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University of Southampton Research Repository Eprints Soton University of Southampton Research Repository ePrints Soton Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full thesis title", University of Southampton, name of the University School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination http://eprints.soton.ac.uk UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON FACULTY OF ENGLISH Violent Southern Spaces: Myth, Memory, and the Body in Literatures of South Africa and the American South by Denise Anne Greenfield Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy November 2013 i ABSTRACT ‘Violent Southern Spaces’ examines the narratives, archetypes and metaphors of memory, myth and the body that writers from South Africa and the American South have used to contest histories of racial oppression and segregation. In so doing, it seeks to identify significant transnational interactions and connections between the aesthetic forms, politics and histories of literary texts from South Africa and the United States. By analysing texts and situations that are both analogous and singular, this thesis utilises Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community as well as Sam Durrant’s Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning to depict how works of literature interrupt Southern and South African forms of community as well as the myths upon which they are founded. Chapter One examines the tension between the narrative and anti-narrative dimensions of trauma in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story and considers the conditions under which cultural trauma not only exposes the subject as a singularity, but also serves to create community via a collective identification with a mythic past. In their focus on the interruption of community as well as the disruption of the trauma narrative, these texts help us to better understand how certain myths have come to define the nation or region. Chapter Two considers the manner in which community is enacted through departure in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit. Depicted as either a movement towards a more traditional notion of community and communion, or an exposure of the limits of community, there is a certain type of freedom evidenced in such departures—a freedom intimately connected to the being-in-common of community. Finally, in Chapter Three Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf are compared in order to demonstrate how both writers interrogate the excessive accessibility that has come to define the poor white community whilst also writing communities akin to Nancy’s ‘community without unity’. This chapter further examines how both texts depict community as an active, interruptive idea, a continual unworking of totalising and exclusionary myths of collectivity upon which community (and the nation) is formed. ii Table of Contents Introduction: South Africa and the American South: A Case for Comparative Study ............... 1 Chapter One: Writing Community in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story ........................................................................................................... 49 Chapter Two: Enacting Community Through Departure in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit .......................................................................................... 105 Chapter Three: The Coming Community in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf ........................................................................................ 165 Conclusion: A Southern and South African Community ........................................................ 221 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 235 iv Acknowledgements For a study that deals with poverty and violence amongst other things, my journey has been one of tremendous abundance and joy. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my supervisors, Dr. Stephen Morton and Dr. Gail McDonald, for not only are they gifted scholars, but warm, generous individuals. In the course of such a lengthy venture, I found one quality to be just as important as the other. I simply could not have envisioned more thoughtful and patient mentoring as they walked with me through the many iterations of this project. Their encouragement and their criticism have been invaluable in fostering my intellectual growth and I thank them for allowing me the latitude to find my own way and for gently nudging me back on track when I began to wander in head-scratching directions. Our discussions were always lively, thought provoking and entertaining both for their academic content and for the myriad of other themes that had absolutely nothing to do with this project. I sincerely hope those conversations will continue even if they must do so over great distances. I am also particularly grateful to my mother, Judy—to whom I have dedicated this study—for passing on to me her love of books and reading. I have received many blessings from my mother, but perhaps this is the one that I most cherish. Lastly, I thank my husband Chris for his love, forbearance and good humour. He listened even when it was abundantly clear he had no idea what I was ‘going on about’, and he nodded his head at all the right times. He made this dream possible. v 1 Introduction South Africa and the American South: A Case for Comparative Study There is no question that generations of Americans and South Africans, black and white alike, have found [. .] in one another’s experience new perspectives on their own predicaments, new ways of understanding and acting upon their worlds.1 --James Campbell At a time in which the very idea of comparison is being scrutinised, questioned, and expanded, the historian James Campbell suggests that the connections between the United States and South Africa will remain a lively field for scholarly investigation precisely because it has mattered profoundly to so many individuals in both of those nations. One need only recall, he observes, how powerfully the TV news reports of the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s reminded Americans of the footage of earlier struggles closer to home, in places like Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. American student activists’ fight for divestment in South Africa was therefore not simply a matter of foreign policy, but the expression of a desire for greater racial equity in the US.2 Yet, despite a growing interest in the parallels between the histories of racial segregation in South Africa and the United States in comparative historiography,3 there have been no sustained, comparative studies of the correspondences 1 James Campbell, ‘Towards a Transnational Comparative History’, Beyond White Supremacy: Towards a New Agenda for Comparative Histories of South Africa and the US, Collected Seminar Papers: 49 (London: School of Advanced Studies, 1997), p. 27. Cited from Rita Barnard, ‘Of Riots and Rainbows: South Africa, the US, and the Pitfalls of Comparison, American Literary History, 17.2 (2005), p. 402. 2 Barnard, p. 402. 3 See, for example, George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Tim Couzens, The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H.I.E. Dhlomo (Johannesburg: Raven, 1985); Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Anthony W. Marx, Making Race and Nation: A 2 between fictions from these two countries.4 Historically, the transnational links most emphasised have been those relating African-American culture and black South African modernity, and therefore, have focused on the south-eastern US (most often known by the regional term ‘American South’), with its extensive experience of slavery and racial segregation. The influence of African-American culture on black South Africans dates back to the nineteenth century, and by 1912 and the founding of the South African National Native Congress—renamed the African National Congress a year later—there was an established exchange between the South African leaders of this movement and African Americans.5 The decades of the 1940s and 1950s had given rise to an unprecedented migration of black South Africans from the rural towards the urban areas, a move that also saw a shift from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘modern’. As a result of this shift, black South Africans began to search for images that might represent this new black modernity. Finding these in apartheid South Africa was difficult, hence to represent black modernity, South Africans had to look elsewhere and they turned to popular American and African American images. Thus the Comparison of the United States,
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