Hedley Twidle
Biographic Data
| ID | 643535 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hedley Twidle |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hedley |
| FAMILY NAME | Twidle |
| SIGNATURE | TWIDLE H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9806-6224 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 46 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Writing forgetting: Literatures of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and memory loss
Memoir, Utopia, and Belonging in the Postcolony: Akash Kapur's Better to Have Gone
In Better to Have Gone (2021), the nonfiction writer Akash Kapur weaves together memoir and a history of Auroville, an intentional community or "living laboratory" in Tamil Nadu, southern India. My essay considers how this family biography grapples with what the historian Jessica Namakkal calls "the paradox of a postcolonial utopia," as Kapur's personal quest to understand the deaths of two founding members of Auroville widens into a reflection o…
Shadow of a Drought: Notes from Cape Town’s Water Crisis
This essay reflects on the water crisis experienced by the Cape Town metropolitan area in 2016 and 2017. It explores how the question of access to water is implicated in the city’s colonial and apartheid history, and then considers how the spectre of “Day Zero” (the day when the taps would, supposedly, run dry) was invoked in political debates and the media
Matching shadows: Remembering the Plant Conservation Unit
Barbarian Phase
Teaching the Environmental Humanities
This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake of teaching in this area, emphasizing important differences in cultural and pedagogical contexts. The second part is a critic…
Experiments with Truth: Narrative Nonfiction in South Africa
In this reflection on his recently published book, Hedley Twidle explores historical and theoretical approaches to the question of non-fiction in South African literature. Experiments with Truth reads the country's transition as refracted through an array of documentary modes that are simultaneously refashioned and blurred into each other: long-form analytic journalism and reportage; experiments in oral history, microhistory and archival reconstr…
Impossible Images: Radio Astronomy, the Square Kilometre Array and the Art of Seeing
In South Africa's arid central Karoo, astronomers and engineers are slowly building the biggest scientific instrument in the world. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will one day link radio telescopes across the southern hemisphere, turning much of the planet into a vast ear for picking up the faintest echoes from the early universe. This article explores the conceptual and representational challenges posed by radio astronomy in general and the SK…
A Very Strange Relationship: Life Writing, Overwriting, and the Scandal of Biography in the Gordimer-Roberts Affair
This article considers a controversial biography of Nadine Gordimer, as yet the only life of the South African novelist and Nobel laureate. No Cold Kitchen (2005) by Ronald Suresh Roberts was the subject of much media attention when Gordimer revoked her authorization of the project and was accused of “censorship” by her biographer. Beyond the immediate scandal, the Gordimer-Roberts affair reveals latent, unresolved elements within the South Afric…
N2: Reading, writing, walking the South African highway
This piece is drawn from a larger project that asks what it might mean to write a cultural history or “biography” of the longest highway in South Africa, the N2. Influenced by literature on the everyday, on infrastructures and the “infra-ordinary,” my approach pays attention to the highway as a material artefact. Who builds, maintains and manages it; who makes their life along it; what subcultures, lexicons and social behaviours can be read off i…
An Interview with Rustum Kozain
Invasive Narratives and the Inverse of Slow Violence: Alien Species in Science and Society
Environmental narratives have become an increasingly important area of study in the environmental humanities. Rob Nixon has drawn attention to the difficulties of representing the complex processes of environmental change that inflict 'slow violence' on vulnerable human (and non-human) populations. Nixon argues that a lack of "arresting stories, images and symbols" reduces the visibility of gradual problems such as biodiversity loss, climate chan…
Visions of Tsafendas: Literary Biography and the Limits of “Research”
Research seminar, research cluster, research output. The word is almost a fetish within the contemporary academy—but what does “research” actually mean in a discipline like literature? And what happens when a research project overspills its bounds, or pushes up against disciplinary limits and protocols? In this piece, I explore such questions via the figure of Demetrios Tsafendas, the "mad Greek" who assassinated apartheid Prime Minister Hendrik …
Unusable Pasts: Life-Writing, Literary Nonfiction, and the Case of Demetrios Tsafendas
On September 6, 1966, a parliamentary messenger named Demitrios Tsafendas stabbed to death Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in full view of South Africa’s all-white House of Assembly. Tsafendas, the apartheid judiciary soon declared, was insane and without political motive: “a meaningless creature” who had acted on instructions from a tapeworm inside him. Often written off as a “freakish footnote” within the liberation story, his unsettled and com…
Compromise and resistance in postcolonial writing: E.M. Forster’s legacy
Compromise and resistance in postcolonial writing: E.M. Forster’s legacy." Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 52(6), pp. 753–754
Writing the Company: From VOC Daghregister to Sleigh's Eilande
This piece explores recent literary re-creations of the early Dutch East India Company (VOC) years at the Cape of Good Hope, concentrating on Dan Sleigh's Eilande (2002, trans. André Brink, 2005) to examine how an archivist turned novelist uses the textual ‘islands’ provided by official documentation to create a huge prose work that is remarkable for placing the seventeenth-century settlement in its properly global colonial context. Surely this r…
The Cambridge History of South African Literature
South Africa's unique history has produced literatures in many languages, in both oral and written forms, reflecting the diversity in the cultural histories and experiences of its people. The Cambridge History offers a comprehensive, multi-authored history of South African literature in all eleven official languages (and more minor ones) of the country, produced by a team of over forty international experts, including contributors from all of the…
First lives, first words: Camões, magical realism and the limits of invention
Beginning with André Brink's The first life of Adamastor (1988, trans. 1993) – a playful, postmodern “writing back” to the Portuguese epic Os Lusíadas – this article considers local experiments in that international strain of postcolonial literature known controversially but conveniently as “magical realism”. Surveying Brink's post-apartheid literary output, it traces the shifts from weighty national allegories to more irreverent and fantastic re…
In a Country where You couldn’t Make this Shit up”: Literary Non‐Fiction in South Africa
In the last few years, several critics have suggested that the most significant contemporary writing in South Africa is emerging in non-fictional modes. The work of authors like Antony Altbeker, Antjie Krog, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavić ‘almost convinces one’, in the words of one acclaimed novelist, ‘that fiction has become redundant in this country’. This piece sets out to ask why such claims are being made now, and what they can tell us…
Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language (review)
Reviewed by: Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language Hedley Twidle Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language. By Shane Moran. (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009). "We move upon a giddy height when we attempt to know the direction of the world's development" - so runs the opening line of an 1868 monograph by the Prussian-born philologist Wilhelm Bleek, Über den Ursprung der Sprache (On the …
Invasive Narratives and the Inverse of Slow Violence: Alien Species in Science and Society
Environmental narratives have become an increasingly important area of study in the environmental humanities. Rob Nixon has drawn attention to the difficulties of representing the complex processes of environmental change that inflict 'slow violence' on vulnerable human (and non-human) populations. Nixon argues that a lack of "arresting stories, images and symbols" reduces the visibility of gradual problems such as biodiversity loss, climate chan…
In a Country where You couldn’t Make this Shit up”: Literary Non‐Fiction in South Africa
In the last few years, several critics have suggested that the most significant contemporary writing in South Africa is emerging in non-fictional modes. The work of authors like Antony Altbeker, Antjie Krog, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavić ‘almost convinces one’, in the words of one acclaimed novelist, ‘that fiction has become redundant in this country’. This piece sets out to ask why such claims are being made now, and what they can tell us…
Impossible Images: Radio Astronomy, the Square Kilometre Array and the Art of Seeing
In South Africa's arid central Karoo, astronomers and engineers are slowly building the biggest scientific instrument in the world. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will one day link radio telescopes across the southern hemisphere, turning much of the planet into a vast ear for picking up the faintest echoes from the early universe. This article explores the conceptual and representational challenges posed by radio astronomy in general and the SK…
A Very Strange Relationship: Life Writing, Overwriting, and the Scandal of Biography in the Gordimer-Roberts Affair
This article considers a controversial biography of Nadine Gordimer, as yet the only life of the South African novelist and Nobel laureate. No Cold Kitchen (2005) by Ronald Suresh Roberts was the subject of much media attention when Gordimer revoked her authorization of the project and was accused of “censorship” by her biographer. Beyond the immediate scandal, the Gordimer-Roberts affair reveals latent, unresolved elements within the South Afric…
