Wendy Woodward
Biographic Data
| ID | 3957678 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wendy Woodward |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wendy |
| FAMILY NAME | Woodward |
| SIGNATURE | WOODWARD W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Western Cape |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9886-1161 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Arboreal Being
Because trees tend to be objectified, labelled botanically without any awareness of the import of their presence, the novels and short story considered in this article are unusual. Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000), Niq Mhlongo’s Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree (2018), Mia Couto’s Under the Frangipani (2001) and Beverley Rycroft’s A Slim Green Silence (2015) foreground the presence of trees in their narratives, all implicitly critiquing a “c…
Introduction
2019). Introduction: Critical Plant Studies. Journal of Literary Studies: Vol. 35, Critical Plant Studies, pp. 23-27
Canine embodiment in South African lyric poetry
This article discusses South African lyric poetry in English including translations since the 1960s. Rather than being private statements, South African lyrics, like all lyrics, are essentially dialogic—in relation to the philosophical, the political or the psychological. The poems examined here are in dialogue with dogs, their embodiment, their subjectivities, their contiguities with humans. This article considers how trans-species entanglements…
Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts
Human-Animal Relationship Stories Shed Light on Modern Challenges
The Post-humanist Gaze
This article proposes a post-humanist reading of Fanie Jason's photo essay on carthorses in Greater Cape Town. When social realist photography includes non-human animals, they tend to be relegated to the margins of representation: sentimentalised, sensationalised, denigrated or ignored, both metaphorically and literally, they all but disappear. Jason's photographs, however, pose provocative questions about the carthorse body and its intersomatic …
Figuring the Animal in Post-apartheid South Africa
This special issue, which constitutes the first Human-Animal Studies edited collection in southern Africa, includes vibrant, creative and theoretically far-ranging articles. Even as these attest to the transdisciplinary nature of Human-Animal Studies (HAS), the influence of such core narratives as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland resonate, with literature anchoring not only the historical research by Sandra Swar…
A Haunted Text
Persian Sheep, Hawksbill Turtles and Vodsels
Conventionally , novelists have represented meals where meat is eaten uncritically: such meals tend to generate experiences of bonding between the characters. The animals whose bodies are served are unacknowledged as the humans ignore or deny the ethics of their culinary practices. In the last decade or so, however, a number of writers have chosen to engage with the ethics of eating nonhuman animals in their representation of carnivorous meals. J…
The nonhuman animal and Levinasian otherness
This essay discusses literary Human Animal Studies in South Africa since 2000 with its implicit contradiction of Levinasian notions of nonhuman animals as faceless others. Literary Human Animal Studies foregrounds the representation of nonhuman animals, whether they are developed as subjects or have points of view and to what extent humans and animals inhabit a ‘shared’ world. I argue, citing examples, for some sense of an ethical shift in recent…
The Killing (Off) of Animals in Some Southern African Fiction, or "Why Does Every Animal Story Have to be Sad?"
The paper begins with cameos of my personal experience of killing animals and a discussion of the media debate in January 2007 about the ritual slaughtering of a "ceremonial bull" by Tony Yengeni. It then investigates representations of non-human animal deaths in some recent southern African fiction in relation to the thinking of Jacques Derrida, Martha Nussbaum, J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, as well as Buddhist ethics and utilitarianism. Al…
A Cautionary Tale
Lions, leopards and liminal spaces
This paper considers Linda Tucker's Mystery of the White Lions: Children of the Sun God (2003) and Gillian van Houten's The Way of the Leopard (2003), as well as referring to Katy Payne's Silent Thunder: The Hidden Voice of Elephants (1999). All three writers implicitly challenge humanism in their representations of large feline predators as kin. While Tucker, van Houten and Payne are privileged white women engaging with ‘wild’ animals in Africa,…
Jim comes from jo'burg’
This essay argues that Mda deploys epistemological challenges to dualistic thinking through the comic mode in The Heart of Redness, using humour, broadly, for transformatory, postcolonial purposes, and, specifically, for rehabilitating the traditional Xhosa worldview within a historicised setting. The novel narrativises the mutual imbrication of place and identity, but, in the contemporary setting of Qolorha‐by‐Sea, identities never become artefa…
Postcolonial ecologies and the Gaze of animals
This essay is located within the new field of Animal Studies, and foregrounds literary representations of animals within a historicised culture, while stressing that ecologies are inseparable from politics and culture. Three southern African writers, Mda, Vera and Couto, contradict colonial discursivities about nature in their postcolonial texts. Their representations of human-animal relationships will be discussed, to some extent, in relation to…
Deep hiStories
Deep hiStories represents the first substantial publication on gender and colonialism in Southern Africa in recent years, and suggests methodological ways forward for a post-apartheid and postcolonial generation of scholars. The volume’s theorizing, which is based on Southern African regional material, is certain to impact on international debates on gender – debates which have shifted from earlier feminisms towards theorizations which include se…
Deep hiStories
Dog stars and dog souls
