Papers by Corinne Sandwith
Current Writing Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 1998
The periodical Trek, publishedinCapeTowninthe 1940s, has a significance in South African politica... more The periodical Trek, publishedinCapeTowninthe 1940s, has a significance in South African political and cultural affairs which has been overlooked.'Currently, there are two main reasons for attending to the role of Trek. In the first place, the bilingual fortnightly editedby Jacques Malan'functioned as an important organ of anti-government opinion and the critical discussion ofpolitical issues in the context ofa heavily regulated South Africanpublic sphere. In the second place, the pages of Trek's literary columns reveal that the 1970s materialist ...
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
This editorial offers critical reflections on short story writing in South Africa post-2000. Agai... more This editorial offers critical reflections on short story writing in South Africa post-2000. Against the background of critical scholarship on the short story form and thematic trends of short story anthologies since the late 1980s, we argue that short story criticism on apartheid as well as contemporary South African short story writing has consistently emphasized the genre’s disposition to capture the fragmented realities of socio-political transitions in the country. Critics have frequently observed a shift from the overtly politicized short story of the 1970s and 1980s to a return to a more literary and modernist aesthetics in the present. In this special issue, we intend to complicate this reading by mapping out other trajectories the short story has taken in recent years, which point toward the emergence of more popular subgenres such as speculative fiction, crime fiction, and erotic fiction. Short stories also increasingly examine and challenge conventional sexuality and/or g...
English in Africa, 2002
One of the first examples of radical historiography to appear in South Africa was a history of mi... more One of the first examples of radical historiography to appear in South Africa was a history of missionary activity entitled The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest. It was written by Nosipho Majeke and was published in 1952. Along with IB Tabata's Awakening of the People, it formed one of the central texts of a large and influential political organisation known as the Non-European Unity Movement which had its origins in the Western Cape. A truly populist text, The Role of the Missionaries was read, discussed, treasured and ...
Journal of Literary Studies, 1994
Summary This article seeks to establish the aesthetic criteria in terms of which certain texts ga... more Summary This article seeks to establish the aesthetic criteria in terms of which certain texts gain access to the South African literary canon while others are excluded. I have attempted to identify the aesthetic which has resulted in the valorisation of Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm over her earliest completed novel Undine, and hope, thereby, to begin to distinguish the literary values which have informed the construction of the South African canon as a whole.
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 1013929x 1998 9678030, Jun 1, 2011
The periodical Trek, publishedinCapeTowninthe 1940s, has a significance in South African politica... more The periodical Trek, publishedinCapeTowninthe 1940s, has a significance in South African political and cultural affairs which has been overlooked.'Currently, there are two main reasons for attending to the role of Trek. In the first place, the bilingual fortnightly editedby Jacques Malan'functioned as an important organ of anti-government opinion and the critical discussion ofpolitical issues in the context ofa heavily regulated South Africanpublic sphere. In the second place, the pages of Trek's literary columns reveal that the 1970s materialist ...
English in Africa, 2006
A contribution of postcolonial studies has been the recognition of the various forms resistance o... more A contribution of postcolonial studies has been the recognition of the various forms resistance or complicity may take in the colonial situation. In Homi Bhabha, for example, we move from Fanon's psychology of violence and its attendant material effects to the psychology of display: the native mimicking the master. The danger of such a shift-what is called the cultural turn in postcolonial studies-is that a focus on the expressive manifestation (or'text') may divert attention from the shaping pressures of historical context. One such ...
Literature For Our Times, Aug 17, 2007
Abstract This paper explores the making of an oppositional public sphere in 1960s South Africa. T... more Abstract This paper explores the making of an oppositional public sphere in 1960s South Africa. The focus of this investigation is the radical South African journal, Africa South, edited by Ronald Segal. Africa South brought together an impressive range of contributors, many of whom were at the forefront of the struggle against the apartheid state. The aim of this paper is to give closer attention to the forms of oppositionality and resistance which were made possible in South Africa by a journal of this kind. I give attention to the following questions: ...
