Book Review: Losing the Plot. Crime, reality and fiction in postapartheid writing
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/124942 , vital:35712 , https://dx.doi.org/10.17159/tvl.v.54i2.2980
- Description: In this wide-ranging and impressive ac¬count of postapartheid writing, De Kock describes the “dizzingly heterogeneous corpus” (1) of South African literature after apartheid with the aim of describing its distinctive features and complexity. The methodology is straightforward. De Kock has chosen to read particular liter¬ary works in order to identify broader ideas and trends. To contextualise the study, De Kock deploys the key, perva¬sive notion of “transition”. The notion is variously defined as a “transformative shift from one ‘state’ to another” (2), a “popular mythology” in the “collective consciousness” (3), and as containing a counter-discourse of disillusionment or disorientation, which De Kock refers to as “‘plot loss’” (3). This “plot loss” becomes a central trope in the book to express the social and political chaos of the country, evident in various criminal manifestations of neo-colonialism such as neo-liberal economic policies, new forms of racism, and corruption.
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- Date Issued: 2017
The first world’s third world expert: self-exoticization in Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:26358 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/53922 , http://jcpcsonline.com/contents/ns-v03n1.html , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
- Description: A literary criticism of the book "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini is presented. It outlines the characters and explores the symbolic significance of these characters. It explores the aspects of contemporary literature among neo-Orientalist representations of the Middle East and the Muslim world. It notes on the contribution of the Euro-American intervention in military and cultural identities of Middle East Orientalists. An overview of the story is also given.
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- Date Issued: 2015
Navi Pillay: Realising Human Rights for All
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2013
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/157960 , vital:40134 , ISBN 978-1906413453
- Description: Navi Pillay has become one of the world's leading advocates in the field of human rights. This new biography tells the story of her humble beginnings in an Indian family in apartheid South Africa, her struggle to gain an education, and her eventual success by becoming the first black woman in the nation to set up a law practice. She defended many anti-apartheid activists and fought for the rights of the mostly political prisoners of Robben Island. In 1995 Nelson Mandela nominated Pillay as the first black female judge on South Africa's Supreme Court. This is the story of how she overcame enormous obstacles to achieve her dream of human rights.
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- Date Issued: 2013
On becoming an African-Asian English academic at Rhodes University
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:21926 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/14392 , https://0-www.jstor.org.wam.seals.ac.za/stable/24487641
- Description: preprint , I arrived at Rhodes University English Department with not much more than a passion for literature. During the last fourteen years I have been able to observe the discipline in operation. My perspective has broadened and deepened, taking in the trajectory from Stanley Kidd and the colonial Cambridge practices, and from what might be termed the 'humanist enterprise of English studies', 1 to the white liberalism of Guy Butler in the middle of the twentieth century, then to the present post-apartheid era of humanities cutbacks and increasing commodification of knowledge.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Crimes against nature : ecocritical discourse in South African crime fiction
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:26322 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/53754 , http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/18125441.2014.950599 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
- Description: Heeding Patrick Murphy's call to critics, in his book, Ecocritical explorations in literary and cultural studies: fences, boundaries and field, to study “nature-oriented mystery novels … in order to understand the degree to which environmental consciousness and nature awareness has permeated popular and commercial fiction” (2009: 143), this article examines how highly successful author, Deon Meyer, has employed crime fiction to popularize ecological issues and debates in South Africa. In this article, Meyer's first “nature-oriented” novel, the crime thriller, Blood safari (2009), is analysed. The main question asked is whether South African crime fiction deploys ecocritical discourse for mercenary reasons or whether its engagement with environmental issues constitutes a bona fide sub-category of ecocritical literature. The same rationale – understanding how “environmental consciousness and nature awareness” manifest in one of the most popular and commercially viable genres of fiction in South Africa today – informs the broader study from which this article is drawn. Some of the findings of this study, which includes a reading of Meyer's second “nature-oriented” novel, Trackers (2011), Jane Taylor's Of wild dogs, Margaret von Klemperer's Just a dead man, and Ingrid Winterbach's literary detective novel, The book of happenstance, are referred to briefly. To conclude, the contribution of “nature-oriented” crime fiction to a “localised ecocriticism” is assessed
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- Date Issued: 2014
Women writers of the South Asian diaspora : towards a transnational feminist Aesthetic?
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article , text
- Identifier: vital:26375 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/54027 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
- Description: Women writers of the South Asian diaspora have, in recent decades, found prominence in the international literary arena. These writers may be new immigrants to their diasporic homes, migrants who divide their lives between far-flung homes (for example, Anita Desai, who lives in India, the United Kingdom [UK] and Germany), or descended from nineteenth-century immigrants, as is the case of South African authors like Farida Karodia and Agnes Sam.
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- Date Issued: 2008
Towards a transnational feminist aesthetic: an analysis of selected prose writing by women of the South Asian diaspora
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2007
- Subjects: South Asian literature -- Women authors , Women and literature -- Asia , English prose literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2307 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1012941 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
- Description: This thesis argues that women writers of the South Asian diaspora are inscribing a literary aesthetic which is recognisably feminist. In recent decades women of the South Asian diaspora have risen to the forefront of the global literary and publishing arena, winning acclaim for their endeavours. The scope of this literature is wide, in terms of themes, styles, genres, and geographic location. Prose works range from grave novelistic explorations of female subjectivity to short story collections intent on capturing historical injustices and the experiences of migration. The thesis demonstrates, through close readings and comparative frameworks, that an overarching pattern of common aesthetic elements is deployed in this literature. This deployment is regarded as a transnational feminist practice.
