Ronit Frenkel
Biographic Data
| ID | 143496 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ronit Frenkel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ronit |
| FAMILY NAME | Frenkel |
| SIGNATURE | FRENKEL R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Johannesburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3732-8360 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
African Literature in Transition: The Archive of African Literature, 1800–2000
This book offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as formed by and itself a form of collective memory. It explores the historical spaces and maps that African literature brings to the surface and re-imagines in novel ways. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves within the world. The book examines the mental maps…
The Traveling Archive: The Discursive Knowledge Circuits of Transatlantic Africas
This chapter explores how African intellectual knowledge systems have been shaped by the cultural interchange between the African continent and the African diaspora in the Americas. In particular, I explore how notions of Africa and Pan-African thought have both shaped and been shaped by thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter attempts to trace a series of connections through a sampling of anglophone poetry, plays, letters, novels, s…
Pleasure as genre: Popular fiction, South African chick-lit and Nthikeng Mohlele's Pleasure
The success of popular women's fiction requires a mode of analysis that is able to reveal the patterns across this category in order to better understand the appeal of these books. Popular fiction, like chick-lit, can be contradictorily framed as simultaneously constituting one, as well as many genres, if a genre is the codification of discursive properties. It may consist of romances, thrillers, romantic suspense and so forth in terms of its dis…
Yo-yo culture: Thinking South Africa after Marikana
The years following the Marikana massacre were tumultuous ones in South Africa, characterized by corruption scandals, economic downgrades, rising unemployment and increasing resistance to Jacob Zuma’s presidency from South Africans across race, class, regional and political lines. The country’s outlook was pessimistic with dystopian predictions circulating widely as the Zuma regime slowly attempted to erode hard-won democratic processes and pover…
Transnational imaginaries and the negotiation of sexual rights during the South African transition
In this article, we trace the transnational cultural flows that shaped the recognition of sexual rights as human rights during the transition to democracy in South Africa. Through a close reading of Beverley Ditsie and Nicky Newman’s documentary film, Simon & I (2002), we investigate the contested history of postapartheid sexual rights in which local cultural politics overlap and intersect with transnational agents, ideologies, and affect. Ditsie…
The afterlives of a successful revolution: Zakes Mda’s Rachel’s Blue and Jaco van Schalkwyk’s The Alibi Club outside of the global novel
This article examines how two recent novels set in the USA but written by South African writers, Zakes Mda and Jaco van Schalkwyk, articulate a new circuitry of relationships across the Atlantic within the frame of cultural flows. This circuitry is not about the national, global, or the post-transitional, it is not about South African or American exceptionalism, but is rather about imagining new spaces and forms of political articulation that bri…
South African representations of “America”
This special issue considers literature that has recourse to the ambivalent agency of a “national” condition outside of its place of production. In particular, it explores American-themed South African literature, with a particular focus on changing cultural patterns within a context of transnational flows. This special issue highlights conduits between South Africa and the United States that circulate cultural and political influence across and …
Imraan Coovadia’s Metonymic Aesthetics and the Idea of Newness in the South African Cultural Imaginary
In this article, I read Imraan Coovadia’s writings as a type of metonymic aesthetics with a relationship to questions of newness, where Coovadia’s poetics become formative to the conceptual shifts of contemporary cultural formations. In The Institute for Taxi Poetry (2012), Coovadia reveals how ordinary features of South African cultural life can become objects of both connection and rupture that are embedded in the multiple layers of South Afric…
Imraan Coovadia in Conversation with Ronit Frenkel
Exile in Mauritius: Colonial violence and Indian Ocean archives
On 26 December 1940, 1 580 central European Jewish refugees were imprisoned on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius by the British colonial government after attempting to enter Palestine illegally. Unable to be repatriated to Nazi occupied Europe, and because no other country would grant them safe harbour, the British colonial government used these refugees as a symbolic deterrent against illegal immigration to Palestine by imprisoning them at Be…