This essay begins with a brief overview of current debates on animals and dualism from Mary Midgley's “practical” ethics to Val Plumwood's ecological philosophy. The narratives which I consider, Triomf ([1994]1999) by Marlene van Niekerk and Disgrace ([1999]2000) by J.M. Coetzee, both posit some continuum between humans and dogs. They locate the dogs culturally and historically and represent them as subjects capable, within heterarchical relation…
Beyond fixed geographies of the self counterhegemonic selves and symbolic spaces in Achmat Dangor's “Kafka's Curse” and Anne Landsman's the devil's chimney
(2000). Beyond fixed geographies of the self counterhegemonic selves and symbolic spaces in Achmat Dangor's “Kafka's Curse” and Anne Landsman's the devil's chimney. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 21-37
Dis/embodying transcendence in the early‐nineteenth century
Early‐nineteenth‐century Christianity in relation to Ann Hamilton and Mary Moffat provides a rich site for the consideration of embodiment, the feminine speaking subject and the divine. I argue that Ann Hamilton claimed agency through her particular experience of the lived body, which tended to contradict the Cartesian soul/body split of Western culture. She wrote reports of Lattakoo to the London Missionary Society (LMS) in London, asserted her …
Marginal midwifery
The powers of discourse
Subaltern women, their identities constructed within the margins of imperialist history, are subject to the privileged discourses of institutionalised medicine, education and the law. This essay focuses on how the laws of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, as well as customary law, circumscribe the corporeality of these women, and reads two narratives, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga and Daughters of the Twilight by Farida Karodia, in …
Metonymies of Colonialism in Four Handsome Negresses
Mourning Song
Metonymies of colonialism in four handsome negresses by Ethelreda Lewis
Postcolonial ecologies and the Gaze of animals
This essay is located within the new field of Animal Studies, and foregrounds literary representations of animals within a historicised culture, while stressing that ecologies are inseparable from politics and culture. Three southern African writers, Mda, Vera and Couto, contradict colonial discursivities about nature in their postcolonial texts. Their representations of human-animal relationships will be discussed, to some extent, in relation to…
Introduction
2019). Introduction: Critical Plant Studies. Journal of Literary Studies: Vol. 35, Critical Plant Studies, pp. 23-27
Canine embodiment in South African lyric poetry
This article discusses South African lyric poetry in English including translations since the 1960s. Rather than being private statements, South African lyrics, like all lyrics, are essentially dialogic—in relation to the philosophical, the political or the psychological. The poems examined here are in dialogue with dogs, their embodiment, their subjectivities, their contiguities with humans. This article considers how trans-species entanglements…
Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts
Figuring the Animal in Post-apartheid South Africa
This special issue, which constitutes the first Human-Animal Studies edited collection in southern Africa, includes vibrant, creative and theoretically far-ranging articles. Even as these attest to the transdisciplinary nature of Human-Animal Studies (HAS), the influence of such core narratives as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland resonate, with literature anchoring not only the historical research by Sandra Swar…
Persian Sheep, Hawksbill Turtles and Vodsels
Conventionally , novelists have represented meals where meat is eaten uncritically: such meals tend to generate experiences of bonding between the characters. The animals whose bodies are served are unacknowledged as the humans ignore or deny the ethics of their culinary practices. In the last decade or so, however, a number of writers have chosen to engage with the ethics of eating nonhuman animals in their representation of carnivorous meals. J…
A Cautionary Tale
The ‘natural outlawry of womankind’
This essay considers Christina Stead's exploration of those women artists in her oeuvre to whom she attributes embedded artworks, Catherine Baguenault in Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Louisa Pollit in The Man Who Loved Children, Teresa Hawkins in For Love Alone, and Eleanor Herbert in Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife). In giving these putative women artists their own voices, Stead not only empowers women in the social formation she depicts, but she ex…
Metonymies of colonialism in four handsome negresses by Ethelreda Lewis
Metonymies of Colonialism in Four Handsome Negresses
Mourning Song
The powers of discourse
Subaltern women, their identities constructed within the margins of imperialist history, are subject to the privileged discourses of institutionalised medicine, education and the law. This essay focuses on how the laws of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, as well as customary law, circumscribe the corporeality of these women, and reads two narratives, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga and Daughters of the Twilight by Farida Karodia, in …
Marginal midwifery
Dis/embodying transcendence in the early‐nineteenth century
Early‐nineteenth‐century Christianity in relation to Ann Hamilton and Mary Moffat provides a rich site for the consideration of embodiment, the feminine speaking subject and the divine. I argue that Ann Hamilton claimed agency through her particular experience of the lived body, which tended to contradict the Cartesian soul/body split of Western culture. She wrote reports of Lattakoo to the London Missionary Society (LMS) in London, asserted her …
Beyond fixed geographies of the self counterhegemonic selves and symbolic spaces in Achmat Dangor's “Kafka's Curse” and Anne Landsman's the devil's chimney
(2000). Beyond fixed geographies of the self counterhegemonic selves and symbolic spaces in Achmat Dangor's “Kafka's Curse” and Anne Landsman's the devil's chimney. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 21-37
Dog stars and dog souls
