South Africa in the Global Imaginary
Edited by Leon de Kock, Louise Bethlehem and Sonja Laden
(Unisa Press, 2004)
Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage\
By Michael Titlestad
(UNISA Press, 2004)
The title of the collection of essays edited by Leon de Kock et al, South Africa in the Global Imaginary, struck me as a little misleading. In his introduction, De Kock tells us that at a colloquium at Wits University in 1998, some non-South African academic luminaries impressed upon the local academics the importance that South Africa ”succeed”. Apparently, and despite local cynicism, the story of post-1994 South Africa provides these international academics with some form of model and hope. But South Africa, of course, has a longer history in such ”global imaginary”. Colonialism, for one, is simultaneously evidence of such existence and occasion for further existence in a global imaginary. And, of course, our pariah-hood of the apartheid era is a more recent version.
My problem with the title is not that De Kock et al are unaware of this at all. Nor is my problem that the essays are not concerned with issues of global academic importance. Investigations of culture within the context of South Africa’s history of colonialism and apartheid, as well as within a present context, can lead to critical insights applicable to other countries and societies. My problem, rather, is that the book does not address the issue directly.
For example, the book does not focus on representations of South Africa elsewhere. And while the anecdote above also mentions the need to resist foreign perceptions of a South African miracle, the book does not address a ”global imaginary” as its primary issue. The connection between the title and what the book does offer is thus somewhat oblique. It collects a range of articles on things South African, from the literary to psychoanalysis, from Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) testimony to educational comics, but can hardly be said to address any salient features of the rubric South Africa in the Global Imaginary.
The frame of the book, naturally, is the introduction by its editor — in this case, one of its editors — and I read it with some interest. De Kock introduces a new metaphor to talk about, not reconcile, the irreconcilable.
Or, in academic parlance, the incommensurate. His metaphor is the ”seam”, which marks a ”crisis of inscription” that pops up time and again in South African cultural discourse. That is, the mark of the beast that is South African literary culture is the one where a writer — in some way or another — recognises the radically fragmented nature of the environment being written about. Whether this is by way of outright recognition or by strong disavowal, the South African writer almost always shows some awareness of a society fractured.
This is the crisis of inscription and the seam is a metaphor to explain writers’ attempts at overcoming that crisis. Again, in academic parlance, the seam allows us to see ”the nib as a stitching instrument that seeks to suture the incommensurate”. De Kock, for instance, quotes from Sol Plaatje to show how Plaatje must suppress his own identity in order to inhabit the space of Victorian civil society from which he addresses it. And it is by paying attention to such ”poetics of the seam” that De Kock believes one can find continuity in the forms of South African identity formation, despite various historical ruptures. He notes, for instance, ”with great irony that … the apartheid state applied what would today be called a multicultural policy”. (I always thought, with great irony, that what is today called multicultural policy is no different from apartheid.)
Overall, the book maintains interest and I read with particular interest Dirk Klopper’s piece on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s TRC testimony. By way of Walter Benjamin’s famous image, Klopper sees the TRC ”also as a kind of ‘angel of history’ and that a similar incapacitating melancholia characterises its dream of a recoverable unity, a redeemed mankind”. And it is Madikizela-Mandela’s hearing that emblematises such an against-the-grain reading of the TRC as melancholic. Madikizela-Mandela’s fragmentary responses and evasions become, in Klopper’s reading, the truth that gives the lie to common perceptions that, through the TRC, the truth will out, firstly, and that, secondly, that ”truth” will lead to ”reconciliation”.
Other essays in the book include Jonathan Crewe on Wulf Sachs’ Black Hamlet, David Attwell on experimentalism in black South African fiction and Peter Merrington on the orientalism implicit in ”the Cape-to-Cairo imaginary”. The book should thus be of interest to all scholars of South African history, literature and culture. One essay that did feel out of place was Pippa Skotnes’ piece which mainly explains her Miscast installation of eight years ago and, therefore, is not in the same vein of critical writing as the rest of the book.
Michael Titlestad’s book, Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage, may well appeal to a slightly broader academic audience as it investigates the role and manifestations of jazz in South African literary culture. More specifically, Titlestad is interested in the representation of jazz by writers, both fictional and journalistic. Titlestad is also interested in how jazz is used in the development and/or contestation surrounding black modernity as understood in studies of black Atlantic culture. In this regard, the book adds to our understanding of modernity in South Africa, an important area of study when one considers how apartheid tried to suppress the development of a black urban identity in South Africa .
Following a theoretical chapter — mainly on the work of Michel de Certeau so as to theorise ”improvisation” as a mode of resistance — the book covers jazz and literature in South Africa from Sophiatown (”the near-mythic” 1950s) to Soweto (1980s). But it also has a chapter that transcends such periodisation: its central theme is the way in which jazz ”has been used, at least since the late-1960s, to imagine forms of personal and national healing in the (real or envisioned) wake of apartheid’s demise” and it includes Ari Sitas’s recent (2000) work.
Naturally, the usual suspects appear, both writers and musicians who — as especially with the 1950s — have indeed reached mythic proportions. For me it served as a welcome reacquaintance, and the theoretical work provided a fresh angle on the past 50 years of cultural production in South Africa, despite the fact that I suffer overwhelming exhaustion with much contemporary theoretical writing. I also enjoyed the innovative ”solo” chapters. Interspersed between the chapters outlined above are short pieces on either a particular writer or musician (for example: Wopko Jensma and Abdullah Ibrahim).
Unisa Press is to be commended on producing such handsome academic books and the quality of editing is high. I note this, as another series of books on South African culture a few years ago made for frustrating reading given the careless production and numerous typographical errors.