The field of our study is Francophone African Literature and this thesis explores the themes of marginality and grief both experienced by Princess Akissi in The Blind Kingdom and Princess Pokou in Queen Pokou (2004) during their rise to power in their respective kingdoms. The two novels written by Véronique Tadjo from Ivory Coast, are subjected to thematic analysis because they are both based on similar storylines - that of conflict and rivalry within kingdoms resulting in the exile of the two princesses. One of the novels is set in a pre-colonial period while the other is set in a postcolonial era. Queen Pokou, winner of the 2005 Grand Prix Littéraire d’Afrique Noire (which is the most distinguished prize in Francophone African literature), is a retelling of the founding myths of the Baoulé people of Ivory Coast. In her literary texts, Tadjo transgresses the original legend and her reconstruction of this legend is significant because it challenges the ritual sacrifice made by Princess Pokou in order to free her people and to become queen. In The Blind Kingdom (1990), Tadjo highlights the corruption and injustice of the ruling elite. Space is used to reinforce the King’s domination thus a revolution is necessary to overthrow the exploitative power structures in place. The revolution that takes place relies heavily on the participation of Karim and especially on Princess Akissi who chooses to rebel against her father, King Ato IV in order to stop injustice. This thematic analysis, supported by semiotic theory, aims to establish and demonstrate the relationship between marginality of the two princesses, in particular, and their subsequent grief. It sheds light on the reasons for their exclusion from power as well as the nature of the conflicts that occur as they rise to power. The study postulates that certain myths and images are evoked by the novelist to symbolise the exclusion of the two princesses from power.

After failing his Post Graduate Diploma in Accounting Mangaliso Zolo takes an office job at a large insurance company in Cape Town. Anonymous and overlooked in a vast bureaucracy but with a pay check promising happiness and security, he slides into a series of personal crises that test his grip on what he believes in. When at his lowest ebb he leaves his job, grabs his bible and hits the streets his world closes in on him and he is eventually confined to a psychiatric hospital. Penumbra is a novel that explores the liminal area between faith and avarice, sanity and madness, modernity and tradition, friendship and enmity. It is set in contemporary South Africa, a society defined by alienation and excess.

This is a contemporary mystery novel set in the Eastern Cape. A town’s airstrip, situated between the golf club and the military base, acts as host to the local flying club and an active skydiving school. An amateur investigator uses unorthodox methods and the help of friends to find the cause of aeroplane fires and sabotage. His investigations lead him via geological research and insurance reports into contact with members of the aviation, property development and military fields.

The stories in this collection explore the fantastical, the power of memory, and the human capacity to love. Moving between the surreal, the absurd, the allegorical, and the metafictional, they elaborate on life's ordinary madness and the mysteries of the spirit. By challenging the either/or boundaries of the binary of realism and fantasy, the stories provoke the reader to engage actively with the text. Influenced by experimental US author Stacey Levine, the mid‐century British novelist Barbara Comyns, and the adventurous Chinese writer Can Xue, in most cases, they create a playful, experimental world that exists at a slight angle to the world as we know it.

An analysis of the preoccupation writers of South African fiction display after the process started by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is vital in post-apartheid South African writing. It becomes clear that a fascination with the past is not bound to any one specific racial or gender group within post-apartheid South Africa. Authors can therefore be said to continue the excavation work that the TRC started many years ago. The severe impact that the rigid classification of human beings into different groups based on race had, and continues to have, becomes evident in contemporary South African writing. The fact that white privilege always comes at a cost for those wanting to attain or maintain it cannot be overlooked and whiteness as a construct is examined.

Ce travail a pour but d' analyser la facon dont deux romancieres africaines, Veronique Tadjo et Calixthe Beyala, reussissent a rendre leurs romans plus proches de leurs experiences personnelles en tant que femmes. En exploitant des formes innovatrices, elles arrivent a depeindre les complexites de la condition de la femme. Pour mieux comprendre ces nouveaux procedes d' ecriture, nous montrerons l' importance de la forme ainsi que le rapport entre la forme et le contenu dans les romans A Vol d'oiseau (1986) et Le Petit Prince de Belleville (1992). Nous commencerons en situant le moment litteraire ou elles ecrivent dans le courant de la litterature africaine. Dans le premier chapitre, nous examinerons la forme des deux romans en nous basant, en partie, sur quelques concepts tires de Esthetique et theorie du roman de Mikhail Bakhtine. Le deuxieme chapitre portera sur le rapport entre la forme et son contenu. Nous pourrons conclure qu' a travers deux formes differentes l' une de l' autre, Veronique Tadjo et Calixthe Beyala proposent une solution originale pour l' emancipation des femmes africaines dans une ecriture variee et dynamique. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

