Skip to Main Content
International Education Week Photographs
Book List
Adjaye, Africa, Architecture: A Photographic Survey of Metropolitan Architecture by David Adjaye
This is one of the most original, ambitious and important architectural publications of our time, now available to everyone wishing to gain an understanding of a unique architectural heritage overlooked for too long. The African continent contains some of the world's most vibrant culture and creativity, and yet its buildings - vernacular, colonial or contemporary - have rarely engaged the interest of Western architects. David Adjaye, the first black architect to establish a truly global reputation in his field, has found endless sources of inspiration for his designs in the rich - and chequered - heritage of Africa's teeming metropolises. His life dream was to return to the continent as an architect to document Africa's built environment. Over a long decade, he tirelessly documented these dynamic, colourful cities, photographing thousands of buildings, sites and places, and letting each building speak for itself, in telling contrast to a design world obsessed with photorealistic slickness. The result was a stunning seven-volume work that has become an essential resource for all those interested in the burgeoning continent. This new compact edition will make the fruits of this once-in-a-generation record available to a much wider audience.
ISBN: 9780500343166
Publication Date: 2016
Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity by Tsitsi Ella Jaji
Africa In Stereo examines the role that African American music has played in the pan-Africanist imagination since the end of the nineteenth century. Throughout, Jaji marshals a wide array of critical, archival, literary, visual, and sonic sources to craft an argument centered on the stereophonic echoes between three sites on the African continent emblematic of pan-Africanism (Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa) and black musical cultures in the US (as well as few other places on the diasporic landscape). Rather than take a purely musical tack that traces the influence of African American music on musical repertoires from Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa, Africa In Stereo beautifully shows how a US black popular musical genres inspired a host of writers and filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembene, John Akomfrah, Sol Plaatje, Léopold Senghor, K. Anyidoho, Charlotte Maxeke, Ken Bugul, as well as the glossy visual languages found in the early magazines Bingo (Senegal) and Zonk! (South Africa).
ISBN: 9780199936373
Publication Date: 2014
Approaches to Teaching Coetzee's 'Disgrace' and Other Works by Laura Wright (Editor); Jane Poyner (Editor); Elleke Boehmer (Editor)
The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee won him global recognition and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work offers substantial pedagogical richness and challenges. Coetzee treats such themes as race, aging, gender, animal rights, power, violence, colonial history and accountability, the silent or silenced other, sympathy, and forgiveness in an allusive and detached prose that avoids obvious answers or easy ethical reassurance. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," identifies secondary materials, including multimedia and Internet resources, that will help instructors guide their students through the contextual and formal complexities of Coetzee's fiction. In part 2, "Approaches," essays discuss how to teach works that are sometimes suspicious of teachers and teaching. The essays aim to help instructors negotiate Coetzee's ironies and allegories in his treatment of human relationships in a changing South Africa and of the shifting connections between human beings and the biosphere.
ISBN: 9781603291385
Publication Date: 2014
Diaspora and Identity in South African Fiction by J. U. Jacobs
South African identities, as they are represented in the contemporary South African novel, are not homogeneous, but fractured and often conflicted: African, Afrikaner, 'colored,' English, and Indian. None can be regarded as rooted or pure, whatever essentialist claims the members of these various ethnic and cultural communities might want to make for them. All of them, this study argues, are deeply divided and have arisen, directly or indirectly, out of the experience of diasporic displacement, migration, and relocation, from the colonial, African, and Indian diasporas to present-day migrations into and out of South Africa, as well as diasporic dislocations within Africa. The book contains 20 works by 12 contemporary South African novelists - Breyten Breytenbach, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Aziz Hassim, Michiel Heyns, Elsa Joubert, Zakes Mda, Njabulo S. Ndebele, Karel Schoeman, Patricia Schonstein Pinnock, Ivan Vladislavic, and Zoe Wicomb - and shows how diaspora is a dominant theme in contemporary South African fiction, and how the diasporic subject is a most recognizable figure. [Subject: Literary Criticism, African Studies, Migration Studies, Diaspora Studies]
ISBN: 9781869143015
Publication Date: 2016
Dreams: Three Works by Elisabeth Jay (Editor); Olive Schreiner (Editor)
This volume brings together for the first time the entire range of the shorter pieces of imaginative writing that she continued to produce throughout her life, together with her final account of the vision informing her life's work. It rescues Schreiner from the charge of having exhausted a slim talent in one semi autobiographical novel and provides a context in which to situate a woman writer whose idealist concerns recognised no simple geographical boundaries. To picture her as first and foremost a colonial writer or, alternatively, primarily as a member of the finde-siecle British avant garde, does little justice to the links she made in her own writing and to the complex situation she occupied, for Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner's life (1855-1920) straddled two centuries and two continents, while her travels between the land of her birth, South Africa, and her family's European homeland embroiled her in the political ferment of two wars: the Boer War (1899-1902) and the first World War (1914-1918).
