English Studies
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The polygynous household in Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives: a haven in a heartless world
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017)Despite Lola Shoneyin’s public condemnation of the impediments to female autonomy, equality, freedom, dignity, and self-realisation inherent in polygamy, the polyvalent nature of her contemporary Nigerian novel, The Secret ... -
The path which goes beyond: Danger on Peaks responds to suffering
(Taylor & Francis, 2017)Now well into his eighties, Gary Snyder continues to pursue lifetime habits of engagement and detachment in which the activities of literary work, spiritual practice, environmental activism, and family life are mutually ... -
Reading for hope: a conversation about texts and method
(Taylor & Francis, 2018)In a conversation about their shared interests, the authors discuss methodology, reading strategies, and comparative historiographies relating to the recuperation of residues of hope that linger in the wake of failed ... -
Between text and stage: the theatrical adaptations of J.M. Coetzee’s Foe
(Taylor & Francis, 2017)Several of J.M. Coetzee’s novels have been adapted successfully for the stage, both as theatrical and operatic versions, but these adaptations have not received much critical attention. This article examines the ways in ... -
Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die (1990) in post-apartheid South Africa – a critical rereading
(Taylor & Francis, 2017)Rereading Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die nearly thirty years after it was first published in 1990 proved to be a complex, rewarding experience. Setting her story of the lives of rural African women in KwaZulu-Natal ... -
“Utterly Divided”? The feminist perspectives of Lauretta Ngcobo and Olive Schreiner
(Taylor & Francis, 2017)This article compares the feminist views of Olive Schreiner with those of Lauretta Ngcobo, raising questions about race, gender, intersectionality, decolonisation and the curriculum in South Africa. -
I am/am I an African? A relational reading of Diaspora and Identity in South African Fiction by J.U. Jacobs
(AOSIS, 2017)The publication of Diaspora and Identity in South African Fiction (2016) by J.U. Jacobs is a timely intervention, in that it is the first comprehensive study of South African fiction to sustain the argument that South ... -
Co-constructing a rubric checklist with first year university students: A self-assessment tool
(University of Jyväskylä, 2017)This paper reports on a study in which students co-constructed a rubric checklist with their lecturer and which they used to assess themselves. Data were collected by means of a student questionnaire, tutor feedback, as ... -
The reading habits and practices of undergraduate students at a higher education institution in South Africa: a case study
(Independent Institute of Education, 2017)Research conducted in South Africa has shown that the reading literacy level of students entering higher education is lower than is desirable. In an attempt to gain an understanding of students’ reading habits and ... -
What lies beneath: exploring the deeper purposes of feedback on student writing through considering disciplinary knowledge and knowers
(Taylor & Francis, 2017)Feedback plays an integral role in students’ learning and development, as it is often the only personal communication that students have with tutors or lecturers about their own work. Yet, in spite of its integral role in ... -
“Then You Are a Man, My Son”: Kipling and the Zuma rape trial
(Duke University Press, 2016)It is now a decade since Jacob Zuma, current president of South Africa, stood trial for rape, and while much writing has been generated about this trial, Judge Willem J. van der Merwe’s hypothetical supplement to Kipling’s ... -
Smoking around the campfire: A San encounter with the colonial
(Taylor & Francis, 2016)In 1873 Joseph Orpen, resident of Nomansland, engaged a San1 man Qing to guide a combined force of levies and mounted police through the Maloti mountains in present-day Lesotho where they hoped to intercept a group of ... -
A comparative reading of Elleke Boehmer’s Nile Baby and Richard Hoskins’ The Boy in the River: different attitudes towards the possibility of cultural ‘mixedness’
(Routledge, 2016)This article examines two contemporary texts that present different attitudes towards cultural diversity in Britain: Elleke Boehmer’s novel Nile Baby and Richard Hoskins’ memoir The Boy in the River. Boehmer, who is an ... -
Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood: Spaces of getting and becoming in post-apartheid Durban
(UNISA Press, 2016)Sifiso Mzobe’s Young blood (2010) generates much of its energy, this article will argue, through its representation of social and physical mobility and its articulation of space with modes of consumption in post-apartheid ... -
Oral literature in South Africa: 20 years on
(Taylor & Francis, 2016)I offer a retrospective on the field of orality and performance studies in South Africa from the perspective of 2016, assessing what has been achieved, what may have happened inadvertently or worryingly, what some of the ... -
To Write Liberty
(Taylor & Francis, 2018)The keynote for the International Conference, Writing for Liberty, held in Cape Town in 2017 is a response to the contradictory demands made on writers: to respond to the suffering in the world and to refrain from ... -
Last Word: What does “hospitality” really mean?
(Duke University Press, 2018)115 Last year I filled out an endless number of forms on the internet and had my photo taken this way for an American visa, that way for a Schengen one, another way for Britain. I stood in queues to gather freshly ... -
The classics, African literature, and the critics
(Institute for the Study of English in Africa Rhodes University, 2017)Faced with the criticism that myth and epic poetry have no place in contemporary South African literature departments, there is no point in defending the material on the grounds of intrinsic worth. No text can claim this ... -
Repeating and disrupting embodied histories through performance: Exhibit A Mies Julie and Itsoseng
(Taylor & Francis, 2013)The concern about South African arts being - as Achille Mbembe claims - ‘stuck in repetition’ can be challenged by examining developments in the performance arts which deliberately employ repetition. In these cases ... -
Witness to the makeshift shore: Ecological practice in A Littoral Zone
(UKZN, 2013)This essay suggests that Douglas Livingstone's long poem 'A Littoral Zone' (1991), an explicit conversation between his work as an environmental scientist and his work as a poet, makes for a poetic statement that is, ...
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