Zoë Wicomb & the Translocal

Zoë Wicomb & the Translocal PDF Author: Kai Easton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315283395
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
This is the first book on the fiction of Zoë Wicomb, a writer long at the forefront of the South African canon and whose international stature was firmly secured with the award of an inaugural Windham Campbell prize at Yale in 2013. It brings together interdisciplinary essays from the UK, USA, South Africa, and Australia, demonstrating Wicomb’s importance as a novelist, short-story writer, and critic. The central focus of the volume is the translocal, a term that navigates the complex and shifting relations between disparate localities, respecting the situatedness of each locality within its immediate geopolitical context, while investigating the connections and contrasts that operate between them. In Wicomb’s case, her work stems from a dual allegiance to two localities, both in her fiction as in her life: South Africa’s Western Cape and the west of Scotland. In tracking the relations, contemporary and historical, between these sites, her fiction reveals a consistent interest in and interrogation of home and belonging, space and place; it also offers telling insights into questions of race and gender. The historical processes of colonization and migration that have produced translocal connections of this kind are central to postcolonial studies, to which this book makes a significant contribution. Exploring the visual and cartographical, and extending debates on the transnational and cosmopolitan that are currently taking place across disciplines, including literary studies, geography, history, politics, and anthropology, the collection covers the range of Wicomb’s work. It also features an unanthologised essay by Wicomb herself, an interview, and a suite of photographs by Sophia Klaase, whose images of Namaqualand inspired Wicomb’s most recent novel, October.

Zoë Wicomb & the Translocal

Zoë Wicomb & the Translocal PDF Author: Kai Easton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315283395
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
This is the first book on the fiction of Zoë Wicomb, a writer long at the forefront of the South African canon and whose international stature was firmly secured with the award of an inaugural Windham Campbell prize at Yale in 2013. It brings together interdisciplinary essays from the UK, USA, South Africa, and Australia, demonstrating Wicomb’s importance as a novelist, short-story writer, and critic. The central focus of the volume is the translocal, a term that navigates the complex and shifting relations between disparate localities, respecting the situatedness of each locality within its immediate geopolitical context, while investigating the connections and contrasts that operate between them. In Wicomb’s case, her work stems from a dual allegiance to two localities, both in her fiction as in her life: South Africa’s Western Cape and the west of Scotland. In tracking the relations, contemporary and historical, between these sites, her fiction reveals a consistent interest in and interrogation of home and belonging, space and place; it also offers telling insights into questions of race and gender. The historical processes of colonization and migration that have produced translocal connections of this kind are central to postcolonial studies, to which this book makes a significant contribution. Exploring the visual and cartographical, and extending debates on the transnational and cosmopolitan that are currently taking place across disciplines, including literary studies, geography, history, politics, and anthropology, the collection covers the range of Wicomb’s work. It also features an unanthologised essay by Wicomb herself, an interview, and a suite of photographs by Sophia Klaase, whose images of Namaqualand inspired Wicomb’s most recent novel, October.

Writing Transnational History

Writing Transnational History PDF Author: Fiona Paisley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 147426400X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Over the past two decades, transnational history has become an established term describing approaches to the writing of world or global history that emphasise movement, dynamism and diversity. This book investigates the emergence of the 'transnational' as an approach, its limits, and parameters. It focuses particular attention on the contributions of postcolonial and feminist studies in reformulating transnational historiography as a move beyond the national to one focusing on oceans, the movement of people, and the contributions of the margins. It ends with a consideration of developing approaches such as translocalism. The book considers the new kinds of history that need to be written now that the transnational perspective has become widespread. Providing an accessible and engaging chronology of the field, it will be key reading for students of historiography and world history.

The Short Story after Apartheid

The Short Story after Apartheid PDF Author: Graham K. Riach
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1835533930
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
The Short Story after Apartheid offers the first major study of the anglophone short story in South Africa since apartheid’s end. By focusing on the short story this book complicates models of South African literature dominated by the novel and contributes to a much-needed generic and formalist turn in postcolonial studies. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and these brief, fragmentary, elliptical, formally innovative stories offer perspectives that reframe or revise important concerns of post-apartheid literature: the aesthetics of engaged writing, the politics of the past, class and race, the legacies of violence, and the struggle over the land. Through an analysis of key texts from the period by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, this book assesses the place of the short story in post-apartheid writing and develops a fuller model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought.

You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town

You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town PDF Author: Zoë Wicomb
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 9781558612259
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
The South African novel of identity that "deserves a wide audience on a par with Nadine Gordimer."

David's Story

David's Story PDF Author: Zoë Wicomb
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558619135
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A powerful post-apartheid novel and winner of South Africa’s M-Net Literary Award, hailed by J.M. Coetzee as “a tremendous achievement.” South Africa, 1991: Nelson Mandela is freed from prison, the African National Congress is now legal, and a new day dawns in Cape Town. David Dirkse, part of the underground world of activists, spies, and saboteurs in the liberation movement, suddenly finds himself above ground. With “time to think” after the unbanning of the movement, David searches his family tree, tracing his bloodline to the mixed-race “Coloured” people of South Africa and their antecedents among the indigenous people and early colonial settlers. But as David studies his roots, he soon learns that he’s on a hit list. Now caught in a web of surveillance and betrayal, he’s forced to rethink his role in the struggle for “nonracial democracy,” the loyalty of his “comrades,” and his own conceptions of freedom. Mesmerizing and multilayered, Wicomb’s award-winning novel delivers a moving examination of the nature of political vision, memory, and truth. “A delicate, powerful novel, guided by the paradoxes of witnessing the certainties of national liberation and the uncertainties of ground-level hybrid identity, the mysteries of sexual exchange, the austerity of political fiction. Wicomb’s book belongs on a shelf with books by Maryse Condé and Yvette Christiansë.” —Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

