Minor Genres in Postcolonial Literatures

Afrikaans metaphors for Dutch and the NetherlandsThere seems to be an irrepressible urge to metaphorize the relation between the Netherlands and South Africa in the Afrikaans popular imagination, perhaps in order to bridge the growing separation between the two countries. Four complexes of such metaphors, window, family relations, root and landscape, are briefly analysed, with most emphasis on the last category. From a handful of Afrikaans poems since 1950, and especially from poems by Elizabeth Eybers, Lina Spies and Marlene van Niekerk, it seems possible to reconstruct a descriptive system that underlies poems contrasting the Netherlands (represented by Amsterdam in particular) as a safe, protected space with the South African landscape as open and exposed. These poems also clearly show up the dialectic of abrogation and appropriation and the anxiety about land and identity so typical of postcolonial literatures.

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The Language of Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction (review)

Comparative Literature Studies ◽

10.1353/cls.2005.0031 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 42 (2) ◽

pp. 310-312

Author(s):

Wail S. Hassan

Keyword(s):

Postcolonial Literatures

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Towards a definition of postcolonial biographical fiction

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature ◽

10.1177/0021989419881234 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 55 (3) ◽

pp. 335-346

Author(s):

Daria Tunca ◽

Bénédicte Ledent

Keyword(s):

Special Issue ◽

Individual Life ◽

Definition Of ◽

Postcolonial Literatures

In this introduction to the special issue on “Illuminating Lives: The Biographical Impulse in Postcolonial Literatures”, we start by situating the genre of biographical fiction, which has become increasingly popular in postcolonial literatures and beyond, in relation to more “traditional” nonfictional biography. We then examine how postcolonial biofiction might be distinguished from its postmodern avatar, and we tentatively circumscribe some of the tendencies that appear to cluster more systematically in postcolonial biofiction than in other types of writings: the focus on individuals — including artist figures — either forgotten or marginalized in traditional history; the use of the biofictional as a veritable mode of knowledge that allows writers and their critics to explore the philosophical implications of examining human trajectories; and the presence of narrative fragmentation, which often problematizes the possibility of ever fully apprehending an individual life.

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