The Road Not Travelled
Tracking Love in Frank Anthony’s The Journey: The Revolutionary Anguish of Comrade B
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21541176 |
|---|---|
| Authors | F Fiona Moolla (0000-0001-7809-2222, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2023-05-29 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | English in Africa (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0376-8902 • E-ISSN: 2071-7474 |
| Publisher | African Journals Online (AJOL) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4314/eia.v50i1.4 |
| OpenAlex | W4378807230 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 2 |
The Journey (1991) is a virtually unknown “struggle” novel by Frank Anthony (d. 1993), a senior member of the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), who was incarcerated on Robben Island for six years. The novel and its author have been elided from South African history as a racialized literary establishment and the defensiveness of the resistance organization of which he was a member reinforced each other in tacit censorship. Anthony’s novel presents revealing insights into the repression of the personal in the anti-apartheid movement, which reflected the “liquidation” of love in leftist discourse of the period. The importance of love, especially romantic love– the highly volatile emotion which is often boundary-breaking and radically transformative–has been recognized in contemporary postMarxism and critical race theory. Blindness to the potential of love in dominant struggle politics is reflected in the protagonist of The Journey, whose passion for social justice leads, paradoxically, to repression of the empowerment and emancipation of self(lessness) through other(s), enabled by eros
Anguish · Art · Democracy · Emancipation · Left-wing politics · Literature · New Left · Passion · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · South African History and Culture
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |