Against Normalization: Writing Radical Democracy in South Africa (Post-Contemporary Interventions) - Softcover

O'Brien, Anthony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822325713 ISBN 13: 9780822325710

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anthony O’Brien is Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"An important, topical, beautifully written, challenging, and always interesting book. Delicately melding close reading with political vision, O'Brien presents a carefully contextualized introduction to South African writers of the last two decades and includes a consideration of their many genres."--Margaret Daymond, editor of "South African Feminisms: Writing, Theory, and Criticism, 1990-1994"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

AGAINST NORMALIZATION

Writing Radical Democracy in South AfricaBy Anthony O'Brien

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2001 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2571-0

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...........................................................................1INTRODUCTION Normalization or Radical Democracy...........................................9ONE Radical Democracy and the Electoral Sublime...........................................36TWO Njabulo Ndebele and Radical-Democratic Culture........................................76THREE Against Normalization: Cultural Identity from Below.................................103FOUR Staging Whiteness: Beckett, Havel, Maponya...........................................133FIVE Locations of Feminism: Ingrid de Kok's Familiar Ground...............................176SIX No Turning Back: Nise Malange and the Onset of Workers' Culture.......................215SEVEN Lines of Flight: Bessie Head, Arthur Nortje, Dambudzo Marechera.....................257EPILOGUE Post-Apartheid Narratives: The House Gun and Fools...............................281NOTES.....................................................................................299BIBLIOGRAPHY..............................................................................325

Chapter One

Radical Democracy and the Electoral Sublime

This is being written just after the fourth anniversary of the first free election in South Africa, on April 27, 1994: a date celebrated around the world. Majority rule since 1994 has already produced tangible benefits. According to the estimate of the political scientist Tom Lodge, the achievements of the first free vote include

a primary health care program that has already significantly reduced infant mortality, three million people supplied with piped water, half a million electrical connections a year, the significant spread of home ownership among the relatively poor, and wage rises that have beaten the (declining) inflation rate. ("Besieged in Mafeking" 3)

Lodge points out, however, that this path is put in question by the government's adoption of GEAR, with its neoliberal prioritization of growth over redistribution-to the outrage of cosatu, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (the ANC's principal ally), which argues for an alternative, Keynesian macroeconomic policy. Recent discussion of an ANC merger with Inkatha, Gatsha Buthelezi's right-wing Zulu nationalist party, suggests similar turmoil in the political sphere.

When allies and enemies shift ground like this, the famous "transition" in South Africa is clearly still very much in transition, and characterized by fierce debates, not least over questions of culture. This chapter moves into those cultural debates and the discourse of the local, the national, and the global that frames them, along two different tracks: first, at the national level, an account of how South African writers saw the event of the first free election in 1994; second, at the local level, an account of a visit to one of the most important sites where an exciting new radical-democratic culture had begun to be formed in the eighties and was undergoing a significant change in the transition, the Culture and Working Life Project (CWLP) in black working-class Durban. The dialectical tension between established writers representing the vote as a new national act of representative democracy and the CWLP writing class establishing the act of writing as a new local act of participatory democracy is a tension that underlies all the readings of theoretical debates, individual texts, and groups of writers that follow in later chapters. Here an attempt is made to convey the texture and felt experience of both sides of this dialectic as a background for the discussions to follow.

Writing the First Free Election

To begin a book whose argument is that in this transition period, far from everyone pulling toward some mythical center whose most likely name would be liberal democracy, critical attention needs to be given to the most radical impulses in literature and culture in South Africa, their writing of new directions in radical democracy, it is logical to look at writers' reactions to that inaugural event of the first free vote and their personal responses to voting-the black writers for the first time. We can do this thanks to the foresight of the novelist Andr Brink, who in the weeks before election day 1994, asked writers "to keep a diary of that day and send it to the publisher as soon as possible after the event ... here was an opportunity for writers to test their word against, arguably, the most remarkable moment in their history" (S.A. 27 April 1994 8). Brink printed the responses of forty-five writers, including most of the best-known (notably absent are the radical worker poets of the Durban CWLP), in a volume entitled S.A. 27 April 1994: an authors' diary * 'n skryversdagboek. What the rest of the population thought about voting is undoubtedly more important than these few testimonies, and still fresh in the memory is the television coverage of the popular experience of the vote, the long queues, the stories of the old and sick coming in by wheelbarrow if necessary to cast their first ballot. But the specialized social work that writers do is the work of interpretation, and Brink's compilation is a unique chance to look at what he calls "the `state of our literature' and the state of our humanity at this crucial juncture" (8). It is an opportunity to inquire into the role and the responsibility of the literary intellectual in constructing (establishing or subverting) a discourse of the nation, the new nation.

Benedict Anderson's anthropologizing of the nation as "nation-ness" summons up a tone point the persuasive historical image of citizens everywhere reading the same daily newspaper at the same time, defining for themselves in this way a horizontal belonging in space and time to the bounded "imagined community" of a nation of citizen-subjects as readers of the news (Imagined Communities 61-63). The 1994 vote, the foundational ballot that inaugurated a new democracy and with it, in many people's minds-if only because of repeated slogans like "the new South Africa"-a new nation, is more than a reading in common of putatively national texts like novels and news, ads and soap operas; it is a choreographed performance, a common act of writing, appending that common signature of the citizen, the x, which so strikes Nadine Gordimer's imagination in her account of the day. It is clear that Brink's compilation coheres, for all its diversity of tone, style, and opinion, around the discourse of the nation; for these writers, above all else, voting is primarily the key signifier of that discourse. The book therefore raises the question of what is being said, what is to be said, what needs to be said, about the current concept of the nation in South Africa. To found the nation on the ballot is already to privilege Western representative democracy as synonymous with the nation itself, in the same moment in which global late capitalism is assumed to be synonymous with economic rationality, and to risk foreclosing other conceptualizations of democracy, nation, culture, and social life. The most interesting responses in Brink's invaluable little book are those that mine the writer's awareness of the limits and ambiguities of the ballot as received truth, as the self-evident, commonsense metonym of democracy and freedom. The book in this way questions the somewhat archaic...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822325713
• ISBN 13: 9780822325710
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland