Terror in the African Anglophone novels of Chinua Achebe, Doris Lessing, J.M. Coetzee and Laila Lalami originated as a consequence of a breakdown in the family structure. Traditionally, conventional patriarchy, in addition to securing the psychological and material needs of the family, has served as one of the building blocks of tribes and nations. Since the father figure within narrative is allegorized as a metonym of the state, the absence of patriarchal authority represents the disintegration of the link between individuals and national institutions. Consequently, characters may also turn to committing acts of terror as a rejection of the dominant national ideology. This dissertation aims to demonstrate how the breakdown of the family and the conventional gendering of roles may give rise to terrorist violence in the African setting. To recontextualize the persistence of the Conradian definition of terror as an Anglo-European phenomenon brought to Africa, I contrast the ways in which the breakdown of the family affects both indigenous and Anglo-European households in Africa across generations. I suggest that, under the reinvention of older gender norms, the unfulfilling Anglo-European patriarchy exposes Anglo-European women to indigenous violence. Moreover, I theorize that the absence of patriarchal authority leads indigenous families to seek substitutions in the form of alternative family institutions, such as religious and political organizations, that conflict with the national ideology. Furthermore, against the backdrop of globalized capitalism, commodity fetishism emerges as a substitute to compensate for the absent father figure. Therefore, this project demonstrates the indisputable relationship between the breakdown of the family structure and individual acts of terror that aim at the fulfillment of capitalist fetish or individual desire, and at the expense of national security. Finally, the rhetorical dimension of terror against family and women in Africa will be proven to be the allegorized norm of globalized terror in the twenty-first century.

MA (English Literature) / Department of English / See the attached abstract below

Both historiographical and literary practices have undergone revision in recent years in attempting to address the inheritance of nineteenth-century realism. Since the object of realist stylistics, employed in both the writing of fiction and history, is to render authorship authoritative or even invisible, the ideological import of these narratives is often such that the constructedness of the historical record and its absences are veiled. In developments beginning in the 1980s with the advent of ‘New Historicism’ and with the emergence of postmodern literary techniques, the interface of literature and history became of seminal importance, since both were now credited as being products of narrative and discourse, and hence, to varying degrees, of the literary imagination. This movement intersects interestingly with developments in postcolonial studies, since it is the voices of the marginalized and disempowered colonized peoples that are routinely co-opted and excised from nineteenth-century realist histories. These concerns are now being fully explored in the literature of the contemporary post-transitional South African moment, since authors in this country seemingly now feel freed up to look back to histories that precede the immediate traumas of apartheid. The concern, in relation to apartheid developments but also on a broader universal scale, is this: if history is viewed as perpetual emergences of modernities, then one of the great absences in the record is the historical determinants of any given epistemology. The attempt to recreate such an epistemological genealogy is thus simultaneously postcolonial, historiographical, and literary. Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues (2005), Ingrid Winterbach’s To Hell with Cronjé (2010), and Etienne van Heerden’s The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (2002) attempt to bridge this gap in the recorded sensibilities of any historical moment by representing a ‘lived experience’ of the past, and in the process imaginatively recreating the cultural, historical and psychological locations of the proponents of an emerging modernity. This study concerns itself with the ways in which these authors address the influence of realist historiography through the use of literary innovations that allow for the departure from realist stylistics. Most commonly, all three authors draw on forms of magic realism, but multiple refigurings and recombinations of notions of temporality, narrative, and characterization likewise work to defamiliarize the once stable discourse of history.

This dissertation examines the way in which South African colonial texts may be read for the historical signs they inadvertently reveal. The history of land acquisition in South Africa may be read through the representation of burial and illegitimate pregnancy in South African farm novels. Both burial and illegitimate pregnancy are read as signifiers of illegitimacy in the texts, surfacing, by indirection, the question of the illegitimacy of land acquisition in South Africa. The South African farm novel offers a representational form which seeks (or fails) to mediate the question of land ownership and the relationship between colon and indigene. In the four texts under discussion, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, Florence Ethel Mills Young's The Bywonner[sic], Pauline Smith's The Beadle and Daphne Rooke's Mittee, the representation of burial and illegitimate pregnancy is problematic and marked by narrative displacements and discursive breakdowns. KEY TERMS burial, colonial discourse, farm novel, illegitimacy, illegitimate pregnancy, land, postcolonial theory, representation / English / M.A. (English)

