Sam Naidu
Biographic Data
| ID | 3692943 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sam Naidu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sam |
| FAMILY NAME | Naidu |
| SIGNATURE | NAIDU S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rhodes University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9456-8657 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 11 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
African Literature in Transition
This book offers a compelling vision of the dynamism of local printing presses across colonial Africa and the new textual forms they generated. It invites a reconceptualisation of African literature as a field by revealing the profusion of local, innovative textual production that surrounded and preceded canonical European-language literary traditions. Bringing together examples of print production in African, Europea and Arabic languages, it exp…
George McCall Theal’s Urge to Publish and His Collaborative Printing Process, 1862–1882
George McCall Theal’s early career in an emergent South African print industry was fragmented, contradictory and ambiguous. Reflecting the volatility of his environment, he strategically shifted careers, voices and readerships. This period in Theal’s career reveals a profound instability that induced the young migrant to occupy a variety of public spaces and to immerse himself in a range of writing and print endeavours. Obscured by his later raci…
How black is African Noir
This article examines African noir as a literary sub-genre that attempts to articulate a revised and updated black Atlantic counterculture (1993). Using the framework provided by Paul Gilroy’s concept of a black Atlantic model of critique, African noir is shown to be transnational and intercultural in many aspects, thereby resisting racist discourses and expanding on conceptualisations of blackness and gender. Two primary texts are selected for a…
Vulnerability and Consequential Complicity
In the short stories "Devil at a Dead End" (1978) and "On Monday of Last Week" (2009), the protagonists (migrants from Lesotho to South Africa and from Nigeria to the USA, respectively) are portrayed as vulnerable in terms of race, sexual violation, and exploitation. While capturing the complex vulnerability of the African female migrant, these stories also engage with the consequential complicity that constitutes part of the subjects' response t…
In Search of the “Goodlife”
This article explores representations of complex diasporic subjectivities that resist, or attempt to resist, obsolete nationalist notions of citizenship and identity by crossing the US– Mexico border (and, in so doing, crossing other intangible borders) in search of a better life. Two examples of border literature, Luis Alberto Urrea's Into the Beautiful North (2009) and Graciela Limón's The River Flows North (2009), have been selected for analys…
Intersecting Diasporas
Crimes against nature
Heeding Patrick Murphy's call to critics, in his book, Ecocritical explorations in literary and cultural studies: fences, boundaries and field, to study “nature-oriented mystery novels ... in order to understand the degree to which environmental consciousness and nature awareness has permeated popular and commercial fiction” (2009: 143), this article examines how highly successful author, Deon Meyer, has employed crime fiction to popularize ecolo…
Writing the violated body
Using the late twentieth-century French feminist notions of écriture féminine and the abject as a starting point, this article considers the various pitfalls, effects and ethical ramifications of representations of violence against the female body in South African crime fiction. How do authors reconcile the entertainment value of such representations with their aims to perform social analysis? This article attempts to answer this question by firs…
South African crime fiction
In this essay we demonstrate how the burgeoning field of South African crime fiction has responded to the birth and development of a democratic, post-apartheid South African state. First, an overview of South African crime fiction in the last 20 years is presented. Then the essay presents an argument for South African crime fiction to be regarded as the ‘new political novel’, based on its capacity for socio-political analysis. We use Deon Meyer, …
Crime Fiction, South Africa
Crime fiction is an emergent category in South African literary studies. This introduction positions South African crime fiction and its scholarship in a global lineage of crime and detective fiction. The survey addresses the question of its literary status as ‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow’. It also identifies and describes two distinct sub-genres of South African crime fiction: the crime thriller novel; and the literary detective novel. See Stephen Kni…
Fears and Desires in South African Crime Fiction
Deon Meyer, Devil's Peak (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2008),, 406 pp, £7.99 paperback, ISBN 978-0-340-82266-1. Michiel Heyns, Lost Ground (Johannesburg & Cape Town, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2011)
Writing the violated body
Using the late twentieth-century French feminist notions of écriture féminine and the abject as a starting point, this article considers the various pitfalls, effects and ethical ramifications of representations of violence against the female body in South African crime fiction. How do authors reconcile the entertainment value of such representations with their aims to perform social analysis? This article attempts to answer this question by firs…
Vulnerability and Consequential Complicity
In the short stories "Devil at a Dead End" (1978) and "On Monday of Last Week" (2009), the protagonists (migrants from Lesotho to South Africa and from Nigeria to the USA, respectively) are portrayed as vulnerable in terms of race, sexual violation, and exploitation. While capturing the complex vulnerability of the African female migrant, these stories also engage with the consequential complicity that constitutes part of the subjects' response t…
