Shane Moran - Alternation Journal

Writing
South Africa
Kelwyn Sole
Review Article
lwj~n Sole
Il'rztivlg Soi~th A.fiicu:
Literatiire, Apirrfheid and Dernocmcji 1970 1995.
Edited by llerek AttridgeandRoseriiary Jolly
Cambridge, New York andMelbourne: Cambridge Uliiversity Press,
1998, xvii + 288pp. atic insistence on absolute difference' (1 70).
ISBN0 521 592186:O 521 597684(pbk)
This collection consists of essays, interviews and position
with the exception ofAlbie Sachs' well-known I989 inter
Serote. According to the editors, the contents are intent on exploring the rela
between art and politics in South Africa. They approach issues relating to the
s can wipe out shame' (106). It becomes i~lcreasingly clear that 'shame' is
responsibility, the interrelationship between class, gender
representations in literature, the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, ly lnobilised as a lnoralising term in this essay, which results in an elnotional
questions of for111 and language. In addition, the specificity of the country's liter
traditions, and their relationship to wider African and metropolitan traditions, is un
scrutiny; underpinned with examinations of the usefulness of designations
'modemism', post-lnodemism' and 'post-coloniality' to an
These are of course, all crucial concerns for anyone t
co~nplexity and diversity of our literary and cultural practices.
Of the essays in this collection a few are COmp
sulnmary. Tile interchange between Parry and Attwell abou
John Coetzee is olle of these instances. Despite Coetzee's efforts in his novels
critical writing to disrupt the social and discursive auth
Parry suggests that his work can be eventually seen to
The interest in the relation ofpostcoloniality and postmodemism to notions of
perceptioll. This is because he represents the oppressed in h
viewpoints 'situated as objects of representations and meditations which offer them
place from which to resist the modes that have constituted them' (15 1); thus effectiv
pre-enlpting non-Westem knowledges. The withholdillg of any gesture toward
politics of 'fulfillment' or any prospect of a different, transformed, social order resul
in a 'textual practice which dissipates the engagement
inscribes' ( 1 64). Sinlilarly, his refusal to engage with the t
landscape clear ill his criticism of'white writing') becomes, ironically enough,
denial ofally possibility of connection to the land. Attwell responds by pointing outth
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