List of Titles

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

‘That ever-blurry line between us and the criminals’: African Noir and the Ambiguity of Justice in MŨkoma wa NgŨgĨ’s Black Star Nairobi and Leye Adenle’s When Trouble Sleeps

- Naidu, Samantha

Authors: Naidu, Samantha
Date: 2020
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/158069 , vital:40145 , https://0-doi.org.wam.seals.ac.za/10.1093/fmls/cqaa020
Description: This article, which focuses on African noir as a variety of neo-noir literature, begins by outlining the intertextual and intercultural relationships between classic noir and African noir. Thereafter, the postcolonial, postmodernist and transnational elements of African noir are described utilizing Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ’s novel Black Star Nairobi (2013) and Leye Adenle’s When Trouble Sleeps (2018) as exemplars. Arguing that African noir draws on various genres and discourses, the article demonstrates how issues of socio-political justice, ontological and existential dilemmas, aesthetic concerns and the epistemological quest are rendered as ambiguous and murky. Based on a close reading of Black Star Nairobi and When Trouble Sleeps, the article concludes that the predominant chiaroscuro effect of African noir is not so much a ‘dark’ sensibility as one of abstruseness and poignant Afro-pessimism.
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Date Issued: 2020

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‘I don’t belong nowhere really’: the figure of the London migrant in Dan Jacobson’s ‘A Long Way from London’ and Jean Rhys’s ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’

- Naidu, Samantha, Thorpe, Andrea

Authors: Naidu, Samantha , Thorpe, Andrea
Date: 2018
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/68422 , vital:29254 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2018.1461477
Description: Publisher version , In this article we compare and contrast the figure of the migrant, central to Dan Jacobson’s short story ‘A Long Way from London’ ([1953] 1958. A Long Way from London and other stories. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson), and to Jean Rhys’s short story ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ ([1962] 1987. The Collected Stories. New York: Norton), both of which are set in London in the early to mid-twentieth century. The main argument is that these figures, as migrants in London from South Africa and the Caribbean respectively, similarly occupy a liminal space despite stark differences in class, race and gender. In both stories this liminal space is described through evocations of London as a hostile diasporic space, lacking in hospitality, and experienced by the migrant figure as a place of confinement and incarceration. Also, both stories utilize the technique of silence or lacunae when it comes to issues of specific discrimination and abuse, such as racism or sexual exploitation. For the purposes of comparison, the character Manwera from ‘A Long Way from London’ and, Selina, the protagonist of ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, are selected for analysis. Particularly, their respective responses (Manwera’s pride and dignity, and Selina’s recovery after a breakdown, and her musical talent) to the exigencies of migration are suggestive of ‘adaptive strength’ (Steve Vertovec and Robin Cohen [1999] 2001. Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism. Cheltenham and Northampton MA: Elgar Reference Collection, xviii), a common feature in transnational literature which attempts to celebrate liminality and multiplicity as key characteristics of a transnational subjectivity. In addition, the protagonist of ‘A Long Way from London’, Arthur, offers a contrast to Manwera and Selina, not only because of race and class, but because he is depicted as having adapted to and assimilated into British culture, while being strangely detached from and ambivalent about both homeland and diasporic home. Varying forms of adaptive strength are portrayed in both stories, but they close with intimations of bleak futures for the migrant figures. The essay thus concludes with the observation that in these two stories, the figure of the London migrant is rendered as facing further grave challenges, and that all three figures ‘belong nowhere’ (Rhys [1962] 1987 Rhys, Jean. [1962] 1987. The Collected Stories. New York: Norton. [Google Scholar] , 175).
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Date Issued: 2018

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Evil and the Hero-Villain Binary in Deon Meyer’s Post-Apartheid Crime Thriller, Devil’s Peak:

- Naidu, Samantha, van der Wielen, Karlien

Authors: Naidu, Samantha , van der Wielen, Karlien
Date: 2017
Language: English
Type: text , book
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/157991 , vital:40137 , ISBN 9781498533423
Description: The Functions of Evil Across Disciplinary Contexts explores answers to two important questions about the age-old theme of evil: is there any use in using the concept of evil in cultural, psychological, or other secular evaluations of the world and its productions? Most importantly, if there is, what might these functions be? By looking across several disciplines and analyzing evil as it is referenced across a broad spectrum of phenomena, this work demonstrates the varying ways that we interact with the ethical dilemma as academics, as citizens, and as people. The work draws from authors in different fields—including history, literary and film studies, philosophy, and psychology—and from around the world to provide an analysis of evil in such topics as deeply canonical as Beowulf and Shakespeare to subjects as culturally resonant as Stephen King, Captain America, or the War on Terror. By bringing together this otherwise disparate collection of scholarship, this collection reveals that discussions of evil across disciplines have always been questions of how cultures represent that which they find socially abhorrent. This work thus opens the conversation about evil outside of field-specific limitations, simultaneously demonstrating the assumptions that undergird the manner by which such a conversation proceeds.
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Date Issued: 2017

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[A] girl from the village: totally unspoilt

- Naidu, Samantha

Authors: Naidu, Samantha
Date: 2020
Language: English
Type: text , book
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/158057 , vital:40144 , ISBN 9781498591775
Description: The South Asian women’s diaspora engages in spatio-temporal interactions and power differentials in a variety of narratives, articulating agency, multiplicities of belonging and culturally integrative practices, highlighting homing paradigms. The sense of alienness in a new homeland, rather in worldwide home places, triggers rethinking of diasporic conceptions and epistemes of individual and group histories, personal and collective experiences. Some of the questions that this anthology seeks to consider are: How do women from the South Asian diaspora represent cultural negotiations and alienness of the adopted homeland in various narratives? What are the themes/issues they select to portray their perceptions of foreignness? How do culture, history and politics intervene in their portrayal of lived experiences? How do they locate themselves in the matrix of foreignness and diaspora? The contributors to this anthology examine narratives depicting South Asian women, their complexly positioned voices, gesturing at the proliferating challenges and reflecting the grim realities of a globalized world.
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Date Issued: 2020

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South Asian diasporic women's short fiction: the South African contribution

- Naidu, Samantha

Authors: Naidu, Samantha
Date: 2007
Language: English
Type: Article , text
Identifier: vital:26376 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/54037 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
Description: Although Indian Women S Short Fiction Has Always Enjoyed Equal Importance And Popularity As Their Novels, Very Little Critical Attention Has Been Paid To It So Far. Indian Women S Short Fiction Seeks To Fulfil This Long Felt Need. It Puts Together Fifteen Perceptive And Analytical Articles By Scholars Across The World. The Articles, Which Are Focussed On Native Indian Writing As Well As Diasporic Short Fiction, Deal With Such Interesting Literary Issues As Construction Of Femininity, Disablement And Enablement, Bengali Heritage, Hybrid Identities, Nostalgia, Representation Of The Partition Violence, Tradition And Modernity, And Cultural Perspectivism.
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Date Issued: 2007

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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

- Naidu, Samantha

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

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Teaching Postcolonial Crime Fiction:

- Naidu, Samantha

Authors: Naidu, Samantha
Date: 2018
Language: English
Type: text , book
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/158013 , vital:40139 , 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

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A “Horrific Breakdown of Reason": Holmes and the Postcolonial Anti-Detective Novel, Lost Ground

- Naidu, Samantha

Authors: Naidu, Samantha
Date: 2017
Language: English
Type: text , book
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/157980 , vital:40136 , ISBN 978-1-137-55595-3
Description: Using the notion of “negative hermeneutics,” this chapter examines how Michiel Heyns’s novel Lost Ground draws on the heritage of the Sherlock Holmes stories. It argues that Heyns’s representation of contemporary South Africa necessitates a shift from the emphasis on the epistemological quests of nineteenth-century detective fiction to the “negative hermeneutics” and ontological concerns of postcolonial anti-detective fiction. An analysis of Lost Ground reveals direct intertextual and metatextual references to “The Silver Blaze,” yet the novel subversively presents a detective figure that is the antithesis of Holmes. Thus the chapter demonstrates how in postcolonial social and cultural contexts the ratiocinative process is hermeneutically inadequate and socio-political analysis comes to replace, or combine with, the feats of reason epitomized by Holmes.
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Date Issued: 2017

