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In this reflection on his recently published book, Hedley Twidle explores historical and theoretical approaches to the question of non-fiction in South African literature. Experiments with Truth re...

This piece is drawn from a larger project that asks what it might mean to write a cultural history or “biography” of the longest highway in South Africa, the N2. Influenced by literature on the eve...

Research seminar, research cluster, research output. The word is almost a fetish within the contemporary academy—but what does “research” actually mean in a discipline like literature? And what happens when a research project overspills its bounds, or pushes up against disciplinary limits and protocols? In this piece, I explore such questions via the figure of Demetrios Tsafendas, the "mad Greek" who assassinated apartheid Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1966, supposedly acting on instructions from a tapeworm inside him. It is one of the strangest facts in South African history; it is also, of course, a kind of fiction, and one that has been refracted into a range of literary and artistic works. Reading across both official and “creative” archives, I address a range of methodological problems that I encountered in attempting an academic treatment of Tsafendas and his (as the presiding apartheid judge put it) “useless life”.

This piece explores recent literary re-creations of the early Dutch East India Company (VOC) years at the Cape of Good Hope, concentrating on Dan Sleigh's Eilande (2002, trans. Andre Brink, 2005) to examine how an archivist turned novelist uses the textual ‘islands’ provided by official documentation to create a huge prose work that is remarkable for placing the seventeenth-century settlement in its properly global colonial context. Surely this region's most exhaustive rendering of the genre known problematically as ‘the historical novel’, it ranges from Germany and Holland via St Helena and the Cape to Madagascar, Mauritius and Batavia. And if for Brink ‘the lacunae in the archives are most usefully filled through magical realism, metaphor and fantasy’, (Coetzee and Nuttall, Negotiating the Past, 3), I suggest that Sleigh's work forms an opposite pole, offering an example of a much slower, lonelier genesis and a more cautious recovery of historical specificity. I hope to discern the possibilitie...

This paper emerges from a symposium held at the University of Cape Town in May 2012 to mark the 50 th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring . Hosted by the Institute for the Humanities in Africa (HUMA), the event was intended to explore the contemporary resonances of Carson’s text from the global South, and also to consider the emerging field of the environmental humanities. Writers, historians, literary scholars and social anthropologists were asked to intervene in debates where the voices of natural scientists are typically more prominent. Rachel Carson’s work is often praised (and sometimes condemned) for its simplicity and lyricism, its “sensitive literary style”. My engagement with Silent Spring explores this idea of literariness, tracing the formal qualities and rhetorical strategies of her oeuvre : the ecology of allusion and quotation that it generates, the metaphors and genres that it draws on. In doing so, it argues that the celebrated accessibility of her writing is in fact a carefully worked-for effect. The simplicity of Silent Spring, in other words, is more complex than it first appears: a quality that lent the book much of its power, yet also rendered it vulnerable in other ways. At the same time, I hope to read Carson’s public science writing alongside the anti-globalisation protest of Arundhati Roy, probing the relation between the simple and the complex in contemporary environmentalism. Both turned their attention to explicitly instrumental writing after winning fame for more “literary” texts; both questioned the credibility of the male expert; and both deployed the intimate address of the essay form for polemical effect. Yet equally, Roy’s work allows one to see how Carson’s version of environmentalism looks from the developing world: how the ideas of ecology, toxicity and “slow violence” that Silent Spring did much to introduce into public culture might play out in a postcolony like South Africa.

Beginning with Andre Brink's The first life of Adamastor (1988, trans. 1993) – a playful, postmodern “writing back” to the Portuguese epic Os Lusiadas – this article considers local experiments in that international strain of postcolonial literature known controversially but conveniently as “magical realism”. Surveying Brink's post-apartheid literary output, it traces the shifts from weighty national allegories to more irreverent and fantastic re-imaginings of the past, going on to ask how successfully the flamboyant narrative procedures which he helped to import can survive in a South African context. It is an account borne of admiration for the sheer ambition of his attempt at Reinventing a continent (as a 1996 essay collection has it), but also from an unease that this purveyor of a prose, which strays into the realms of the postcolonial exotic, is regarded as such a major writer on the international stage (one who must be classed, according to the Vintage edition dust jackets, with Garcia Mar...

In the last few years, several critics have suggested that the most significant contemporary writing in South Africa is emerging in non-fictional modes. The work of authors like Antony Altbeker, Antjie Krog, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavic ‘almost convinces one’, in the words of one acclaimed novelist, ‘that fiction has become redundant in this country’. This piece sets out to ask why such claims are being made now, and what they can tell us about the status of the literary in contemporary South Africa. From Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism (1973)to J. M. Coetzee’s ‘The Novel Today’ (1988) – and, more recently, David Shields’s Reality Hunger (2010) – the relation between ambitious non-fiction and the serious novel has often been portrayed as one of antagonism and rivalry. Yet while not wanting to dismantle the different kinds of truth-claim made by fictive and documentary modes, I suggest that instances of fiction and non-fiction from South Africa have in fact for a long time been in an unusually inten...

A Passage to India is a book I taught to first-year students at the University of Cape Town for a number of years; but I want to reassure you that this won't be a rehashing of old lecture notes, and that there is no danger of me confusing you with that younger audience. At least one of you may actually have read the whole novel before this lecture. For many undergraduates, I have come to realize, the role of the lecturer is to provide a kind of sales pitch: the literary equivalent of a film trailer, coming to a lecture theatre near you.

Walking up the slopes of Table Mountain on Woolsack Drive, one soon reaches the Cape Dutch cottage the road is named after: whitewashed curvilinear gables and teak shutters just visible behind the security gates of what is now a postgraduate residence. The Woolsack was commissioned by Cecil John Rhodes, mining magnate, sometime Cape prime minister and fervent builder of the British Empire. Designed by Rhodes’s protégé, the architect Herbert Baker, this sunny atrium protected from the winds that buffet Devil’s Peak was first occupied by that empire’s most famous chronicler: Rudyard Kipling.