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Transcribing tales, creating cultural identities an analysis of selected written english texts of Xhosa folktales

- Naidu, Samantha

Authors: Naidu, Samantha
Date: 2000
Subjects: Tales -- South Africa , Folklore -- South Africa , Xhosa literature -- History and criticism
Language: English
Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
Identifier: vital:2187 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002229 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657 , Tales -- South Africa , Folklore -- South Africa , Xhosa literature -- History and criticism
Description: This thesis maps a marriage of postcolonial theory and folklore studies. The progeny of this marriage is an analytic tool which can suitably and effectively tackle the subject of written folktale texts, whether they be part of a nineteenth century colonialist discourse, or a twenty-first century nationalist discourse. First, GM Theal's collection of folktale texts, Kaffir Folklore (1882), is analysed as part of his specific colonialist discourse. Theal formulated for himself, and for the Xhosa peoples, identities which consolidated the colonialisms he supported. I argue that these folktale texts, although a part of Theal's colonialist discourse, are hybrid, containing the voices of both coloniser and colonised. Second, the position of contemporary written folktales in a neo-colonialist and >new nationalist discourse=, is examined. The optimistic belief of scholars and authors, that folktales are a means of bridging cultural gaps, is questioned. Finally, it is shown that authors of folktale texts can synthesise diverse literary traditions in a hybrid artform. This synthesis, to some extent, embodies the >new nationalist= aim of a unified national cultural identity in South Africa. The central value of recognising the role of folktale texts in colonialist and nationalist discourses lies in the awareness that this type of literary activity in South Africa is a cross-cultural practice. The confluence of voices which constitutes these folktale texts, reveals that our stories are intertwined. In the past, the discourses of colonialism and apartheid controlled the formation of the diverse and hierarchised cultural identities of South Africa. But this is not to say that alternative stories of self-fashioning and cultural self-determination did not exist. In the folktale texts of writers such as Mhlope, Jordan, and even in Theal's colonial collection, different mediums, literary heritages and styles converge to create narratives which speak of cross-cultural interaction and the empowerment of the black voice. In post-apartheid South Africa, there is even greater opportunity to reshape stories, to recreate selves, and to redefine intercultural relations. This thesis has outlined how some of those stories, which use folktale texts as their central trope, are constructed and commodified. Not only do these reinvented folktale texts embody the heterogeneous cultural influences of South Africa, they also have the potential to promote, first, the understanding of cultural differences, and second, the acceptance of the notion of cultural hybridity in our society.
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Date Issued: 2000

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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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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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Towards a transnational feminist aesthetic: an analysis of selected prose writing by women of the South Asian diaspora

- Naidu, Samantha

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

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Reviews: Unsettling Questions: Palestine, Israel, the Holy Land and Zion

- Stähler, A, Vice, S, Brauner, D, Bassi, S, Naidu, Samantha, King, B, O'Neal, G S, Aldama, F L, Gibbs, J, Rotstein, J R U, Calderaro, M A

Authors: Stähler, A , Vice, S , Brauner, D , Bassi, S , Naidu, Samantha , King, B , O'Neal, G S , Aldama, F L , Gibbs, J , Rotstein, J R U , Calderaro, M A
Date: 2009
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/157948 , vital:40133 , https://doi.org/10.1080/02690050802589479
Description: Reviews: Unsettling Questions: Palestine, Israel, the Holy Land and Zion
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Date Issued: 2009

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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South African crime fiction: sleuthing the State post-1994, African Identities

- Naidu, Samantha

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

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