Research Publications (English Studies)

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Antigone’s return: when a once-told story is not enough
(African Journals Online (AJOL), 2022) Marika Flockemann
Encountering an old story in a reimagined way is sometimes deliberately more unsettling than pleasurably familiar in its new guise. A case in point is a recent revisioning of Sophocles’ Antigone, arguably the most frequently recalled story from the classical canon, which has seen several local it erations over time – most notably in The Island by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshon a (1973). The focus here is how the re-enactment of the Antigone story, Antigone (not quite/quiet) at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in 2019, produced as part of a project on Re-imagining Tragedy in the Global South, generates a multi-layered reading experience within the affect-laden and communal atmosphere of a live performance event. Reading here encompasses several dimensions: apart from reading the re-envisioned performative response in relation to its much-translated ‘original’ version, there is the experience of reading as an embodied, affective encounter in the context of the live performance event. In addition, this invites a process of reading around classic texts, which as I argue, can revitalise the intersections between current and apparently forgotten texts in one’s own reading history. In reflecting on Antigone (not quite/quiet) for instance, in relation to the contemporary need for ‘stark fictions’ of the past in developing an ethics of responsibility, I was struck by an unbidden recollection of Thomas Hardy’s preoccupation with tragedy in late nineteenth-century Victorian England. As I shall show, Hardy’s frequent rebuttals in response to often somewhat dismissive accusations of his over-determined pessimism reveal his fore sight in understanding the necessity of a tragic sensibility, which in hindsight now makes sense ‘differently’ and even anticipates some current debates on there velatory and critically urgent aspects of a tragic consciousness.
Longing for Love: Eros and National Belonging in Three Novels by Rayda Jacobs
(Unisa Press, 2022) Moolla, Fatima Fiona
The female Muslim descendant of Cape slavery is a key figure in the work of South African writer, Rayda Jacobs. Three of her novels, in particular, seem to track the social and political genealogy of the female Muslim descendant of slaves, namely, Eyes of the Sky (1996), The Slave Book (1998), and Sachs Street (2001). These novels trace, through the subjectivity of the female Muslim slave, the emergence of the South African nation from its origins at the Cape, through the hinterland, to its contemporary borders. The novels foreground the personal relationship of romantic love, which, of all the personal relationships, is the most volatile and dynamic, producing unexpected transformations. Love, which produces a child from the erotic encounter in Eyes of the Sky, and social union through marriage in The Slave Book, is presented as having the potential to transcend racial, class and religious boundaries in the colonial state. We see in the declining apartheid state presented in the third novel, Sachs Street, that the national allegorical potential of eros finally is not fully realised, leading to a reconceptualisation of romantic love in a transnational frame, centred nonetheless in Cape Town, South Africa. As much as these novels are historical, since they are written post-1994 reflecting the contemporary concerns of its author, they present a singular vision of the place of the female Muslim descendant of slaves in the South African nation, where the postcolonial nation is implicitly conceptualised as a white dominated derivative European nation-state.
�It has a purpose beyond justifying a mark�: Examining the alignment between the purpose and practice of feedback
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2020) van Heerden, Martina
Research has shown that written feedback is important for studentlearning and development. However, the messages embedded in feed-back may lead to students being misled about what they need to learnor how they need to develop. This article reports on a small-scale inves-tigation into the messages embedded in feedback. Legitimation CodeTheory was used to first conceptualise the often-hidden purpose of adiscipline (English Studies), and concomitantly of feedback within thediscipline, and second to analyse actual comments given to first-yearstudents on their assignments. It was found that there is a clear mis-alignment between the purpose and practice of feedback, thereby sug-gesting that students are receiving misleading messages about whatthey need for success within the discipline. This may have implicationsbeyond merely passing the module. A suggestion is made to activelyconsider, and develop, feedback as a discipline-specific literacy.
Faded mountain
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2022) Moolman, Kobus
A faded mountain at the edge of a threadbare field. Smoke and dust trudging the last rungs of a sky. And now a narrow dirt road that twists between snatches of shivering trees and snatches of shadow. Then a gasping river, and cattle and goats and children running across an empty yard, yelling into the wind.
