In TheBrowser.com’s excellent “five books” series, To Heaven by Water author Justin Cartwright takes readers through five novels, mainly by white writers, that play light over the concept of “African literature”:
Q: What is African literature?
A: It comes in different varieties. One is African literature written by Africans, and which in South Africa has a particular dimension. Another is white writers writing about Africa. Some people deny there’s any such thing as “white writing” but in fact there clearly is. White writing is a phrase used by John Coetzee [Nobel Prize for Literature 2003]. It’s about the predicament of the white person in Africa – people who have been dropped down, willingly or unwillingly, in an alien environment, and who try to make an accommodation with it. Now a writer like Nadine Gordimer [Nobel Prize for Literature 1991] thinks she’s made such an accommodation with Africa that there is no such thing as white writing at all, but when you look at her books they’re essentially about the same problem: the white man in Africa. It goes back to Conrad and probably further.
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November 19th, 2009 @22:08 #
Utterly fascinating. I disagree with a lot of what he says, but there's no denying that this is a fresh way of looking at established texts.
November 20th, 2009 @07:51 #
I also found much to disagree with here. Much.