3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/45
Browse
3 results
Search Results
Item Real and imagined readers: censorship, publishing and reading under apartheid(2012-08-21) Matteau, RachelThis thesis studies the readership of literature that was banned under the various laws that comprised the censorship system, focusing on the apartheid period, from the 1950s until the early 1990s. It investigates the conditions under which banned and subversive literature existed in the underground network despite the ever-looming censorship apparatus. It is based on theories drawn from the history of the book, sociology of literature, South African literary histories, and on data from secondary and primary sources such as archival material and interviews with, and testimonies from, readers. This thesis focuses on the roles of readers in alternative circuits, by examining the modalities of sourcing, distributing, reading and sharing of imported and local banned publications. It seeks to demonstrate that readers did read banned books and books likely to be banned, showing creativity in the various strategies used to get these books into the country and to share them amongst the largest number of readers, using texts in various fashions, and actively participating to the South African literary industry and broader socio-political affairs.Item Journeying out of silenced familial spaces in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple hibiscus(2008-12-09T11:47:55Z) Ouma, Chrispher Ernest WerimoThis study explores the silencing of familial spaces in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. It probes into how the familial space is invested with religiosity: how ritual and norm structure and silence familial spaces and how transcendence from these spaces can be achieved through elements of laughter, music and sexuality. The study uses post-colonial theories, concepts of familial ideology and familial theory to read the text. The introductory chapter provides a politico-historical background of the text, then a literary historiography of how the familial trope has been used in African literature with special focus on Achebe. The chapter also outlines the theoretical framework of the study while anticipating the issues to be dealt with. Chapter two focuses on how the familial space is invested with religious rituals and how these silence the familial space. Chapter three examines how augmentation out of the silenced familial spaces works through elements of laughter, sexuality and music. Chapter four investigates the family as a portrait of the state and most significantly how these two institutions are portrayed to be in a complex relationship. The study’s conclusion is that the family can be used as an alternative site for discourses of marginality and can give a nuanced critique of the postcolony.Item ‘The Old Iron Cooking Pot of Europe’ Storytelling, Sleuthing and Neo-colonialism in the Botswana novels of Alexander McCall Smith(2006-11-02T12:27:25Z) Finnegan, LesleyIn this study I will interrogate some of the issues and contradictions raised by Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana novels. These texts feature a black African woman protagonist in a developing society, and have achieved huge popular and commercial success, but they are written by a white European man. I will examine briefly whether the books can be considered as ‘African Literature,’ and how the author has negotiated the interface between history and literature to convince readers and critics in ‘the West’ that he is portraying ‘the real Africa.’ I will investigate the strategies used by the author to create this ‘authentic’, ‘traditional’ effect, how he writes convincingly as, about and on behalf of women, and the use he makes of the detective fiction mode. Ultimately I will consider whether these novels represent a restorative ‘writing back’ or whether they constitute a continuing appropriation of African history, culture and identity, a further re-invention of Africa by and for ‘the West’.