Playing in the Light

Playing in the Light PDF Author: Zoë Wicomb
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1595582215
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
By the Windham Campbell Prize winner Set in a beautifully rendered 1990s Cape Town, Zo Wicomb's celebrated novel revolves around Marion Campbell, who runs a travel agency but hates traveling, and who, in post-apartheid society, must negotiate the complexities of a knotty relationship with Brenda, her first black employee. As Alison McCulloch noted in the New York Times, "Wicomb deftly explores the ghastly soup of racism in all its unglory--denial, tradition, habit, stupidity, fear--and manages to do so without moralizing or becoming formulaic." Caught in the narrow world of private interests and self-advancement, Marion eschews national politics until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission throws up information that brings into question not only her family's past but her identity and her rightful place in contemporary South African society. "Stylistically nuanced and psychologically astute" (Kirkus), Playing in the Light is as powerful in its depiction of Marion's personal journey as it is in its depiction of South Africa's bizarre, brutal history.

Still Life

Still Life PDF Author: Zoë Wicomb
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620976110
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A New York Times Top Historical Fiction Pick of 2020 A stunningly original new novel exploring race, truth in authorship, and the legacy of past exploitation, from the Windham-Campbell lifetime achievement award winner When Zoëml; Wicomb burst onto the literary scene in 1987 with You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, she was hailed by her literary contemporaries and reviewers alike. Since then, her carefully textured writing has cemented her reputation as being among the most distinguished writers working today and earned her one of the inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes for Lifetime Achievement in Fiction Writing. Wicomb's majestic new novel Still Life juggles with our perception of time and reality as Wicomb tells the story of an author struggling to write a biography of long-forgotten Scottish poet Thomas Pringle, whose only legacy is in South Africa where he is dubbed the "Father of South African Poetry." In her efforts to resurrect Pringle, the writer summons the specter of Mary Prince, the West Indian slave whose History Pringle had once published, along with Hinza, his adopted black South African son. At their side is Sir Nicholas Green, a seasoned time traveler (and a character from Virginia Woolf's Orlando). Their adventures, as they travel across space and time to unlock the mysteries of Pringle's life, offer a poignant exploration of colonial history and racial oppression.

Literary Activism

Literary Activism PDF Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199091404
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Literary Activism revisits and interrogates, and looks to renew, the force of the literary. It's a movement that emerges from a radically altered landscape for both publishing and academia, where what Amit Chaudhuri calls ‘market activism’ has effected changes – on language, on the measuring of value, on the concept of influence – in ways we struggle to recognise. Encompassing the perspectives of the writer, critic, translator, academic, and publisher, the essays in this volume follow no single line of enquiry. Rather, they offer the beginnings of an analysis of the literary world at a certain moment of globalisation, while also questioning whether a literary world exists and, if it does, where its boundaries lie. The collection moves in many directions – from Arun Kolatkar and his near-heroic refusal of both marketplace and reputation; to Derek Attridge, who argues for a form of affirmative criticism which positions the critic as a ‘lover of the text’; while, from Amsterdam, Dubravka Ugrešić reflects on life in a literary ‘out of nation zone’, adrift in a territory where intellectual protest has been stripped of ideological impetus and subsumed by the voraciousness of the market. Taken together, these essays initiate a series of conversations about who reads what and why, about the practice of writing and criticism at this particular contemporary moment, and about the activities and institutions that shape an understanding of what literature is and what it can do.

October

October PDF Author: Zoë Wicomb
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1595589678
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
A South African academic returns to her homeland in this novel by the award-winning author of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town—“an extraordinary writer” (Toni Morrison). Winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, Zoë Wicomb is an essential voice of the South African diaspora, hailed by fellow writers—such as Toni Morrison and J. M. Coetzee, among others—and by reviewers as “a writer of rare brilliance” (The Scotsman). In October, Wicomb tells the story of Mercia Murray, a South African woman of color in the midst of a difficult homecoming. Abandoned by her partner in Scotland, where she has been living for twenty-six years, Mercia returns to South Africa to find her family overwhelmed by alcoholism and buried secrets. Poised between her new life in Scotland and her South African roots, Mercia recollects the past and assesses the present with a keen sense of irony. October is a stark and utterly compelling novel about the contemporary experience of a woman caught between cultures, adrift in middle age with her memories and an uncertain future.

The Short Story in South Africa

The Short Story in South Africa PDF Author: Rebecca Fasselt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000562409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This book considers the key critical interventions on short story writing in South Africa written in English since the year 2000. The short story genre, whilst often marginalised in national literary canons, has been central to the trajectory of literary history in South Africa. In recent years, the short story has undergone a significant renaissance, with new collections and young writers making a significant impact on the contemporary literary scene, and subgenres such as speculative fiction, erotic fiction, flash fiction and queer fiction expanding rapidly in popularity. This book examines the role of the short story genre in reflecting or championing new developments in South African writing and the ways in which traditional boundaries and definitions of the short story in South Africa have been reimagined in the present. Drawing together a range of critical interventions, including scholarly articles, interviews and personal reflective pieces, the volume traces some of the aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities in the genre and sheds new light on questions of literary form. Finally, the book considers the place of the short story in twenty-first century writing and interrogates the ways in which the short story form may contribute to, or recast ideas of, the post-apartheid or post-transitional. The perfect guide to contemporary short story writing in South Africa, this book will be essential reading for researchers of African literature.