Complicities

Sanders Mark Sanders

Description

Complicities explores the complicated-even contradictory-position of the intellectual who takes a stand against political policies and ideologies. Mark Sanders argues that intellectuals cannot avoid some degree of complicity in what they oppose and that responsibility can only be achieved with their acknowledgment of this complicity. He examines the role of South African intellectuals by looking at the work of a number of key figures-both supporters and opponents of apartheid.Sanders gives detailed analyses of widely divergent thinkers: Afrikaner nationalist poet N. P. van Wyk Louw, Drum writer Bloke Modisane, Xhosa novelist A. C. Jordan, Afrikaner dissident Breyten Breytenbach, and Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. Drawing on theorists including Derrida, Sartre, and Fanon, and paying particular attention to the linguistic intricacy of the literary and political texts considered, Sanders shows how complicity emerges as a predicament for intellectuals across the ideological and social spectrum. Through discussions of the colonial intellectuals Olive Schreiner and Sol T. Plaatje and of post-apartheid feminist critiques of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Complicities reveals how sexual difference joins with race to further complicate issues of collusion.Complicities sheds new light on the history and literature of twentieth-century South Africa as it weighs into debates about the role of the intellectual in public life.

Sujets

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

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 25 décembre 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822384229
• Langue: English

Extrait

complicities

philosophy and postcoloniality

AserieseditedbyValentinMudimbe

and Bogumil Jewsiewicki

complicities the intellectual and apartheid

mark sanders

duke university press Durham and London 2002

∫2002 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Carter & Cone Galliard by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Parts of certain chapters have appeared in di√erent versions and are re- printed by permission: ‘‘Towards a Genealogy of Intellectual Life: Olive Schreiner’sThe Story of an African Farm,’’ inNOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 34, no. 1 (2000), copyright NOVEL Corp∫2000 (chapter 1); ‘‘ ‘Problems of Europe’: N. P. van Wyk Louw, the Intellectual and Apartheid,’’Journal of Southern African Studies25, no. 4 (1999), copyright Taylor & Francis Ltd. »http://www.tandf.co.uk…(chapter 2); ‘‘Responding to the ‘Situation’ of Modisane’sBlame Me on History:Towards an Ethics of Reading in South Africa,’’Research in African Literatures25, no. 4 (1994),∫Indiana Univer- sity Press (chapter 3). The epigraph in chapter 1 from Olive Schreiner’s ‘‘Journal: Rattel’s Hoek’’ appears by kind permission of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

Solomon Sanders (1922–2000)

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p r e fa c e ix

i n t r o d u c t i o n: 1Complicity, the Intellectual, Apartheid

c h a p t e r1. 19Two Colonial Precursors

c h a p t e r2. The Intellectual and Apartheid 57

c h a p t e r3. Apartheid and the Vernacular 93

c h a p t e r4. Prison Writing 131

c h a p t e r5. 159Black Consciousness

c o n c l u s i o n : ‘‘Don’t Forget to Tell Us What Happened to You Yourself . . .’’ 197

n o t e s 213

b i b l i o g r a p h y 243

i n d e x 265

preface

This book began with the idea of writing a literary history with an emphasis on cultural politics, but it developed into the more di≈cult project of setting out a theory of intellectual responsibility. As South Africa underwent the momentous changes of the 1990s, the shape of my project also changed. Early in that decade notions of resistance, subver- sion, and the building of alternative grassroots structures were still the order of the day in anti-apartheid politics and, in turn, set the agenda for left literary and cultural studies. But with the negotiations to end apart- heid, the nonracial election of April 1994, and the Truth and Reconcilia- tion Commission, which began its work in 1996, what emerged at the forefront of public discourse was the question ofcomplicity.The role of intellectuals after apartheid had become a matter of urgent debate, and it became clear that, like the legacy of apartheid thinking, the activities of intellectuals during the apartheid era would have to be scrupulously examined. By the mid-1990s I had been in the United States for several years and had followed the polemics in theNew York Review of Booksand elsewhere on the complicity of European intellectuals in Nazism. Sensationalism dominated, and the level of debate, on the whole, was not high. Al- though some commentators endeavored, with mixed results, to estab- lish deeper links between a given writer’s thoughts and deeds, accusers