Prose-Poem-Drama: "Proemdra"--"Black Aesthetics" versus "White Aesthetics" in South Africa

As is well known, blacks in South Africa were not only at odds with political and economic colonialism right from the start, but also quarreled with white concepts of writing from the very moment the colonialists imported them into the country. These Western views of literature differed considerably from those the blacks were familiar with in their oral tradition.

It has often been pointed out that in traditional African communities there are strong holistic tendencies. Various fields of social activities are not separated from each other, nor is there any apparent division of labor. A similar situation exists among the discourses in such communities. The political discourse, the historical discourse, the religious discourse, the literary discourse—all these are intimately interwoven, or actually one. In addition, there also seem to be no clear-cut boundaries between different types or genres of texts, not even a real distinction between verse and prose (see, e.g., Finnegan 74-76, 361-68, 390-91, and Opland 33). This tendency towards an homogeneous, integrative discourse is particularly intensified by the orality of all communication in such societies, since a division of discourses is largely connected with literacy and print. It is true that studies on the African oral tradition regularly subdivide their corpus into various forms of literature, but then this kind of classification seems to represent primarily an effort of Western or Western-trained black scholars to organize their research material rather than a reflection of the actual features of traditional literature. ² As it is, blacks in South Africa and in other parts of the continent regularly emphasize that in their tradition "art like life is whole" (Dathorne 5). This also means that literature is not regarded as performing a function differing from other discourses; instead, it serves definite social goals.

Up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European societies shared many features with traditional African communities. There, too, no clear distinction existed, for example, between religious and secular activities, between work and spare time, between a private and a public sphere. Similarly, no distinct borderlines were drawn between different types of discourse. And as far as a particular discourse was—either at that time or subsequently—identified as a specific literary discourse, it exercised apparently social and political functions.

All this changed, however, during the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century, when many comparably autonomous spheres emerged, affecting the discourses as well. Now, for example, a news discourse was separated from a "novels discourse" (on this issue, cf. Lennard J. Davis) and from political, religious, and scientific forms of discourse, all of which achieved relative independence; from them the literary discourse was delimitated as well. Gradually, an increasing number of literary texts abstained from producing political or ecclesiastical propaganda, and they no longer served primarily to convey social information; instead, they aimed at entertainment and at providing literary experiences in their own right. This emergence of literature as an "autonomous" sphere was accompanied, moreover, by various efforts to differentiate within the field of literary texts, for instance between different genres—especially in the wake of neoclassical orientations.

Subsequently, the "autonomous" literary sphere became the object of a similarly "autonomous" metadiscourse, initiated primarily by Kant, who uncoupled aesthetics from other fields of cognition. For Kant, there existed a hiatus between the discerning subject and the world, and he held that the beautiful in particular could not be seized by conceptual thought. Therefore, he regarded all judgments on aesthetic representations as judgments of taste, not, however, of cognition. Basically, he conceived of literary works as autonomous objects that are characterized by "purposiveness without purpose" and should be treated with "disinterested complacency."

Of course, Hegel subsequently attempted to conjoin all that Kant had shattered and to subject literature to conceptual thought, thus, in a way, reapproaching older Western as well as African conceptions. Following Hegel, in the twentieth century, we can find...