|
(Reading
Roy Campbell, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee)
[Abstract: This essay depicts the baffling shock of méconnaissance at
every turn of the panoptical lens of the South African landscape.
If sublimation is the highest point of the low as Jacques Lacan
posits, South African literature represents a primary candidate
for its consistent mourning of a glory (Lacanian agalma) that never
was. The best writers, including Roy Campbell, Nadine Gordimer,
and J. M. Coetzee, are often lost in the miraginary (qua
chimerical) borders of life and art in South Africa that Coetzee
in particular always-already indulges in a Europhilic dance of depravity that
hails the hegemony of anthropomorphism and lycanthropy over sense
and decency.]
Their first secret is an intimate, sexual, family secret, a
trauma of begetting which speaks a whole history of racial division
(apartheid as sexual apartheid as much as, if not before, anything
else).
- Jacqueline Rose
For, where the legacy of apartheid has been one of domination,
a sense of self is bound up with cultural patterns at the broadest
level. Similarly, where black and white identities have been ravaged
through false definitions imposed and fixed by systemic racial
obsession, another sense of self is critical to the notion of
an alternative future.
- Stephen Clingman
South African literature is a literature in bondage … shot
through as they are with feelings of homelessness and yearnings
for a nameless liberation. It is a less than fully human literature,
unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power,
unable to move from elementary relations of contestation, domination,
and subjugation.
- J. M. Coetzee
In a study of inter-racial relationships in three
novels, the South African writer, Lewis Nkosi, posits that human
relationships are formed and quickly blighted by an atmosphere of
moral confinement (1). This paper examines the historical hunger
of South African literature. It makes the case that racial obsession,
and by inference sexual excess, overdetermines South Africa’s
literary production.
The preceding epigraphs support the view of apartheid as a cultural
excess that circumscribes creative imagination. In affirming this
reading in her study of literature and the archive in South Africa,
Sarah Nuttal posits that to write one’s story is always “to
enter into the order of corruption – corruption in the sense
of a destroyed purity and thus of an excess” (296). She supports
her postulation by citing the checkered history of race, sex, and
madness in Bessie Head’s autobiographical legend: “The
reason for my (Head’s) peculiar birthplace (Pietermaritzburg
Mental Hospital) was that my mother was white, and she had acquired
me from a black man. She was adjudged insane and committed to the
mental hospital while pregnant.” In an epigraph to her short
story selection Jump and Other Stories, Nadine Gordimer provides
a disturbing visual of excess in her description of the short story:
“To write one is to try to express from a situation in the
exterior or interior world the life-giving drop – sweat, tear,
semen, saliva – that will spread an intensity on the page,
burn a hole in it.” The impact of this statement in relation
to South Africa and her literature will become clear towards the
end of this paper. The operative terms for this study are, therefore,
derived from the phrases “sexual apartheid” (Rose 107),
“racial obsession” (Clingman 9), and “torsions
of power” (Coetzee, “Jerusalem” 98). “Excess”
in Lacanian terms is variously defined as objet petit a, leftover,
rupture, pus, scar, shell, effigy of a mortal wound which is a representation
of a representation.
Select poetry of Roy Campbell, Nadine Gordimer’s novel July’s
People, and J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace will be used for
this study. Campbell (1901-1957), Gordimer (1923-), and Coetzee
(1940-) are chosen because their work traverses the entire development
of twentieth century South African politics and culture. The three
are also among the most prominent of their generations of South
African writing of the past one hundred years. All three are, moreover,
individually and collectively relevant to the issue of South African
racial hunger. Abiola Irele notes that South African writing assumes
a new direction with the work of settler white writers. “The
heightened sense of involvement with the particular experience of
the black community in relation to the political and social circumstances
of the racial divide that governs life within the South African
context, gives a distinct quality of reference to their work”
(Irele 60).
Foregrounding the conflictual impulses in white South African writing
are the master narratives of the conquest of space and nature and
the inheritance of the earth and its riches. The primitive material
accumulation – which was the drive behind the occupation of
South Africa as a settler colony – forecloses the deadly contestation
between the native black African population and the alien white
invaders. The severity of the racial conflict was overdetermined
by the commitment of the powerful white minority to objectify the
overwhelmed black majority. The vicious design of linguistic definition
and political subjection marks the inhuman legacy of racism and
its apartheid extension.
