Campus Fiction and Critical University Studies from Below

Disgrace , Welcome to Our Hillbrow , and the Postcolonial University at the Millennium

Datos Bibliográficos

ID13015263
AutoresAnne W Gulick (0000-0002-1292-410X, University of South Carolina, autor de correspondencia)
Año2022
Volumen9
Número2
Páginas177-197
Fecha de publicación2022-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2052-2614 • E-ISSN: 2052-2622
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/pli.2021.52
OpenAlexW4225005484
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas16

Two of South African literature’s best-known titles from the turn of the twenty-first century are works of campus fiction that rarely get recognized as such. In this article I read J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) as novels whose figuration of the university is far more central to their treatment of the contradictions and ambiguities that characterize postapartheid South Africa than is generally acknowledged. In the course of narratives that seem largely focused on other things, these texts offer up a distinctly South African but also distinctly postcolonial variety of campus fiction, and a critical engagement with the neoliberal university and the conditions under which upward mobility and intellectual inquiry take shape in the twenty-first-century global south. Coetzee and Mpe suggest capacious and transformative, if also deeply ambivalent, ways of imagining an as-yet unrealized decolonial future for universities

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Pedagogy · Postcolonial literature · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Transformative learning · Variety (cybernetics · African cultural and philosophical studies · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · South African History and Culture