Kingsbury Hospital � ICU
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2022) Moolman, Kobus
into the night the hospital sails noisy as an aircraft * and just as miraculous * somewhere beyond is a world bigger than this shining needle point but no window may be opened lest the weight of everything outside overwhelm * the inside of here now is all the inside left of me all open at the back like a gown and dragging drips and drains
Drawing the dark
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2022) Moolman, Kobus
Day and night, night after night, deep in his prayer, he deliberated whether it was possible to draw the dark without ever looking at it.He had his head in his hands.His hands covered his eyes. His breath caught onwords that tasted like ash.Day and night, night after night,he dragged his slow feet across the frozen lake of memory. It was dark always there beneath that bright layer of appearances; a darkness he trusted, the way a child trusts his mother to recognise him in the rush after the bell.
Faded mountain
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2022) Moolman, Kobus
A faded mountain at the edge of a threadbare field.Smoke and dust trudging the last rungs of asky.And now a narrow dirt road that twists betweensnatches of shivering trees and snatches of shadow.Then a gasping river,and cattle and goats and children running across an empty yard,yelling into the wind.
Chapter 12 imagination and the eco-social crisis (or: why I write creative non-fiction)
(Brill, 2020) Martin, Julia
Green Matters reflects on the �unique cultural function� of literary texts with regard to environmental and ecological concerns. Another way of putting this is to ask: what do literary texts enable us to say or do in relation to the eco-social crisis that is not so readily expressed in other forms of discourse? I�d like to explore this question with regard to my own practice. After some years of writing fairly conventional journal articles and conference papers about literature and ecology, I now find myself among those practitioners in the Environmental Humanities who have been prompted by the urgency of the present crisis to reconsider the modes of our academic expression. This means that I wish to extend the reach of my writing beyond the limited readership of traditional academic discourse, and to admit such radical modes of knowing as may only be expressed through literature.
Desert ethics, myths of nature and novel form in the narratives of Ibrahim al-Koni
(University of Pretoria, 2015) Moolla, Fatima
This broadly comparative essay contrasts environmentalism in the fiction in English translation of the Libyan writer, Ibrahim alKoni, with dominant trends in contemporary environmentalism. An analysis of three of the most ecocritically pertinent of the novels in English translation suggests that the natural world is viewed through the lens of the mythical, encompassing the religious worlds of both Tuareg animism, as well as monotheism represented by Islam and early Christianity. The novels to be considered are The Seven Veils of Seth, Anubis and The Bleeding of the Stone. Unlike environmental approaches which derive from the European Enlightenment of procedural rational disenchantment, human beings in Al-Koni�s work are accorded a place in the sacred order which allows non-parasitic modes of existence within the framework of a sacred law.
Canine embodiment in South African lyric poetry
(University of Pretoria, 2018) Woodward, Wendy
This article discusses South African lyric poetry in English including translations since the 1960s. Rather than being private statements, South African lyrics, like all lyrics, are essentially dialogic�in relation to the philosophical, the political or the psychological. The poems examined here are in dialogue with dogs, their embodiment, their subjectivities, their contiguities with humans. This article considers how trans-species entanglements between human and canine, whether convivial or adversarial, manifest poetically in myriad ways in gendered and/or racialised contexts and analyses how the vulnerabilities of both humans and dogs are made to intersect. Ruth Miller portrays dogs as divine creations who are uncertain and �embarrassed�. Ingrid Jonker�s poems intertwine human and canine, foregrounding gendered vulnerabilities. Where dogs are figured metonymically, entanglements of human and dog break down binary categorisations, in Jonker�s poems as well as in those of other poets.
