Browsing by Author "Daymond, Margaret Joan."

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Culture in the public sphere : recovering a tradition of radical cultural-political debate in South Africa, 1938-1960.
(2005) Sandwith, Corinne.; Daymond, Margaret Joan.
This thesis is concerned with the negotiation of cultural and literary matters in South African public life during the period 1938 to 1960. While I begin with an exploration of the more 'orthodox' or 'academic' traditions of literary-cultural discussion in South Africa, the far more urgent preoccupation has been to explore a hitherto undocumented tradition of cultural-political debate in the South African public sphere, one which arose in the ' counter-public' circles of oppositional South African political groups. What has emerged is a rich and heterogeneous public debate about literature and culture in South Africa which has so far gone unrecorded and unrecognised. What sets this 'minority' discussion apart from more mainstream cultural discourses, I argue, is its overt engagement with contemporary socio-political issues. Articulated mainly by 'subaltern' writer-intellectuals - who occupied a precarious position in the social order either by virtue of their racial classification, class position or political affiliation - this is a cultural debate which offers a forthright critique of existing race and class norms. In these traditions, literary-cultural discussion becomes a vehicle for the articulation of radical political views and a means whereby marginalised individuals and groups can engage in oppositional public debate. In this regard, I argue, literary-cultural debate becomes a means of engaging in the kind of public political participation which is not available in the ' legitimate' public sphere. Focusing in the first instance on literary criticism 'proper', this thesis considers the distinctive reading strategies, hermeneutic practices, and evaluative frameworks which mark these alternative South African discursive traditions . Here I argue that the political, content-oriented, historical and ideological emphases of an alternative South African tradition are in marked contrast to the formalist, abstracted and moralising tendencies of more normative approaches. What the thesis points to is not only the existence of a substantial body of anti-colonial criticism and response in South Africa from the mid-1930s onwards, but also to a vigorous tradition of Marxist literary criticism in South Africa, one which predates the arrival of Marxist approaches in South African universities by some thirty years. Aside from the more traditional critical arena of literary consumption and evaluation, the thesis also considers a more general public discussion, one in which questions such as the place of politics in art, the social function of literature/culture, and the complex 'postcolonial' questions of cultural allegiance, identity and exclusion are debated at length. In this regard, culture becomes one of the primary sites of a much broader contestation of ruling class power. Regarded by many in these traditions as intrinsic to the operations of class and colonial oppression, culture also figures as one ofthe primary nodes of resistance. In seeking out these marginal South African 'subaltern counterpublics', the project has sought to retrieve a history of radical cultural-political debate in South Africa which is not available as part of the existing literary-cultural archive. In this regard, I hope not only to keep these ideas ' afloat' as a way of complicating and interrogating the present, but also seek to provide a more accurate and inclusive sense of the South African public sphere during the period under review. In particular, I offer a sense of the many competing intellectual discourses which formed the broader intellectual context out of which the dominant English Studies model was eventually constellated. I also give attention to the complex social processes by means of which certain intellectual discourses are granted legitimacy and permanence while others are discarded: what emerges in this regard, as I suggest, is gradual 'outlawing' of politics from South African cultural debates which coincides with the rise of the apartheid state.
In a manner of speaking : some aspects of structure, including narration, in the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell.
(1980) Daymond, Margaret Joan.
No abstract available.
A postcolonial, feminist reading of the representation of 'home' in Jane Eyre and Villette by Charlotte Brontë.
(2005) Tabosa-Vaz, Camille.; Daymond, Margaret Joan.
