Issue #0

Rewriting modernity studies in black South African literary history

Plot

Rewriting Modernity connects the black literary archive in South Africa-from the nineteenth-century writing of Tiyo Soga to Zakes Mda in the twenty-first century-to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. Attwell provides a welcome complication of the linear black literary history-literature as a reflection of the process of political emancipation-that is so often presented. He focuses on cultural transactions in a series of key moments and argues that black writers in South Africa have used print culture to map themselves onto modernity as contemporary subjects, to negotiate, counteract, reinvent and recast their positioning within colonialism, apartheid and in the context of democracy.