The emergence of the South African farm crime novel : socio-historical crimes, personal crimes, and the figure of the dog
- 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
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2016
- 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
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2016
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.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2015
- 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.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2015
The myth of authenticity : folktales and nationalism in the 'new South Africa'
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2001
- Language: English
- Type: Article , text
- Identifier: vital:26378 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/54047 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
- Description: Folktales texts are published in glorious, polychromatic, innovative forms that promote the texts as both culturally educational and entertaining.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2001
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2001
- Language: English
- Type: Article , text
- Identifier: vital:26378 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/54047 , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
- Description: Folktales texts are published in glorious, polychromatic, innovative forms that promote the texts as both culturally educational and entertaining.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2001
The struggle for authority in George McCall Theal's Kaffir Folklore
- 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
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2014
- 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
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2014
The writing circle by Rozena Maart
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Book review , text
- Identifier: vital:26374 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/54017 , http://www.wasafiri.org/product/wasafiri-issue-57/ , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
- Description: Book review. The writing circle by Rozena Maart.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2009
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Book review , text
- Identifier: vital:26374 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/54017 , http://www.wasafiri.org/product/wasafiri-issue-57/ , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
- Description: Book review. The writing circle by Rozena Maart.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2009
Three tales of Theal: biography, history and ethnography on the Eastern Frontier
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: Article , text
- Identifier: vital:24529 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/36216 , https://www.jstor.org/stable/23267873?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2012
- Authors: Naidu, Samantha
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: Article , text
- Identifier: vital:24529 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/36216 , https://www.jstor.org/stable/23267873?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents , https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-8657
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2012
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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
Vrou is gif : the representation of violence against women in Margie Orford’s Clare Hart novels
- 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
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2013
- 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
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2013
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.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2008
- 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.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2008
Writing the violated body : representations of violence against women in Margie Orford’s crime thriller novels
- 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
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2014
- 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
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2014
‘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).
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2018
- 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).
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2018
‘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
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020