Traversing Transnationalism: The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies
The recent dramatic expansion of the field of transnational studies has reshaped discourses across the humanities and social sciences and created the opportunity for extensive multi-regional exchanges. Traversing Transnationalism intervenes into these developments by offering essays from scholars working both within and outside the metropolitan “centre”, and by reorientating the axis of research towards geopolitical and cultural formations locate…
Stranger and/as guest
South Asians in Kenya: Gender, Generation and Changing Identities in Diaspora
The politics of loss: Post-colonial pathos and current Booker Prize-nominated texts from India and South Africa
This article explores two recent texts that are connected to arguably the most prestigious English-language literary prize, the Booker — Kiran Desai's The inheritance of loss, which received the award in 2006, and Achmat Dangor's Bitter fruit, which was nominated for the award in 2004. The prevalence of Indian and South African writers among the shortlisted texts necessitates a closer examination of the politics that undergirds the Booker and its…
Performing Race, Reconsidering History: Achmat Dangor's Recent Fiction
This article examines the relationship between race, memory and apartheid constructions in Achmat Dangor's novels Kafka's Curse (1997) and Bitter Fruit (2001). Questions of history, identity, sexual transgression, and transformation emerge in both texts' treatment of ambiguity. Kafka's Curse, dealing with the inconsistencies of identity during South Africa's transition to a democracy, highlights the janus-faced nature of race where representation…
Feminism and Contemporary Culture in South Africa
This project1 was born out of the rapidly shifting cultural geographies of post-apartheid South Africa where the position of women illuminates critical issues about how the political and social str
Ordinary Secrets and the Bounds of Memory: Traversing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Farida Karodia's Other Secrets and Beverley Naidoo's Out of Bounds
This article investigates South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a form of cultural articulation in dialogue with Farida Karodia's Other Secrets and Beverley Naidoo's Out of Bounds. I situate the TRC as an opening device that is inherently limited in terms of being only one (polemical) narrative of the past—literature is another. Narrative in post-Apartheid South Africa therefore forms a dialogue with both the silences of Apa…
Feminism and Contemporary Culture in South Africa
This project1 was born out of the rapidly shifting cultural geographies of post-apartheid South Africa where the position of women illuminates critical issues about how the political and social str
Performing Race, Reconsidering History: Achmat Dangor's Recent Fiction
This article examines the relationship between race, memory and apartheid constructions in Achmat Dangor's novels Kafka's Curse (1997) and Bitter Fruit (2001). Questions of history, identity, sexual transgression, and transformation emerge in both texts' treatment of ambiguity. Kafka's Curse, dealing with the inconsistencies of identity during South Africa's transition to a democracy, highlights the janus-faced nature of race where representation…
Pleasure as genre: Popular fiction, South African chick-lit and Nthikeng Mohlele's Pleasure
The success of popular women's fiction requires a mode of analysis that is able to reveal the patterns across this category in order to better understand the appeal of these books. Popular fiction, like chick-lit, can be contradictorily framed as simultaneously constituting one, as well as many genres, if a genre is the codification of discursive properties. It may consist of romances, thrillers, romantic suspense and so forth in terms of its dis…
Yo-yo culture: Thinking South Africa after Marikana
The years following the Marikana massacre were tumultuous ones in South Africa, characterized by corruption scandals, economic downgrades, rising unemployment and increasing resistance to Jacob Zuma’s presidency from South Africans across race, class, regional and political lines. The country’s outlook was pessimistic with dystopian predictions circulating widely as the Zuma regime slowly attempted to erode hard-won democratic processes and pover…
Transnational imaginaries and the negotiation of sexual rights during the South African transition
In this article, we trace the transnational cultural flows that shaped the recognition of sexual rights as human rights during the transition to democracy in South Africa. Through a close reading of Beverley Ditsie and Nicky Newman’s documentary film, Simon & I (2002), we investigate the contested history of postapartheid sexual rights in which local cultural politics overlap and intersect with transnational agents, ideologies, and affect. Ditsie…
The afterlives of a successful revolution: Zakes Mda’s Rachel’s Blue and Jaco van Schalkwyk’s The Alibi Club outside of the global novel