Relative to the South African hunger is the attendant moral stalemate
that is the residue of the abandonment of human responsibility.
To hunger implies the instinctual compulsion to eat and the satisfaction
of desire. To “eat the other” as has been demonstrated
by generations of theorists – including Friedrich Hegel, Karl
Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida,
Diana Fuss, Peter Hulme, Alan Rice, and Crystal Bartolovich –
is the phenomenology of consumption that organizes the cannibal
culture of racism and slavery, apartheid and colonialism, capitalism
and globalized consumerism (Hulme 1-38). Peter Theroux concurs with
this reading when he asks, in his travelogue Sandstorms: Days and
Nights in Arabia: “Does anyone with a non-profit interest
in a foreign land not owe it largely to the sexual pull of the culture
and its people?” (Rieff 249) The North African travelogues
of Andre Gide and Oscar Wilde, as well as Edward Said’s reading
of “orientalism,” tend to bear out the reading of apartheid
as a sexual perversion. The present essay grapples with the haunting
question: What vision does the South African racial hegemony portend
for the future beyond the machinery of decay?
Campbell’s poetry is broadly concerned with the subject of
purity and violence. In the first instance, the image of innocence
and unconscious withdrawal predisposes the poet’s personae
to a prophetic vision of an imminent emergence with staggering consequences.
This, in Campbell’s poetry, is the symbolic location of the
conquered and subdued blacks in pre-apartheid South Africa of the
early twentieth century. In the second instance, recurrent stirrings
of war and expropriation forebode the ultimate collapse of the apartheid
regime. A veteran of both the Spanish War and the Second World War,
Campbell’s work signifies the political activism of the outsider.
As shown ahead, his poetic shaft lampoons the simpleminded logic
of racial bigotry.
Gordimer’s July’s People is a novel of the apartheid
era, beginning with the rise to power of the minority Afrikaner
National Party in 1948 and ending with the militant resurgence of
the African National Congress. In telling the story of the relationship
between the black servant, July, and his employer white family,
the Smales, Gordimer explores the unbalanced and volatile relationship
between blacks and whites in apartheid South Africa. She lays emphasis
on language and discourse communities to demonstrate how differences
in verbal communication delineate the opulent white bourgeois world
from the slippery landscape of the black proletariat. Though Jewish,
Gordimer was a pioneer activist of the anti-apartheid movement,
and her July’s People is a counter-narrative of the social
upheaval in her country.
Coetzee’s Disgrace brings up the South African story to a
head. In many ways, it mimics Gordimer’s July’s People.
Whereas Gordimer describes the revolt leading up to the collapse
of apartheid, Coetzee describes the dilemma of power shift. The
tumultuous rage that announces its conceptual stirrings in July’s
People reaches uncontrollable peak in Disgrace. If July’s
People showcases the making of the human beast, Disgrace illustrates
the triumph of human bestiality. If July’s People is a naturalist
fiction, Disgrace is the ultimate post-naturalistic fiction –
just as Campbell’s pastoralism is a camouflage of the early
phase of naturalism.
The persistent exploration of human animality is one of the major
differences between South African literature and the literature
of the rest of Africa, except to some extent East Africa. The naturalism
that is signified in the novels of Meja Mwangi shows the link between
East African literature and South African literature in terms of
the longevity and impact of white settler presence in both regions.
That naturalism remained a recurrent motif in South African literature
till the end of the twentieth century shows how far behind the moral
range of modern man that the apartheid policy took the society.
The aptly titled Disgrace is a perfection of the literary subgenre
of depravity. Its genealogy includes Peter Abrahams’s novel
Mine Boy; Alex La Guma’s novels A Walk in the Night, The Stone
Country, and The Time of the Butcherbird; Dennis Brutus’s
poetry collections Sirens, Knuckels, Boots and Letters to Martha,
and Coetzee’s own earlier novel Life & Times of Michael
K.
