Film as /and Popular Social Text: The Reception of John Trengove’s Inxeba/The Wound and Wanuri Kahui’s Rafiki

This article is interested in popular and institutional or state responses to the representations of queerness offered in the films Inxeba/The Wound (South Africa, 2017) and Rafiki (Kenya, 2018). Aside from portraying the marked homophobia that continues to circulate on the African continent, the institutional and state responses to the films have overshadowed the positive popular reception which has characterised conversations around the films on social media and public spaces. This article shows how social media functions as animportant space of contestation for diverse issues relating to non-normative gender and sexual identities. As these films circulate in different spaces and are viewed by diverse audiences, they elicit equally diverse reactions and responses. The article examines how viewers, in Africa and beyond, receive and engage with the queerness represented in the two films. It argues that the multifaceted reactions to Inxeba/The Wound and Rafiki are central to articulating important questions about what it means to be queer in Africa,and particularly what it implies for black queers to inhabit heteronormative and patriarchal spaces on the continent. Through an analysis of the reactions and receptions of the two films in Africa and the global North, it is argued that it is possible to trace important inter-regional, intra-continental and intercontinental dialogues and conversations regarding the representation of queer African subjectivities. The intra-continental and inter-continental dialogues bring to light questions of gaze and viewing that are inherent in the circulation of queer-themed films. Kewords: Inxeba/The Wound, Rafiki, reception, popular culture, queerness

“When in Doubt, Leave Out”:1 The Country Editor Who Declined to Publish a Long Letter from Olive Schreiner

The authors deal with six unpublished communications from Olive Schreiner to James Butler, Editor of the Cradock newspaper The Midland News and Karroo farmer between March 1893 and October 1905, as well as a reply from Butler to Schreiner. These documents are housed in the Cory Library for Historical Research at Rhodes University. Transcriptions by J. Fogg are appended. The heart of the article deals with Butler’s refusal to publish Schreiner’s “letter to the Women of Somerset East” which she had sent as a contribution to the protest meeting held in Somerset East on 12 October 1900 to mark the first anniversary of the declaration of the South African War. Keywords: Unpublished Schreiner Letters, South African War, Women’s Meeting Somerset East 12 October 1900, editorial policies, Cecil Rhodes’s control of the South African English language Press.

Fragments Towards an Impossible (Domestic) Genre of the Human in Kenyan Crime Fiction

Extrajudicial executions and other forms of police violence in Kenya have always been an issue of significant concern in local and international media and human rights organisations. Reflective of this, scholarly interest in crime fiction in Kenya has grown significantly in recent years. However, the gendered implications of criminality – from sex work to errant motherhood to alternative modes of investigation – are still largely overlooked in postcolonial literary fiction and criticism. As part of a larger study on how women writers and characters shape crime fiction in Kenya, this paper critically engages with stories that the criminalised woman knows, tells, forgets, incarnates, discards or hides about the city. It does so by examining the history of urban sex workers in Kenya, the representation of ‘urban women’ in postcolonial Kenyan novels and contemporary mainstream media, and the various (post) colonial laws that criminalise sex work. Through Justina, an elusive character in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust, I consider how (post)colonial legislative frameworks and social life attempt to manage “impossible domesticity” (Saidiya Hartman) inside and against the geo-history of gendered and classed criminality in urban Kenyan spaces. My purpose is to interrogate hegemonic constructions of the citizen – and by extension, of the human – in Kenyan law and public morality Keywords: crime fiction, feminism, sex work, human, homo narrans

Sites in Contestation: Reading Contemporary Popular Culture in Africa

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“Writer’s block” in Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man or Perhaps Only –

A new edition in 2015 by Dorothy Driver of the unfinished novel, From Man to Man or Perhaps Only –, and the accessibility of Liz Stanley’s Olive Schreiner Letters Online (OSLO) have made it possible to speculate on reasons for Olive Schreiner’s apparent “writer’s block” in not completing the novel that she felt so passionately about and worked on intermittently for forty-seven years. I argue that Schreiner’s progress was impeded by several factors: her fixation on a rare flash of “illumination” which produced the novel’s exquisite Prelude; her conflating of the ending of the novel with her own end; her commitment to “baking bread” for her country; and her inclusion, near the end of the novel as it now stands, of a scene in which two characters express the agony and anxiety associated with publication. Keywords: Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man, writer’s block

Schreiner’s Karoo, Blackburn’s Joburg: Revisioning the Colonial Novel; or, From the Story of a Colony to a ‘South African’ Story

Schreiner criticism over the last two decades or so has shown greater interest in her ideas than in her literary imagination. Without setting up ‘silos’ of approach – thought and imagination, after all, are inextricably bound – I revisit the power of the literary imagination in the works of both Olive Schreiner and Douglas Blackburn against a context of contemporaneous ‘colonial fiction’: that is, against a context that accentuates, in contrast, the substance and seriousness of the two novelists on whom I focus. Can these two novelists be seen to chart a shift from the story of a colony to a ‘South African’ story? We may conclude, in any case, that between them Schreiner and Blackburn revisioned the colonial novel Keywords: Schreiner, Blackburn, colonial South Africa, fiction, imagination/ideas, then/now

Olive Schreiner, War and Pacifism

Some new primary sources make an important contribution to re-thinking Olive Schreiner’s ideas about war and pacifism and are discussed in depth and their analytic reverberations explored. Many previously unknown Schreiner letters and postcards to her niece Lyndall (Dot) Schreiner have become available; Schreiner’s open letters, essays and allegories written over the Great War period have been collected and published; and the manuscripts of her unfinished treatise on war, conscientious objection and pacifism, The Dawn of Civilisation, have been edited in a completed version. These sources throw much light on the interconnections between Schreiner’s personal relationships, writing, feminism and pacifism. Taken together, they show that over the period of the Great War she was led to a new conviction that the aspects of human nature responsible for violence, conquest and killing were intractable and could be changed only in the distant future. Keywords: Olive Schreiner, letters, manuscripts, pacifism, violence, war

Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man: Alternative Models of Reality and the Problematics of Human Reasoning

This article considers the presence of evolutionary theory in Olive Schreiner’s novel From Man to Man (1926) and the ways in which it evokes her notion of a horizontal equality between all life forms. Her model extends the materiality inherent in the evolutionary substructure to incorporate the noumenal. This in turn is validated by direct perception which, in Schreiner’s view, bypasses the distorting rational mind that she sees as responsible for creating hierarchical dualistic models. Such models for Schreiner reflect a tendency to categorise and label in order to separate and dominate. The article considers how Schreiner’s use of an experimental narrative form allows her to explore and express her egalitarian principles. It further proposes that a re-evaluation of From Man to Man is salutary in ourcurrent environmental crisis, as it reminds us of how an evolutionary, longterm and non-anthropocentric perspective can communicate the importance of the natural world. Keywords: Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man, ecocriticism, evolutionary theory

Review

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Review

No Abstract.