English Studies
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Longing for Love: Eros and National Belonging in Three Novels by Rayda Jacobs
(Unisa Press, 2022)The female Muslim descendant of Cape slavery is a key figure in the work of South African writer, Rayda Jacobs. Three of her novels, in particular, seem to track the social and political genealogy of the female Muslim ... -
‘It has a purpose beyond justifying a mark’: Examining the alignment between the purpose and practice of feedback
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2020)Research has shown that written feedback is important for studentlearning and development. However, the messages embedded in feed-back may lead to students being misled about what they need to learnor how they need to ... -
The road not travelled: Tracking love in Frank Anthony’s the journey: The revolutionary anguish of Comrade B
(2023)The Journey (1991) is a virtually unknown “struggle” novel by Frank Anthony (d. 1993), a senior member of the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), who was incarcerated on Robben Island for ... -
Faded mountain
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2022)A faded mountain at the edge of a threadbare field. Smoke and dust trudging the last rungs of a sky. And now a narrow dirt road that twists between snatches of shivering trees and snatches of shadow. Then a gasping ... -
Kingsbury Hospital – ICU
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2022)into the night the hospital sails noisy as an aircraft * and just as miraculous * somewhere beyond is a world bigger than this shining needle point but no window may be opened lest the weight of everything outside ... -
Drawing the dark
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2022)Day and night, night after night, deep in his prayer, he deliberated whether it was possible to draw the dark without ever looking at it.He had his head in his hands.His hands covered his eyes. His breath caught onwords ... -
Chapter 12 imagination and the eco-social crisis (or: why I write creative non-fiction)
(Brill, 2020)Green Matters reflects on the ‘unique cultural function’ of literary texts with regard to environmental and ecological concerns. Another way of putting this is to ask: what do literary texts enable us to say or do in ... -
Desert ethics, myths of nature and novel form in the narratives of Ibrahim al-Koni
(University of Pretoria, 2015)This broadly comparative essay contrasts environmentalism in the fiction in English translation of the Libyan writer, Ibrahim alKoni, with dominant trends in contemporary environmentalism. An analysis of three of the most ... -
Canine embodiment in South African lyric poetry
(University of Pretoria, 2018)This article discusses South African lyric poetry in English including translations since the 1960s. Rather than being private statements, South African lyrics, like all lyrics, are essentially dialogic—in relation to ... -
Oceans
(Routledge, 2021)One day, long ago, a little boy was killed. He was used up, and discarded, and thrown away, left for secret dumping, the nameless dead, floating in a sea of sinking secrets. -
All the Tokoloshes are dying
(Routledge, 2021)The last line of defence, when even the most distant tokoloshe returned, Took up a place of arms or/of wisdom, to make the last stand of the world. Even the oldest ones returned, long away in their peace and nature after ... -
Reopening Agaat: Afrikaans, Encyclopedic Narrative, World Literature
(Routledger, 2021)This essay offers a meditation on Marlene van Niekerk’s 2004 novel Agaat as an encyclopedic (or, more exactly, a counter-encyclopedic) narrative, as defined–controversially–by Edward Mendelson in an influential 1976 polemic. ... -
Eros and Self-Realization: Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru
(The Pennsylvania State University, 2020)A comparative analysis of Zora Neale Hurston’s Teir Eyes Were Watching God and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru suggests the importance of romantic love to the self actualization of the heroines of these novels, whose authors share ... -
‘Foundational fictions’ Variations of the marriage plot in Flora Nwapa’s early Anglophone-Igbo novels
(Taylor & Francis, 2019)The Igbo marriage song recorded by Ifi Amadiume in her influential ethnographic study of the Nnobi in Southeastern Nigeria is a reminder of the cross-cultural, trans-historical significance of some form of marriage in the ... -
BECOMING-MINORITARIAN Constructions of coloured identities in creative writing projects at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa
(Taylor & Francis, 2020)The institutional history of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in some ways mirrors the paradoxes, ambiguities, absurdities, contradictions and possibilities – in short, the complexities – of the concept “coloured”. ... -
Postnational paradoxes: Nuruddin Farah's recent novels and two life narratives in counterpoint
(Indiana University Press, 2018)Nuruddin Farah’s most recent novel, Hiding in Plain Sight, provides an interesting fictional terrain within which to explore postcolonial postnationalism. This novel highlights the impacts of globalization and transnationalism ... -
Dog sacrifice in Isidore Okpewho’s call me by my rightful name and the Works of Wole Soyinka: Ogun, race, identity and diaspora
(Ranchi: Glocal Colloquies, 2016)This essay considers the ways in which the significance of blood sacrifice in the propitiation of the Yoruba god Ogun is transformed in the context of international literature which asserts an endogenous African modernity, ... -
Her heart lies at the feet of the mother: Transformations of the romance plot in Leila Aboulela’s minaret
(University of Western Cape, 2021)Sudanese-British writer, Leila Aboulela’s novel, Minaret (2005) transforms the plot structure of Western literary and popular romance forms and develops further the plotlines of African-American Muslim romance novels. ... -
In the heart of the country: The auto/biographies of Ayesha Dawood and Fatima Meer
(University of Cape Town, 2020)South African struggle auto/biography has been a male-dominated genre in which the political has correspondingly dominated the personal. These life narratives have presented the formation of relatively coherent, autonomous ... -
Love in a State of Fear: Reflections on Intimate Relations in Nuruddin Farah's Dictatorship Novels
(Routledge, 2016)Romantic love, shot through with passion and the erotic, has extremely rarely been the focus of the study of African oral traditions or a theme considered in African literature criticism. This situation prevails despite ...
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