Campbell represents the subject of animalism in his narrative poem
“A Veld Eclogue: The Pioneers” (22-26). The Afrikaners
(“Boers”) who settled at the Cape in 1652 have taken
over the entire land of South Africa and quickly relapsed into laziness.
In the poem, Campbell caricatures his white compatriots as “Johnny
and Piet … one Durban-born, the other Dutch.” The two
simple shepherds lie in a vast wasteland where they watch only one
jointly-owned Nanny-goat. Campbell sarcastically describes the two
as lying “On the bare veld where nothing grows/ Save beards
and nails and blisters on the nose.” Rain does not fall, but
the poor Nanny-goat waits patiently as Johnny and Piet “switched
the flies/ Or paused to damn a passing nigger’s eyes.”
Otherwise the poet-personae do nothing but hack jiggers from their
gnarled toes, sleep, loudly sing the “smutly” folksong
“Ferreira” for jumping baboons. They engage in the religious
debauchery of “Nagmaal” and hold a special rally of
the “Empire Group.” Campbell signifies that these Boer
pioneers are unwashed and smelly lay-about who are clumsy horsemen
and very bad hunters whose singular distinction is in sprawling
across “boundless spaces.” Though they venomously despise
each other, they are passion-driven in their joint hatred for blacks:
“One touch of tar-brush makes the whole world kin.”
Campbell’s poetic portraiture attempts to reverse centuries
of racist anthropology which persistently reserves taxonomical ordering
to black Africans. He believes that the colonial is mentally and
physically superior to the European, thereby contradicting preceding
European travelogue which compares South African blacks to cattle,
hogs, and tortoise (Butler and Mann 76). Buffon’s eighteenth
century speculative anthropology relates the Khoi (“Hottentots”)
to apes, in tandem with a report of April 14, 1653, in which the
South Africa settler-pioneer Van Riebeeck refers to the “Hottentots”
as “dull, stupid, lazy, and stinking” (White Writing
19, 21). Campbell’s poetic vision, therefore, controverts
the Europhilic narratives of Joseph Conrad, Hannah Arendt, and Coetzee
which suggest that Europeans in Africa tend to degenerate with their
new environment.
Gordimer extends Campbell’s vision by positing that degeneration
is both a product of communal politics and a global human condition.
She depicts rootlessness in July’s People through the diachronic
binarism of settler-native, urban-rural, master-servant, oppressor-oppressed,
white-black, bourgeois-peasant, and adult-infant relationships.
The gradual breakdown of law and order engendered by the contradictions
of these dichotomies illumines Gordimer’s dissatisfaction
with the bleak social formation of her South Africa. The unwholesome
experience of the white family of Maureen and Bam Smales and their
three young children is a pointer to Gordimer’s politics.
To escape the raging black revolution in the Johannesburg metropolis,
the Smales accept the invitation of their black servant, July, to
move to his hometown in a remote agrarian village. Their fortunes
quickly tumble from the affluence of the white Witwatersrand suburb
to a meager existence in huts that leak, among roaming pigs that
feed on human excrement, surrounding bushes that serve for convenience,
and drunken women who stagger to pee on the sidewalk with babies
strapped on their backs. What is even more disturbing is the smoothness
with which the Smales children adapt to their new environment, squatting
with the black children over a lunch of “mealie-meal”
with bare hands, wiping their behind with stones, and playing among
shit-smeared toilet rolls blowing in the air. In effect, the powerful
machinery of hunger overdetermines all pretences of civilization.
The black revolution never really happens, but Gordimer is, like
Campbell, questioning the political validity of white liberalism.
July’s People is therefore a prophecy of what could happen
in the face of a total breakdown in the quality of human relationship
in South Africa. Niceties and decency which mark the pre-revolutionary
interchange of the Smales and their black servant are not enough
to heal the political wound of apartheid. The treatment the Smales
receive from July and his kin shows that hegemonic pendulum and
its attendant excess could swing one way or the other and not necessarily
the prerogative of any particular race. Maureen suddenly recalls
that she had looked on her servants as if they were her creatures
like cattle and pigs. Arthur Ravenscroft rightly remarks that it
is Gordimer’s shrewd understanding of how the exercise of
power at whatever level poisons the human heart that makes her “psychological
study of yet another unlovely white South African an enterprise
that is also politically just and relevant” (Ravenscroft 132).