In Search of the “Goodlife”
This article explores representations of complex diasporic subjectivities that resist, or attempt to resist, obsolete nationalist notions of citizenship and identity by crossing the US– Mexico border (and, in so doing, crossing other intangible borders) in search of a better life. Two examples of border literature, Luis Alberto Urrea's Into the Beautiful North (2009) and Graciela Limón's The River Flows North (2009), have been selected for analys…
Fears and Desires in South African Crime Fiction
Deon Meyer, Devil's Peak (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2008),, 406 pp, £7.99 paperback, ISBN 978-0-340-82266-1. Michiel Heyns, Lost Ground (Johannesburg & Cape Town, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2011)
Crime Fiction, South Africa
Crime fiction is an emergent category in South African literary studies. This introduction positions South African crime fiction and its scholarship in a global lineage of crime and detective fiction. The survey addresses the question of its literary status as ‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow’. It also identifies and describes two distinct sub-genres of South African crime fiction: the crime thriller novel; and the literary detective novel. See Stephen Kni…
Fears and Desires in South African Crime Fiction
Deon Meyer, Devil's Peak (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2008),, 406 pp, £7.99 paperback, ISBN 978-0-340-82266-1. Michiel Heyns, Lost Ground (Johannesburg & Cape Town, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2011)
Crimes against nature
Heeding Patrick Murphy's call to critics, in his book, Ecocritical explorations in literary and cultural studies: fences, boundaries and field, to study “nature-oriented mystery novels ... in order to understand the degree to which environmental consciousness and nature awareness has permeated popular and commercial fiction” (2009: 143), this article examines how highly successful author, Deon Meyer, has employed crime fiction to popularize ecolo…
Writing the violated body
Using the late twentieth-century French feminist notions of écriture féminine and the abject as a starting point, this article considers the various pitfalls, effects and ethical ramifications of representations of violence against the female body in South African crime fiction. How do authors reconcile the entertainment value of such representations with their aims to perform social analysis? This article attempts to answer this question by firs…
South African crime fiction
In this essay we demonstrate how the burgeoning field of South African crime fiction has responded to the birth and development of a democratic, post-apartheid South African state. First, an overview of South African crime fiction in the last 20 years is presented. Then the essay presents an argument for South African crime fiction to be regarded as the ‘new political novel’, based on its capacity for socio-political analysis. We use Deon Meyer, …
In Search of the “Goodlife”
This article explores representations of complex diasporic subjectivities that resist, or attempt to resist, obsolete nationalist notions of citizenship and identity by crossing the US– Mexico border (and, in so doing, crossing other intangible borders) in search of a better life. Two examples of border literature, Luis Alberto Urrea's Into the Beautiful North (2009) and Graciela Limón's The River Flows North (2009), have been selected for analys…
Intersecting Diasporas
Vulnerability and Consequential Complicity
In the short stories "Devil at a Dead End" (1978) and "On Monday of Last Week" (2009), the protagonists (migrants from Lesotho to South Africa and from Nigeria to the USA, respectively) are portrayed as vulnerable in terms of race, sexual violation, and exploitation. While capturing the complex vulnerability of the African female migrant, these stories also engage with the consequential complicity that constitutes part of the subjects' response t…
How black is African Noir
This article examines African noir as a literary sub-genre that attempts to articulate a revised and updated black Atlantic counterculture (1993). Using the framework provided by Paul Gilroy’s concept of a black Atlantic model of critique, African noir is shown to be transnational and intercultural in many aspects, thereby resisting racist discourses and expanding on conceptualisations of blackness and gender. Two primary texts are selected for a…
African Literature in Transition
This book offers a compelling vision of the dynamism of local printing presses across colonial Africa and the new textual forms they generated. It invites a reconceptualisation of African literature as a field by revealing the profusion of local, innovative textual production that surrounded and preceded canonical European-language literary traditions. Bringing together examples of print production in African, Europea and Arabic languages, it exp…
George McCall Theal’s Urge to Publish and His Collaborative Printing Process, 1862–1882
George McCall Theal’s early career in an emergent South African print industry was fragmented, contradictory and ambiguous. Reflecting the volatility of his environment, he strategically shifted careers, voices and readerships. This period in Theal’s career reveals a profound instability that induced the young migrant to occupy a variety of public spaces and to immerse himself in a range of writing and print endeavours. Obscured by his later raci…
Sociology (7 works) · Art (6 works) · History (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Literature (4 works) · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control (3 works) · Literary criticism (3 works)