In the aftermath of the Shoah (Holocaust)—the mass murder of 6,000,000 Jews—Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Reflexions sur la Question Juive (1946), in which he concluded that the fate of the Jews, the fate of the individual non-Jew, and the fate of the entire world are inextricably and reciprocally intertwined. Building on Sartre's perception, Portrait of a Jew (1962) and The Liberation of the Jew (1966) describe what the author, Albert Memmi, terms "the universal Jewish fate": that of being the paradigmatic "colonized" Other—insofar as the Jews are a particularly oppressed minority, that is, their marginalization epitomizes the fate of all humanity. Further, Memmi argues both that "to be a Jewish writer is ... to express the Jewish fate" and that a "true Jewish literature" is necessarily one which revolts against the imposition and acceptance of this fate. Sartre's and Memmi's insights posit that Jewish consciousness acts upon both national and world consciousness. Memmi suggests that one means of expressing the Jewish consciousness is through literature. In their imaginative interpretations of the post-Shoah interconnections between the Jew, the nation, and the world, modern Jewish fiction writers of the Diaspora (dispersion) —at least those whose work foregrounds tropes of Jewish sensibility, incorporating Jewish characters and themes—often delineate a world which, in the aftermath of Auschwitz, is socially and existentially even more precarious than it was before the war. This study examines post-Shoah Jewish consciousness and its relation to national/world consciousness,as represented in the English-language Jewish fiction of Australia, South Africa, and Canada, Commonwealth countries whose diverse Jewish literatures have been overshadowed by the predominant English-language Jewish literary culture of the U.S.A. The structure of this study is bipartite. Part B is an indexed Bibliography enumerating primary works by Jewish prose fiction writers of Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Part A is a critical commentary on Part B. The Introduction (Chapter 1) outlines the theoretical bases for the study. The three following chapters scrutinize Jewish Australian (Chapter 2), Jewish South African (Chapter 3), and Jewish Canadian (Chapter 4) fiction. Among the writers considered are Australians B.N. Jubal, Judah Waten, David Martin, Morris Lurie, Serge Liberman, and Lily Brett; South Africans Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, Jillian Becker, Antony Sher, and Rose Zwi; and Canadians Henry Kreisel, A.M. Klein, Adele Wiseman, Mordecai Richler, and Robert Majzels. Each of these three chapters follows a similar format: a description of the origin, history, and demography of the Jewish community; an outline of the important pre-World War II Jewish fiction writers and their work; an examination of representative post-Shoah works; and concluding remarks about the ways in which the works under consideration here contest and revise both the canons of nation and national literature and the very concepts of nation, canon, and canon-making. An Epilogue (Chapter 5) contextualizes the thematic patterns common to the Jewish fiction of the three countries and suggests ways in which this fiction can be located within the larger framework of Jewish Literature.

The dissertation focuses on the mapping of the southern African urban spaces and how it is linked to the urban dwellers' constitution of their identities, agency and subversion of the obtaining bleak and hegemonic conditions as represented in current fiction set in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Chapter 1 of the dissertation gives an overview of the social and historical developments characterising the construction of the southern African city from the colonial up to the current global city. The subordinate and marginal identities inscribed upon the Southern Africans as well as early forms of agency and subversion of the Western social, political and economic hegemony that has defined the city through out history will be looked at. Michael de Certeau's (1993) ideas showing the hegemonic Western socio-economic agenda's creation of ordinary urban dwellers' invisibility and fragmentation, which they later subvert by renaming and remapping the alienating urban spaces of New York to improve their own lives, will be taken into consideration in this chapter's definition of the construction of the city and urban identities. In Chapter 2, the representation of the southern African urban spaces' cartography in the fiction is discussed. The characteristic spaces ranging from the socially and morally decayed inner-city, the well-built postmodern and elite Central Business District, the affluent low-density suburbs and the far-away impoverished highdensity suburbs will be explored. The discussion attempts a complex unpacking of linkages between the mapping of Harare and Johannesburg with the hegemonic western social and economic agenda as well as the current urban dwellers' state of individual and psychological fragmentation. Chapter 3 examines the way in which the current southern African urban social dislocation is represented in the fiction. The complexity of the urban dislocation signified by the prevalence of violence, xenophobia and HIV/AIDS is discussed. There is also a dialectical analysis ofhow the depicted urban dislocation is located within the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, the western global cultural and economic influence as well as individual effort and decision-making in the chapter. Chapter 4 explores the ways in which gendered urban spaces are portrayed in the fiction. The subordination of primarily women, as well as the weak and dependent irrespective of gender is discussed. The resultant anxieties, alienation, marginalisation of women and the subservient are viewed from the traditional and colonial patriarchy's construction of the city as a predominantly masculine space excluding women. The western global cultural and economic hegemony's creation of a new gendered ideology characterised by the exclusion and feminisation of the poor, invisible and dependent is also discussed in this chapter. Nevertheless, the chapter ends with a discussion of the existing possibilities of female empowerment notably inscribed in the city's open education system, informal trade space as well as the provision of a social space encouraging pragmatic female decision-making especially in relation to HIV and AIDS. Finally the dissertation's concluding note is based on an evaluation of the postcolonial condition of southern Africa in relation to the mapping of the urban spaces and various identities represented in the fiction. An attempt is also made to place the research within the problematic of whether the mapping is based on postcolonialism or postmodernism. The objective here is to offer the importance of a cross-reading between the two as enabling a more meaningful conception of the region's current urban space. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2003.

My stories are set in the townships, and move with the vigorous rhythms and jagged structures of township life. Some of them are written in English and others in isiXhosa. Some of the dialogue is township slang, a mixture of languages; and pure isiXhosa. The stories follow no particular pattern and are arranged according to any form of chronology, and different voices, at times as a man/boy and in others as a girl. The characters are not related each story perfectly stands for itself. Some of the stories hark back to the days of apartheid and are seen through the eyes of a child confused by the humiliations of his elders. / Amabali am asekelwe ezilokishini yaye ahambelana neemeko ezimaxongo zokuphila zasezilokishini apho yaye amanye asukela kwixesha lengcinezelo yesizwe esimnyama. Imiba echatshazelwa kula mabali iquka intlupheko, intiyo kwakunye nokuphilisana koluntu ezilokishini, phantsi kwezo meko. Amabali la ndizame ukuwenza alandele indlela yokubalisa yhenkwenkwana enguSkhumba, ethi ibone iqwalasele iimeko zokuphila zabantu bohlanga lwayo. Ingqokelela esisiqendu sokuqala yona ibhalwe ze yangeniswa ngesiNgesi. / This thesis is presented in two parts: English and isiXhosa.