Like Gordimer, Campbell also devotes the two short poems “On
Some South African Novelists” and “On the Same”
to satirizing artistic non-commitment.
Whatever literature has produced so far in its representations of
sociopolitical dilemma in Africa, no other writer has produced a
work of such boundless sweep of imponderable hunger on an African
society – in relation to the stark reality of ugliness, infinite
reaches of human depravity, and the enormity of its moral wasteland
– as Coetzee’s Disgrace. Not even Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness set on the River Congo could come close, for it
is only the apartheid regime in South Africa that could make such
a total collapse of human life-force possible. Coetzee’s protagonist
in Disgrace, David Lurie, a once-distinguished professor of English
at a Cape Town university, falls from grace after he is dismissed
from his college position on charges of statutory rape of a female
student. He withdraws to Grahamstown to stay with his lesbian daughter
who lives with her dogs and cats and wears “asexual clothes.”
On encountering Bev Shaw, director of the Animal Welfare League,
Lurie quickly degenerates into “a dog-man: a dog undertaker;
a dog psychopomp; a harijan” (Disgrace 146). “The dogs
that are brought in,” as the narrator broods, “suffer
from distempers, from broken limbs, from infected bites, from mange,
from neglect, benign or malign, from old age, from malnutrition,
from intestinal parasites, but most of all from their own fertility”
(142).
Lurie’s job is to assist Bev Shaw in killing the too many
different kinds of sick animals that are littered all over the place.
Then he packs them up for disposal at the incinerator after the
carcasses have spent a night in the automobile parked at his lodging.
He wakes up very early everyday prepared to make new corpses. He
tells his daughter: “As for the animals, by all means let
us be kind to them. But let us not lose our perspective. We are
a different order of creation from the animals. Not higher, necessarily,
just different. So if we are going to be kind, let it be out of
simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution”
(74). When the preceding statement is related to Bev Shaw’s
“Animal Welfare League W. O. 1529,” a disturbing pattern
emerges between Coetzee’s fictive invention and the anthropomorphism
of his European forbears who settled in the South African Cape in
1652. As historical allegories, Coetzee’s narratives could
be read as mimic fiction.
In the earlier Life & Times of Michael K, Coetzee’s caricature
Michael, a genetic garbage, escapes into the primitive Karoo countryside
where he spends many hours and days scheming how to trap mountain
wild goats. While a war rages all around, Michael lives in a hole
occasionally emerging to plant, water, and eat his hidden pumpkins.
Michael’s escapist doctrine is that human survival in such
a state of anomy is dependent on one’s ability to live like
a beast. He is said to be “like stone, a pebble, having lain
around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time …
An unbearing, unborn creature” (Life 135). It is Coetzee’s
disturbing treatment of his subjects that necessitates Ravenscroft’s
cautionary critique of the characterization of Michael. Reading
the novel, says Ravenscroft, “raises afresh the question whether
the extremes of experienced human suffering … can be conveyed
in art, other than wholly symbolically, without appalling offence
being done to the everyday dignity of human nature” (129).
In other words, the repetitive, Europhilic portrayal of latter-day
noble savagery that runs through Coetzean fiction calls for much
more than the uncritical fawning and adulation which enable masked
outrage against civilized taste and ethnic concerns to escape clear-eyed
scrutiny. That is why Salman Rushdie accuses Coetzee of “cold
detachment” and calls the discourse of Disgrace “heartless”
– and worse than “rubble literature” – for
being “part of the darkness it describes.” “For
a character to justify himself by claiming not to understand his
motives is one thing; for the novelist to collude in that justification
is quite another” (Rushdie 298).1
Campbell’s poem “The Zulu Girl” (30-31) portrays
the haunting image of a young Zulu mother, who works between hoeing
the farmland and breastfeeding her baby under the steamy sun. As
the sleeping baby suckles, his flesh imbibes “An old unquenchable
unsmotherable heat -/ The curbed ferocity of beaten tribes/ The
sullen dignity of their tribes.” Campbell presents a visual
immediacy of the looming form of the mother’s body, protective
and nurturing her infant for the terrible cloud that bears an approaching
harvest in its breast. Another poem “The Serf,” presents
a ploughman patiently working through the green like a somnambulist.
