Other than the name of this special issue might suggest, the present collection of articles is not meant as a revisionist perspective on earlier, established versions of the history of language and literature in Afrikaans. Its aim is, however, closely related, and takes its cue from the title of the symposium 'Bredie van stories: herinnering en geschiedenis in recente Afrikaanse literatuur' organised in the context of the 'Week van de Afrikaanse roman', held at Leiden University in October 2014. As the use of the word 'bredie' 1 suggests, storytelling is approached as the result of stewing various different ingredients. As such, the bredie, itself a dish that combines multiple culinary traditions like Dutch and Cape Malay cooking, might serve as a good example of the idea of transculturation as a profound and inevitable mixing of voices, stories and experiences, which is the focus of this special issue. In other words, the use of history in the title of this issue does not denote a metanarrative of history, but points towards the representations of moments of intimate contact and violent clashes that form our perspectives on history in Afrikaans.

This paper is an attempt to indicate problematic areas in the writing of literary history in South Africa. In response to vast socio-political changes, critical practice (specifically when dealing with categories such as race, language and group boundaries), is in a state of flux and 'theory needy'.

2008

History is the great forger of national identity, but literature also played a key-role in its construction, in Europe as well as in the newly independent former colonies of Africa, Asia and the Americas. Many post-colonial writers actively participated in the nation-building process, providing epics for identification and contributing to a national imaginary. In most of Africa, the national projects have failed and given room for disillusion, which may also be artistically productive. But neither happened in South Africa, where national modernization was frustrated in an embryonic stage by the imposition of Apartheid. During the transition process, and especially in the last decade, South African writers have reexamined history in the pursuit of neglected and suppressed configurations. The marginal, yet critical role of literature in the transition seems to be that of deconstructing prevailing myths, rather than the forging of new identities. This paper discusses the presence of history and the near past in recent novels by five South African witers (Zakes Mda, Marlene van Niekerk, Zoë Wicomb, Aziz Hassim and Ronnie Govender), and takes a special interest in the disclosed legacy of creolization. 1 The transition is here defined as the period from 1990-when Nelson Mandela was released and the formerly forbidden political organizations unbanned-up to the present.

Current Writing, 1993

The trend in analyses of postapartheid South African literature is to see a body of writing that is largely “freed from the past” and which exhibits a wide range of divergences from “struggle” writing. This article provides a differently nuanced conceptualization and argues that some of the literature’s key dynamics are founded in “mashed-up temporalities.” My analysis borrows from Ashraf Jamal’s appropriation of art historian Hal Foster’s “future anterior” or a “will have been.” In my reading, emblematic strands of postapartheid writing are less “free from the past” than trading in an anxiety about never having begun. The body of literature in question—in this case, white post-transitional writing—is inescapably bound to the idea of the time of before, so much so that it compulsively iterates certain immemorial literary tropes such as those of the frontier and the journey of discovery. Further, I suggest that much postapartheid literature written in what I call “detection mode”—providing accounts of “crime” and other social ills—is distinguished by disjunctive continuity rather than linear or near-linear discontinuity with pre-transition literature, yet exhibits features of authorial voice and affect that place it within a distinctly postapartheid zone of author-reader interlocution.

H. Yeatman (eds),, 2010

Contemporary South African literature shows a renewed concern with the close bonds between land, place and people in the New South Africa. In the post-apartheid period, this is literature that reflects a close awareness of the need for an art that retains both a sense of creative integrity and the ethical and political demands of the narrative of the new, postapartheid nation. Often history is invoked not as the deterministic frame that regulates each character’s lives typical of so much of the country’s literature, but as the accumulated mesh of individual experiences encompassed by the historical narrative. More to the point, this is writing of great aesthetic energy and political relevance, strengthened by an urgent need to justify its own relevance and a desire to contribute to the healing of a nation that remains in many ways deeply wounded.

This review article addresses the increasing dominance of works of creative nonfiction as sources of the most incisive commentary on post-apartheid South Africa. Reviewing recent work by Lindie Koorts, Jacob Dlamini and Jonny Steinberg, the article highlights the use of the biographical mode of creative nonfiction to induce a reconsideration of the past and present. By placing an individual at the centre of their narratives, these authors tender a humanising narrative which challenges simplistic interpretations of the past and reactions in the present.

After the formal end of the apartheid period in 1994, some writers and critics expressed a sense of unease about the future of South African literature. Yet, the post-apartheid period has produced an array of texts on topics not previously part of South African literary discourse. Writing from the transitional period for the most part turned inward, working in or against the confessional mode modeled by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. During the current post-transitional period, marked loosely by the publication of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace in 1999, a younger generation of writers has begun to represent new social issues surrounding difference and inequality, especially representations of Black women, gays and lesbians, and migrants. Recent critical approaches to this literature have offered valuable conceptual tools for further research.

In: Boehmer, Elleke & De Mul, Sarah (eds.) 2012. The Postcolonial Low Countries. Literature, Colonialism, Multiculturalism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books: 139-162 , 2012

Afrikaans women's writing was one of the marginal discourses in Afrikaans literature that however, for all its marginality, played an important part in interrogating the structures of power in South Africa during the apartheid era. As such, Afrikaans women's writing formed part of Afrikaans literature's history of resistance and dissidence which grew especially strong after 1960, as political repression, too, grew stronger. 1 Using broad and over-simplified strokes, one can paint early Afrikaans literature as largely nationalist. On the one hand it could be seen a postcolonial literature, resisting colonial oppression by the British; on the other hand it could be regarded as a colonial literature, co-opted culturally to reinforce an Afrikaner nationalism which itself continued the colonial oppression of the past.