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Reviewed by:
  • Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History
  • Derek Attridge
Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History By David Attwel. Athens: Ohio UP, 2006. x + 228 pp. ISBN: 0-8214-1712-6 paper.

The justifiably high worldwide reputation of Olive Schreiner, Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee has obscured the much richer picture of South African culture that emerges when black writing is taken properly into account. In examining the impact of South Africa’s entry into the modern world in this important book, David Attwell does not portray black writing as merely registering or rejecting that impact; he shows, in meticulous detail, how writers negotiated with modernity in its relation to indigenous traditions, re-inventing and recasting as much as absorbing or resisting. His account of this process of transculturation complicates the linear black literary history that is often offered, from the growth of a mission-educated elite in the late nineteenth century through the coming-to-political-consciousness of the early part of the twentieth century and the American-influenced urban culture of the mid-century to the period of exile, Black Consciousness, and mass democratic movements. Choosing a series of key moments, Attwell examines the cultural crosscurrents that cut across this linear story of literature as a reflection of the process of political emancipation; while acknowledging the political and economic forces that circumscribed the authors he considers, he focuses on the important question of subject-formation as part of the creation of an alternative modernity—a question often overlooked in politically driven accounts, though it is of course a crucial aspect of any political movement.

The scholarship here is of the highest order, and it is presented in a readable and often gripping style, with factual detail and literary analysis at all times serving the purpose of the larger argument. The opening chapter on Tiyo Soga provides a fascinating start, showing how the Christian values of missionaries could be imbibed without their racist implications. This is followed by a chapter that ranges more widely across a number of black writers who, in the early twentieth century, helped to create a more positive version of the African future than that promulgated by their white teachers, and thus contributed importantly to the growth of a sophisticated African nationalism. Chapter 3 is both an absorbing story of two Zulu poets, H. I. E. Dhlomo and B. W. Vilikazi, in dialogue about their craft and a case history that reveals the problems of bringing oral Zulu culture into the medium of a modern, print literature. The following chapter, on Es’kia Mphahlele, takes us into the question of black South African culture in an international context, and is followed by one on the poetry of the Black Consciousness period of the 1970s, tracing the shift from lyric to epic under the political, but at the same time personal, pressures of the time. The final chapter challenges the common idea that black writing in South Africa is characterized by its fidelity to the realist tradition; it shows that there is a significant “experimental” strand in black writing, and ends, bringing us up to the recent past, with an illuminating reading of Zakes Mda’s Heart of Redness. [End Page 150]

This is a richly detailed, theoretically sophisticated, elegantly written, and politically astute study that deserves a place on the shelves of anyone with an interest in the culture of South Africa, past or present, or in the colonial response to metropolitan modernity.

Derek Attridge
University of York
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