Rewriting modernity : studies in Black South African literary history / / David Attwell

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910970463703321
• Autore: Attwell David
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Athens, : Ohio University Press, 2006
• ISBN: 0-8214-4231-7
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (246 p.)
• Disciplina: 809/.8968
• Soggetti: South African literature - Black authors - History and criticism; South African literature (English) - Black authors - History and criticism; Apartheid in literature; Politics in literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Originally published: Scottsville, South Africa : University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 215-228) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1 The transculturation of enlightenment -- 2 Time and narrative -- 3 Modernising tradition -- 4 Fugitive pieces -- 5 Lyric and epic -- 6 The experimental turn -- Notes -- Select bibliography -- Index.
• Sommario/riassunto: 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. David 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, reinvent, and recast their positioning within colonialism, apartheid, and the context of democracy.