Post-Apartheid Modernism and Consumer Culture
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12917575 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rita Barnard (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 215-244 |
| Publication date | 2011-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Modernist Cultures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1753-8629 • E-ISSN: 2041-1022 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/mod.2011.0014 |
| OpenAlex | W2054911258 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 3 |
In this essay, I wish to extend the terrain of modernist studies and offer a new, perhaps troubling, way of viewing post-apartheid South African literature and culture. After some critical and theoretical ground clearing in the first two sections, I propose to read two contemporary novels in order to test my sense that their shared preoccupations are best grasped if we view them under the rubric of ‘post-apartheid modernism’. I bear in mind, nevertheless, that ‘modernism’ – no less than ‘modernity’ – is best treated as a kind of ‘native category’, which cannot be defined a priori and which does not translate without difficulty.1 As will become clear, I am not proposing an ‘alternative modernity’ in the strongest sense, which would involve identifying irreducible cultural differences that somehow rupture the grand narratives of colonial and capitalist expansion. While my concern is to describe a particular historical context and a set of artistic preoccupations generated by it, I am reluctant to let go of the idea that such preoccupations respond to a singular, if wildly uneven, modernity. Especially since I am speaking here about Africa. For I take to heart James Ferguson’s position that, much as anthropologists and others like to hold forth about the different modernity of African life (of, say, industrial workers with extended family systems, or transnational business executives who fear witches, and so forth), such discourse is often unfaithful to the experience of many Africans, who have come to regard modernity, not as a matter of difference, but of lack: as something others have and they don’t, ‘a dream to be remembered from the past’ – and one that, given the intransigent class
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Modernism (music · Legal Issues in South Africa · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,23 |
| Citation span | 2013 - 2021 (9) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |