Rewriting modernity : studies in Black South African literary history /

One of the strange gifts of South Africa's disrupted and racialized national narrative is the uselessness of applying Western constructs to the country's literary history. Thus, in rewriting what might be called a post-apartheid, prehistory of the present, a literary historian need not clear space in a prior, ossified canon for fresh sightings of neglected works of genius. What Attwell (Univ. of York, UK) has done is start over: he acknowledges and defines the conditions under which black South African writers have long been negotiating a transcultural subjectivity as a way to conduct the conversation of modernizing culture on self-defining and self-empowering terms. Modernity, in this context, is a reality implicit in transnational capitalism, affecting everyone everywhere, sometimes cruelly. It is by definition a process both created and resisted over two centuries, and it has produced (in Southern Africa) special economic and cultural conditions both within and between nations. Attwell takes the risk of choosing to narrate a modernizing South Africa via a historical arc of black male writers only. It is a timely choice and a searing story, and he presents and articulates his fine insights into neglected works with a humility that is passionate, generous, profound, enlightening, and politically sensitive. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. F. Alaya emerita, Ramapo College of New Jersey