The road not travelled: Tracking love in Frank Anthony�s the journey: The revolutionary anguish of Comrade B
(2023) Moolla, Fatima Fiona
The Journey (1991) is a virtually unknown �struggle� novel by Frank Anthony (d. 1993), a senior member of the African People�s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), who was incarcerated on Robben Island for six years. The novel and its author have been elided from South African history as a racialized literary establishment and the defensiveness of the resistance organization of which he was a member reinforced each other in tacit censorship. Anthony�s novel presents revealing insights into the repression of the personal in the anti-apartheid movement, which reflected the �liquidation� of love in leftist discourse of the period. The importance of love, especially romantic love � the highly volatile emotion which is often boundary-breaking and radically transformative � has been recognized in contemporary post- Marxism and critical race theory. Blindness to the potential of love in dominant struggle politics is reflected in the protagonist of The Journey, whose passion for social justice leads, paradoxically, to repression of the empowerment and emancipation of self(lessness) through other(s), enabled by eros. A final version of this article appears in English in Africa 50.1 (Apr 2023): 73�98, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/eia.v50i1.4
Oceans
(Routledge, 2021) Pancham, Kershan Vikram
One day, long ago, a little boy was killed. He was used up, and discarded, and thrown away, left for secret dumping, the nameless dead, floating in a sea of sinking secrets.
All the Tokoloshes are dying
(Routledge, 2021) Pancham, Kershan ikram
The last line of defence, when even the most distant tokoloshe returned, Took up a place of arms or/of wisdom, to make the last stand of the world. Even the oldest ones returned, long away in their peace and nature after their years of service, even The Oldest Ones, returned.
Reopening Agaat: Afrikaans, Encyclopedic Narrative, World Literature
(Routledger, 2021) Barnard, Rita
This essay offers a meditation on Marlene van Niekerk�s 2004 novel Agaat as an encyclopedic (or, more exactly, a counter-encyclopedic) narrative, as defined�controversially�by Edward Mendelson in an influential 1976 polemic. It emphasizes Agaat�s historic specificity as a postapartheid novel par excellence: as one that does not instigate, but rather annuls an ethnic-national culture. In other words it considers the ways in which Agaat both fits and inverts Mendelson�s specifications and the ways in which these specifications have been challenged by recent critics. In doing so, the essay tests out the idea that the novel at its limits is paradoxical, not only in its simultaneously curatorial and destructive aspects, but also in the ways it both resists and invites translation. It reads Van Niekerk�s literary accomplishment in light of her understanding of the position of minority languages in a desperately unequal world and her attraction to (and recoil from) an outmoded, but also utopian notion of the shamanic possibilities of the mother tongue. It also reflects, from personal experience, on the ways in which the novel encourages, but also works against what Rebecca Walkowitz has termed �collective possessiveness� and �native reading.�.
Eros and Self-Realization: Zora Neale Hurston�s Janie and Flora Nwapa�s Efuru
(The Pennsylvania State University, 2020) Moolla, Fiona. F
A comparative analysis of Zora Neale Hurston�s Teir Eyes Were Watching God and Flora Nwapa�s Efuru suggests the importance of romantic love to the self actualization of the heroines of these novels, whose authors share similar biog raphies, concerns, and literary positions in the spheres of African American and African literatures respectively. For Hurston, eros paradoxically represents the ultimately unfulfilled possibility for self-realization that finally may be achieved only in and through the self. By contrast, for Nwapa, the focus shifts from the centrality of romantic love to the complex and contradictory place of childbear ing in female self-realization. However, finally, self-actualization is achieved with other women in identification with Mammywater, the powerful Igbo lake goddess
�Foundational fictions� Variations of the marriage plot in Flora Nwapa�s early Anglophone-Igbo novels
(Taylor & Francis, 2019) Moola, Fiona Fatima
The Igbo marriage song recorded by Ifi Amadiume in her influential ethnographic study of the Nnobi in Southeastern Nigeria is a reminder of the cross-cultural, trans-historical significance of some form of marriage in the establishment of some form of family as the foundation and guarantor of survival and stability of the social. Domestic happiness in the extended family of the Igbo context of the period in which the novel is set involves not only husband and wife, as in the nuclear family, but also the husband�s extended family relations. Analysing the gender dynamics of marriage is a focus of a vast number of feminist studies of African literature. Isidore Okpewho in �Understanding African Marriage: towards a Convergence of Literature and Sociology� contrasts the picture of marriage that occurs in African cultural expression, with marriage as it emerges in anthro-sociology. �Motherhood� is a concept that has come under intense scrutiny in the scholarship of African society and literature.