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The focus of this dissertation is the examination of the relationship between space and identity in recent narratives of migration, in contemporary African literature. Migrant narratives suggest that there is a correlation between identity formation and the types of boundaries and borders migrants engage with in their various attempts to find new homes away from their old ones. Be it voluntary or involuntary, the process of migrating from a familial place transforms the individual who has to negotiate new social formations; and tensions often accrue from the confrontation between one’s culture and the culture of the receiving society. Return migration to the supposed country of origin is an equally important trajectory dealt with in African migrant literature. The reverse narrative stipulates similar tensions between one’s diasporic culture – the culture of the diasporic space – and the culture of the homeland. Thus, intra- and inter-continental migrations and diaspora is a bifurcated inquiry that examines both outward and return migrations. These movements reveal the ways in which Africans make sense of their Africanity and their place in the world. The concepts of “border”, “boundary” and “borderland” are useful to examine notions of difference and separation both within the nation-state and in relation to transnational, intra-African as well as inter-continental exchanges. I focus more fully on these notions in the texts that examine migrations within Africa, both outward and return movements. This study is not only interested in the physical features of borders, boundaries or borderlands, but also on their consequences for the processes of identity formation and translation, and how they can help to reveal the social and historical characteristics of diasporic formations. What undergirds much of the analysis is the assumption that the negotiation of belonging and space cannot be separated from the crossing or breaching of borders and boundaries; and that these negotiations entail attempts to enter the borderland, which is a zone of exchange, crisscrossing networks, dissolution of notions of singularity and exclusive identities. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die fokus van hierdie proefskrif is ‘n ondersoek na die verhouding tussen ruimte en identiteit in onlangse migrasie-narratiewe in kontemporêre Afrika-literatuur. Migrasienarratiewe dui op ’n korrelasie tussen identiteitsvorming en die soorte skeidings en grense waarmee migrante gemoeid raak in hulle onderskeie pogings om nuwe tuistes weg van die oues te vind. Hetsy willekeurig of gedwonge, die migrasieproses weg van ’n familiale plek verander die individu wat nuwe sosiale formasies moet oorkom, en spanning neem dikwels toe weens die konfrontasie tussen die eie kultuur en dié van die ontvangersamelewing. Migrasie terug na die sogenaamde land van herkoms is net so ’n belangrike onderwerp in Afrika-migrasieliteratuur. Die terugkeernarratief stipuleer dat daar ooreenkomstige spanning heers tussen ’n persoon se diasporiese kultuur – die kultuur van die diaspora-ruimte – en die kultuur van die land van oorsprong. Die ondersoek na intra- en interkontinentale migrasies en diasporas is dus ’n tweeledige proses wat uitwaartse sowel as terugkerende migrasies beskou. Hierdie bewegings openbaar die ware maniere waarop Afrikane sin maak uit hulle Afrikaniteit en hulle plek in die wêreld. Die konsepte van “grens”, “grenslyn” en “grensgebied” is nuttig wanneer die begrippe van verskil en verwydering ondersoek word binne die nasiestaat asook in verhouding tot transnasionale, intra-Afrika en interkontinentale wisseling. Ek fokus meer volledig op hierdie begrippe in die tekste wat ondersoek instel na migrasie binne Afrika, beide uitwaartse en terugkerende bewegings. Hierdie studie gaan nie net oor die fisiese kenmerke van grense, grenslyne en grensgebiede nie, maar bestudeer ook die gevolge daarvan op die prosesse van identiteitsvorming en vertaling, en die manier waarop hulle kan help om die sosiale en historiese eienskappe van diasporiese formasies te openbaar. ’n Groot deel van die analise word ondersteun deur die aanname dat die onderhandeling tussen tuishoort en ruimte nie geskei kan word van die oorsteek of deurbreek van grense en grenslyne nie, en dat hierdie onderhandelinge lei tot pogings om die grensgebied te betree, waar die grensgebied gekenmerk word deur wisseling, kruising van netwerke en die verwording van begrippe soos sonderlingheid en eksklusiewe identiteite.

This thesis is a contribution to the ongoing debate over standards of criticism for the novel in Africa. After reviewing the three main approaches, the 'Afro-centric', the 'Euro-centric ' and the 'syncretic', and highlighting their shortcomings, I hope to demonstrate that if the devices of point of view ' are used properly they may provide a valuable tool for a useful reading of the novels. Point of view is seen as a holistic device and not, as Lubbock and others suggest, a question of 'the relationship of the narrator to the story'. The views of Boris Uspensky, Gerard Genette and Susan Lanser on this subject are modified to suit the eclectic and comparative designs of the study. Point of view is thus seen as the means through which a given device operates in a specific context, what it reveals, and how it relates to other textual elements. Four main categories are proposed, namely the dramatized, the inward, the multiple and the communal perspectives. These categories demonstrate the flexibility of method which point of view allows and they show how novels from different backgrounds may be examined under one 'convention' without depriving such novels of their originality. Twenty novels by British, American and African novelists are subsequently divided into these four categories and each of the novels is described, allowing them to define one another. The communal perspective is found to be a unique feature of the five African novels examined in the last three chapters. These novels require the reader to modify his opinions about point of view, for the novelists seem to speak on behalf of their communities. The communal pose thus becomes a literary device. It is a device which manifests itself in the case of the novels of Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah and Gabriel Okara through the skilful use of character, language and setting. The reader who comes to the novels with the conviction that character is a paradigm of traits will need to bear in mind that traits in these novels are what are normally known as characters in other novels and that in the novels, therefore, characterisation is largely transferred from the individual person to the communal personality. This is the contribution these African novelists have made to world fiction. It is nevertheless shown that this distinct feature need not deny a common ground from which the critic of the African novel can define the novels' themes and methods and that ultimately the isolation which the three main approaches seem to recommend is neither desirable, nor is it helpful as a way of making the reader aware of the form and content of the novels.

The broad aim of this study is to show, through a comparative and contrasting analysis of three thematically related texts - namely Peter Abrahams's Mine Boy; Alan Patan's Cry, the Beloved Country and Phyllis Altman's The Law of the Vultures - the ideologically mediated nature of the relationship between the 'real' history which constituted their context, and the representations of it in the historical realist form. An examination afthe texts' characters and events; political formulations, and formal devices reveals three very different representations of the same object. This diversity is significant in so far as it supports a Marxist conceptualisation of the [historical] realist text as a production of ideology as opposed to a portrayal of reality. The study considers the nature of the relationship between each text and ideology in terms of three aspects of this relationship: the 'objectively determinable' relation between history, ideology and text; the ideology of the text itself, and the mode of a text's insertion into an 'ideological sub-ensemble.' In relation to the modes of a text's insertion into an ideological sub-ensemble, my specific aim is to assess the extent to which each text actually challenges the political dispensation to which it was addressed. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2000.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1992. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 301-307).

Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2005. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

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