Research Articles (English Studies)

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Browsing by Author "Brown, Duncan"

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    �Modern prophets, produce a new bible�: Christianity, Africanness and the poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho
    (Southern African Literature and Culture Centre, UKZN, 2008) Brown, Duncan
    In this article I consider how one might approach the apparently singular figure of Nontsizi Mgqwetho, a Xhosa woman who produced an extraordinary series of Christian izibongo in newspapers in the 1920s: through what kind of language, from what critical perspective, might one think and write about her? There have been various attempts to write about Mgqwetho, and there are certain obvious possibilities in terms of approach and methodology, which I explore briefly, but I want to suggest a mode of reading which provides a richer, more engaged and more engaging understanding � one which reads with and through, rather than onto or against, her African Christian articulations.
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    Oral literature in South Africa: 20 years on
    (Taylor & Francis, 2016) Brown, Duncan
    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 significant implications have been, what remain challenges, and how we may think of, or rethink, orality and performance studies in a present and future that are changing at almost inconceivable pace.
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    The making of a (wild) fish
    (Duke University Press, 2025) Brown, Duncan; Thom, Craig
    In this article, which draws on experiences of having observed Martin Davies’s trout egg and milt collection at Thrift Dam in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, interviews with Davies himself, theoretical literature on fish breeding, genealogy, animal history, science studies, legislation on genetic manipulation, literature on notions of wildness and domestication, and actually fly-fishing at venues stocked with Davies’s fish, the article’s authors consider the possibilities and paradoxes involved in the historical-biological “making” of a fish: a fish in process for more than thirty years, described by its(co)maker as “totally wild.” The article explores the question: Can one make a “wild” fish? The question is not entirely new, as there are extensive debates in animal and environmental studies about wildness. The process of answering that question leads the article’s authors to the core of Anthropocenic debates about interspecies relationships, distinctions between the domesticated and the wild, the biology and ethics of genetic manipulation, and even the limits of the human. These issues have been well explored by many scholars, but this article’s authors engage with them from the specificities of fish and their bodies, which, with the fluidity of their environment and their inherent, elusive slipperiness, frequently evade conceptual or physical capture. In particular, the case that the article’s authors consider raises challenging questions about human and nonhuman agency: Can a body of water and its multiple constituents be actors? Can fish which cannot breed “naturally” be agents in their own remaking? Can one make a fish for and with a specific environment? Are “natural” and “human” selections necessarily irreconcilable? And so on. As Claude LéviStrauss famously said, animals are good to think with. In this case, trout disturb the waters.