A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the criteria for the c[egree of Master of Arts / The literature produced by writers who align themselves with national liberation and resistance movements presents a serious challenge to dominant standards of literary . aesthetics. Resistance writing aims to break down the assumed division between art and politics. and in this view literature becomes an arena of conflict and struggle. This dissertation examines certain aspects of the poetry of Mongane Wally Serote in order to explore the relationship between aesthetics and resistance in his writing. Over the last two decades, Serote has made a significant contribution to the development of South African literature, and his work has important implications for literary criticism in South Africa. Chapter 1 looks at some of these implications by discussing the concept of resistance literature and the main issues arising from the debates and polemics surrounding the work of Serote and other black political writers. Perhaps the most important here is the need to construct a critical approach to South African resistance literature that can come to terms with both its aesthetic qualities and political effects. This kind of approach would in some way attempt to integrate the seemingly incompatible critical practices of idealism and materialism. Accordingly, Chapter 2 is a materialist approach to aspects of Serote's early poetry. The critical model used is a simplified version of the interpretive schema set out by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious. This model enables a discussion of the poetry in relation to ideology, and also suggests ways of examining the discursive strategies and symbolic processes in this particular phase of Serote's development. Serote's later work is 'characterised by the attempt to create a unifying mythology of resistance. Chapter 3 thus looks at Serote's long poems from an idealist perspective that is based on the principles of myth-criticism, As this is a complex area, this chapter merely sketches the main features of Serote' s use of myth as a form of resistance, and then suggests further avenues of exploration along these lines. The dissertation concludes by pointing towards some of the implications of recent political developments in South Africa for Serote and other resistance writers. / Andrew Chakane 2018

This study examines representations of Southern African black women in the works' of two male and two female writers. A comparative approach is used to review the ways in which the writers characterise women who labour under intense restrictions in domestic situations, the workplace, and in political contexts. Some representations suggest that women have come to terms with social strictures and have learned to live fulfilled lives despite them. Other representations are contextualised in creative situations in which social roles are re-imagined. In the process, women are removed from conventional object-related gendered positions. These representations suggest that women have the capability to achieve personal transcendence rather than accept the immanence imposed by stereotyped gender relationships and repressive political structures. The suggestion is made that writers can change the image of women by centralising them as active subjects, challenging their exclusion and creating spaces for women to represent themselves / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This study examines representations of Southern African black women in the works' of two male and two female writers. A comparative approach is used to review the ways in which the writers characterise women who labour under intense restrictions in domestic situations, the workplace, and in political contexts. Some representations suggest that women have come to terms with social strictures and have learned to live fulfilled lives despite them. Other representations are contextualised in creative situations in which social roles are re-imagined. In the process, women are removed from conventional object-related gendered positions. These representations suggest that women have the capability to achieve personal transcendence rather than accept the immanence imposed by stereotyped gender relationships and repressive political structures. The suggestion is made that writers can change the image of women by centralising them as active subjects, challenging their exclusion and creating spaces for women to represent themselves / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This study explores the crisis of representation in black South African protest and ‘post’-apartheid literature. Conversant with the debates on the crisis of representation in black South African protest literature from the 1960s to the late 1980s, the dissertation proposes a re-reading of the ‘crisis’ by locating it in the black writer’s struggle for an aesthetic with which to express the existential crisis of blackness. I contend that not only protest but also contemporary or ‘post’-protest black South African literature exhibits a split or fractured mode of writing which is characterised by the displacement/unheimlichheid produced by colonialism and apartheid, as well as by the contentious nature of that which this literature endeavours to capture – the fraught identity of blackness. In my exploration of the split or double narratives of Mongane Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood, K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents, and Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut, I examine the representation of blackness through the themes of violence, trauma, powerlessness, failure, and unhomeliness/unbelongingness – all of which suggest the lack of a solid foundation upon which to construct a stable black identity. This instability, I ultimately argue, suggests a move beyond an Afrocentric perspective on identity and traditional tropes of blackness towards a more processual, fluid, and permeable post-black politics.

The thesis looks at how the poets Sepamla, Serote, Gwala and Mtshali (SSGM) make concerted efforts to demonstrate how different forms of social activities have sought to whitewash black people in believing myths about themselves. These myths were perpetuated by the government of apartheid policies and its related bureaucratic organs like the education system. The fallacies were also communicated through biased literature and denigrating terminologies. The study analyses how the selected poems of SSGM set out to conscientize black people to realise how they had unconsciously accepted certain behaviours. This had led them to compare themselves to the “privileged cultures” and to strive to be identified with those who were in power and those who were despised and were therefore powerless. The main aim of this study is to demonstrate how the poetry of Sepamla, Serote, Gwala and Mtshali exposed the extent to which black people had been psychologically subjected to internalising negative views of who they were. From the title of the thesis we note a claim that conscientization was the motive behind the poetry of Sepamla, Serote, Gwala, and Mtshali. This claim was discerned from the poetry that was analysed. It was also deemed fit to verify this through structured interviews and questionnaires that were arranged and conducted with the poets. However the interviews did not include the late Sepamla who had been called to higher service by the time the research was conducted. The researcher’s interactions with the poets confirmed the claim that conscientization was indeed the motive behind their poetry. Aspects of peoples’ lives which had been targeted as tools for disempowering black people were experienced in the form of racism, apartheid policies, Bantustan institutions, and laws, demeaning terminologies, cultural superiority, and prejudiced beliefs, arts, music, literature, theatre and sport. An analysis of the poetry under review led to the conclusion that the poetry of SSGM was not protest poetry as some scholars had claimed. The aim of the poetry was not to instigate any militancy against oppressors but to make black people aware of their identity and to affirm them in their resistance against cultural hegemony. The study makes use of Marxist theories and specifically cites those aspects which relate to the tools used to analyse the poetry of SSGM. Georg Lukacs’s viewpoint that literature reflects the social reality of its time is applied to some of the selected poetry. Eagleton and Althusser talk about the formalization of literature which makes ideology to become visible to the reader. Gramsci says the task of producing and disseminating ideology is performed by organic intellectuals. Writers are regarded as organic intellectuals. In spite of the limiting circumstances the four black writers whose poetry is being considered, managed to conscientize people around issues that needed to be opposed or rejected. This study is significant in so far as it exposed how poetry of black selected writers conscientized people and indirectly contributed to the liberation of the oppressed in South Africa. It is suggested that further studies are undertaken to re-assess the role of literature written by the black writers during the apartheid regime. A special attention must be given to those literary works that were banned and reasons for such action by those who were hell bent on subjugating black people. One of the challenges encountered during the research was that some of the books were out of print. However, a thorough and persistent search did result in the final access to those books which were not easily available. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2013.