The South African short story and its mediation of the hegemonic tendencies of nationalism
Date
2010-04-01T10:22:15Z
Authors
Maithufi, Sopelekae
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Abstract
Abstract
This research assesses the suitability of Njabulo Ndebele’s conception of the “ordinary”,
a reference to a site of experience central to which are ‘non-official’ mediations of
apartheid, to the analyses of the short stories of a range of black South African writers
published, between 1970 and 1990. In contrast to the intense national resistance discourse
that dominates these two decades, this fiction gives a picture of black subjectivities each
internally dialogised.
It is argued that the selected texts experiment with the realisms which foreground
heterogeneous practices calling to mind the idea of the “ordinary” in, paradoxically,
elaborate and nuanced ways that have yet to be fully appreciated. An attempt is made to
show that, in a fortuitous application of Ndebele’s theorising against the mere onedimensional
interrogation of apartheid, the chosen short stories give impetus to the
examinations of how narratives are tapped into for their depictions of everyday living as
well as the effects thereof on social formations. This study, therefore, further discusses
the contribution that other hypotheses can make in critiquing the significance of the
quotidian practices that the notion of the “ordinary” introduces. Central to this
argument’s approach is thus the utilisation of theory as a tool to suggest ways of
considering how, in turn, fictional representations of social practices make obvious the
rationale for re-theorising, or for moving away from theory as a hegemonic order.
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The representations of the social totalities that are initiated by the quotidian interaction
with the dominant discourse of apartheid and with the imagined communities that are
usually considered to be its adversaries are focused on. It is argued that, in contrast to the
homogenising that commonly features in many anti-apartheid narratives, the ones that
come into being as a result of being teased from the existing semiotic fields are
complexly structured totalities. This research submits that the preferred literature presents
these social entities in novel styles that acknowledge, for instance, that the quotidian that
is enunciated in the sites of experience that Ndebele calls the “ordinary” is redolent of
discursive practices.
The introductory chapter critically discusses the theory of the “ordinary”. In the
following seven chapters, respectively, different hypotheses from across disciplines are
considered in the light of the textures of everyday life that various short story collections
depict. Ndebele’s representation of the “ordinary”, Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the
popular intellectual, Ndebele’s idea that the oral story is a tool that provides for
‘redemptive fantasy’, Credo Mutwa’s portrait of ‘iNgoma’ (ritual), bell hooks’s
impression of “ritual enactment”, Loren Kruger’s depiction of the syncretic, and Arjun
Appadurai’s concepts of “locality” and “neighborhood” are deployed in the readings of
what Ndebele would refer to as the “ordinary” in this study’s chosen short fiction. This
thesis closes with a short conclusion.
Key concepts: Acting out, African Initiated Christianity, apartheid, articulation,
Bildungsroman, back-text, blackness, bukhontxana/homosexuality, carnivalesque,
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catatonia, depersonalisation, diacritics, ena/soul, false consciousness, fantasy, folklore,
forgiveness, goatskin bag/thari, healing/therapy, heuristic device, home, Immorality
Ordinance, iNgoma/ritual, interiority, isangoma/diviner, jazz, locality, mamlambo/fortune
snake, masculinity, memory, metacommentary, mimicry, moya/spirit, mutual
zombification, nativism, necklacing, neighbourhood, Njabulo Ndebele, the ordinary,
people’s power, politics of the belly, polysemic, popular intellectual, post-anti-apartheid,
postcolony, prophet, push—push!/pyramid scheme, quotidian, reverie, ritual enactment,
sauwe/sabubi/profound amnesia believed to be induced by ancestors, schizophrenia, selfreclamation,
sewasho/ash used during ritual cleansing, short story, skaz, spectacular,
Staffrider, syncretic, textures of everyday life, trance, trans-racial haunting, Ubuntu,
ubwenge/intelligence, Umkhonto we Sizwe.