BECOMING-MINORITARIAN Constructions of coloured identities in creative writing projects at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa
(Taylor & Francis, 2020) Moola, Fatima
The institutional history of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in some ways mirrors the paradoxes, ambiguities, absurdities, contradictions and possibilities � in short, the complexities � of the concept �coloured�. The one feature that remains constant in coloured identity constructions is the conception of marginality, a marginality which primes it for consideration through the lens of theoretical articulations of minority discourses generally, and minority literature, in particular. If published writers of coloured identity are a minority in the South African literature landscape, the creative writing student is an interesting minority within that minority. Perhaps what is most unique about the UWC creative writing programmes is the way in which they have fostered a �becoming-minoritarian� in respect of language, through the multi-and trans-linguality encouraged by cross-faculty collaborations, bringing in disciplinary expertise from Afrikaans, English and Xhosa, the Nguni language most commonly spoken in the Western Cape
Postnational paradoxes: Nuruddin Farah's recent novels and two life narratives in counterpoint
(Indiana University Press, 2018) Moolla, Fiona. F
Nuruddin Farah�s most recent novel, Hiding in Plain Sight, provides an interesting fictional terrain within which to explore postcolonial postnationalism. This novel highlights the impacts of globalization and transnationalism on subject formation, personal and family relations, and opens up questions of sexuality in a postnational context. Connections between individual subject and nation formation have been considered across Farah�s career beginning with his first novel, From a Crooked Rib, that marked the double emergence of the autonomous individual and the nationstate, to, most notably, Maps, which completely deconstructs the �mythical� foundations of the Somali nation. Hiding in Plain Sight presents an idealized, postnational cosmopolitanism with no apparent collective affiliation that is presented as the automatic outcome of constitutive hybridity and global hyper-mobility.
Dog sacrifice in Isidore Okpewho�s call me by my rightful name and the Works of Wole Soyinka: Ogun, race, identity and diaspora
(Ranchi: Glocal Colloquies, 2016) Moolla, Fiona. F
This essay considers the ways in which the significance of blood sacrifice in the propitiation of the Yoruba god Ogun is transformed in the context of international literature which asserts an endogenous African modernity, and the specificity of black experience and identity. It focuses mainly on Isidore Okpewho�s 2004 novel, Call Me By My Rightful Name, compared with the role of Ogun in Wole Soyinka�s aesthetics, foregrounding key essays, drama and poetry. Okpewho�s novel presents the reality of the ancestral call among the Yoruba of the American and Caribbean diaspora, which synecdochically represents the call of an essentialized Africa. The central character, Otis Hampton, is a middle class basketball playing African- American college student who inexplicably begins to respond in uncontrollable ways to African drumming and involuntarily chants in a language he does not understand.
Her heart lies at the feet of the mother: Transformations of the romance plot in Leila Aboulela�s minaret
(University of Western Cape, 2021) Moolla, F. Fiona
Sudanese-British writer, Leila Aboulela�s novel, Minaret (2005) transforms the plot structure of Western literary and popular romance forms and develops further the plotlines of African-American Muslim romance novels. It does so by foregrounding the dissenting mother as obstruction to the union of the hero and heroine, against the backdrop of the unique status of the mother in Islam. Thus, the ending of the novel is neither happy nor tragic. Instead, the lovers are separated, and closure requires reconciliation on the part of the couple with the concerns of the mother. In addition, because of the significant difference in age, the heroine is in some ways like a mother to the hero. Final contentment of the heroine is undermined by her questionable actions at the end, resulting in psychic and spiritual contraction. The novel is therefore opened up to ambiguity and uncertainty in the closure, notwithstanding the faith of the heroine. The specific form which closure takes, is determined by the dissenting mother as obstruction in Islamic romance.

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