This article examines how two recent novels set in the USA but written by South African writers, Zakes Mda and Jaco van Schalkwyk, articulate a new circuitry of relationships across the Atlantic within the frame of cultural flows. This circuitry is not about the national, global, or the post-transitional, it is not about South African or American exceptionalism, but is rather about imagining new spaces and forms of political articulation that bri…
South African representations of “America”
This special issue considers literature that has recourse to the ambivalent agency of a “national” condition outside of its place of production. In particular, it explores American-themed South African literature, with a particular focus on changing cultural patterns within a context of transnational flows. This special issue highlights conduits between South Africa and the United States that circulate cultural and political influence across and …
Exile in Mauritius: Colonial violence and Indian Ocean archives
On 26 December 1940, 1 580 central European Jewish refugees were imprisoned on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius by the British colonial government after attempting to enter Palestine illegally. Unable to be repatriated to Nazi occupied Europe, and because no other country would grant them safe harbour, the British colonial government used these refugees as a symbolic deterrent against illegal immigration to Palestine by imprisoning them at Be…
South Asians in Kenya: Gender, Generation and Changing Identities in Diaspora
The politics of loss: Post-colonial pathos and current Booker Prize-nominated texts from India and South Africa
This article explores two recent texts that are connected to arguably the most prestigious English-language literary prize, the Booker — Kiran Desai's The inheritance of loss, which received the award in 2006, and Achmat Dangor's Bitter fruit, which was nominated for the award in 2004. The prevalence of Indian and South African writers among the shortlisted texts necessitates a closer examination of the politics that undergirds the Booker and its…
Ordinary Secrets and the Bounds of Memory: Traversing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Farida Karodia's Other Secrets and Beverley Naidoo's Out of Bounds
This article investigates South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a form of cultural articulation in dialogue with Farida Karodia's Other Secrets and Beverley Naidoo's Out of Bounds. I situate the TRC as an opening device that is inherently limited in terms of being only one (polemical) narrative of the past—literature is another. Narrative in post-Apartheid South Africa therefore forms a dialogue with both the silences of Apa…
Ordinary Secrets and the Bounds of Memory: Traversing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Farida Karodia's Other Secrets and Beverley Naidoo's Out of Bounds
This article investigates South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a form of cultural articulation in dialogue with Farida Karodia's Other Secrets and Beverley Naidoo's Out of Bounds. I situate the TRC as an opening device that is inherently limited in terms of being only one (polemical) narrative of the past—literature is another. Narrative in post-Apartheid South Africa therefore forms a dialogue with both the silences of Apa…
The politics of loss: Post-colonial pathos and current Booker Prize-nominated texts from India and South Africa
This article explores two recent texts that are connected to arguably the most prestigious English-language literary prize, the Booker — Kiran Desai's The inheritance of loss, which received the award in 2006, and Achmat Dangor's Bitter fruit, which was nominated for the award in 2004. The prevalence of Indian and South African writers among the shortlisted texts necessitates a closer examination of the politics that undergirds the Booker and its…
Performing Race, Reconsidering History: Achmat Dangor's Recent Fiction
This article examines the relationship between race, memory and apartheid constructions in Achmat Dangor's novels Kafka's Curse (1997) and Bitter Fruit (2001). Questions of history, identity, sexual transgression, and transformation emerge in both texts' treatment of ambiguity. Kafka's Curse, dealing with the inconsistencies of identity during South Africa's transition to a democracy, highlights the janus-faced nature of race where representation…
Feminism and Contemporary Culture in South Africa
This project1 was born out of the rapidly shifting cultural geographies of post-apartheid South Africa where the position of women illuminates critical issues about how the political and social str
Stranger and/as guest
South Asians in Kenya: Gender, Generation and Changing Identities in Diaspora
Traversing Transnationalism: The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies
The recent dramatic expansion of the field of transnational studies has reshaped discourses across the humanities and social sciences and created the opportunity for extensive multi-regional exchanges. Traversing Transnationalism intervenes into these developments by offering essays from scholars working both within and outside the metropolitan “centre”, and by reorientating the axis of research towards geopolitical and cultural formations locate…