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Vrou is gif : the representation of violence against women in Margie Orford’s Clare Hart novels

- Naidu, Samantha

Authors: Naidu, Samantha
Date: 2013
Language: English
Type: Article , text
Identifier: vital:26372 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/53997 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/asp/article/view/136092 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
Description: This article takes as its starting point that crime fiction is a public and political response to gender-based violence. Using the methods of both discourse analysis and literary analysis of the crime fiction genre, the novels of Margie Orford, internationally acclaimed crime author and patron of Rape Crisis, are examined for their representations of violence against women, and the role played by these representations in Orford’s overall feminist project in the Clare Hart series. The article also considers theories about gender-based violence which link male violence to a purported crisis in the established gender order of South Africa. An attempt is made to understand the relationship between fictionalised representations of violence and the ‘banality’ of real-life violence. Finally, Hart, Orford’s hard-boiled female detective figure, is assessed to determine whether this character constitutes a significant feminist achievement that contributes to discourses which counter gender-based violence
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Date Issued: 2013

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Teaching Postcolonial Crime Fiction:

- Naidu, Samantha

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

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Navi Pillay: Realising Human Rights for All

- Naidu, Samantha

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

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On becoming an African-Asian English academic at Rhodes University

- Naidu, Samantha

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

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Intersecting Diasporas:

- Naidu, Samantha

Authors: Naidu, Samantha
Date: 2019
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/158034 , vital:40141 , DOI: 10.1080/18125441.2019.1661597
Description: With increased mobility enabled by evolving technology, the world experiences higher rates of migration and globalisation than ever before. This phenomenon has led, in recent years, to a high volume of literature about migration and diaspora, i.e. literature which deals with the general theme of transnationalism. The term transnational, in its simplest guise, refers to the relations between citizens of different nation states and the networks which link them. It also refers to the complex subjectivity of those who migrate. Scholars emphasise that transnationalism, because of heterogeneity and diversity, gives rise to a site for dynamic social and cultural change. At the same time, continuity is a necessary feature of this site. The co-existence of change and continuity (a focused process of adaptation and assimilation which simultaneously considers the role of memory, the past, and ties to homeland) then is also a defining element of transnationalism.
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Date Issued: 2019

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Writing the violated body : representations of violence against women in Margie Orford’s crime thriller novels

- Naidu, Samantha

Authors: Naidu, Samantha
Date: 2014
Language: English
Type: Article , text
Identifier: vital:26361 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/53932 , http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/18125441.2014.904396 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
Description: Using the late twentieth-century French feminist notions of écriture féminine and the abject as a starting point, this article considers the various pitfalls, effects and ethical ramifications of representations of violence against the female body in South African crime fiction. How do authors reconcile the entertainment value of such representations with their aims to perform social analysis? This article attempts to answer this question by first describing how violence targeted at the female body is graphically portrayed, and, second, by assessing the effects of these visceral descriptions. Margie Orford’s novels, in particular, the first in the Clare Hart series, Like clockwork (2006), which foregrounds human trafficking, prostitution and gender-based violence, will be examined. In Orford’s Clare Hart series, the female detective figure, the various plots to do with assault, abduction, rape and murder, and the explicit imagery that descriptively conveys such crimes, are narrative techniques employed by Orford to address this scourge, and the patriarchy and sexism of contemporary South African society in general. The article ends by assessing whether a bona fide feminist subgenre of South African crime fiction is being inscribed by Orford
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Date Issued: 2014

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Transnational Crime in Deon Meyer’s Devil’s Peak and Santiago Gamboa’s Night Prayers:

- Naidu, Samantha

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

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