Scholarship on the literary inscription of urban space in early twentieth-century South Africa ha... more Scholarship on the literary inscription of urban space in early twentieth-century South Africa has tended to focus on Sophiatown and the writers of the 1950s 'Drum generation'. In this reading, the idea of Johannesburg as it emerges in Drum magazine is seen to contrast sharply with earlier literary renditions of the city as a place of vice and moral decay. In this article, I draw attention to an important but little-known precursor to this emergent tradition of writing and claiming the modern city, namely journalist and writer, R. R. R. Dhlomo. As the author of a moralising fable about the depredations of city life, A n A frican Tragedy (1928), Dhlomo is conventionally positioned as one of those writers whose reading of the city would inevitably be surpassed. This perspective ignores the significance of his popular satirical column, "R. Roamer Esq." which appeared in the commercial African weekly The Bantu W orld over a period of ten years. Concerned in particular with the urban and peri-urban environments of late 1930s Johannesburg, the column maps out a detailed urban topography. Using the first-person perspective of an observing and observant urban street-walker/roamer, it calls attention to particular sites of engagement and encounter such as the court room, the train station and the street as well as the more intimate spaces encoding black urban marginality such as the backyard servant's room. In this paper I consider what forms of the metropolis emerge from Roamer's verbal mapping as well as what kinds of city figures, topographies, movements and interactions are inscribed. I argue that the column grants particular significance to the experience, English in Africa 45 No. 3 (
Social Dynamics, 2019
In this article, I examine the popular satirical column “R. Roamer Esq.” written by R.R.R. Dhlomo... more In this article, I examine the popular satirical column “R. Roamer Esq.” written by R.R.R. Dhlomo which appeared in The Bantu World newspaper. The study seeks to reassemble the archive of African intellectual and political life by foregrounding a hidden history of print culture practices and traditions. I assert the historical importance of the newspaper column and the satirical gesture in South African letters and emphasise the significance of the modes of humour and irony as forms of political resistance. In directing attention to the rhetorical and performative aspects of South Africa’s protest history, the article expands on the political role of the African press in the aftermaths of colonialism in articulating new modes of agency, resistance and critique. In particular, Dhlomo’s satirical column is approached as a space of literary expression in which opposition to various aspects of 1930s South African society is articulated in elusive, indirect and coded ways. As such, I advocate a reading of South African literary history that goes beyond the published literary text, one which can accommodate the idiosyncratic form of the newspaper column. In this sense, the newspaper itself is re-imagined as an important site of linguistic and genre-based experimentation, invention and play.
Reading and literacy projects in South Africa have a long and fascinating history. In this conver... more Reading and literacy projects in South Africa have a long and fascinating history. In this conversation, Kgauhelo Dube talks about a contemporary Pretoria-based initiative which seeks to promote reading and literacy through the showcasing of African authors and texts. The discussion explores some of the social and material dynamics which inform the post-apartheid reading project, including the lack of reading and library facilities in township settings and the ongoing alienation experienced by black students and scholars in white-dominated institutions. It points to the importance of the contemporary revival of the discourse of decoloniality as a means of framing the project, and as a route to understanding the broader contexts in which African literature is produced and consumed. The discussion also engages with the importance of the short story form for the public reading event and considers some of the ways in which the written text is subsequently reshaped as a dynamic and mobile digital product.
This paper elucidates the material, spatial, social and infrastructural contexts of reading in ea... more This paper elucidates the material, spatial, social and infrastructural contexts of reading in early twentieth century South Africa. It adds to a growing body of work on reading practices and patterns of book consumption by drawing attention to the neglected question of the “where of reading” – the physical contexts and settings of reading and the ways in which the organisation of space and the allocation of resources impacted on particular reading experiences and habits. The article also takes up a related set of questions pertaining to the access of books, the nature of specific reading encounters, the social relations that developed in these contexts and the reading practices that ensued. It focuses in detail on the contexts of reading which developed around the various “Non-European” reading initiatives and advances the concepts of the “poor library” and “fugitive reading” in order to describe both the rudimentary and improvisational nature of black reading spaces at this time and the various practices of tactical, opportunistic and itinerant reading which arose in response. Finally, it draws attention to the sociable, convivial and inherently public nature of black reading encounters and highlights a pervasive practice of mediated reading in which book interests were shared and encouraged.
Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka was first published in Sesotho in 1925 by the Morija Sesuto Book Depot unde... more Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka was first published in Sesotho in 1925 by the Morija Sesuto Book Depot under the auspices of the Societé des missions évangéliques de Paris. It has been translated into several languages, including English, French and German. In this article, I present a reading of the multiple stagings of Mofolo’s novel by assessing the changes in the material and paratextual production of the text. By following the fortunes of Mofolo’s Chaka, I elucidate the various shapes it has taken and meanings it has accrued on its journey through time and space. Four distinct lineages of Mofolo’s Chaka are identified: the mission text, the English colonial text, the French colonial production and the post-colonial text; thus tracing the historical passage of an African-authored text through colonial, apartheid, post-colonial and post-apartheid contexts. The article sheds light on the particular ways in which the novel and African literature more generally have been made to signify, what interpretive frames have been privileged, and what kinds of genre categorisation have predominated. In advancing the notion of ‘history by paratext’, I also argue for the shifting paratext as an important historical index of the tensions, contradictions and inconsistencies of particular historical contexts.
Keywords: Thomas Mofolo, Chaka, paratext, publishing, African literature, mission literature, post-colonial literature, book history
Tracks and Traces of Violence: Representation and Memorialization of Violence. Views from Art, Literature and Anthropology, 2017
Early 20th-century South Africa saw the emergence of a range of liberal reading initiatives aimed... more Early 20th-century South Africa saw the emergence of a range of liberal reading initiatives aimed at encouraging a black reading culture. What ensued was a lively public debate about reading and the uses of the book which included not only the liberal philanthropic groups that gave support to these projects but also those African readers and intellectuals who found themselves the targets of the reading initiative itself. In the first part of this article, I highlight the prominent role played by liberal advocates of the book in establishing the broad parameters of the book-reading encounter in South Africa, particularly as it related to emergent black reading communities. I give attention to the nature of this developing reading consensus and the assumptions about reading and the world of the book that it encoded. In the second part of the article, I explore the ways in which this consensus was negotiated by African readers and intellectuals. To this end, I look at some of the traces and fragments of an on-going debate about reading and its social and personal value recorded in the contemporary African press. The aim of the article is not only to ascertain how Africans responded to the liberal incitement to read but also to address some of the contestations over the meaning and use-value of reading during this period as part of a more general history of reading in early 20th-century South Africa.
The Hoover Collection of South African Communist Party Papers includes a small roneoed copy of a ... more The Hoover Collection of South African Communist Party Papers includes a small roneoed copy of a collection of poetry by Peter Abrahams, entitled Here Friend (1941). The well-worn, now flimsy, anthology roughly stapled in pale yellow cardboard contains 17 poems bookended between a foreword in which Abrahams introduces his collection to potential readers and a letter of thanks signed "Comradely yours, Peter Abrahams": This is an experiment. There is a great poverty in the art of the people. In a small way this is an attempt to help in overcoming that poverty. The people are the heirs to the culture of the past. Capital is not. It has proved this conclusively in this war. All art and culture will be destroyed unless the people look after it. So this little experiment … I am speaking to you, the comrades of all colors, not those who are reading this out of curiosity. I have no place and time for them … We must get through to the people. To the man and woman in the street. We don't want the ivory tower. It died with the dead art that neither you nor I could understand. It is our duty to shape a living art of the poor out of the mess Big Business has got the world into; tomorrow this world will be ours. There will be time to appreciate art then: and besides we have a duty, we must help show the people along the road to that Tomorrow. So I offer this to every man, especially the hungry and down. It won't help your belly, but it will show you how to grab the things that are really yours. 1
Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern …, Jan 1, 2010
The violent attacks on immigrants in May and June 2008 laid bare some of the contradictions of th... more The violent attacks on immigrants in May and June 2008 laid bare some of the contradictions of the South African postcolony. Focusing on the vigorous public debate which arose in the aftermath of violence, this essay explores a moment of interpretive crisis in which the privileged stories of the nation were unexpectedly unravelled. From there, it moves to a discussion of the political investments at stake in the government's choice of the crime story as dominant interpretive scheme, giving particular emphasis to what this revealed about national myth-making, the production of consensus and modalities of power in the postcolonial state.
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Papers by Corinne Sandwith
Keywords: Thomas Mofolo, Chaka, paratext, publishing, African literature, mission literature, post-colonial literature, book history
Keywords: Thomas Mofolo, Chaka, paratext, publishing, African literature, mission literature, post-colonial literature, book history