This dissertation comprises an exploration of the concept of home and its link to propriety as it was imposed on women, focussing specifically on Jane Eyre and Villette by Charlotte Bronte. These novels share a preoccupation with notions of 'home' and what this means to the female protagonists. The process of writing on the part of the author, Charlotte Bronte, and the act of first-person narration on the part of the two female protagonists, Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, is significant in that the "muted culture" of women (Showalter 1999: xx) of the nineteenth century was given authorial and authoritative power in their stories. Questions of identity and location developed from Jane Eyre's and Lucy Snowe's being orphans, penniless and without homes. Subsequently issues of ownership and self-sufficiency emerged in their stories, all of which found particular focus in the home. This "muted culture", examined through the theories of marxism and new historicism, is also illuminated by a feminist analysis of Jane Eyre and Villette which reveals that the marginal female figures are entitled to, or deserving of, the privileges of home and selfhood only once they have made some sacrifice for this "unthinkable goal of mature freedom" (Gilbert & Gubar 2000:339). The exploration of 'home' finds resonance in a post-colonial context, as Bronte encompassed marginal figures in her society who remained homeless, bereft of their stories due to the effect of drastically "interrupted experiences" (Ndebele 1996: 28) in the process of identity formation. The situated analysis of the concept of home operates in two contexts in this thesis, that of nineteenth-century Britain and twentieth-century South Africa. Njabulo Ndebele states that South Africans have been marked by the experience of homelessness, "The loss of homes! It is one of the greatest of South African stories yet to be told" (1996: 28-9). By drawing on Bronte to illuminate the concept of home, a South African reader is able to further an understanding of the multi-faceted nature of this concept and to see that the new possibilities claimed for marginal figures at the periphery may have their origins in the representation of an earlier woman writer's "double-edged" (Eagleton 1988: 73) representation of 'home' .
Representations of South African Indian women in Farida Karodia's Daughters of the twilight and Shamim Sarif's The world unseen.
(2003) Dannewitz, Antoinette.; Daymond, Margaret Joan.
In this article I examine the representations of South African Indian women in Farida Karodia's Daughters of the Twilight and Shamim Sarif's the world unseen. My contention is that each author chooses a different mode of representation and that certain features of these representations suggest both the different relationship each author has with South Africa and the differences in the times of production of the novels. Thus while both novels are set in the 1950s, Karodia, whose site of enunciation is the 'interregnum' in the 1980s, imagines the agency of her women quite differently from Sarif, who writes from a 'post-anti-apartheid' site of enunciation in the late 1990s. I analyse and compare the relationships between characters (men and women; women and women) and look at the cultural and political significance of mixed-race figures, concentrating on uncovering the mechanisms of power and their effects. I read these against a politico-historical context of the setting and that of the times and places of production.
Self, life and writing in selected South African autobiographical texts.
(1994) Coullie, Judith Lutge.; Daymond, Margaret Joan.
Autobiographical writing acquired increasing importance during the apartheid period, with greater numbers of autobiographical texts being published by a more representative range of South Africans across race, class and gender categories. This thesis analyzes the implications of shifts in autobiographical production, in English, during the years 1948-1994 through the examination of selected texts. The readings are informed by poststructuralism, modified by information about indigenous black South African cultural practices, as well as by input supplied by some of the autobiographical texts themselves. This theoretical approach may be referred to as a "pratique de metissage" (Glissant). The texts selected for close reading are from a field of over 120 autobiographical texts. They were chosen for their ability to illustrate important trends in South African autobiographical writing, specifically with regard to the three constituent parts of autobiography: autos, bios, and graphe. The chapter dealing with the depiction of self interrogates the hierarchized discourses of male-biased humanism in Roy Campbell's Light on a Dark Horse (1951). In Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman (1985) I analyze the melding of the conceptual frameworks of indigenous black cultures and Western individualism by which the autobiographical subject is defined. Breyten Breytenbach's The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984) is read as an exploration of the postmodernist decentred self. In the chapter focusing on the portrayal of life experiences, I examine the ways in which the narrator of Albert Luthuli's Let My People Go (1962) seeks to secure the reader's approval of his version of recent South African history; while the analysis of the sub-genre referred to here as worker autobiography is principally concerned with the politics of life-writing. In Chapter 5, I look at how Godfrey Moloi's My Life: Volume One (1987) uses the discourses of popular American movies of the 40s and 50s in order to validate a self victimized by racism, and also at the ways in which Lyndall Gordon's Shared Lives (1992) probes the limits and possibilities of biography through autobiographical speculation. In general, apartheid autobiography moves away from individualism to contribute, through various means, to social and political change.