His heart bears the burden of insults as memories assail him of
war cries of the past and tribal spears that were fatal. Yet he
doggedly works to plough down palaces, thrones, and towers.
Much of South African literature is set in a miraginary garden or
a chimera. The Edenic image of South Africa which is inscribed in
the psyche of the first European settlers forecloses the primordial
savagery that ravaged the Paradise. Coetzee calls attention to the
preoccupation of South African writers with exploring the intrusion
of evil and violence in their society (White Writing 14). Campbell,
in his poem “Horses on the Camarge,” observes that “the
great white breakers” have transformed the garden into “the
grey wastes of dread” by turning the natives into slaves and
letting ghosts haunt the land. In “The Wayzgoose” Campbell’s
persona bewails a land torn by shells and “fat white sheep,”
where donkeys grow into statesmen, “worms the size of magistrates,”
and the tadpole becomes a journalist. The genius of the poem is
Campbell’s discovery that hunger and parasites are in a symbiotic
siege on Eden:
The “garden colony” they call our land,
And surely for a garden it was planned:
What apter phrase with such a place could cope
Where vegetation has so fine a scope,
Where weeds in such variety are found
And all the rarest parasites abound,
Where pumpkins to professors are promoted
And turnips into Parliament are? (243)
Behind the shrapnel of Campbell’s sarcasm
is his attempt to describe the breakdown of the fountain cords of
life. In “Death of the Bull,” the poet sings that “a
wound that never heals/ rills forth the lily-scented blood.”
“A Jug of Water” also persists in the pursuit of a phallic
ghost in the character of “A Masquer so anonymously white/
Who smiles without a face.” In “Christ in Uniform,”
the persona cries out against the waste of blood and desire as two
lovers on the couch of joy collapse “with a strangled cheer.”
Campbell’s “The Theology of Bongwi, the Baboon”
(17) satirizes white Christology. An ape sits in the forest yelping
at the moon: “Tis God who made me in His shape/ He is a Great
Baboon.” In death, sings the ape, this loving God will raise
him from the sod to teach the perfect “Mischief” of
heaven, “The Nimbleness of God.” Campbell castigates
the church of South Africa for supporting apartheid, just as the
American church supported slavery. It is this God of racial and
material deception of Campbell’s poetry that the black South
African writer, Ezekiel Mphahlele, describes as an intellectualized
God who lacks meaning to the African (xxiv). The anthropologist
Jean Comarrof pushes a thesis of existential immolation in her lecture
“Alien-nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millenial Capitalism
in South Africa,” by arguing that the South African body is
like a grave – a place in which God had died.
If Campbell is the high priest of the death of love, Gordimer is
the goddess. In July’s People Maureen Smales watches with
deepening repulsion at the shattered ego of her once beloved husband,
Bam. She blackmails her former black servant, July, threatening
to tell his wife of his urban girlfriend. Ravenscroft notes that
the crudity of exposing her breasts to Bam without a shred of sexual
intimacy matches her drowning the superfluous litter of kittens.
She finally abandons her husband and children and races off at the
sound of a helicopter.
In Coetzee’s Disgrace Lurie watches as three black men come
into her daughter’s farm home and take turns to rape Lucy.
Lurie himself is beaten, tied up, locked in a toilet, and set on
fire. Though he survives the assault, it is Lucy’s repressed
acceptance of the experience that shocks him. Worst of all Lucy
looks forward to having the baby from gang rapes. In July’s
People July does not show surprise that Dan his kinsman steals Bam’s
gun, and he initially denies knowing Dan’s whereabouts. In
Disgrace Lucy’s black assistant, Petrus, shows no surprise
at the rape of Lucy by three black men who are known to him. Like
July, he denies knowing Pollux, his teenage nephew who is one of
the rapists. Pollux comes back to live on the farm under the protection
of Petrus. July takes over Bam’s car, and Petrus prepares
to take over Lucy’s farm with a proposal to make her his second
wife.
What both Coetzee and Gordimer are describing is the process of
cold-blooded divestiture of arbitrary white dominance. Lucy, Maureen,
and the Smales children understand and accept the coming of change.
