scholarly journals The Making of the New Man in Contemporary African Fiction: A Reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-73
Author(s):  
Christabel Aba Sam
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
New South ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Man ◽  
Definition Of

Critical works on Coetzee’s Disgrace shows that the novel constructs a distressing picture of the conditions in post-apartheid South Africa –tabling his attempts at blurring national enthusiasm, creating racial stereotypes and consequently damaging the hopes of the new South Africa.  However, a re-reading of the novel reveals that the survival of post-apartheid South Africa reside in the potential of a willing unity of racial bodies and a careful re-definition of masculinity vis-à-vis spatial re-configurations. Drawing on the concept of futurity and Frantz Fanon’s idea of the new man, this paper argues that the correlation between forms of community and forms of masculinity provide basis for re-configuring social cohesion in post-apartheid South Africa.

The seeds of ethnic or tribalistic manifestations in Limpopo: The case of Makhado, Vuwani and Malamulele

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ndwamato G. Mugovhani
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
New South ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Essential Property ◽  
Research Article ◽  
Democratic Elections

This research article argued that the current conflicts between Vhavenda and Vatsonga, two decades and four years later after the first democratic elections for a new South Africa in 1994, are manifestations of the seeds that were sown by the Voortrekkers since their arrival around the Soutpansberg in the northern parts of South Africa in 1836. Makhado (Louis Trichardt), Vuwani and Malamulele have been embroiled in continuous arguments and counterarguments, advocacies and counter advocacies, including protests, and in some instances, destruction of the essential property. Before then, Vhavenda and Vatsonga used to live alongside each other and even together. In their traditional village settings, there was no discrimination based on language or ethnicity. Through review of early scholarly writings, oral resources garnered from elders and the author’s personal experience, a few episodes were highlighted, and the ramifications thereof were discussed.Contribution: This study also postulated that although the promotion of the tribes’ uniqueness was culturally significant, social cohesion and multiculturalism could have been sustained without institutionalising the segregation laws and demarcations, for these decisions have come back to haunt the present democratic South Africa’s ideals of nation building and social cohesion.

J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace as an Allegory of the Pain, Frustration, and Disorder of Post-Apartheid South Africa

Matatu ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Remy Oriaku
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
New South ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Rape Seed ◽  
Victim Status ◽  
Personal Level

In J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (1999), David Lurie, an embodiment of the unrepentant Afrikaner, his predatory masculinist ways recalling the overbearing and highhanded culture of the apartheid era, is shown as both perpetrator and victim. His daughter Lucy transcends her victim status; carrying in her the post-rape seed of the multiracial entity birthed by the post-apartheid arrangement, she is, unlike her father, prepared to make concessions and undertake the compromise and accommodation that are essential in the new South Africa. By the end of the novel, however, Lurie, too, has, at least on the personal level and in his caring for animals, learned the virtue of humility. Central motifs in Disgrace are linked to those in other novels such as Elizabeth Costello and in the metatextual The Lives of Animals. However, Coetzee, in his exploration of ethics and morality, is richly ambiguous, as is his approach to the porous divides between fiction, metafiction, faction, and autobiography. The essay closes with an examination of the various inflections characterizing Coetzee’s retreat from public testimony into autobiography, as a way in which to deal with the nature of the society he has now left in moving to Australia.

scholarly journals After the Fall: Reevaluating Whiteness in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Elements ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brady Smith
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
South African ◽  
Majority Rule ◽  
New South ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Disruption ◽  
South Africans ◽  
The Social ◽  
Precarious Situation

In light of the unfavorable way in which many white South Africans have reacted to black majority rule in contemporary South Africa, there has been a tendency to read J.M. Coetzee's 1999 novel <em>Disgrace</em> as a condemnation of the social disruption that has characterized South African life since 1994. While the novel certainly expresses a degree of unease over the politically precarious situation of whites in the new South Africa, such readings tend to ignore the complexities of both the novel and the politics of life after apartheid. Rather than an attack that describes white life as now essentially impossible, I try to understand <em>Disgrace</em> as a meditation on the meaning of whiteness in the new South Africa, one that seeks to leave behind the racist and imperialist discourses that previously defined whiteness as a social identity. <br />

