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Research in African Literatures 34.4 (2003) 185-186



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Re-imagining White Identity by Exploring the Past: History in South African Novels of the 1990s, by Jochen Petzold. Studies in English Literary and Cultural History 5. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002. 244 pp. ISBN 3-88476-529-9.

This study addresses an important issue in South African literature of the 1990s, that is, the ways in which writers in English have explored the transitional identities of a postapartheid nation. As Petzold explains in his introduction, the change to a Rainbow Nation necessitated a rethinking of white identity with race no longer a "stable basis for identity construction" (4). But Petzold has complicated his task by tying this reconstruction of identity to the genre of historical narrative, choosing texts that "treat history in the sense of events that happened or might have happened in the past [. . .] in order to examine the creative tensions arising between the historical subject matter and present issues of identity construction, which have their basis in contemporary political realities" (7). It is in establishing this link between text and "reality" that his thesis loses some of its strength, to my mind, laboring somewhat to establish the assumption that literature is a site where present-day identity construction can be seen as emanating from writers' fictionalizing of the past.

The initial theoretical discussion of the first four chapters includes analysis of what constitutes historical narrative (or novels that are "interested in specifically historical subject-matter") and of Afrikaner constructions of a white South African identity, identifying "intentional history" and the formation of a group identity as important elements. There is, however, some conflation between textual constructions of identity and an application of these to real life. For example, in concluding his discussion of Anne Landsman's The Devil's Chimney, Petzold posits that the ending "suggests that South Africans will have to come to terms with their own personal histories in order to move ahead, to be symbolically born into the New South Africa" (136). Yet the very ambiguity of the novel's ending precludes such a simplistic intentional reading, and indeed Petzold's own close reading of the text in this chapter has itself been more carefully nuanced than this final suggestion would imply.

This is the strength of the study—its close readings, including three novels by André Brink, Landsman's novel, two novels by Mike Nicol, and Jo-Anne Richards's The Innocence of Roast Chicken. I found the analysis of André Brink's problematic representations of Afrikaner history to be well tuned to the basic contradiction between Brink's metahistorical discourse [End Page 185] that privileges "story" and his often didactic manipulation of the reader into accepting the particular version of Afrikaner history that he is presenting. The discussion of Richards's novel as an example of the farm novel genre is also well-handled. Where the study strains somewhat is in its rather formulaic application of Nünning's typology of historical novels to the particular texts under discussion. This is especially evident in the readings of Nicol's allegorical texts that seem to elude Petzold's rather literal lens. Hence, the writer admits that, for the Nicol's texts, it is "somewhat difficult to characterize the functualization of history in terms of Nünning's categories" (177). Additionally, a more productive application of postcolonial theory's concepts of counterdiscursive and transformative histories might have enabled Petzold to deal more easily with ambiguities.

Despite these reservations, this careful and scholarly study is well worth reading and its textual analyses would certainly be of interest to students of South African literature.

 



Sue Kossew
University of New South Wales

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