Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction xiii
Zakes Mda xiii
Why 'Dance of Life'? xv
Towards an ethics of performance xvi
From play-writing to novel-writing xviii
Written texts and oral storytelling xx
Social realism or magic realism? xxi
Vision/focalisation xxiii
Place/setting/landscape xxiv
Chapter 1 Zakes Mda's construction of the 'cross-border' reader 1
Introduction 1
Maps, writers, readers and communities under apartheid 1
From pre- to post-apartheid South Africa 2
What is a 'South African' readership? 3
The concept of ubuntu as constitutive of the cross-border writer and reader 4
From 'interstitial' space to the space of novel-writing 4
Refiguring temporality 7
Crossing textual boundaries 10
Hybridity as postcolonial strategy 10
Hybridity and intertextuality in Mda's novels 11
Mda's intertexts 11
Finally 18
Chapter 2 'Appropriating urban space': Ways of Dying 19
Introduction: Why Bakhtin? 19
The social realism of Ways of Dying 21
Heteroglossia and states of transition 23
'That stuck-up bitch' Noria 26
Carnival, grotesque realism, degradation 29
'Laughing truth' and the speaking voice 32
Chapter 3 From 'the speaking voice' to intertextuality in The Heart of Redness 34
Introduction 34
Community and agency in The Heart of Redness and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness 34
Shared terrain 37
Salient contrasts 41
Mda in the classroom: The Heart of Redness 47
Finally 58
Duplicity, plagiarism or transformation? Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness and Jeff Peires' The Dead Will Arise 59
Continuities: oral storytelling 65
Reversing 'barbarism' and ?civilisation' 66
New directions 67
Focalisation 67
Reconceptualising Believers and Unbelievers 69
Reading The Dead Will Arise and The Heart of Redness through Attridge's The Singularity of Literature 73
Finally 74
Chapter 4 Towards a new ontology of postcolonial vision: The Madonna of Excelsior 76
Introduction 76
In the Trinity's studio 77
Ecphrasis: turning paintings into fiction 79
Women, donkeys, sunflowers 83
Appropriating the Madonna motif 86
Chapter 5 Art, landscape and identity in She Plays with the Darkness, The Madonna of Excelsior and Cion 89
Introduction 89
She Ploys with the Darkness 91
The Madonna of Excelsior 94
Cion 100
Chapter 6 Imaginary homelands: Diaspora and identity in Cion 105
The concept of diaspora 105
Narrating identity: South Africa and the United States 111
Narrating identity through the narratives of the past 113
Performing identity 117
Toloki takes over from the Sciolist 120
Finally... 124
Chapter 7 'Our only physical and psychic home': Ecology and community in The Whale Caller 125
An eco-criticism for South Africa 127
Dismantling dualisms 129
The sympathetic imagination/Becoming animal 130
Storytelling 131
Storytelling as political activism 133
The sensorium of storytelling 135
Stories' 'emotional hue'. 138
Towards an ecological sublime 140
Rethinking language 142
Finally 145
Chapter 8 'The trenches are the boardrooms of South Africa': Black Diamond 147
Stereotypes and formulae 147
Soweto and cookery 149
'Camera eye', narration: ideological considerations 153
Riding the tiger 155
Black Diamond and Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia 156
Finally 158
Chapter 9 Some concluding thoughts 159
Bibliography 163
Index 175