Visions of Tsafendas: Literary Biography and the Limits of “Research”
Research seminar, research cluster, research output. The word is almost a fetish within the contemporary academy—but what does “research” actually mean in a discipline like literature? And what happens when a research project overspills its bounds, or pushes up against disciplinary limits and protocols? In this piece, I explore such questions via the figure of Demetrios Tsafendas, the "mad Greek" who assassinated apartheid Prime Minister Hendrik …
Unusable Pasts: Life-Writing, Literary Nonfiction, and the Case of Demetrios Tsafendas
On September 6, 1966, a parliamentary messenger named Demitrios Tsafendas stabbed to death Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in full view of South Africa’s all-white House of Assembly. Tsafendas, the apartheid judiciary soon declared, was insane and without political motive: “a meaningless creature” who had acted on instructions from a tapeworm inside him. Often written off as a “freakish footnote” within the liberation story, his unsettled and com…
Compromise and resistance in postcolonial writing: E.M. Forster’s legacy
Compromise and resistance in postcolonial writing: E.M. Forster’s legacy." Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 52(6), pp. 753–754
Matching shadows: Remembering the Plant Conservation Unit
N2: Reading, writing, walking the South African highway
This piece is drawn from a larger project that asks what it might mean to write a cultural history or “biography” of the longest highway in South Africa, the N2. Influenced by literature on the everyday, on infrastructures and the “infra-ordinary,” my approach pays attention to the highway as a material artefact. Who builds, maintains and manages it; who makes their life along it; what subcultures, lexicons and social behaviours can be read off i…
An Interview with Rustum Kozain
Writing the Company: From VOC Daghregister to Sleigh's Eilande
This piece explores recent literary re-creations of the early Dutch East India Company (VOC) years at the Cape of Good Hope, concentrating on Dan Sleigh's Eilande (2002, trans. André Brink, 2005) to examine how an archivist turned novelist uses the textual ‘islands’ provided by official documentation to create a huge prose work that is remarkable for placing the seventeenth-century settlement in its properly global colonial context. Surely this r…
Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language (review)
Reviewed by: Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language Hedley Twidle Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language. By Shane Moran. (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009). "We move upon a giddy height when we attempt to know the direction of the world's development" - so runs the opening line of an 1868 monograph by the Prussian-born philologist Wilhelm Bleek, Über den Ursprung der Sprache (On the …
The Cambridge History of South African Literature
South Africa's unique history has produced literatures in many languages, in both oral and written forms, reflecting the diversity in the cultural histories and experiences of its people. The Cambridge History offers a comprehensive, multi-authored history of South African literature in all eleven official languages (and more minor ones) of the country, produced by a team of over forty international experts, including contributors from all of the…
First lives, first words: Camões, magical realism and the limits of invention
Beginning with André Brink's The first life of Adamastor (1988, trans. 1993) – a playful, postmodern “writing back” to the Portuguese epic Os Lusíadas – this article considers local experiments in that international strain of postcolonial literature known controversially but conveniently as “magical realism”. Surveying Brink's post-apartheid literary output, it traces the shifts from weighty national allegories to more irreverent and fantastic re…
In a Country where You couldn’t Make this Shit up”: Literary Non‐Fiction in South Africa
In the last few years, several critics have suggested that the most significant contemporary writing in South Africa is emerging in non-fictional modes. The work of authors like Antony Altbeker, Antjie Krog, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavić ‘almost convinces one’, in the words of one acclaimed novelist, ‘that fiction has become redundant in this country’. This piece sets out to ask why such claims are being made now, and what they can tell us…
Writing the Company: From VOC Daghregister to Sleigh's Eilande
This piece explores recent literary re-creations of the early Dutch East India Company (VOC) years at the Cape of Good Hope, concentrating on Dan Sleigh's Eilande (2002, trans. André Brink, 2005) to examine how an archivist turned novelist uses the textual ‘islands’ provided by official documentation to create a huge prose work that is remarkable for placing the seventeenth-century settlement in its properly global colonial context. Surely this r…
Visions of Tsafendas: Literary Biography and the Limits of “Research”
Research seminar, research cluster, research output. The word is almost a fetish within the contemporary academy—but what does “research” actually mean in a discipline like literature? And what happens when a research project overspills its bounds, or pushes up against disciplinary limits and protocols? In this piece, I explore such questions via the figure of Demetrios Tsafendas, the "mad Greek" who assassinated apartheid Prime Minister Hendrik …
