Research Articles (English Studies)

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Complicit refugees, cosmopolitans and xenophobia: Khaled Hosseini's 'The Kite Runner' and Romesh Gunesekera's 'Reef' in conversation with texts on xenophobia in South Africa
(Common Ground, 2008) Flockemann, Miki
In the aftermath of the brutal xenophobic attacks in parts of South Africa against 'other' Africans between March and May this year, a fairly sustained (if repetitive) public debate has emerged in the local press. The aim is to extend this discussion to South African literary production and to stories from elsewhere - in this case, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. The distinction between complicit refugees and cosmopolitans draws on some of the arguments of Mark Saunders and Anthony Appiah as a framework for comparing Hosseini s popular 'The Kite Runner' (2003) and Gunsekera's lyrical 'Reef' (1994). These will be read in relation to K. Sella Duiker's 'Thirteen Cents' (2000). Establishing a 'conversation' between these texts is associated (from Appiah) with calls/or re-thinking terms such as citizen and cosmopolitan. This, in turn. has implications for the current expressions of and about, xenophobia in South Africa.
�Connecting Mind to Pen, to Eyes, to Face, to Arms and Legs�: Toward a Performative and Decolonial Teaching Practice
(Cambridge University Press, 2020) Flockemann, Miki
The push to sustain online learning platforms that have been established in the wake of Covid-19 at South African universities raises a number of concerns. Apart from highlighting the stark and ongoing social inequities in terms of access, the need to ensure that there is still scope in our teaching practice for affective and performative encounters has also been thrown into sharp relief. I draw on two teaching contexts, the one dealing with a literary text, and the other a live performance in order to explore the decolonial potential of affective encounters
The everyday experience of xenophobia: performing The Crossing from Zimbabwe to South Africa
(Routledge, 2010) Flockemann, Miki; Ngara, Kudzayi; Roberts, Wahseema; Castle, Andrea
Debates on the underlying causes of xenophobia in South Africa have proliferated since the attacks -between March and May 2008. Our article shows how exploring the everyday 'ordinariness' of xenophobia as performance can contribute additional insights not readily available in the public media or in works such as the recently published Go home or die here.- violence, xenophobia and the reinvention of difference (Hassim et al. 2009). The claim that as metaphor the meaning of performance is discovered in the dialectic established between the fictitious and actual context, provides a point of departure for a discussion of an autobiographical one-man play, The Crossing, in which Jonathan Nkala performs .his hazardous and 'illegal' rites of passage from Zimbabwe to South Africa. The play's aesthetic of 'witnessing', associated with the protest generation, intersects with and looks beyond a post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) aesthetic. To contextualise our discussion of Nkala's work we track trends in responses to xenophobia, including the suggestion that the attacks were underpinned by prevailing discourses of exceptianaJism and indigeneity. However, the intimacy of targeting those living close to you needs fuller anatysis. We will argue that the liminality of the performance event provides scope for making connections not directly 'there' at the moment of performance. This has a bearing on the 'return' to Fanon and claims about 'negrophobia' characterising many reports in the public domain on the events of 2008. In turn, this invites speculation about the re-alignments indicated here.
Facing the stranger in the mirror: Staged complicities in recent South African performances
(Routledge, 2011) Flockemann, Miki
The staging of complicity has developed into one of the most prevalent trends in recent South Africa theatre. The audience may become aware of their own complicity in injustice, or complicity may feature as a subject to be explored in the play. I will argue that one can identify three broadly defined performance modalities which shape current engagements with complicity. These modalities are identified by the adjectives, 'thick' (as in densely layered, complex, deep), 'reflective' (as in reflecting upon as well as revealing), and 'hard' (in the sense of direct, uncompromising, difficult to penetrate). Rather than signifying distinct categories, these terms are attributed to a cluster of performance dynamics.
I am/am I an African? A relational reading of 'Diaspora and Identity in South African Fiction' by J.U. Jacobs
(AOSIS, 2017) Flockemann, Miki
The publication of Diaspora and Identity in South African Fiction (2016) by J.U. Jacobs is a timely intervention, in that it is the first comprehensive study of South African fiction to sustain the argument that South African writing is always already diasporic. Although Jacobs' diasporic framework undoubtedly serves as an important addition to the recent trends identified by literary scholars, his focus on 12 well-established writers (including Coetzee, Wicomb, Mda, Gordimer and Ndebele), highlights some of the gaps that need to be filled in a study of this kind. For instance, what about the younger generation of writers, including those from elsewhere in Africa who are writing about living in South Africa? How do they deal with what has been termed the new diaspora, with debates around Afropolitanism and the experiences of internal, inter-continental and trans-continental migrancy in an increasingly globalising world? Despite these shortcomings, Jacobs' premise about the inevitably diasporic identifications that are narrativised in the 20 novels analysed here can provide a useful foundation for further scholarship on how the diasporic condition informs and is mediated in other texts. These, as I will show, range from works by a new generation of emerging writers on the one hand to the performing arts on the other hand.
Little perpetrators, witness-bearers and the young and the brave: towards a post-transitional aesthetics
(Taylor & Francis, 2010) Flockemann, Miki
The aesthetic choices characterizing work produced during the transition to democracy have been well documented. We are currently well into the second decade after the 1994 election - what then of the period referred to as the 'second transition'? Have trends consolidated, hardened, shifted, or have new 'post-transitional' trends emerged? What can be expected of the future 'born free' generation of writers and readers, since terms such as restlessness, dissonance and disjuncture are frequently used to describe the experience of constitutional democracy as it co-exists with the emerging new apartheid of poverty? Furthermore, what value is there in identifying post-transitional aesthetic trends?
Repeating and disrupting embodied histories through performance: Exhibit A Mies Julie and Itsoseng
(Taylor & Francis, 2013) Flockemann, Miki
The concern about South African arts being - as Achille Mbembe claims - �stuck in repetition� can be challenged by examining developments in the performance arts which deliberately employ repetition. In these cases repetition is played with not just as a process of voiding or emptying out, but also to reconceptualise and embody historical and lived experiences. This can involve re-enactments of images, texts and theatrical styles which are worked upon and productively problematised through performance as a live event. In looking at the performance aesthetics of repetition, Diana Taylor�s The archive and the repertoire (2003) provides a useful context, since Taylor�s work straddles the disciplinary intersections between performance studies, anthropology and history. As point of departure, this article focuses on three works produced at the 2012 National Arts Festival, since the accumulation of new and not-new works viewed in quick succession offers scope for identifying aesthetic trends and shifts. Brett Bailey�s Exhibit A, Yael Farber's Mies Julie, and Omphile Molusi's Itsoseng, for instance, demonstrate various aspects of an aesthetics of repetition. The embodied histories that are performed in these works throw up a number of paradoxes. However, the productions do not simply circulate performing bodies as empty aesthetic images, but as transmitters of cultural memory, as well as witnesses to states of profound transition that engage both performers and audiences alike.

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