ISBN: 1902459318
Publication Date: 2003
The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut
Taut, spare, and compellingly readable, The Good Doctor is a brilliant literary high-wire act short enough to be devoured in one or two sittings. When Laurence Waters arrives at the small rural hospital in a South African homeland where Frank works, Frank is immediately suspicious. Everything about Laurence grates on Frank, from his smoking in their shared room, to his unfamiliar optimism about what the doctors can truly accomplish among the local population--but Laurence seems oblivious, immediately and repeatedly declaring Frank his friend despite the other''s indifference. Frank originally came to the hospital to get his bearings after his wife left him for his best friend--but denial of the higher-level post he was promised when he came, and the disillusionment of working at a completely ineffectual hospital (it''s always deserted, an entire wing closed off and gradually being looted of any reusable equipment lacks basic supplies), has hardened him into cynical apathy--which makes Laurence''s optimism all the more irritating. Laurence starts planning a campaign to "bring the hospital to the people," by running clinics in nearby villages. A group of soldiers have arrived in the village, reportedly looking for holes in the border where smuggling has become rampant. Then Laurence''s African-American girlfriend Zanele, who has adopted an African name and dress, and who shares his political idealism (but not much actual intimacy, it seems) comes to visit, and Laurence and Frank host a party. During the flush of drunkenness the tensions between the staff melt away (the Cuban couple estranged by Frank having had an affair with the woman; the strained power relations between Frank and the other doctors and Tehogo, the young black African man who works as the caretaker and unlicensed nurse). But in the aftermath of the party this quickly melts away--especially when Frank goes to return the cassettes Tehogo lent him for the party, and accidentally discovers a cache of looted metal fittings from the hospital in Tehogo''s room. Finally, Laurence talks Frank into spending an evening with Zanele while he is on duty--which ends in a bizarre encounter with an apartheid-era local despot and a furtive sexual union with Zanele. Frank is understandably relieved that a few days later an appointment to see his estranged wife to sign divorce papers allows him a chance to get away. When Frank returns, Laurence meets him by telling him everything''s changed. Laurence has ignored Frank''s wish not to report Tehogo''s theft, and in so doing has revealed that Frank was the one who discovered it. The clinic has become a huge public relations coup, raising awareness and goodwill toward the hospital though its capacities are no better than before, and everyone but Frank seems swept up in its success. And a secret Frank has been keeping from Laurence since their first day of friendship--the married poor black woman Frank has been sleeping with off and on for years, sometimes for money--comes to light, in a way, when the woman comes to Laurence at the end of the clinic to tell him she needs an abortion, and that it must be done at her home. Enjoying Laurence''s discomfort with this moral dilemma, Frank does not help with the procedure and when he guiltily goes to check on the patient the next night, she and the shack where she lived, where he would go to meet her, are gone. Meanwhile Tehogo has more or less completely stopped coming in to work. Convinced that his affair''s husband is somehow linked to the former despot and to a rash of recent robberies because of his white car, Frank tips the colonel leading the group of soldiers--a brutal Afrikaner under whom, as a conscript, Frank had been forced to help torture black informants before the end of apartheid--as to where he thinks the despot''s encampment is hiding. Soon after, a soldier turns up with Tehogo, vitally wounded from a gunshot. As Frank tends to the wound obsessively to assuage his guilt at possibly having exposed Tehogo to the colonel, Laurence for once is completely apathetic--whether disgusted at Tehogo for being a thief and complicating his image of human perfectibility, or too distracted by the apparently more noble work of tomorrow''s second village health clinic, which seems more than ever to Frank like lip service. Frank volunteers to move Tehogo to the bigger hospital where his life can assuredly be saved, but when he wakes in the morning Tehogo, the soldier guarding him, the bed to which he was handcuffed, and Laurence, who was on night duty, are all gone. Soon the soldiers leave town too, and as the stultifying silence of the pre-Laurence days returns, Frank is left to make some sense of the strange almost-year of the young doctor''s presence.
ISBN: 9780802141699
Publication Date: 2004
In a Strange Room: Three Journeys by Damon Galgut
A Man Booker Prize finalist: "This tale of ill-fated journeys through Greece, Africa and India shows" the author of The Quarry "at a superb new high" (The Guardian). In this newest novel from South African writer Damon Galgut, a young loner travels across eastern Africa, Europe, and India. Unsure what he's after, and reluctant to return home, he follows the paths of travelers he meets along the way. Each new encounter--with an enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers, and a woman on the verge--leads him closer to confronting his own identity. Traversing the quiet of wilderness and the frenzy of border crossings, every new direction is tinged with surmounting mourning, as he is propelled toward a tragic conclusion. Shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, In a Strange Room is a hauntingly beautiful evocation of life on the road. It was first published in the Paris Review in three parts--"The Follower," "The Lover," and "The Guardian"--one of which was selected for a National Magazine Award and another for the O. Henry Prize.
ISBN: 9781609450113
Publication Date: 2010
Late Essays, 2006-2017 by J. M. Coetzee
A new collection of twenty-three literary essays from the Nobel Prize-winning author. J. M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. J. M. Coetzee is not only one of the most acclaimed fiction writers in the world, he is also an accomplished and insightful literary critic. In Late Essays: 2006-2016, a thought-provoking collection of twenty-three pieces, he examines the work of some of the world's greatest writers, from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Goethe and Irène Némirovsky to Coetzee's contemporary Philip Roth. Challenging yet accessible, literary master Coetzee writes these essays with great clarity and precision, offering readers an illuminating and wise analysis of a remarkable list of works of international literature that span three centuries.
