley, Janice Peritz, and David Richter; the World Studies Program, especially Frederick Buell, Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi, and Ed Strug; and the Women’s Studies Program, especially Patricia Clough and Hester Eisenstein. For their inspiriting intel- lectual comradeship, thanks to June Bobb, Jonathan Buchsbaum, Gordon Campbell, Jacqueline Di Salvo, the late Melvin Dixon, Hugh English, Kim- berly Flynn, Barbara Foley, Debbie Geis, Larry Hanley, bell hooks, David Kazanjian, Steven Kruger, Marilyn Neimark, Cicely Rodway, Michael Sar- gent, Ron Scapp, Alisa Solomon, Amy Tucker, Jyotsna Uppal, and John Weir. Many others too numerous to name at Queens andhad a hand in the book, and I am especially grateful to the historian Dorothy Helly and the members of her interdisciplinary faculty seminar on feminist scholar-