Such realism was driven by the need to represent the texture of African experience from an African perspective, and no longer as “the other” in a colonial paradigm. Hence the need for a realistic portrayal, a response to “the real” that sought to describe it accurately and analyse it insightfully.
Postmodern literature does not feel the same need. Against the rationalism of realism it poses the irrationality of the unconscious, of dream, of fantasy. Instead of simply representing “the real”, it wants to play with it — to undermine its foundational assumptions, to ask questions about what constitutes it.
As Gerald Gaylard shows in After Colonialism: African Postmodernism and Magical Realism (Wits University Press), this can take a wide variety of forms — in fact, the advent of postmodernism in African writing injected the very diversity of form and content that realism often lacked. These “magical aesthetics” develop along with a post-colonial Africa, though the progress of each is not susceptible to neat delineation or mutual coordination. It is clear, though, that many African writers of the late 20th century felt they had new problems to contend with and needed new fictional forms to do so. The old over-arching “meta-narratives” and hierarchies have gone or are radically under question, replaced by a new instability both in the forms of the world and the way they are turned into story.
This doesn’t mean, however, that such works don’t tackle political issues, as Gaylard shows in his examination of writers such as Dambudzo Marechera and Ivan Vladislavic. Gaylard’s is a capacious and compendious work, taking in a huge range of writers of many different kinds. It will be immensely valuable to the student of African literature seeking a broad overview of the field in its contemporary manifestations. If it seems often to leave key terms unstably defined or insufficiently interrogated (or to conflate them), that perhaps demonstrates how the very boundaries of the real and the fantastical, and how we understand them, have shifted and continue to shift in African fiction.
David Attwell’s Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press) is more narrowly focused, and thus provides more detail on particular writers, their works and their contexts. He concentrates on black South African writers, who have been misrepresented by what Attwell calls “the tendency to assume that there is really only one story to be told about black literary and cultural history: that of the growth of political consciousness”. This literary history, he says, treats texts like “coloured pins on a battle map”.
The full picture, however, is more complex. Using the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s concept of “transculturation”, he shows how the response of the oppressed or marginalised to hegemonic cultural norms is not simply either passive or straight fowardly resistant: rather, it involves a process of selection, revision, contestation and transformation that, in the cases presented here, produces a series of “fugitive” or alternative modernities.
Attwell considers for instance, the way HIE Dhlomo and BW Vilakazi clashed in the 1930s over their different approaches to creating new drama and poetry (respectively) by and for Africans while drawing on models such as Shakespeare and Western rhyming verse. He discusses Mongane Serote’s attempts to push South African poetry of the 1970s away from the lyric and towards the epic, and Es’kia Mphahlele’s engagement with négritude and the African diaspora.
In a South Africa struggling both with the meanings of its own cultural heritage and its status in a globalised world, this study provides an excellent model for the exploration of past cultural practice and provokes serious thought about present artistic dilemmas. It helps immeasurably that Rewriting Modernity has a theoretical flexibility and stylistic flair that often elude academic works.