ISBN: 9780735223912
Publication Date: 2017
Nadine Gordimer by Dominic Head
The award to Nadine Gordimer of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991 was an affirmation of her distinctive contribution to twentieth-century fiction and to the creation of a literature that challenges apartheid. In this study, which may be used as an introduction as well as by those already familiar with Gordimer's work, Dominic Head discusses each of her novels in detail, paying close attention to the texts both as a reflection of events and situations in the real world, and as evidence of her constant rethinking of her craft. Head shows how Gordimer's concerns, apparent in her earliest novels, are developed through increasing stress on the politics of textuality; and he pursues the implications of this development to consider how Gordimer's later work contributes to postmodernist fiction, and to a recentering of political engagement in an era of uncertainty.
ISBN: 0521433614
Publication Date: 1994
Out of Bounds: Seven Stories of Conflict and Hope by Beverley Naidoo
We are the young people, We will not be broken! For almost fifty years, apartheid forced the young people of South Africa to live apart as Blacks, Whites, Indians, and "Coloreds." This unique and dramatic collection of stories--by native South African and Carnegie Medalist Beverley Naidoo--is about young people's choices in a beautiful country made ugly by injustice. Each story is set in a different decade during the turbulent years from 1948 to 2000, and portrays powerful fictional characters who are caught up in very real and often disturbing events.
ISBN: 9780060508012
Publication Date: 2008
The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer
The Nobel Laureate's psychologically penetrating story of the love affair between a rich South African and the illegal alien she "picks up" on a whim Who picked up whom? Is the pickup the illegal immigrant desperate to evade deportation to his impoverished desert country? Or is the pickup the powerful businessman's daughter trying to escape a priveleged background she despises? When Julie Summers' car breaks down in a sleazy street, at a garage a young Arab emerges from beneath the chassis of a vehicle to aid her. The consequences develop as a story of unpredictably relentless emotions that overturn each one's notion of the other, and of the solutions life demands for different circumstances. She insists on leaving the country with him. The love affair becomes a marriage-that state she regards as a social convention appropriate to her father's set and her mother remarried in California, but decreed by her 'grease monkey' in order to present her respectably to his family. In the Arab village, while he is dedicated to escaping, again, to what he believes is a fulfilling life in the West, she is drawn by a counter-magnet of new affinities in his close family and the omnipresence of the desert. A novel of great power and concision, psychological surprises and unexpected developments, The Pickup is a story of the rites of passage that are emigration/immigration, where love can survive only if stripped of all certainties outside itself.
ISBN: 0374232105
Publication Date: 2001
The Road to Mecca by Athol Fugard
A South African pastor and a young teacher from Cape Town battle over the fate of an eccentric elderly widow.
ISBN: 0930452798
Publication Date: 1988
South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary by Njabulo S. Ndebele
Described as a prophet of the post-apartheid condition, Njabulo Ndebele is a prize-winning author, poet and critic and one of the leading lights in South Africa's literary world. These essays, beginning in 1984, were written over the storm years of the democratic struggle and are reprinted here with a new introduction by Graham Pechey.
ISBN: 0719040523
Publication Date: 1994
South Africans: A Set of Portrait-Poems by Chris Mann
This title provides a series of portraits, of people as individuals and in groups of individuals. The subjects of these portrait-poems are drawn from a variety of cultural and economic settings. They come from different rural and urban backgrounds, are of different age-groups and genders, and speak different languages. The title thus provides a glimpse of the astonishing diversity of the people who are South Africans.
ISBN: 0869809229
Publication Date: 1996
South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over by Andrew Van Der Vlies
Nation' and 'literature' are always inherently unstable categories but, in the case of South Africa, this instability is particularly marked. This study considers the effects local and global networks had on the publication, promotion and reception of a series of key writers and their works between 1883 and 2005, asking: who published what, where, why, and how; how and why work was construed as 'South African', what this meant, and how it affected reading. Exploring new approaches to studying colonial and postcolonial print cultures, it seeks to redress inadequately historicised or transnationally situated studies of South African writing in English. In addition to making considerable contributions to the study of well-known writers like Olive Schreiner, Alan Paton, and Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee (chapters on the early publication history of Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, Paton's globally influential Cry, the Beloved Country, and Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country, his second novel but the first to be published abroad), it also includes discussions of the contrasting reputations of poets Roy Campbell and William Plomer in the 1920s and 1930s, of exiled ANC-activist Alex La Guma's publishing odyssey (in Nigeria, East Germany and Britain); and Zakes Mda's novel about hybrid identities and identifications in colonial and in post-apartheid South Africa, The Heart of Redness (2000).The book is absolutely essential reading for anyone with an interest in the fields of South African, African, and general colonial and postcolonial literatures and history, as well as those with an interest print and media cultures, and the History of the Book.
