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A survey of South African crime fiction : critical analysis and publishing history

- Naidu, Samantha

Authors: Naidu, Samantha
Date: 2017
Language: English
Type: Book , text
Identifier: vital:26344 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/53878 , https://www.isbs.com/products/9781869143558 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
Description: Is crime fiction the new 'political novel' in South Africa? Why did the apartheid censors disapprove of crime fiction more than any other genre? Crime fiction continues to be a burgeoning literary category in post-apartheid South Africa, with more new authors, titles and themes emerging every year. This book is the first comprehensive survey of South African crime fiction. It provides an overview of this phenomenally successful literary category, and places it within its wider social and historical context. The authors specialise in both literary studies and print culture, and this combination informs a critical analysis and publishing history of South African crime fiction from the nineteenth century to the present day. The book provides a literary lineage while considering different genres and sub-genres, as well as specific themes such as gender and eco-criticism. The inclusion of a detailed bibliography of crime fiction since the 1890s makes A Survey of South African Crime Fiction an indispensable teaching and study aid
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Date Issued: 2017

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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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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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‘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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The emergence of the South African farm crime novel : socio-historical crimes, personal crimes, and the figure of the dog

- Naidu, Samantha

Authors: Naidu, Samantha
Date: 2016
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:26325 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/53776 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/eia/article/view/142930 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
Description: Crime fiction is an established and popular literary genre in South Africa that has gained international recognition and acclaim. The genre continues to expand and develop in terms of thematic concerns and experiments in form. One such notable development is the farm crime novel, which extends the tradition of the South African plaasroman. Recent texts, such as Elaine Proctor’s The Savage Hour and Karin Brynard’s Weeping Waters, quite deliberately set their respective murder mysteries on remote farms, and both novels particularise details of farm life. This article argues that the main concerns of the farm crime novel are, on one level, socio-historical – that is, the crimes perpetrated are the result of relationships to the land, land claims and land re-distribution, and the complex, evolving relationship between landowner and labourer. On another level, true to the conventions of crime fiction, the farm crime novel also explores interpersonal or intimate relationships that result in crimes of passion. Of particular interest is the observation that common to both thematic levels is a profound rendering of the link between human-animal relations and human-human relations. Drawing on Karla Armbruster’s work on the cultural significance of narratives about dogs and the need for more just and ethical relationships with animals, the article then demonstrates how this rendering occurs, often, through the figure of the dog. To conclude, some comments are offered on the position of the farm crime novel in a post-apartheid literary landscape
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Date Issued: 2016

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The struggle for authority in George McCall Theal's Kaffir Folklore

- Naidu, Samantha

Authors: Naidu, Samantha
Date: 2014
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:26362 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/53942 , https://www.upjournals.co.za/index.php/SAJFS/article/view/1674 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
Description: This article focuses specifically on George McCall Theal’s collection of folktale texts, Kaffir Folklore (1882), as an example of an early South African ethnographic publication, and argues that the folktale transcriptions contained therein, although a part of Theal’s general colonialist project, are hybrid, containing the voices of both coloniser and colonised. The key argument is that the presence of the African voices in this text reveals simultaneously that Theal’s editorial aspirations were never absolutely imposed, and that agency and influence (albeit limited) of the colonised Xhosa co-authors were present. The article offers an analysis of the paratext (the preface, the introduction and the explanatory notes) of Kaffir Folkore, rather than a close reading of the tales themselves. To facilitate an understanding of Theal’s editorial practice, Kaffir Folkore is compared to Harold Scheub’s The Xhosa Ntsomi (1975). More generally, drawing on postcolonial folklore and book-history scholarship, the article explores how folklore texts of the colonial era, although contributing to the establishment of a literary and cultural orthodoxy in modern South Africa, constitute a telling hybrid genre, which invites a re-evaluation of colonial relations, and of individual texts themselves. In short, these texts synthesise different literary traditions (European and African), different mediums (the oral and the written), different disciplinary approaches (ethnography, folklore, literature), and most significantly, the voices of different subjects. Kaffir Folklore (1882) epitomises this synthesis
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Date Issued: 2014

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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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Fears and desires in South African crime fiction

- Naidu, Samantha

Authors: Naidu, Samantha
Date: 2013
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:26323 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/53765 , http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03057070.2013.826070 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
Description: This article is a review of a burgeoning literary genre, South African crime fiction, as much as it is a review of specific texts. First, for the purposes of contextualisation and historicisation, an overview of the primary literature is provided. Then criticism and theories of extant crime fiction in mainly the UK and USA, of which South African crime fiction is a descendent, are outlined. This outline is followed by descriptions of two sub-genres (the crime thriller novel and the literary detective novel). Two exemplar texts, Devil’s Peak (2007) and Lost Ground (2011) are then reviewed. The artistic merit of the respective sub-genres and their capacity for social analysis is also considered. The article ends with some brief inferences and the claim that the credibility and heft of this popular literary genre have been established
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Date Issued: 2013

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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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Sherlock Holmes in context

- Naidu, Samantha

Authors: Naidu, Samantha
Date: 2017
Language: English
Type: Book
Identifier: vital:26345 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/53888 , http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137555946 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
Description: This book of interdisciplinary essays serves to situate the original Sherlock Holmes, and his various adaptations, in a contemporary cultural context. This collection is prompted by three main and related questions: firstly, why is Sherlock Holmes such an enduring and ubiquitous cultural icon; secondly, why is it that Sherlock Holmes, nearly 130 years after his birth, is enjoying such a spectacular renaissance; and, thirdly, what sort of communities, imagined or otherwise, have arisen around this figure since the most recent resurrections of Sherlock Holmes by popular media? Covering various media and genres (TV, film, literature, theatre) and scholarly approaches, this comprehensive collection offers cogent answers to these questions
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Date Issued: 2017

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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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Book Review: Losing the Plot. Crime, reality and fiction in postapartheid writing

- Naidu, Samantha

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

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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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Crimes against nature : ecocritical discourse in South African crime fiction

- Naidu, Samantha

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

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Crime fiction, South Africa : a critical introduction

- Naidu, Samantha

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

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