Faculty of Humanities
School of Languages
Department of English
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
In this article published in The English Academy Review 28 (1), Ms Brown, makes a provocative contribution to the debate on what constitutes South African identity by examining the work of Chris Zithulele Mann, a white South African poet, who openly acknowledges the importance for his writing of the Zulu concept of the shades or guiding spirits.
The article argues that Mann’s use of this key aspect of Zulu spirituality allows him to challenge the racial binaries prevalent in South African culture. By affirming a consciously-created Zulu identity for himself, it is suggested that Mann both subverts the rigidly physical categorizations of traditional racial politics and creates a third space in which he places himself at once between and beside `the assumed “polarities” of conflict’ (Bhabha, 1999). In this way, the poet attempts both to escape the restrictions placed on identity by simplistic categorizations within his own country and also to make real his more general belief that in the 21st century `many and probably a growing number of people are saturated by shades that originate in other cultures’ (1992:9).
By questioning the limitations inherent in traditional determiners of identity such as culture and ethnicity, Ms Brown finds that Mann echoes De Toro who has also observed that with the blurring of boundaries that once surrounded totalizing discourses, in the future we can only hope to position ourselves with regard to a nomadic subjectivity in a nonhierarchical space, where discourses, including that around questions of identity, are being constantly territorialized, deterritorialized and reterritorialized (1995: 39).
Contact person: Ms MA Brown.
In his article, A Hunger for Seriousness: T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hippopotamus’, which was published in The English Academy Review (28)2, Mr de Villiers explores the way in which the early poem, ‘The Hippopotamus’, reveals Eliot’s deepening austerity and interest in religion. The author argues that, upon close inspection, the quatrain poems (to which ‘The Hippopotamus’ belongs) dispel rather than affirm the long-held critical view that Eliot was creating glib and fatuous works of satire. Due to the misconception which has clouded these poems, they have suffered comparable neglect within the enterprise of Eliot studies.
Mr de Villiers’s findings show that, though the poem in question is more binary and simplistic than the quatrain poems following, it marks the genesis of Eliot’s endeavour to ‘set his lands in order’. The essay suggests that, on the surface, the poem’s handling of established religion and theology appears facetious and, at times, almost blasphemous. And yet, its power of scepticism most forcefully manifests in Eliot’s obstinate determination to present a final answer through a swirling network of intertextuality.
Ultimately, Mr de Villiers challenges traditional assumptions about the poem by finding that ‘The Hippopotamus’ is not anarchic, but rather represents an early version of the impulse to ‘not cease from exploration’, though it fails to sustain its seriousness throughout.
Contact person: Mr A R de Villiers.
Contact person: Prof RB West-Pavlov.
This book summarizes the findings of a decade of research on the ways in which Australian national culture has been constructed via the workings of the ‘imagination’. Teasing out the implications of this terms, it suggests, on the one hand, that much of Australian national identity is based upon the sort of illusions inherent to the construction and maintenance of all ideologies, especially those particularly fraught examples which characterise the so-called ‘settler’ societies of the erstwhile British commonwealth; on the other hand, it sees imagination as a driving force capable of renewing, via the innovative character of cultural creativity, the conceptual ground upon which polyglot and poly-cultural Australian society stands.
The book draws its findings from four broad areas of enquiry: first, indigenous literary production; second, white ‘settler’ identities; third, immigrant identities; and finally, the global construction of Australian literature. The opening first part points to an underlying sense of place shared in different but complementary ways by indigenous, ‘settler’, immigrant and expatriate Australians. At the book’s conclusion, part four gestures towards the transnational view of Australian literature which of course forms the constitutive and enabling condition of possibility of the collection itself. The two sections on sense of place and the transnational view of Australian culture bracket the sections between.
The two parts in between, dealing with settlement and immigration, describe vectors which are also mutually constitutive of each other, and in turn hold the bracketing states of being, indigeneity and transnationalism, together and apart via a productive set of tensions.
The book finds that though these four ‘conditions’ of Australianness describe distinct modes of belonging to country, they tend none the less to overlap and inflect each other. What they produce together is a ‘folded’ conception of Australian identity whose various facets and surfaces, both ideological and creative, make up an undulating fabric of located identities which are connected in many ways, some very loose, some exceedingly intimately, with country.
Contact person: Prof RB West-Pavlov.
Contact person: Ms MA Brown.
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