ISBN: 9780719076145
Publication Date: 2007
Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008 by Nadine Gordimer
Never before has Gordimer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, published such a comprehensive collection of her nonfiction. Telling Times represents the full span of her works in that field--from the twilight of white rule in South Africa to the fight to overthrow the apartheid regime, and most recently, her role over the past seven years in confronting the contemporary phenomena of violence and the dangers of HIV. The range of this book is staggering, and the work in totality celebrates the lively perseverance of the life-loving individual in the face of political tumult, then the onslaught of a globalized world. The abiding passionate spirit that informs "A South African Childhood," a youthful autobiographical piece published in The New Yorker in 1954, can be found in each of the book's ninety-one pieces that span a period of fifty-five years. Returning to a lifetime of nonfiction work has become an extraordinary experience for Gordimer. She takes from one of her revered great writers, Albert Camus, the conviction that the writer is a "responsible human being" attuned not alone to dedication to the creation of fiction but to the political vortex that inevitably encompasses twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. Born in 1923, Gordimer, who as a child was ambitious to become a ballet dancer, was recognized at fifteen as a writing prodigy. Her sensibility was as much shaped by wide reading as it was to eye-opening sight, passing on her way to school the grim labor compounds where black gold miners lived. These twin decisives--literature and politics--infuse the book, which includes historic accounts of the political atmosphere, firsthand, after the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto uprising of 1976, as well as incisive close-up portraits of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, among others. Gordimer revisits the eternally relevant legacies of Tolstoy, Proust, and Flaubert, and engages vigorously with contemporaries like Susan Sontag, Octavio Paz, and Edward Said. But some of her most sensuous writing comes in her travelogues, where the politics of Africa blend seamlessly with its awe-inspiring nature--including spectacular recollections of childhood holidays beside South Africa's coast of the Indian Ocean and a riveting account of her journey the length of the Congo River in the wake of Conrad. Gordimer's body of work is an extraordinary vision of the world that harks back to the sensibilities--political, moral, and social--of Dickens and Tolstoy, but with a decidedly vivid contemporary consciousness. Telling Times becomes both a literary exploration and extraordinary document of social and political history in our times.
ISBN: 9780393066289
Publication Date: 2010
Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to Present by Nii O. Quarcoopome
Over the past 500 years, African people have experienced and interpreted their relationships with Europeans in particular ways. From the late fifteenth century, contacts between the first Portuguese merchants and indigenous peoples of the West and Central African coasts marked the beginning of Europe's economic engagement with sub-Saharan Africa. With increased trade came missionaries who paved the way for the subsequent European colonization of Africans from the late nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century. Under colonialism, a previous relationship of autonomy and parity changed to one of subjugation. The postcolonial era has seen yet another shift in the image of the European, as Africans have increasingly participated in a global environment unmediated by colonizing powers. Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to Present focuses on these historical changes as they are articulated in African visual arts. Presented as a series of case studies, Through African Eyes addresses the arts and experiences of a representative group of African cultures. More than 90 of Africa's finest three-dimensional art and utilitarian objects of wood, ivory, metal, and textiles illustrate changes in African perceptions of the European. Essays by leading scholars in the field provide a sense of chronological progression while providing a rich overview of artistic genres and themes issuing from this cross-cultural exchange. Through African Eyes combines diverse representational forms--from sixteenth-century Benin bronzes to contemporary satiric masks and figures along with related material culture--to demonstrate the multiple relationships that developed between Africans and Europeans and their profound impact on African visual culture.
ISBN: 9780895581631
Publication Date: 2009
Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee; C. C. Askew (Illustrator)
A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, now a major motion picture starring Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire whose servant he is. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he finds himself jolted into sympathy with their victims--until their barbarous treatment of prisoners of war finally pushes him into a quixotic act of rebellion, and thus into imprisonment as an enemy of the state. Waiting for the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee's third novel, which won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize, is an allegory of the war between oppressor and oppressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that elevate their own survival above justice and decency.
ISBN: 9780143116929
Publication Date: 2010
Ways of Dying by Zakes Mda
Written in the style of "magic realism," this tragic-comic contemporary novel is set against the backdrops of shabby but vibrant city slums and a rural South African community. The story's hero, Toloki, is an eccentric yet dignified professional mourner whose different worlds are reconciled, amid an atmosphere charged with bizarre realism, when he finds love and makes peace with his past.
