1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910452006303321

Autore

Fincham Gail

Titolo

Dance of Life [[electronic resource] ] : The Novels of Zakes Mda in Post-apartheid South Africa / / Gail Fincham

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Athens, : Ohio University Press, 2012

ISBN

0-8214-4414-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (225 p.)

Disciplina

823/.914

Soggetti

South African literature (English)

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Zakes Mda; Why 'Dance of Life' ?; Towards an ethics of performance; From play-writing to novel-writing; Written texts and oral storytelling; Social realism or magic realism?; Vision/focalisation; Place/setting/landscape; Chapter One: Zakes Mda's Construction of The 'Cross-Border' Reader; Introduction; Maps, writers, readers and communities under apartheid; From pre- to post-apartheid South Africa; What is a 'South African' readership?; The concept of ubuntu as constitutive of the cross-border writer and reader

From 'interstitial' space to the space of novel-writing Refiguring temporality; Crossing textual boundaries; Hybridity as postcolonial strategy; Hybridity and intertextuality in Mda's novels; Mda's intertexts; Finally...; Chapter Two: 'Appropriating Urban Space'; Introduction: Why Bakhtin?; The social realism of Ways of Dying; Heteroglossia and states of transition; 'That stuck-up bitch' Noria; Carnival, grotesque realism, degradation; 'Laughing truth' and the speaking voice; Chapter Three: From 'The Speaking Voice' to Intertextuality in The Heart of Redness; Introduction

Community and agency in The Heart of Redness and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness Shared terrain; Salient contrasts; Mda in the classroom: The Heart of Redness; Duplicity, plagiarism or transformation? Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness and Jeff Peires' The Dead Will Arise; Continuities: oral storytelling; Reversing 'barbarism' and 'civilisation'; New directions; Focalisation; Reconceptualising



Believers and Unbelievers; Reading The Dead Will Arise and The Heart of Redness through Attridge's The Singularity of Literature; Finally...; Chapter Four: Towards a New Ontology of Postcolonial Vision:

Introduction In the Trinity's studio; Ecphrasis: turning paintings into fiction; Women, donkeys, sunflowers; Appropriating the Madonna motif; Chapter Five: Art, Landscape and Identity in She Plays with the Darkness, The Madonna of Excelsior and Cion; Introduction; She Plays with the Darkness; The Madonna of Excelsior; Cion; Chapter Six: Imaginary Homelands; The concept of diaspora; Narrating identity: South Africa and the United States; Narrating identity through the narratives of the past; Performing identity; Toloki takes over from the Sciolist; Finally...

Chapter Seven: 'Our Only Physical and Psychic Home'An eco-criticism for South Africa; Dismantling dualisms; The sympathetic imagination/Becoming animal; Storytelling; Storytelling as political activism; The sensorium of storytelling; Stories' 'emotional hue'; Towards an ecological sublime; Rethinking language; Finally...; Chapter Eight: 'The Trenches are The Boardrooms of South Africa':; Stereotypes and formulae; Soweto and cookery; 'Camera eye' narration: ideological considerations; Riding the tiger; Black Diamond and Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia; Finally...; Chapter Nine

Some Concluding Thoughts

Sommario/riassunto

In recent years, the work of Zakes Mda-novelist, painter, composer, theater director and filmmaker-has attracted worldwide critical attention. Gail Fincham's book examines the five novels Mda has written since South Africa's transition to democracy: Ways of Dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), The Whale Caller (2005), and Cion (2007). Dance of Life explores how refigured identity is rooted in Mda's strongly painterly imagination that creates changed spaces in memory and culture. Through a combination of magic realism, African orature, and intertextuality