Subjection and Survival in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-170
Author(s):  
Maryam Beyad ◽  
Hossein Keramatfar
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
New South ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Power Struggles ◽  
Interracial Violence ◽  
Sane Society

Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, constructs a disturbing picture of the state of post-apartheid South Africa. It was generally criticized on the ground that instead of sharing national enthusiasm, it damaged the hopes of constructing a just and nonracial society by perpetuating racial stereotypes and fueling interracial violence. Disgrace, however, this paper holds, is a realistic, though gloomy, narrative of human condition. It is the scene of individuals struggling for survival amid existential and social forces in post-apartheid culture. Apartheid represented the era of victimization, subjection, and pathological attachments. It distorted intersubjective relations, turned humans’ interactions into power struggles, and produced deformed, stunted subjects. This paper examines the continuing presence of these deformed subjects in new South Africa and the violence that their presence occasions. The residual presence of character deformity and pathological intersubjectivity is a social reality of the new South Africa in Disgrace, a reality that diminishes the prospect of the promised sane society of post-apartheid era.

The Late-Victorian ‘New Man’ and the Neo-Victorian ‘Neo-Man’

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
New Man ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Victorian Age

The New Man was a crucial topic of discussion and a continual preoccupation in late-Victorian feminist writing, precisely because he was more often a wished-for presence than an actual one. Nevertheless, creators of neo-Victorian fiction and film repeatedly project him backwards onto the screen of literary history, representing him as having in fact existed in the Victorian age as a complement to the New Woman. What is at stake in retrospectively situating the New Man – or, as I will call him, the ‘Neo-Man’ – in the nineteenth century, through historical fiction? If one impulse behind fictional returns to the Victorian period is nostalgia, then what explains this nostalgia for The Man Who Never Was? This essay will suggest that neo-Victorian works have a didactic interest in transforming present-day readers, especially men, through depictions of the Neo-Man, which broaden the audience's feminist sympathies, queer its notions of gender relations, and alter its definition of masculinity.

The Perpetuation of Gender Norms and White Hegemonic Patriarchy in the South African Defence Force as Represented in André van der Merwe’s Moffie (2006)

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Nolen Fortuin
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
White Family ◽  
White Children ◽  
White Masculinity ◽  
Party Government ◽  
Compulsory Military Service ◽  
The Military

With the institution of compulsory military service in South Africa in 1948 the National Party government effected a tool well shaped for the construction of hegemonic masculinities. Through this, and other structures like schools and families, white children were shaped into submissive abiding citizens. Due to the brutal nature of a militarised society, gender roles become strictly defined and perpetuated. As such, white men’s time served on the border also “toughened” them up and shaped them into hegemonic copies of each other, ready to enforce patriarchal and racist ideologies. In this article, I look at how the novel Moffie by André Carl van der Merwe (2006) illustrates hegemonic white masculinity in South Africa and how it has long been strictly regulated to perpetuate the well-being of the white family as representative of the capitalist state. I discuss the novel by looking at the ways in which the narrator is marked by service in the military, which functions as a socialising agent, but as importantly by the looming threat of the application of the term “moffie” to himself, by self or others.  

African Islam and Islam in Africa

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. i-xi
Author(s):  
Ali A. Mazrui
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Black Africa ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Definition Of

Sub-Saharan Africa is often regarded as part of the periphery, rather thanpart of the center, of the Muslim world. In the Abrahamic world, Africa isoften marginalized. But is there anything special about Islam’s relationshipwith Africa? Are there unique aspects of African Islam? Islam has exerted anenormous influence upon Africa and its peoples; but has Africa had anyimpact upon Islam? While the impressive range of articles presented in thisspecial issue do not directly address such questions, my short editorialattempts to put those articles within the context of Africa’s uniqueness in theannals of Islam. One note: Although these articles concentrate on sub-Saharan Africa (“Black Africa”), our definition of Africa encompasses thecontinent as a whole – from South Africa to Egypt, Angola to Algeria, andMozambique to Mauritania ...

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