ISBN: 0195711068
Publication Date: 1995
Writing Home: Lewis Nkosi on South African Writing by Lindy Stiebel (Editor); Michael Chapman (Editor)
Lewis Nkosi's insights into South African literature, culture and society first appeared in the 1950s, when the 'new' urban African in Sophiatown and on 'Drum' magazine mockingly opposed then Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd's Bantu retribalisation policies. Before his death in 2010, Nkosi focused on the literary-cultural challenges of post-Mandela times. Having lived for 40 years in exile, he returned to South Africa, intermittently, after the unbannings of 1990. His critical eye, however, never for long left the home scene. Hence, the title of this selection of his articles, essays and reviews, 'Writing Home'. Writing home with wit, irony and moral toughness Nkosi assesses a range of leading writers, including Herman Charles Bosman, Breyten Breytenbach, J.M. Coetzee, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Alex La Guma, Bloke Modisane, Es'kia Mphahlele, Nat Nakasa, Njabulo S. Ndebele, Alan Paton and Can Themba. Combining the journalist's penchant for the human-interest story with astute analysis, Nkosi's ideas, observations and insights are as fresh today as when he began his 60-year career as a writer and critic. Selected from his out-of-print collections, 'Home and Exile, The Transplanted Heart' and 'Tasks and Masks', as well as from journals and magazines, Lewis Nkosi's punchy commentaries will appeal to a wide readership. Lindy Stiebel is a professor of English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and visiting professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. Michael Chapman is affiliated as a senior researcher to the Durban University of Technology. He is also an emeritus professor and fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. [Subject: African Studies, Literature, Literary Criticism]
ISBN: 9781869143091
Publication Date: 2016
Adjaye, Africa, Architecture: A Photographic Survey of Metropolitan Architecture by
This is one of the most original, ambitious and important architectural publications of our time, now available to everyone wishing to gain an understanding of a unique architectural heritage overlooked for too long. The African continent contains some of the world's most vibrant culture and creativity, and yet its buildings - vernacular, colonial or contemporary - have rarely engaged the interest of Western architects. David Adjaye, the first black architect to establish a truly global reputation in his field, has found endless sources of inspiration for his designs in the rich - and chequered - heritage of Africa's teeming metropolises. His life dream was to return to the continent as an architect to document Africa's built environment. Over a long decade, he tirelessly documented these dynamic, colourful cities, photographing thousands of buildings, sites and places, and letting each building speak for itself, in telling contrast to a design world obsessed with photorealistic slickness. The result was a stunning seven-volume work that has become an essential resource for all those interested in the burgeoning continent. This new compact edition will make the fruits of this once-in-a-generation record available to a much wider audience.
Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity by
Africa In Stereo examines the role that African American music has played in the pan-Africanist imagination since the end of the nineteenth century. Throughout, Jaji marshals a wide array of critical, archival, literary, visual, and sonic sources to craft an argument centered on the stereophonic echoes between three sites on the African continent emblematic of pan-Africanism (Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa) and black musical cultures in the US (as well as few other places on the diasporic landscape). Rather than take a purely musical tack that traces the influence of African American music on musical repertoires from Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa, Africa In Stereo beautifully shows how a US black popular musical genres inspired a host of writers and filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembene, John Akomfrah, Sol Plaatje, Léopold Senghor, K. Anyidoho, Charlotte Maxeke, Ken Bugul, as well as the glossy visual languages found in the early magazines Bingo (Senegal) and Zonk! (South Africa).
Approaches to Teaching Coetzee's 'Disgrace' and Other Works by
The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee won him global recognition and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work offers substantial pedagogical richness and challenges. Coetzee treats such themes as race, aging, gender, animal rights, power, violence, colonial history and accountability, the silent or silenced other, sympathy, and forgiveness in an allusive and detached prose that avoids obvious answers or easy ethical reassurance. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," identifies secondary materials, including multimedia and Internet resources, that will help instructors guide their students through the contextual and formal complexities of Coetzee's fiction. In part 2, "Approaches," essays discuss how to teach works that are sometimes suspicious of teachers and teaching. The essays aim to help instructors negotiate Coetzee's ironies and allegories in his treatment of human relationships in a changing South Africa and of the shifting connections between human beings and the biosphere.
Diaspora and Identity in South African Fiction by
South African identities, as they are represented in the contemporary South African novel, are not homogeneous, but fractured and often conflicted: African, Afrikaner, 'colored,' English, and Indian. None can be regarded as rooted or pure, whatever essentialist claims the members of these various ethnic and cultural communities might want to make for them. All of them, this study argues, are deeply divided and have arisen, directly or indirectly, out of the experience of diasporic displacement, migration, and relocation, from the colonial, African, and Indian diasporas to present-day migrations into and out of South Africa, as well as diasporic dislocations within Africa. The book contains 20 works by 12 contemporary South African novelists - Breyten Breytenbach, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Aziz Hassim, Michiel Heyns, Elsa Joubert, Zakes Mda, Njabulo S. Ndebele, Karel Schoeman, Patricia Schonstein Pinnock, Ivan Vladislavic, and Zoe Wicomb - and shows how diaspora is a dominant theme in contemporary South African fiction, and how the diasporic subject is a most recognizable figure. [Subject: Literary Criticism, African Studies, Migration Studies, Diaspora Studies]
Dreams: Three Works by
This volume brings together for the first time the entire range of the shorter pieces of imaginative writing that she continued to produce throughout her life, together with her final account of the vision informing her life's work. It rescues Schreiner from the charge of having exhausted a slim talent in one semi autobiographical novel and provides a context in which to situate a woman writer whose idealist concerns recognised no simple geographical boundaries. To picture her as first and foremost a colonial writer or, alternatively, primarily as a member of the finde-siecle British avant garde, does little justice to the links she made in her own writing and to the complex situation she occupied, for Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner's life (1855-1920) straddled two centuries and two continents, while her travels between the land of her birth, South Africa, and her family's European homeland embroiled her in the political ferment of two wars: the Boer War (1899-1902) and the first World War (1914-1918).
