Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature, and History in South Africa and Australia (review)

Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner, and Sarah Nuttall. London: Routledge, 1996. xii + 263 pp. ISBN 0-415-12408-5.

Text, Theory, Space accepts one of the main challenges of postcolonial theory--to cross national and disciplinary borders--in addressing the complex interactions among land, space, power, cultural identity, and their various representations in southern (especially South) African and Australian literature, history, and cartography. In arranging the book's sixteen essays in three sections--"Defining the South," "Claiming Lands, Creating Identities, Making Nations," and "Borders, Boundaries, Open Spaces"--the editors have created a certain chronological coherence, moving from colonial accounts of the land to postcolonial ones. While this move helps to hold the collection together, it also gives focal status to the colonial moment: in choosing Australia and South Africa, variously described as white settler colonies and white supremacist states, Text, Theory, Space seems less concerned with that other challenge of postcolonial theory--restoring voices of the formerly colonized.

One of only three essays to focus exclusively on indigenous representations, Liz Gunner's "Names and the Land: Poetry of Belonging and Unbelonging, a Comparative Approach" is central to the book's project as it confronts very directly "the ways in which land and identity have operated as sites of contestation and creativity" (128). In sketching a chronology of change in South African praise-poetry as it has responded to political and literary circumstances over the last century, Gunner deconstructs the literary/oral and modern/traditional binaries (the latter implicitly supporting the book's bias toward non-indigenous texts). Similarly, in a richly challenging essay comparing the history and historiography of the Matopos (in Zimbabwe) and Uluru/Ayer's Rock, Terence Ranger critically illustrates both the similarities and differences between southern African and central Australian precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial experience. In both cases he demonstrates how greater attention to gender studies and cultural geography can add dynamism to previously static accounts that, by essentializing "first peoples," may confine indigenous populations within invented traditions. This point resonates in Tony Birch's sharp observation that it is "indigenous communities who have had their lifestyles most disrupted, and who have lost their land" who are "least likely to receive full and proper justice" (184). Together these essays make a strong case that not only should we distrust contemporary appeals to the traditional and authentic, but that we should not be so simplistic as to assume that hybridity is only a post-colonial state.

Adding further layers of gendered and spatial complexity, the final section of the book includes a pair of essays by Dorothy Driver and Rob Nixon, respectively, attacking the adoption of urban, European sexist ideology in Drum magazine in the 1950s and charting Bessie Head's attempt at finding a "rural transnationalism" to counter the urban nationalism that rendered her stateless. In recording the limitations on African women to define their own space in their own terms, these final essays provide exemplary analyses of the range of power relations involved in naming places in (post)colonial spaces.

While the editors admit to a certain arbitrariness in the connection between Australia and South Africa, commenting on the difference between the restitution of authority in South Africa to indigenous population groups and the continued domination of Australia by (mainly white) immigrant political power, Text, Theory, Space is a rich and suggestive collection. It would be interesting to see, for instance, similar comparative work drawing attention to the postcolonial nature of American land, literature, and history.

Simon Lewis

Simon Lewis teaches African literature at the College of Charleston.

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