Bam Smales and David Lurie could not accept change as a fact and
that creates a new tension in white family relations. Maureen antagonizes
her husband, Bam, and runs away; Lucy antagonizes her father, Lurie,
and he moves out of the farm. Campbell, Coetzee, and Gordimer emphasize
the fluidity of signifiers in the interracial signifying chain.
Miraginary subject positions are magnified via the tragicomic schema
of identification, meconnaissance, and anamorphic chiasma. All the
texts under analysis represent the psychotic subject’s emergence
from the unconscious sleep of innocence to the recognition of the
contestable space of the father.
A major factor that marks the dislocation of communication between
whites and blacks in the texts under review is the use of language.
In July’s People Maureen observes that the native work hands
speak the “bastard” black lingua franca of the mines,
whose vocabulary was limited to the “orders given by whites
and responses by blacks” (July’s 45). The English language
spoken by the black servant, July, is learned in the kitchens, factories,
and mines, and it is not based on exchange of ideas and feelings.
By the time of his final confrontation with Maureen at the end of
the novel, July has abandoned Maureen’s alien language to
spar against her in his own identitarian ethnic language. Similar
verbal confrontation recurs in Disgrace.
Under apartheid blacks need the oppressive English language to gain
employment in the mines and white homes. In the revolutionary dismantling
of the apartheid machinery blacks have no further use of the colonial
language because the erstwhile agencies of oppression, like the
land, mines, and institutions – qua metonymic “ideological
state apparatuses” (Althusser) – have been recovered.
In his poem “The Flaming Terrapin” (59-93) Campbell
shows how the imperial ship (“cruising shark”) lifts
tons of gold through River Congo. In his novel Mine Boy Peter Abrahams
portrays the oppressive workings of apartheid labor in which the
mines often collapse and kill the trapped black workers, and the
black workers generally develop lung cancer and die young. With
the fall of apartheid and subsequent transfer of its self-perpetuating
technologies the notorious white power of linguistic objectification
simply disappears.
It is necessary, in conclusion, to draw attention to the pervasive
social crisis in South Africa. Raphael de Kadt had imagined that
post-apartheid South Africa will be concerned with “the problems
of urbanization, poverty and economic growth” (Kadt 57-58).
Available evidence, however, points to underlying problems of continuing
historical hunger of race and sex, coupled with the devastation
of an as yet incurable disease. In fact, Lucy in Disgrace demands
that Lurie should stop calling the land on which they live a farm
or garden, something pure, untainted, and innocent. She is more
worried that her rapists act with hate and behave like “tax
collectors.” The unborn baby is a conception of hateful sex.
“They do rape,” Lucy’s words ring with horror
(Disgrace 158). The young rapists do not believe that they owe anyone
any moral obligation, least of all the white population. In other
words, they act with vengeance. This is the prophecy of such visionary
white writers as Campbell, Gordimer, and Athol Fugard, and the warning
of such black compatriots as Dennis Brutus, Alex la Guma, and Can
Themba. In differing styles and forms they all contend with the
possibility of an Eden without the corruptive agency – or
excess – of a serpentine order of Adam and Eve, a pre-Adamic
pristine conception of art and creation. South African literature
as sign becomes a prime instance of writing as an excess of an excess,
an unattainable part-object, an unfillable hole of desire, a jouissance
of the symbolic order, a remainder of a remainder.
The high incidence of HIV/AIDS in South Africa suggests a link to
the epidemic of rape violence in the country. In an alarming essay
“Africa’s Plague and Everybody’s AIDS,”
Gordimer writes that there were one thousand seven hundred HIV infections
in South Africa everyday in 1999. Four million South Africans had
tested positive to the HIV virus in a national population of forty-three
million people. Other report indicates that over two million Africans
died of AIDS in 2006 alone, the bulk of which were apparently in
Southern Africa (Sawyer). Gordimer’s outcry (which recalls
the epigraphs from Rose, Clingman, and Coetzee) points to the thrust
of this essay: “For there will be a cure discovered, there
will be a vaccine – and after that? How shall we restore the
quality of human relations that have been debased, shamed, reduced
to the source of a fatal disease?” (“Africa’s
Plague” A29).
