Paper long abstract:

The central topic of my PhD research is the concept of regaining dignity and the manifestations of this process in post-apartheid South African literature.

Whether a quality or state of being worthy of esteem or respect, dignity is a very complicated and sensitive issue for various reasons. Still, a sense of worth is of utmost importance to all of us. The deliberate degradation of this worth has often been used as a power-tool in history.

In the past few decades the role of dignity has changed significantly worldwide, but especially in countries, which underwent radical political changes.

I believe that dignity cannot be granted or given, instead it is the circumstances, which allow it to be upheld that can be created and maintained. In an unjust political system (like apartheid or communism) the circumstances for maintaining dignity are rather difficult or lacking altogether. Nonetheless, the end of an oppressive system does not entail the consequential appearance of dignity. In my PhD thesis I investigate the mechanisms of the process of regaining dignity, the circumstances for its maintenance and its various aspects on a social and individual level.

Dignity has sociological, psychological, philosophical, legal, moral, cultural, ethical etc. aspects but I am taking literature, language and the text as the focal point for studying the phenomenon. I examine the sources and aspects of dignity and its role in the lives of individuals via contemporary South African literature. For my analyses I am using a selection of contemporary South African novels in English.

Paper long abstract:

Memory, exile and identity are part of the psychical configurations that embody the experience of man within the spatial location he occupies and that in which he achieves rigmarole of the performances of different activities akin to the idea of the ‘Waiting for Godot’. Exile has precipitated memories which invariably mould and reconstruct identities, rendering them fluid and malleable. This paper examines the invention and reinvention of memory in John Kani’s Nothing But the Truth (2002) as it affects how justice is perceived and how reconciliation and forgiveness are issued. It also investigates how Kani’s characters navigate the murky waters of a conflated experience in dual identities, informed by exile, and how shifts and adjustments are made to accommodate the products of crossed borders to achieve a resounding reconciliation, having blurred, repressed, or better still, obliterated the dictates and vestiges of the wounded past. It is inferred, therefore, that the reconstruction of the unpalatable past will engender concrete cohesion beyond all existing divides in a new South Africa provided remorse is shown for past deeds and individual identity subsumed under that which is national.

Paper long abstract:

African history has been narrated from different perspectives, including portraying a homogeneous, peaceful and harmonious Africa in pre-colonial times, exploring the effects of colonialism on the psyche and socio-political, and radically challenging colonial powers and their indigenous accomplices for the contemporary throes and woes of the continent. These perspectives have been sustained by a commitment to respond to inaccurate knowledge produced about Africa. However, African writers of the twenty-first century are faced with new challenges that require contemporary representation of African history, which necessitate fraying older narratives in African literature. This is not only to reflect new experiences of migration, biracialism, and miscegenation, but also to connect these experiences with the complexities of the present.

This paper maps a category in contemporary African writing that rejects the reduction of humanity into simple racialised groups by constructing the stories of the past with its fragmented and complicated strands to create narratives that speak to the present. It illustrates this point by examining Abdul Razak Gurnah’s Desertion as a novel in which an interior landscape is underlined in order to reveal how (dis)located subjects negotiate their identities and transform themselves within and outside the multi-racial coastal region of East Africa. The paper concludes that rather than attest to a harmonious African past, the novel is successful because it reconceptualises displacement and identities in twenty-first century Africa.