Title: Representations of slave subjectivity in post-apartheid fiction : the 'Sideways Glance'
Abstract: ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Over the past three decades in South Africa, the documentation of slave history at the Cape
Colony by historians has burgeoned. Congruently, interest in the history of slavery has
increased in South African letters and culture. Here, literature is often employed in order to
imaginatively represent the subjective view-point and experiences of slaves, as official
records contained in historiography and the archive often exclude such interiority. This thesis
is a study of the representations of slave subjectivity in two novels: Rayda Jacobs’s The Slave
Book (1998) and Unconfessed (2007) by Yvette Christianse. Its task is to investigate and
traverse the multitude of readings made possible in these literary representations, and then to
challenge such readings by juxtaposing the representational strategies of the two novels.
Both primary texts are works of historical fiction that, in different ways, draw on the
archive and historiography in order to grant historical plausibility to their narratives.
Engaging with the distinct methods with which they approach and interpret such historical
information, I adopt the terms “glimpsing” and “reading sideways”. Throughout this study, I
engage each of these methods in order to demonstrate the value, and limits, of each technique
in its engagement with the complexities of representing slave subjectivity in the wake of its
(predominant) occlusion from historical and official data. Chapter One presents a brief overview of the emergence of the slave past in
historiography and public spaces. Following Pumla Gqola’s statement that “slave memory
[has] increase[d] in visibility in post-apartheid South Africa”, I move to a discussion of the
theoretical perspectives on (re)memory as employed by writers of fiction that exemplify “a
higher, more fraught level of activity to the past than simply identifying and recording it ”
(“Slaves” 8) . In turn, I identify the imperative archival silence places on authors to write
about slaves, and the relevance of genre in this undertaking. Specifically, I consider the
romantic and tragic historical fiction genres as they are utilised by Jacobs and Christianse in
approaching representations of slave subjectivity, and how this influences emplotment.
Chapter One concludes with a brief exposition of the literary representations offered by
Unconfessed and The Slave Book.
Chapter Two presents a detailed study of Rayda Jacobs’s The Slave Book as a novel of
historical fiction. Jacobs takes up a methodology of “glimpsing” at the slave past through the
representations available in historiography. I trace the moments at which the text seeks to
convey slave subjectivity, within and without historical discourses, through such “glimpses”, and show how they are employed to establish a focus on interiority and to humanise slave
characters.
Chapter Three focuses on Yvette Christianse’s Unconfessed and explores its explicit
engagement with silences surrounding the protagonist Sila van den Kaap’s historical presence
in the…
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-12-01
Language: en
Type: dissertation
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Cited By Count: 2
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