“You Are Suffering from Literary Kwashiorkor”
Transculturation at the Confluence of African Literature, Vegetarianism and Indigenous Ritual Practice in Nape ’a Motana’s Son-In-Law of the Boere
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20156485 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dave Nel |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 53-69 |
| Publication date | 2014-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Literary Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0256-4718 • E-ISSN: 1753-5387 |
| Publisher | Unisa Press (PUBLISHER • ZA) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02564718.2014.887621 |
| OpenAlex | W2076134233 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 12 |
On the surface, Nape ’a Motana’s fictional work Son-In-Law of the Boere (2010) is a tale of love between a black “Jim-comes-to-Jo’burg” stereotype and a white Afrikaans female teaching colleague during a transitional era in South African political and social history. However, as this article will reveal, the text is a compelling and transformative narrative which should be read as a literary transculturation of three veins of social discourse: (1) the literary historiography of African literature and the provision of access for contemporary readers to the African literary archive, (2) vegetarianism as a metaphor for transformation in a postcolonial and post-apartheid society, and (3) the representation of indigenous ritual practices in the modernity of liberation-era South Africa. Furthermore, the novel suggests that access to African fictional texts and a corps of motivated educators in South African schools would go some distance toward developing the necessary literacies to overcome the “literary kwashiorkor” referred to in the title of this essay
Art · Historiography · Indigenous · Literature · Metaphor · Modernity · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · Transculturation · Anthropology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture
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Voices of Justice and Reason
The Cambridge History of South African Literature
From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation
Notes on the evaluation of angel rama's concept of narrative transculturation and fernando ortiz's definition of the term ‘transculturation
Nancy Morejon
Style, Tsotsi-style, and Tsotsitaal
Urban Transculturations
Processes of transculturation in Latin American narrative
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |