3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Difference/derivation: feminist translation under review(2011-08-31) Wallmach, KimItem The use of hair as a manifestation of cultural and gender identity in the works of Tracey Rose(2008-04-08T10:58:15Z) Meyerov, Lee-AtABSTRACT This research report investigates the manifestation of hair as a symbol of cultural and gender identity as is seen in selected works of South African artist Tracey Rose, whose usage of her own culturally specific hair and body serves as metaphor through which she critically engages with issues surrounding the gendered and racialized body. The report will explore the ways in which Rose both in her video piece Ongetiteld (1996) and her performance video installation Span II (1997) challenges and subsequently deconstructs the rigidly defined monoliths of ‘Woman’, ‘femininity’, and the racially constructed category of ‘Coloured’, assigned and imposed on her during the Apartheid era. Rose’s work, highlighting the extent to which the conceptualization of gender and racial identity are bound and read off the body’s corporeality, relates to my own artistic practice, whereby I examine the metaphorical functioning of skin, as a corporeal ‘text’ and parchment, facilitating the inscription of my own cultural, religious and linguistic Otherness.Item Mothers, madonnas and musicians: A writing of Africa's women as symbols and agents of change in the novels of Zakes Mda(2008-03-31T09:11:00Z) Mazibuko, NokuthulaAbstract My dissertation interrogates the ways in which Zakes Mda has made women central to his novels. I argue that the women characters in Mda's novels are key to the idea of the rebirth of Africa (and the simultaneous birth of a (South) African identity) a rebirth made necessary by years of dispossession through colonialism and apartheid. I will explore how on one level Mda, through magical realism, represents women as symbols of both destruction and construction; and how on another level he represents them as complex characters existing as agents of history. Mda’s novels: Ways of Dying (1995), She Plays With the Darkness (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000) and The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) critique the topdown approach of the postapartheid, postcolonial discourse of African Renaissance a discourse which aims to reverse the damage done to the lives of Africans who have been brutalised by history. Mda writes an African renaissance (with a lower case “r”), which acknowledges and explores the ways in which people on the margins of power, recreate and transform their lives, without necessarily waiting for politicians to come up with policies and solutions. The renaissance of ordinary people privileges the spirit of ubuntu, whereby the individual strives to work with the collective to achieve a more humane world. Mda’s female characters are central to the debate on renaissance and reconstruction in that he questions existing gender roles by ii highlighting strongly the rights still denied African women his challenge to the discourse is whether a renaissance is possible if the humanity of women (and others marginalised by class, age, location, ethnicity, and other categories) continues to be denied. I ask the question whether Mda, goes further, and envisions women participating as leaders in traditionally male spaces.Item CONTESTED DOMESTIC SPACES: ANNE LANDSMAN'S "THE DEVIL'S CHIMNEY"(2006-11-15T11:17:48Z) Nudelman, JillThis dissertation interrogates Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney. The novel is narrated by the poor-white alcoholic, Connie, who imagines a story about Beatrice, an English colonist living on a farm in the Little Karoo. Connie, who is a product of the apartheid era, interweaves her own story with that of Beatrice’s and, in this way, comes to terms with her own memories, her abusive husband and the new South Africa. Connie deploys the genre of magical realism to create a defamiliarised farm setting for Beatrice’s narrative. She thus challenges the stereotypes associated with the traditional plaasroman and its patriarchal codes. These codes are also subverted in Connie’s representation of Beatrice, who contests her identity as the authoritative Englishwoman, as constructed by colonial discourse. In addition, Beatrice’s black domestic, Nomsa, is given voice and agency: facilities denied to her counterparts in colonial and apartheid fiction. Nomsa’s relationship with Beatrice is also characterised by subversion as it blurs the boundaries between colonised and coloniser. In this regard, the text demands a postcolonial reading. Connie, in narrating Beatrice’s and Nomsa’s stories, reinvents their invisible lives and, by doing so, is able to rewrite herself. In this, she tentatively envisions a future for herself and also potentially ‘narrates’ the nation, thus contributing to the new national literature. The nation is inscribed in the Cango caves, whose spaces witness the seminal episodes in Beatrice’s narrative. In these events, the caves ‘write’ the female body and women’s sexuality and the text thus calls for an engagement with feminism. The caves also inscribe South African history, the Western literary canon, the imagination and Landsman’s own voice. Hence, the caves assume the characteristics of a palimpsest. This, together with the metafictive elements of the novel, invites an encounter with postmodernism.