Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History

by David Attwell

Rewriting Studies in Black South African Literary History 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. David 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 the context of democracy.

248 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2005

About the author

David Attwell is a scholar based at the University of York with longstanding ties to South Africa. He is currently on leave with a Leverhulme Fellowship to write a book on J.M. Coetzee. Alongside Derek Attridge, he co-edited The Cambridge History of South African Literature.