Short description
Connects the black literary archive in South Africa, since the nineteenth-century writing of Tiyo Soga. This work focuses on cultural transactions in a series of key moments. It argues that black writers in South Africa have used print culture to map themselves onto modernity as subjects, to recast their positioning in the context of democracy.
Long description
Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa - from the nineteenth-century writing of Tiyo Soga to Zakes Mda in the twenty-first century - to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. Attwell provides a welcome complication of the linear black literary history - literature as a reflection of the process of political emancipation - that is so often presented. He focuses on cultural transactions in a series of key moments, and argues that black writers in South Africa have used print culture to map themselves onto modernity as contemporary subjects, to negotiate, counteract, re-invent and recast their positioning within colonialism, apartheid and in the context of democracy.
Review
'David Attwell gives a strikingly fresh and illuminating reading of a century of black South African writing Lively, probing, theoretically sure-footed, generous in spirit, this book represents the very best of the new wave of South African scholarship and criticism.' J.M. Coetzee 'For those of us who often teach aspects of South African literature, this is the book we have been waiting for.' Zakes Mda 'This is a richly detailed, theoretically sophisticated, elegantly written, and politically astute study that deserves a place on the shelves of anyone interested in the culture of South Africa, past or present.' Derek Attridge