Philosophiae Doctor - PhD (English)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10566/9290

Browse

Browsing by Author "Birch, Alannah"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Haunting temporalities: Creolisation and black women's subjectivities in the diasporic science fiction of Nalo Hopkinson
    (University of the Western Cape, 2016) Volschenk, Jacolien; Birch, Alannah; Flockemann, Marika
    This study examines temporal entanglement in three novels by Jamaican-born author Nalo Hopkinson. The novels are: Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), and The Salt Roads (2004). The study pays particular attention to Hopkinson's use of narrative temporalities, which are shape by creolisation. I argue that Hopkinson creatively theorises black women's subjectivities in relation to (post) colonial politics of domination. Specifically, creolised temporalities are presented as a response to predatory Western modernity. Her innovative diasporic science fiction displays common preoccupations associated with Caribbean women writers, such as belonging and exile, and the continued violence enacted by the legacy of colonialism and slavery. A central emphasis of the study is an analysis of how Hopkinson not only employs a past gaze, as the majority of both Caribbean and postcolonial writing does to recover the subaltern subject, but also how she uses the future to reclaim and reconstruct a sense of selfhood and agency, specifically with regards to black women. Linked to the future is her engagement with notions of technological and social betterment and progress as exemplified by her emphasis on the use of technology as a tool of empire. By writing science fiction, Hopkinson is able to delve into the nebulous nexus of technology, empire, slavery, capitalism and modernity. And, by employing a temporality shaped by creolisation, she is able to collapse discrete historical time-frames, tracing obscured connections between the nodes of this nexus from its beginnings on the plantation, the birthplace of creolisation and, as some have argued, of modernity itself.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A study of Roy Campbell as a South African modernist poet
    (University of the Western Cape, 2013) Birch, Alannah; Parr, A.N
    Roy Campbell was once a key figure in the South African literary canon. In recent years, his poetry has faded from view and only intermittent studies of his work have appeared. However, as the canon of South African literature is redefined, I argue it is fruitful to consider Campbell and his work in a different light. This thesis aims to re-read both the legend of the literary personality of Roy Campbell, and his prose and poetry written during the period of �high� modernism in England (the 1920s and 1930s), more closely in relation to modernist concerns about language, meaning, selfhood and community. It argues that his notorious, purportedly colonial, �hypermasculine� personae, and his poetic and personal explorations of �selfhood�, offer him a point of reference in a rapidly changing literary and social environment. Campbell lived between South Africa and England, and later Provence and Spain, and this displacement resonated with the modernist theme of �exile� as a necessary condition for the artist. I will suggest that, like the Oxford dandies whom he befriended, Campbell�s masculinist self-styling was a reaction against a particular set of patriarchal traditions, both English and colonial South African, to which he was the putative heir. His poetry reflects his interest in the theme of the �outsider� as belonging to a certain masculinist literary �tradition�. But he also transforms this theme in accordance with a �modernist� sensibility.