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- Date Issued: 2007
Crime fiction, South Africa : a critical introduction
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2013
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:26315 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/53743 , http://0-dx.doi.org.wam.seals.ac.za/10.1080/1013929X.2013.833416 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
- Description: Crime fiction is an emergent category in South African literary studies. This introduction positions South African crime fiction and its scholarship in a global lineage of crime and detective fiction. The survey addresses the question of its literary status as ‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow’. It also identifies and describes two distinct sub-genres of South African crime fiction: the crime thriller novel; and the literary detective novel. The argument is that South African crime fiction exhibits a unique capacity for social analysis: a capacity which is being optimised by authors and interrogated by scholars
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- Date Issued: 2013
South African crime fiction: sleuthing the State post-1994, African Identities
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/53912 , vital:26357 , http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2015.1009621 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
- Description: In this essay we demonstrate how the burgeoning field of South African crime fiction has responded to the birth and development of a democratic, post-apartheid South African state. First, an overview of South African crime fiction in the last 20 years is presented. Then the essay presents an argument for South African crime fiction to be regarded as the ‘new political novel’, based on its capacity for socio-political analysis. We use Deon Meyer, arguably South Africa’s most popular and successful crime fiction author, as an exemplar for our argument. In the following section, the genresnob debate and the resurgence of such terms as ‘lowbrow’ and ‘highbrow’ are considered in relation to crime fiction and the role it plays in the socio-cultural arena of post-apartheid South Africa. We conclude with a comment on the significance of popular literary genres for democracy and critical discourses which underpin that democracy. The essay shows that crime fiction is a strong tool for socio-political analysis in a democratic South Africa, because it promotes critical discourse in society, despite being deemed lowbrow or ideologically ambiguous.
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- Date Issued: 2015
Teaching Postcolonial Crime Fiction:
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2018
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/158024 , vital:40140 , ISBN 978-3-319-90608-9
- Description: This chapter is a survey of teaching crime fiction in postcolonial South Africa. After offering a definition and historicisation of postcolonial crime fiction in general, the survey focuses on my third-year undergraduate course, ‘Sleuthing the State: South African Crime and Detective Fiction’. The survey includes a description of the curriculum content, teaching methods, forms of assessment and student evaluation. The chapter also contains theoretical discussion about the practical and ethical implications of teaching crime fiction in a turbulent and transitional socio-political context. To end, the chapter comments on the high points of this teaching experience and on some of the challenges encountered.
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- Date Issued: 2018
Transnational Crime in Deon Meyer’s Devil’s Peak and Santiago Gamboa’s Night Prayers:
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2020
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/163881 , vital:41077 , ISBN 9783030534134 , https://0-doi.org.wam.seals.ac.za/10.1007/978-3-030-53413-4_2
- Description: Naidu argues that transnational crime wreaks havoc on global, national and personal levels in the postcolonial crime novels Devil’s Peak (2007) by South African author Deon Meyer and Night Prayers (2016) by Colombian author Santiago Gamboa. As postcolonial crime novels, they critique sociopolitical instability and corruption harking back to colonial times. Using mobility studies, Naidu interrogates the novels’ rendering of complex relations between the local and the global, and the past and the present. Despite stylistic and generic differences, both novels engage with the pervasive, transnational nature of criminal syndicates and current crimes which are a result of turbulent and unjust histories. Naidu examines the mobility of hapless victims, postcolonial anti-detectives and subversive heroines and comments on the ironic hope afforded by such figures.
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- Date Issued: 2020
In Search of the “Goodlife": Border Crossing and Agency in Luis Alberto Urrea's Into the Beautiful North and Graciela Limón's The River Flows North
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2019
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/158046 , vital:40142 , https://doi.org/10.1080/18125441.2019.16474490
- Description: This article explores representations of complex diasporic subjectivities that resist, or attempt to resist, obsolete nationalist notions of citizenship and identity by crossing the US– Mexico border (and, in so doing, crossing other intangible borders) in search of a better life. Two examples of border literature, Luis Alberto Urrea's Into the Beautiful North (2009) and Graciela Limón's The River Flows North (2009), have been selected for analysis. These texts, in describing various diaspora spaces—to enlist Avtar Brah's term (Cartographies of Diaspora. London: Routledge, 1996)—also examine how those who do not migrate are affected by migration. In Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016), Priscilla Solis Ybarra reveals how the past century and a half's Mexican-American literature contains valuable new approaches to creating and sustaining new forms of transnational relations between humans, and ecologically sound relationships between humans and nature.
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- Date Issued: 2019
Shalom India housing society by Esther David
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Book review
- Identifier: vital:26373 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/54007 , http://www.wasafiri.org/product/wasafiri-issue-57/ , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
- Description: Book review. Shalom India housing society by Esther David.
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- Date Issued: 2009