SCHOOL OF LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE STUDIES (SLLS)
Prospective Research Focus
At a School-wide forum on 20 May 2008, the possibility of a new research focus in the School was raised that could speak to both the university’s strategic research planning and the requirements around project funding.
The broad rubric under which consultations with key members of the School were being held was transnationalism. The new research focus would be called ‘Transnational Legacies’.
This proposed research focus capitalizes on the current transnational edge in Humanities research. In the wake of the twin events of South Africa’s significant internationalization after 1994, and the concurrent processes of globalization across the world in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, leading to the rise of transnational forces in economics, culture, technology, it is true to say that South Africa in general has entered a transnational historical ‘moment’.
While this is by no means a new observation or condition, its effects are broad and profound, and are likely to remain so for quite some time. There has been an upsurge in research on this phenomenon in recent years, a snapshot of which can be seen in the special issue of the accredited journal scrutiny2: issues in english studies in southen africa called ‘African Literature and Transnationalism’, edited by Isabel Hofmeyr and Liz Gunner (vol 10 no 2, 2005).
The transnational moment has given literature and cultural studies a new sense of its interrelatedness and contextual life in a world that has become significantly more porous and cross-inflected. The example of a change in focus in research on the playwright Athol Fugard, which arose at a recent WISER colloquium on SA literary studies, is instructive.
In the national frame, scholars in the 1970s and 1980s might have studied an Athol Fugard play in terms of its form, content and social relevance in largely South African, or national, terms. This was the felt reach and ambit of Fugard’s work, although some attention might also have been given to his international reception, but not without a certain suspicion of ‘metropolitan’ or ‘neocolonial’ critical agendas, since the focus of Fugard studies was firmly set around national liberation and national social conditions, which were seen as urgent and of immediate interest. ’Relevance’ was a keyword.
In the wake of formal political liberation and South Africa’s re-entry into a world in the process of globalization, however, this focus has changed quite significantly. While the ‘national liberation’ angle has lost its edge – indeed become passé – the more current question has come to be centred on how Fugard (and what used to be called ‘SA literature’) travels in the world, or how it articulates with the forces of transnationalism generally. And so a more interesting question right now would be, how is Fugard read in Kenya or Nigeria right now? What is the Kenyan Fugard? To what issues does this re-articulation of a SA writer speak? What form does its consumption take, where, and why? Such questions, apart from being interesting in their own right, are also consonant with the changed historical moment. The life of Fugard’s work in the current moment lies precisely in its transnational as well as its ‘national’ re-articulation.
Similarly, current SA writing speaks to a new sense of its ‘public’ or its ‘publics’ in a decidedly plural and transnational sense. Quite literally speaking, just as Koos Kombuis now performs to a medley of Afrikaans South African audiences in London pubs, so SA writing now speaks to a world in which both SA ‘publics’ as well as SA ‘topics’ have been re-articulated in consonance with transnational energies. Stefan Helgesson, a SA critic in Sweden, to cite another example, pays attention to SA ‘struggle’ poet Wopko Jensma in terms of a ‘cosmopolitan’ print culture not beholden to the national framework, indeed explicitly transcending such a framework. This doesn’t mean that Jensma’s work did not, in the 1970s, have national importance, but that the change in the bigger frame or context of reading and preoccupation changes the questions we ask of literature and culture.
That such considerations apply to much SA literature is particularly evident in the fact that the mark of significant Afrikaans writing is its translation into international languages – its moment of internationalization and re-uptake in the transnational frame, which also happens to be where the market for books and the consumption of ‘literature’ is most exponential. While translation has always been an option for the best Afrikaans writing (as indeed it is for all writing), the importance of translation, and its frequency, have increased markedly since 1994. Less a mark of ‘greatness’ alone, translation is now also a mark of the transnational reading market in which literary work now finds its home. ‘Translation / Transnation’ is of course a further possible sub-focus inside the overall Transnational Legacies frame.
The transnational moment also means that we ask different questions of the past, and that we re-envision the past as providing early articulations of a condition in which we now perceive social and literary-cultural life to be expressed. So, for example, our take on indigenous literatures is enriched by our sense of its intermeshing with global cultures and its resultant transculturations. We read Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi partly in view of its Shakespearian manner of presenting dramatis personae, its Elizabethan sense of tragicomic emplotment, and we relate this to the trans- and intercultural context of Plaatje’s own formation as a writer. We may then wish to read Plaatje’s translation of Julius Caesar into Setswana in this light, and how it may have affected other examples of literature in Setswana. These questions relate strongly to the current context: how have processes of transcultural meshing or latticing influenced current literary-cultural conditions? How do we read NP van Wyk Louw today? Do we see in his philosophy of ‘lojale verset’ (loyal dissidence / resistance) a suspicion of neo-national narratives of partisan or insular solidarity in the current political moment on internal ‘transnationalism’ within the body politic in South Africa? Ditto Marlene van Niekerk and other important Afrikaans writers. Is this not the moment for a ‘transnational’ re-evaluation of the Afrikaans literary canon?
Similarly, ‘modern European languages’ (German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian) can look to the imbrication of European languages in African cultures in the historical emergence of ‘Africa’ in the past two centuries or so under strong ‘local’ inhabitations of European cultural fabric – Portuguese in Southern African literatures (Angola, Mozambique), with the same applying in the case of French (West Africa) and German (Namibia) in particular, as well as other connections.