Unusable Pasts: Life-Writing, Literary Nonfiction, and the Case of Demetrios Tsafendas
On September 6, 1966, a parliamentary messenger named Demitrios Tsafendas stabbed to death Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in full view of South Africa’s all-white House of Assembly. Tsafendas, the apartheid judiciary soon declared, was insane and without political motive: “a meaningless creature” who had acted on instructions from a tapeworm inside him. Often written off as a “freakish footnote” within the liberation story, his unsettled and com…
Compromise and resistance in postcolonial writing: E.M. Forster’s legacy
Compromise and resistance in postcolonial writing: E.M. Forster’s legacy." Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 52(6), pp. 753–754
An Interview with Rustum Kozain
Invasive Narratives and the Inverse of Slow Violence: Alien Species in Science and Society
Environmental narratives have become an increasingly important area of study in the environmental humanities. Rob Nixon has drawn attention to the difficulties of representing the complex processes of environmental change that inflict 'slow violence' on vulnerable human (and non-human) populations. Nixon argues that a lack of "arresting stories, images and symbols" reduces the visibility of gradual problems such as biodiversity loss, climate chan…
N2: Reading, writing, walking the South African highway
This piece is drawn from a larger project that asks what it might mean to write a cultural history or “biography” of the longest highway in South Africa, the N2. Influenced by literature on the everyday, on infrastructures and the “infra-ordinary,” my approach pays attention to the highway as a material artefact. Who builds, maintains and manages it; who makes their life along it; what subcultures, lexicons and social behaviours can be read off i…
A Very Strange Relationship: Life Writing, Overwriting, and the Scandal of Biography in the Gordimer-Roberts Affair
This article considers a controversial biography of Nadine Gordimer, as yet the only life of the South African novelist and Nobel laureate. No Cold Kitchen (2005) by Ronald Suresh Roberts was the subject of much media attention when Gordimer revoked her authorization of the project and was accused of “censorship” by her biographer. Beyond the immediate scandal, the Gordimer-Roberts affair reveals latent, unresolved elements within the South Afric…
Teaching the Environmental Humanities
This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake of teaching in this area, emphasizing important differences in cultural and pedagogical contexts. The second part is a critic…
Experiments with Truth: Narrative Nonfiction in South Africa
In this reflection on his recently published book, Hedley Twidle explores historical and theoretical approaches to the question of non-fiction in South African literature. Experiments with Truth reads the country's transition as refracted through an array of documentary modes that are simultaneously refashioned and blurred into each other: long-form analytic journalism and reportage; experiments in oral history, microhistory and archival reconstr…
Impossible Images: Radio Astronomy, the Square Kilometre Array and the Art of Seeing
In South Africa's arid central Karoo, astronomers and engineers are slowly building the biggest scientific instrument in the world. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will one day link radio telescopes across the southern hemisphere, turning much of the planet into a vast ear for picking up the faintest echoes from the early universe. This article explores the conceptual and representational challenges posed by radio astronomy in general and the SK…
Matching shadows: Remembering the Plant Conservation Unit
Barbarian Phase
Shadow of a Drought: Notes from Cape Town’s Water Crisis
This essay reflects on the water crisis experienced by the Cape Town metropolitan area in 2016 and 2017. It explores how the question of access to water is implicated in the city’s colonial and apartheid history, and then considers how the spectre of “Day Zero” (the day when the taps would, supposedly, run dry) was invoked in political debates and the media
Memoir, Utopia, and Belonging in the Postcolony: Akash Kapur's Better to Have Gone
In Better to Have Gone (2021), the nonfiction writer Akash Kapur weaves together memoir and a history of Auroville, an intentional community or "living laboratory" in Tamil Nadu, southern India. My essay considers how this family biography grapples with what the historian Jessica Namakkal calls "the paradox of a postcolonial utopia," as Kapur's personal quest to understand the deaths of two founding members of Auroville widens into a reflection o…
Writing forgetting: Literatures of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and memory loss
History (14 works) · Art (11 works) · History (9 works) · Literature (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Political science (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Narrative (5 works) · South African History and Culture (5 works) · Law (4 works)