The social emergency of historical hunger is the moral dilemma of
a racist state. South Africa has triumphed over the glitter of gold
and the pain of apartheid, but will the return of virtuous power
end the hegemony of surplus passion and primal violence? Campbell,
Gordimer, and Coetzee demonstrate the escape of redemptive emotional
bond from a mindless pursuit of perfunctory desire. Their work illustrates
the solitary reign of vicious excess in every structure overwhelmed
by greed, disease, and death.
Note
1. See my forthcoming essay “Secret/aries of In(san)ity:
J. M. Coetzee’s Male/diction,” for the historicizing
of Coetzee’s “intellectual allegiance” to western
alienists.
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses:
Notes towards an Investigation.” Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York; London: Monthly Review,
1971. 127-186.
Bartolovich, Crystal. “Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism.” Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Ed.
Francis Barker et al. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 204-237.
Butler, Guy, and Chris Mann, eds. A New Book of South African Verse
in English. Cape Town: Oxford UP, 1979.
Campbell, Roy. Collected Poems. London: The Bodley Head, 1949.
Clingman, Stephen. “Introduction.” In Nadine Gordimer.
The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics, and Places. Ed. Stephen
Clingman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. 1-15.
Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. New York: Viking, 1999.
_____. “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech.” Doubling
the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. Derek Atwell. Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1992. 96-99.
_____. Life & Times of Michael K. New York: Viking, 1984.
_____. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.
Comarrof, Jean. “Alien-nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millenial
Capitalism in South Africa.” Unpublished lecture at the Maxwell
School, Syracuse University, April 6, 2006
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Dover Pub, 1990.
De Kadt, Raphael. “Modernity and the Future of Democracy.”
Theoria 74 (October 1989): 45-58.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between
the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Trans. & ed. James
Strachey. Bio. Intro. Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton, 1950.
Fuss, Diana. “Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics
of Identification.” Identification Papers. New York: Routledge,
1995. 141-172.
Gordimer, Nadine. “Africa’s Plague, and Everyone’s
AIDS.” The New York Times (April 11, 2000): A29.
_____. July’s People. 1981. New York: Penguin, 1982.
_____. Jump and Other Stories. London: Bloomsbury Pub, 1991.
Hulme, Peter. “Introduction: The Cannibal Scene.” Cannibalism
and the Colonial World. Ed. Francis Barker et al. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1998. 1-38.
Irele, Abiola. “The African Imagination.” Research in
African Literature 21.1 (1990): 49-67.
Lacan Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960: The Seminar
of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis
Porter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Mphahlele, Ezekiel. “Introduction.” Down Second Avenue:
Growing Up in a South African Ghetto. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith,
1978. vi-xxvi.
Nkosi, Lewis. “Sex and Politics in Southern African Literature.”
Papers on African Literature – Sheffield Papers on Literature
and Society 1 (1976): 1-12.
Nuttal, Sarah. “Literature and the Archive: The Biography
of Texts.” In Refiguring the Archive. Eds. Carolyn Hamilton,
et al. Dordrecht; Boston; London: Kluwer Acadmic Pub, 2002. 283-299.
Ravenscroft, Arthur. “South African Novelists as Prophets.”
In Literature and the Art of Creation: Essays and Poems in Honor
of A. Norman Jeffares. Eds. Robert D. Welch and Suheil Bushrui.
Gerrard's Cross, Berkshire: Colin Smythe, 1988. 124- 139.
Rieff, David. “Sand Trap.” Transition 51: 246-250.
Rice, Alan. “‘Who’s Eating Whom’: The Discourse
of Cannibalism in the Literature of the Black Atlantic from Equiano’s
Travels to Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Research in African
Literature 29.4 (1998): 107-121.
Rose, Jacqueline. States of Fantasy. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996.
Rushdie, Salman. “May 2000: J. M. Coetzee.” Step across
This Line: Collected Nonfiction, 1992-2002. New York: Random House,
2002. 297-299.
Sawyer, Diane. “Interview with Bill Clinton.” Good Morning
America-ABC News Television (July 19, 2007) |
|
|
|
