English Studies
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The importance of confronting a colonial, patriarchal and racist past in addressing post-apartheid sexual violence
(UNISA, 2013)This commentary uses Judge Willem van der Merwe’s rescripting of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ poem during the Jacob Zuma rape trial as a starting point to argue for the importance of understanding the ways in which spectres of ... -
The muslim "who has faith" in Leila Aboulela's novels Minaret (2005) and Lyrics Alley (2009)
(Taylor & Francis, 2013)This essay analyses Leila Aboulela's narrative techniques when depicting a Muslim “who has faith” in her two most recent novels. In Minaret she presents religion as a source of strength for her female narrator-protagonist ... -
Introduction: Religion and spirituality in a postcolonial context
(Taylor and Francis, 2008)This Special Issue emerges out of an interdisciplinary research project on “Religion and Spirituality in a Postcolonial Context” run jointly by the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the Ferguson Centre for African and ... -
Introducing e-learning in a South African Higher Education Institution: challenges arising from an intervention and possible responses
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)This article draws on research conducted at a tertiary institution in South Africa as part of the redesigning of an English for Educational Development (EED) course to include an e-learning online discussion component. ... -
Students’ navigation of the uncharted territories of academic writing
(Taylor & Francis, 2012)Many students enter tertiary education unfamiliar with the ‘norms and conventions’ of their disciplines. Research into academic literacies has shown that in order to succeed in their studies, students are expected to ... -
“The Pregnant Man”: race, difference and subjectivity in Alan Paton’s Kalahari writing
(Taylor & Francis, co-published with Unisa Press, 2010)In South African imaginative writing and scholarly research, there is currently an extensive and wide-ranging interest in the ‘Bushman’, either as a tragic figure of colonial history, as a contested site of misrepresentation, ... -
Alan Paton’s sublime: race, landscape and the transcendence of the liberal imagination
(University of KwaZulu Natal, 2005)This article develops a postcolonial reading of the sublime by suggesting that aesthetic theories of the sublime were, in their classical philosophical formulations by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, founded on problematic ... -
Wilhelm Bleek and the Khoisan imagination: a study of censorship, genocide and colonial science
(Taylor & Francis Group, 2012)In 1864, Wilhelm Bleek published a collection of Khoi narratives titled Reynard the Fox in South Africa, or Hottentot Fables and Tales. This article critically examines this foundational event in South African literary ... -
Creative non-fiction: a conversation
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2011)Creative non-fiction has become in the sense ‘the genre’; of South African writing: writing which makes its meanings at the unstable fault line of the literary and journalistic, the imaginative and the reportorial. Duncan ... -
“Modern prophets, produce a new bible”: Christianity, Africanness and the poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho
(Southern African Literature and Culture Centre, UKZN, 2008)In this article I consider how one might approach the apparently singular figure of Nontsizi Mgqwetho, a Xhosa woman who produced an extraordinary series of Christian izibongo in newspapers in the 1920s: through what ... -
Notes towards a history of Khoi literature
(Taylor & Francis, 2011)This article puts forward a revisionist history of Khoi literature, and also presents a number of translated Khoi narratives that have not been available in English before. Compared to the large volume of Bushman literature ... -
Late style in J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year
(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2010)J.M. Coetzee’s post-millennial writing has been marked by new forms of inventiveness, formal risk-taking and narrative experimentation that have blurred the boundaries between fiction, autobiography and social commentary. ... -
Towards an archaeology of Dusklands
(Institute for the Study of English in Africa, 2011)This essay seeks to explore the question of origins: the beginnings of the literary career of arguably South Africa's most significant author, and the development of a form of authorship that was, at its inception, situated ... -
The taint of the censor: J.M. Coetzee and the making of In the Heart of the Country
(Institute for the Study of English in Africa, Rhodes University, 2008)With the publication of In the Heart of the Country by the London publisher Secker & Warburg in 1977, J. M. Coetzee had achieved international recognition for his second novel, transcending the narrow national literary ... -
Making a case for the teaching of reading across the curriculum in higher education
(Education Association of South Africa (EASA), 2012)Over the past two decades there has been much written in the literature about the importance of reading and the importance of teaching students reading strategies to improve their reading comprehension. Reading is one ... -
Alan Paton’s writing for the stage: towards a non-racial South African theatre
(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2007)Introduction: It would not be an exaggeration to assert that no South African playwright in the 1950s and 1960s received as much international attention and recognition as Alan Paton, until eclipsed by Athol Fugard’s ... -
Race, resistance and translation: the case of John Buchan’s UPrester John
(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2011)In postcolonial translation studies, increasing attention is being given to the asymmetrical relationships between dominant and indigenous languages. This paper argues that John Francis Cele’s UPrester John (1958), is not ... -
Border crossings in the African travel narratives of Ibn Battuta, Richard Burton and Paul Theroux
(Taylor & Francis, 2012)This article compares the representation of African borders in the 14th-century travelogue of Ibn Battuta, the 19th-century travel narrative of Richard Burton and the 21st-century travel writing of Paul Theroux. It ... -
The body unbound: ritual scarification and autobiographical forms in Wole Soyinka’s Aké: the years of childhood
(Sage Publications, 2012)The scarification in Aké is invested with major significance apropos Soyinka’s ideas on African subjectivity. Scarification among the Yoruba is one of the rites of passage associated with personal development. Scarification ... -
When orature becomes literature: Somali oral poetry and folktales in Somali novels
(Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012)The article discusses Somali literature, with particular focus given to the influence of Somali oral poetry and folk tales on modern novels. The difference between the concepts of orature and oral literature is examined, ...
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