States of nomadism, conditions of diaspora : studies in writing between South Africa and the United States, 1913-1936.
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Date
2008
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Abstract
Using the theoretical idea of ‘writing between’ to describe the condition
of the travelling subject, this study attempts to chart some of the literary,
intellectual and cultural connections that exist(ed) between black South
African intellectuals and writers, and the experiences of their African-
American counterparts in their common movements towards civil liberty,
enfranchisement and valorised consciousness. The years 1913-1936 saw
important historical events taking place in the United States, South Africa
and the world – and their effects on the peoples of the African diaspora
were signficant. Such events elicited unified black diasporic responses to
colonial hegemony. Using theories of transatlantic/transnational cultural
negotiation as a starting point, conceptualisations that map out, and give
context to, the connections between transcontinental black experiences of
slavery and subjugation, this study seeks to re-envisage such black South
African and African-American intellectual discourses through reading them
anew. These texts have been re-covered and re-situated, are both published
and unpublished, and engage the notion of travel and the instability of
transatlantic voyaging in the liminal state of ‘writing between’. With my
particular regional focus, I explore the cultural and intellectual politics of
these diasporic interrelations in the form of case studies of texts from several
genres, including fiction and autobiography. They are: the travel writings
of Xhosa intellectual, DDT Jabavu, with a focus on his 1913 journey to the
United States; an analysis of Ethelreda Lewis’s novel, Wild Deer (1933), which
imagines the visit of an African-American musician, Paul Robeson-like figure
to South Africa; and Eslanda Goode Robeson’s representation of her African
Journey (1945) to the country in 1936, and the traveller’s gaze as expressed
through the ethnographic imagination, or the anthropological ‘eye’ in the text.
Description
Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.
Keywords
American literature--African American authors--History and criticism., South African literature--20th century--History and criticism., Exile in literature., Travellers' writings, American--History and criticism., Travellers' writings, South African--History and criticism., African diaspora in literature., Nomads in literature., Blacks--South Africa--Intellectual life., African Americans--Intellectual life., Theses--English.