The Good Doctor by
Taut, spare, and compellingly readable, The Good Doctor is a brilliant literary high-wire act short enough to be devoured in one or two sittings. When Laurence Waters arrives at the small rural hospital in a South African homeland where Frank works, Frank is immediately suspicious. Everything about Laurence grates on Frank, from his smoking in their shared room, to his unfamiliar optimism about what the doctors can truly accomplish among the local population--but Laurence seems oblivious, immediately and repeatedly declaring Frank his friend despite the other''s indifference. Frank originally came to the hospital to get his bearings after his wife left him for his best friend--but denial of the higher-level post he was promised when he came, and the disillusionment of working at a completely ineffectual hospital (it''s always deserted, an entire wing closed off and gradually being looted of any reusable equipment lacks basic supplies), has hardened him into cynical apathy--which makes Laurence''s optimism all the more irritating. Laurence starts planning a campaign to "bring the hospital to the people," by running clinics in nearby villages. A group of soldiers have arrived in the village, reportedly looking for holes in the border where smuggling has become rampant. Then Laurence''s African-American girlfriend Zanele, who has adopted an African name and dress, and who shares his political idealism (but not much actual intimacy, it seems) comes to visit, and Laurence and Frank host a party. During the flush of drunkenness the tensions between the staff melt away (the Cuban couple estranged by Frank having had an affair with the woman; the strained power relations between Frank and the other doctors and Tehogo, the young black African man who works as the caretaker and unlicensed nurse). But in the aftermath of the party this quickly melts away--especially when Frank goes to return the cassettes Tehogo lent him for the party, and accidentally discovers a cache of looted metal fittings from the hospital in Tehogo''s room. Finally, Laurence talks Frank into spending an evening with Zanele while he is on duty--which ends in a bizarre encounter with an apartheid-era local despot and a furtive sexual union with Zanele. Frank is understandably relieved that a few days later an appointment to see his estranged wife to sign divorce papers allows him a chance to get away. When Frank returns, Laurence meets him by telling him everything''s changed. Laurence has ignored Frank''s wish not to report Tehogo''s theft, and in so doing has revealed that Frank was the one who discovered it. The clinic has become a huge public relations coup, raising awareness and goodwill toward the hospital though its capacities are no better than before, and everyone but Frank seems swept up in its success. And a secret Frank has been keeping from Laurence since their first day of friendship--the married poor black woman Frank has been sleeping with off and on for years, sometimes for money--comes to light, in a way, when the woman comes to Laurence at the end of the clinic to tell him she needs an abortion, and that it must be done at her home. Enjoying Laurence''s discomfort with this moral dilemma, Frank does not help with the procedure and when he guiltily goes to check on the patient the next night, she and the shack where she lived, where he would go to meet her, are gone. Meanwhile Tehogo has more or less completely stopped coming in to work. Convinced that his affair''s husband is somehow linked to the former despot and to a rash of recent robberies because of his white car, Frank tips the colonel leading the group of soldiers--a brutal Afrikaner under whom, as a conscript, Frank had been forced to help torture black informants before the end of apartheid--as to where he thinks the despot''s encampment is hiding. Soon after, a soldier turns up with Tehogo, vitally wounded from a gunshot. As Frank tends to the wound obsessively to assuage his guilt at possibly having exposed Tehogo to the colonel, Laurence for once is completely apathetic--whether disgusted at Tehogo for being a thief and complicating his image of human perfectibility, or too distracted by the apparently more noble work of tomorrow''s second village health clinic, which seems more than ever to Frank like lip service. Frank volunteers to move Tehogo to the bigger hospital where his life can assuredly be saved, but when he wakes in the morning Tehogo, the soldier guarding him, the bed to which he was handcuffed, and Laurence, who was on night duty, are all gone. Soon the soldiers leave town too, and as the stultifying silence of the pre-Laurence days returns, Frank is left to make some sense of the strange almost-year of the young doctor''s presence.
In a Strange Room: Three Journeys by
A Man Booker Prize finalist: "This tale of ill-fated journeys through Greece, Africa and India shows" the author of The Quarry "at a superb new high" (The Guardian). In this newest novel from South African writer Damon Galgut, a young loner travels across eastern Africa, Europe, and India. Unsure what he's after, and reluctant to return home, he follows the paths of travelers he meets along the way. Each new encounter--with an enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers, and a woman on the verge--leads him closer to confronting his own identity. Traversing the quiet of wilderness and the frenzy of border crossings, every new direction is tinged with surmounting mourning, as he is propelled toward a tragic conclusion. Shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, In a Strange Room is a hauntingly beautiful evocation of life on the road. It was first published in the Paris Review in three parts--"The Follower," "The Lover," and "The Guardian"--one of which was selected for a National Magazine Award and another for the O. Henry Prize.