This essay begins with a brief overview of current debates on animals and dualism from Mary Midgley's “practical” ethics to Val Plumwood's ecological philosophy. The narratives which I consider, Triomf ([1994]1999) by Marlene van Niekerk and Disgrace ([1999]2000) by J.M. Coetzee, both posit some continuum between humans and dogs. They locate the dogs culturally and historically and represent them as subjects capable, within heterarchical relation…
Deep hiStories
Deep hiStories represents the first substantial publication on gender and colonialism in Southern Africa in recent years, and suggests methodological ways forward for a post-apartheid and postcolonial generation of scholars. The volume’s theorizing, which is based on Southern African regional material, is certain to impact on international debates on gender – debates which have shifted from earlier feminisms towards theorizations which include se…
Deep hiStories
Jim comes from jo'burg’
This essay argues that Mda deploys epistemological challenges to dualistic thinking through the comic mode in The Heart of Redness, using humour, broadly, for transformatory, postcolonial purposes, and, specifically, for rehabilitating the traditional Xhosa worldview within a historicised setting. The novel narrativises the mutual imbrication of place and identity, but, in the contemporary setting of Qolorha‐by‐Sea, identities never become artefa…
Postcolonial ecologies and the Gaze of animals
This essay is located within the new field of Animal Studies, and foregrounds literary representations of animals within a historicised culture, while stressing that ecologies are inseparable from politics and culture. Three southern African writers, Mda, Vera and Couto, contradict colonial discursivities about nature in their postcolonial texts. Their representations of human-animal relationships will be discussed, to some extent, in relation to…
Lions, leopards and liminal spaces
This paper considers Linda Tucker's Mystery of the White Lions: Children of the Sun God (2003) and Gillian van Houten's The Way of the Leopard (2003), as well as referring to Katy Payne's Silent Thunder: The Hidden Voice of Elephants (1999). All three writers implicitly challenge humanism in their representations of large feline predators as kin. While Tucker, van Houten and Payne are privileged white women engaging with ‘wild’ animals in Africa,…
The Killing (Off) of Animals in Some Southern African Fiction, or "Why Does Every Animal Story Have to be Sad?"
The paper begins with cameos of my personal experience of killing animals and a discussion of the media debate in January 2007 about the ritual slaughtering of a "ceremonial bull" by Tony Yengeni. It then investigates representations of non-human animal deaths in some recent southern African fiction in relation to the thinking of Jacques Derrida, Martha Nussbaum, J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, as well as Buddhist ethics and utilitarianism. Al…
A Cautionary Tale
The nonhuman animal and Levinasian otherness
This essay discusses literary Human Animal Studies in South Africa since 2000 with its implicit contradiction of Levinasian notions of nonhuman animals as faceless others. Literary Human Animal Studies foregrounds the representation of nonhuman animals, whether they are developed as subjects or have points of view and to what extent humans and animals inhabit a ‘shared’ world. I argue, citing examples, for some sense of an ethical shift in recent…
Persian Sheep, Hawksbill Turtles and Vodsels
Conventionally , novelists have represented meals where meat is eaten uncritically: such meals tend to generate experiences of bonding between the characters. The animals whose bodies are served are unacknowledged as the humans ignore or deny the ethics of their culinary practices. In the last decade or so, however, a number of writers have chosen to engage with the ethics of eating nonhuman animals in their representation of carnivorous meals. J…
A Haunted Text
The Post-humanist Gaze
This article proposes a post-humanist reading of Fanie Jason's photo essay on carthorses in Greater Cape Town. When social realist photography includes non-human animals, they tend to be relegated to the margins of representation: sentimentalised, sensationalised, denigrated or ignored, both metaphorically and literally, they all but disappear. Jason's photographs, however, pose provocative questions about the carthorse body and its intersomatic …
Figuring the Animal in Post-apartheid South Africa
This special issue, which constitutes the first Human-Animal Studies edited collection in southern Africa, includes vibrant, creative and theoretically far-ranging articles. Even as these attest to the transdisciplinary nature of Human-Animal Studies (HAS), the influence of such core narratives as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland resonate, with literature anchoring not only the historical research by Sandra Swar…
Human-Animal Relationship Stories Shed Light on Modern Challenges
Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts
Canine embodiment in South African lyric poetry
This article discusses South African lyric poetry in English including translations since the 1960s. Rather than being private statements, South African lyrics, like all lyrics, are essentially dialogic—in relation to the philosophical, the political or the psychological. The poems examined here are in dialogue with dogs, their embodiment, their subjectivities, their contiguities with humans. This article considers how trans-species entanglements…
Arboreal Being
Because trees tend to be objectified, labelled botanically without any awareness of the import of their presence, the novels and short story considered in this article are unusual. Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000), Niq Mhlongo’s Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree (2018), Mia Couto’s Under the Frangipani (2001) and Beverley Rycroft’s A Slim Green Silence (2015) foreground the presence of trees in their narratives, all implicitly critiquing a “c…
Sociology (17 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Art (15 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · History (11 works) · Literature (11 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Narrative (7 works) · Psychology (7 works)