Imraan Coovadia’s Metonymic Aesthetics and the Idea of Newness in the South African Cultural Imaginary
In this article, I read Imraan Coovadia’s writings as a type of metonymic aesthetics with a relationship to questions of newness, where Coovadia’s poetics become formative to the conceptual shifts of contemporary cultural formations. In The Institute for Taxi Poetry (2012), Coovadia reveals how ordinary features of South African cultural life can become objects of both connection and rupture that are embedded in the multiple layers of South Afric…
Imraan Coovadia in Conversation with Ronit Frenkel
Exile in Mauritius: Colonial violence and Indian Ocean archives
On 26 December 1940, 1 580 central European Jewish refugees were imprisoned on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius by the British colonial government after attempting to enter Palestine illegally. Unable to be repatriated to Nazi occupied Europe, and because no other country would grant them safe harbour, the British colonial government used these refugees as a symbolic deterrent against illegal immigration to Palestine by imprisoning them at Be…
The afterlives of a successful revolution: Zakes Mda’s Rachel’s Blue and Jaco van Schalkwyk’s The Alibi Club outside of the global novel
This article examines how two recent novels set in the USA but written by South African writers, Zakes Mda and Jaco van Schalkwyk, articulate a new circuitry of relationships across the Atlantic within the frame of cultural flows. This circuitry is not about the national, global, or the post-transitional, it is not about South African or American exceptionalism, but is rather about imagining new spaces and forms of political articulation that bri…
South African representations of “America”
This special issue considers literature that has recourse to the ambivalent agency of a “national” condition outside of its place of production. In particular, it explores American-themed South African literature, with a particular focus on changing cultural patterns within a context of transnational flows. This special issue highlights conduits between South Africa and the United States that circulate cultural and political influence across and …
Pleasure as genre: Popular fiction, South African chick-lit and Nthikeng Mohlele's Pleasure
The success of popular women's fiction requires a mode of analysis that is able to reveal the patterns across this category in order to better understand the appeal of these books. Popular fiction, like chick-lit, can be contradictorily framed as simultaneously constituting one, as well as many genres, if a genre is the codification of discursive properties. It may consist of romances, thrillers, romantic suspense and so forth in terms of its dis…
Yo-yo culture: Thinking South Africa after Marikana
The years following the Marikana massacre were tumultuous ones in South Africa, characterized by corruption scandals, economic downgrades, rising unemployment and increasing resistance to Jacob Zuma’s presidency from South Africans across race, class, regional and political lines. The country’s outlook was pessimistic with dystopian predictions circulating widely as the Zuma regime slowly attempted to erode hard-won democratic processes and pover…
Transnational imaginaries and the negotiation of sexual rights during the South African transition
In this article, we trace the transnational cultural flows that shaped the recognition of sexual rights as human rights during the transition to democracy in South Africa. Through a close reading of Beverley Ditsie and Nicky Newman’s documentary film, Simon & I (2002), we investigate the contested history of postapartheid sexual rights in which local cultural politics overlap and intersect with transnational agents, ideologies, and affect. Ditsie…
African Literature in Transition: The Archive of African Literature, 1800–2000
This book offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as formed by and itself a form of collective memory. It explores the historical spaces and maps that African literature brings to the surface and re-imagines in novel ways. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves within the world. The book examines the mental maps…
The Traveling Archive: The Discursive Knowledge Circuits of Transatlantic Africas
This chapter explores how African intellectual knowledge systems have been shaped by the cultural interchange between the African continent and the African diaspora in the Americas. In particular, I explore how notions of Africa and Pan-African thought have both shaped and been shaped by thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter attempts to trace a series of connections through a sampling of anglophone poetry, plays, letters, novels, s…
Sociology (14 works) · Political science (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Law (8 works) · South African History and Culture (8 works) · Art (7 works) · History (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works)