Suffice it to say that there appears to be a strong convergence of interest around the transnational moment, whose general import deserves closer and deeper scrutiny across languages and disciplines in SLLS. Not only the language disciplines, but also departments such as Media Studies and Journalism, Translating and Interpreting, SA Sign Languages, and Linguistics would be able to find resonances in a general research focus along transnational lines, since their very practice and disciplinary conditions were formed within the broad intercultural and cross-national seams of history and cultural materialities alluded to above.
SLLS’s current flagship research initiative, the Indian Ocean research thrust, indeed, is a pre-eminent expression of the transnational moment in research terms, uncovering previously hidden or unobserved alignments and reinvigorating our sense of historical becoming in a manner that is truly liberating in the larger sense of this term.
Transnational Legacies would seek to introduce several sub-foci in the School and in partnership with others schools or units under this broad rubric. One that has come up strongly in discussion is what I have provisionally entitled ‘Africaworlds’ – the idea here would be to look at, first, how ‘South African’ cultural goods are being rearticulated in Africa and how this changes their mode of consumption and their public life (the example of a Kenyan Fugard is apposite here), and second, how transnational effects have created and are creating changed forms of ‘worlding’ in Africa’s own self-fashioning (to appropriate Edward Said’s use of this term).
Another might be entitled ‘World Afrikaans Literature’ – a revisioning of the Afrikaans canon from a transnational perspective, in which the measure is taken of reception and the re-uptake of Afrikaans literature in its other, global life. Key figures here would include Breyten Breytenbach (for example, how does Breytenbach speak to Israeli, French, Algerian or any number of other readers?), Marlene van Niekerk, Deon Meyer, Etienne van Heerden, Etienne le Roux (who had an earlier double-life as a ‘French’ writer), and several others. What does H.J. Pieterse’s incorporation of the myth of Bluebeard in Die Burg van Hertog Bloubaard (‘Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’, Hertzog Prize, 2002), or his translation into Afrikaans of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, man in the transnational frame?
A further mini-focus could be called ‘The Black Europeans’, taking in the significant legacy of modern European-language literatures in Africa: Francophone (West Africa), Lusophone (Southern Africa), German (Namibia), while other modern European languages (Italian, Spanish) may be found to have experienced more localized or specialized African audiences and literary users / consumers more than one might have suspected after a cursory examination.
There is, in addition, clear scope for a sub-focus entitled ‘Theory and Post-theory in Africa’, or a similar title (Merle Williams and Stefan Polatinsky), and a focus that covers the ‘Postcolonial / Transhistorical’ cusp (including the intersecting threads of fabulist and ‘magical’ content in African articulations of the postcolonial moment).
In Media Studies / Journalism, there is clear potential for a sub-focus entitled something like ‘African Mediaworlds’, looking at questions such as the local transformations of world trends such as the New Journalism (it would not be far-fetched to study the work of Bongani Modando or Nat Nakasa and other ‘Drum Generation’ writers in this frame), ‘Gonzo’ journalism in South Africa (Caspar Greeff, for example), Advocacy and Struggle Journalism, not to mention the South / African inhabitation and re-forming of world media culture(s).
In addition, the Public Intellectual Life project, in a sense, will come to have a new incarnation and be partly lodged in SLLS now that Lesley Cowling and myself have become key players in a grant application to SANPAD (South Africa-Netherlands Research Programme on Alternatives in Development). The potential for Mellon-type compounding benefits here are self-evident.
In each of these potential sub-foci, the idea would be to find one or two extremely passionate lead role-players who would then organize events such as colloquia or symposia leading to special issues of journals in which both senior academics, younger academics and postgraduate students would participate. Efforts should be made to leverage Mellon funding for distinguished visiting professors in each of these fields to conduct lectures, seminars and the like, and to help guide and shape research in general. For example, in the ‘Africaworlds’ thrust, one might invite Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty to lead research on ‘provincialising Europe’ (a research impulse for which Chakrabarty is well-known). Other examples readily come to mind. In the ‘Black Europeans’ thrust, one might invite a figure such as Stefan Helgesson (Portuguese in Southern Africa), or a renowned Francophone expert. One could invite an international comparavist to help, in the ‘World Afrikaans’ thrust, find changed ways of reading Uys Krige’s ‘Spanish’ Afrikaans poems, Etienne le Roux’s ‘French’ novelistic concerns, Koos Prinsloo’s metropolitan postmodernism, Breyten Breytenbach’s Zen Buddhism, and so on. In Media Studies and Journalism, one could find international experts to help us reinterpret world trends in their African re-inhabitations, especially Investigative Journalism traditions and their special precedents, narrative journalism, notions of news and content management, and the like. A distinguished visiting professor here could be Zakes Mda, who has strong opinions on the use of fictional techniques in narrative journalism.
This, then, in broad strokes, is the research plan under discussion in the School. I am also inviting potential participation by people in WISER and the Wits School of Arts, since such big research thrusts thrive on cooperative synergies. For example, Michael Titlestad’s ‘shipwreck’ project might find a far greater purchase on research funding if it decided to work in cooperation with the SLLS Transnational Legacies research thrust, with all the attendant harnessing of funds and expertise, graduate students and research amplification within a bigger framework that might include the bringing on board of younger, newer researchers. Or Gerrit Olivier might be convinced to lead, or at least act as a lead consultant for, a ‘World Afrikaans Literature’ sub-thrust.
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