Late Essays, 2006-2017 by
A new collection of twenty-three literary essays from the Nobel Prize-winning author. J. M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. J. M. Coetzee is not only one of the most acclaimed fiction writers in the world, he is also an accomplished and insightful literary critic. In Late Essays: 2006-2016, a thought-provoking collection of twenty-three pieces, he examines the work of some of the world's greatest writers, from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Goethe and Irène Némirovsky to Coetzee's contemporary Philip Roth. Challenging yet accessible, literary master Coetzee writes these essays with great clarity and precision, offering readers an illuminating and wise analysis of a remarkable list of works of international literature that span three centuries.
Nadine Gordimer by
The award to Nadine Gordimer of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991 was an affirmation of her distinctive contribution to twentieth-century fiction and to the creation of a literature that challenges apartheid. In this study, which may be used as an introduction as well as by those already familiar with Gordimer's work, Dominic Head discusses each of her novels in detail, paying close attention to the texts both as a reflection of events and situations in the real world, and as evidence of her constant rethinking of her craft. Head shows how Gordimer's concerns, apparent in her earliest novels, are developed through increasing stress on the politics of textuality; and he pursues the implications of this development to consider how Gordimer's later work contributes to postmodernist fiction, and to a recentering of political engagement in an era of uncertainty.
Out of Bounds: Seven Stories of Conflict and Hope by
We are the young people, We will not be broken! For almost fifty years, apartheid forced the young people of South Africa to live apart as Blacks, Whites, Indians, and "Coloreds." This unique and dramatic collection of stories--by native South African and Carnegie Medalist Beverley Naidoo--is about young people's choices in a beautiful country made ugly by injustice. Each story is set in a different decade during the turbulent years from 1948 to 2000, and portrays powerful fictional characters who are caught up in very real and often disturbing events.
The Pickup by
The Nobel Laureate's psychologically penetrating story of the love affair between a rich South African and the illegal alien she "picks up" on a whim Who picked up whom? Is the pickup the illegal immigrant desperate to evade deportation to his impoverished desert country? Or is the pickup the powerful businessman's daughter trying to escape a priveleged background she despises? When Julie Summers' car breaks down in a sleazy street, at a garage a young Arab emerges from beneath the chassis of a vehicle to aid her. The consequences develop as a story of unpredictably relentless emotions that overturn each one's notion of the other, and of the solutions life demands for different circumstances. She insists on leaving the country with him. The love affair becomes a marriage-that state she regards as a social convention appropriate to her father's set and her mother remarried in California, but decreed by her 'grease monkey' in order to present her respectably to his family. In the Arab village, while he is dedicated to escaping, again, to what he believes is a fulfilling life in the West, she is drawn by a counter-magnet of new affinities in his close family and the omnipresence of the desert. A novel of great power and concision, psychological surprises and unexpected developments, The Pickup is a story of the rites of passage that are emigration/immigration, where love can survive only if stripped of all certainties outside itself.
The Road to Mecca by
A South African pastor and a young teacher from Cape Town battle over the fate of an eccentric elderly widow.
South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary by
Described as a prophet of the post-apartheid condition, Njabulo Ndebele is a prize-winning author, poet and critic and one of the leading lights in South Africa's literary world. These essays, beginning in 1984, were written over the storm years of the democratic struggle and are reprinted here with a new introduction by Graham Pechey.
South Africans: A Set of Portrait-Poems by
This title provides a series of portraits, of people as individuals and in groups of individuals. The subjects of these portrait-poems are drawn from a variety of cultural and economic settings. They come from different rural and urban backgrounds, are of different age-groups and genders, and speak different languages. The title thus provides a glimpse of the astonishing diversity of the people who are South Africans.
South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over by
Nation' and 'literature' are always inherently unstable categories but, in the case of South Africa, this instability is particularly marked. This study considers the effects local and global networks had on the publication, promotion and reception of a series of key writers and their works between 1883 and 2005, asking: who published what, where, why, and how; how and why work was construed as 'South African', what this meant, and how it affected reading. Exploring new approaches to studying colonial and postcolonial print cultures, it seeks to redress inadequately historicised or transnationally situated studies of South African writing in English. In addition to making considerable contributions to the study of well-known writers like Olive Schreiner, Alan Paton, and Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee (chapters on the early publication history of Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, Paton's globally influential Cry, the Beloved Country, and Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country, his second novel but the first to be published abroad), it also includes discussions of the contrasting reputations of poets Roy Campbell and William Plomer in the 1920s and 1930s, of exiled ANC-activist Alex La Guma's publishing odyssey (in Nigeria, East Germany and Britain); and Zakes Mda's novel about hybrid identities and identifications in colonial and in post-apartheid South Africa, The Heart of Redness (2000).The book is absolutely essential reading for anyone with an interest in the fields of South African, African, and general colonial and postcolonial literatures and history, as well as those with an interest print and media cultures, and the History of the Book.
Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008 by
Never before has Gordimer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, published such a comprehensive collection of her nonfiction. Telling Times represents the full span of her works in that field--from the twilight of white rule in South Africa to the fight to overthrow the apartheid regime, and most recently, her role over the past seven years in confronting the contemporary phenomena of violence and the dangers of HIV. The range of this book is staggering, and the work in totality celebrates the lively perseverance of the life-loving individual in the face of political tumult, then the onslaught of a globalized world. The abiding passionate spirit that informs "A South African Childhood," a youthful autobiographical piece published in The New Yorker in 1954, can be found in each of the book's ninety-one pieces that span a period of fifty-five years. Returning to a lifetime of nonfiction work has become an extraordinary experience for Gordimer. She takes from one of her revered great writers, Albert Camus, the conviction that the writer is a "responsible human being" attuned not alone to dedication to the creation of fiction but to the political vortex that inevitably encompasses twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. Born in 1923, Gordimer, who as a child was ambitious to become a ballet dancer, was recognized at fifteen as a writing prodigy. Her sensibility was as much shaped by wide reading as it was to eye-opening sight, passing on her way to school the grim labor compounds where black gold miners lived. These twin decisives--literature and politics--infuse the book, which includes historic accounts of the political atmosphere, firsthand, after the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto uprising of 1976, as well as incisive close-up portraits of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, among others. Gordimer revisits the eternally relevant legacies of Tolstoy, Proust, and Flaubert, and engages vigorously with contemporaries like Susan Sontag, Octavio Paz, and Edward Said. But some of her most sensuous writing comes in her travelogues, where the politics of Africa blend seamlessly with its awe-inspiring nature--including spectacular recollections of childhood holidays beside South Africa's coast of the Indian Ocean and a riveting account of her journey the length of the Congo River in the wake of Conrad. Gordimer's body of work is an extraordinary vision of the world that harks back to the sensibilities--political, moral, and social--of Dickens and Tolstoy, but with a decidedly vivid contemporary consciousness. Telling Times becomes both a literary exploration and extraordinary document of social and political history in our times.
Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to Present by
Over the past 500 years, African people have experienced and interpreted their relationships with Europeans in particular ways. From the late fifteenth century, contacts between the first Portuguese merchants and indigenous peoples of the West and Central African coasts marked the beginning of Europe's economic engagement with sub-Saharan Africa. With increased trade came missionaries who paved the way for the subsequent European colonization of Africans from the late nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century. Under colonialism, a previous relationship of autonomy and parity changed to one of subjugation. The postcolonial era has seen yet another shift in the image of the European, as Africans have increasingly participated in a global environment unmediated by colonizing powers. Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to Present focuses on these historical changes as they are articulated in African visual arts. Presented as a series of case studies, Through African Eyes addresses the arts and experiences of a representative group of African cultures. More than 90 of Africa's finest three-dimensional art and utilitarian objects of wood, ivory, metal, and textiles illustrate changes in African perceptions of the European. Essays by leading scholars in the field provide a sense of chronological progression while providing a rich overview of artistic genres and themes issuing from this cross-cultural exchange. Through African Eyes combines diverse representational forms--from sixteenth-century Benin bronzes to contemporary satiric masks and figures along with related material culture--to demonstrate the multiple relationships that developed between Africans and Europeans and their profound impact on African visual culture.
Waiting for the Barbarians by
A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, now a major motion picture starring Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire whose servant he is. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he finds himself jolted into sympathy with their victims--until their barbarous treatment of prisoners of war finally pushes him into a quixotic act of rebellion, and thus into imprisonment as an enemy of the state. Waiting for the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee's third novel, which won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize, is an allegory of the war between oppressor and oppressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that elevate their own survival above justice and decency.
Ways of Dying by
Written in the style of "magic realism," this tragic-comic contemporary novel is set against the backdrops of shabby but vibrant city slums and a rural South African community. The story's hero, Toloki, is an eccentric yet dignified professional mourner whose different worlds are reconciled, amid an atmosphere charged with bizarre realism, when he finds love and makes peace with his past.
Writing Home: Lewis Nkosi on South African Writing by
Lewis Nkosi's insights into South African literature, culture and society first appeared in the 1950s, when the 'new' urban African in Sophiatown and on 'Drum' magazine mockingly opposed then Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd's Bantu retribalisation policies. Before his death in 2010, Nkosi focused on the literary-cultural challenges of post-Mandela times. Having lived for 40 years in exile, he returned to South Africa, intermittently, after the unbannings of 1990. His critical eye, however, never for long left the home scene. Hence, the title of this selection of his articles, essays and reviews, 'Writing Home'. Writing home with wit, irony and moral toughness Nkosi assesses a range of leading writers, including Herman Charles Bosman, Breyten Breytenbach, J.M. Coetzee, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Alex La Guma, Bloke Modisane, Es'kia Mphahlele, Nat Nakasa, Njabulo S. Ndebele, Alan Paton and Can Themba. Combining the journalist's penchant for the human-interest story with astute analysis, Nkosi's ideas, observations and insights are as fresh today as when he began his 60-year career as a writer and critic. Selected from his out-of-print collections, 'Home and Exile, The Transplanted Heart' and 'Tasks and Masks', as well as from journals and magazines, Lewis Nkosi's punchy commentaries will appeal to a wide readership. Lindy Stiebel is a professor of English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and visiting professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. Michael Chapman is affiliated as a senior researcher to the Durban University of Technology. He is also an emeritus professor and fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. [Subject: African Studies, Literature, Literary Criticism]
