Browsing by Author "Wessels, Michael"

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    Representations of revolutionary violence in recent Indian and South African fiction
    (Taylor & Francis, 2017) Wessels, Michael
    Several recent novels in English by Indian and South African authors explore the theme of violent political resistance to the entrenched injustices of the hierarchical Indian social order and South Africa�s institutionalised system of racial and economic domination, respectively. This article will investigate and compare the ways in which this theme is treated in four novels: Jhumpa Lahiri�s Lowland (2013), Neel Mukherjee�s Lives of Others (2015), Mandla Langa�s The Texture of Shadows (2014) and Nkosinathi Sithole�s Hunger Eats a Man (2015). The first two chart the consequences for their protagonists of their participation in the Naxalite insurrection in the late 1960s. While Langa�s The Texture of Shadows does not question the decision to engage in armed struggle against the apartheid regime, it refuses to evade the bitter consequences of this decision both for individuals and for the country more generally. Nkosinathi Sithole�s Hunger Eats a Man situates the theme of resistance in relation to the extreme poverty and inequality of the contemporary South African countryside. The comparative approach followed in this article reveals continuities in the representation of resistant violence in the Indian and South African texts in terms of its consequences both for individuals and for post-revolutionary society. At the same time, the comparison exposes significant disjunctions relating to national and generational histories, political ideologies and the ways in which race, class, caste and gender intersect with political resistance in the two countries, as these concerns are imagined in fiction.
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    Sifiso Mzobe�s Young Blood: Spaces of getting and becoming in post-apartheid Durban
    (UNISA Press, 2016) Wessels, Michael
    Sifiso Mzobe�s Young blood (2010) generates much of its energy, this article will argue, through its representation of social and physical mobility and its articulation of space with modes of consumption in post-apartheid South Africa. The novel is set chiefly in the township of Umlazi, the city of Durban and some of its middle- class suburbs. The chief protagonist, a young car thief, moves between township, city and suburb with ease in stolen cars. The open space of the highway separates township and suburb, but also connects them. The novel shows how the spatial arrangements of power and control associated with apartheid are increasingly undermined and reconfigured by new practices of everyday life. Young blood suggests that a certain style of driving can offer new ways of inhabiting the South African city and of bringing its disparate parts together. The ability to move between places in the novel provides opportunities for upward mobility and also enables new forms of symbiosis, trade and consumption. Stealing and driving cars enable Sifiso and his friends to bridge the divide between township and suburb and turn the distance between the two places into a domain of attainment and performance. But the rapid upward social mobility that high-level criminal activity allows is exposed as uncertain and ephemeral by the end of the novel, and the slower route offered by education to self-improvement and class mobility is proffered in its place.
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    Smoking around the campfire: A San encounter with the colonial
    (Taylor & Francis, 2016) Wessels, Michael
    In 1873 Joseph Orpen, resident of Nomansland, engaged a San1 man Qing to guide a combined force of levies and mounted police through the Maloti mountains in present-day Lesotho where they hoped to intercept a group of reluctant Hlubi rebels under chief Langalibalele. Orpen was not only a colonial official but also a keen scholar. In response to his questions Qing commented on some of the rock paintings they saw on their short journey and recounted folklore. A year later Qing�s narratives and his comments on rock art were published along with Orpen�s account of the journey and �remarks� by the celebrated linguist and collector of |Xam narrative, Wilhelm Bleek in an article in the Cape Monthly Magazine (CMM). Orpen�s piece has enjoyed a seminal position in San studies ever since, especially in the field of rock art. The encounter between Qing and Orpen occurred in a context of colonial violence. Not only was the campaign that was being pursued against Langalibalele and his men unnecessary but the San had been subject to genocidal attacks by both regular and irregular colonial forces for a considerable period of time, and the studies of San rock art and narrative at the time were largely carried out in an intellectual climate that saw the extinction of the San as inevitable. This article will locate the CMM article more firmly in its colonial context by combining a close reading of elements of the CMM article itself with a consideration of a wider body of writing that relates to Orpen�s piece.