Narrating the New Nation

Jaspal Kaur Singh and Rajendra Chetty

Narrating the New Nation

South African Indian Writing

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Berlin

Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Singh, Jaspal Kaur, author. | Chetty, Rajendra, author.

Title: Narrating the new nation: South African Indian writing / Jaspal Kaur Singh, Rajendra Chetty.

Description: New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2018.

Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016015048 | ISBN 978-1-4331-3012-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4331-5564-2 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4331-5565-9 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-4331-5566-6 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: South African literature (English)—East Indian authors—

History and criticism. | South African literature (English)—20th century—

History and criticism. | South African literature (English)—21st century—

History and criticism. | East Indian diaspora in literature. | Race in literature.

Classification: LCC PR9358.2.I54 S56 2018 | DDC 820.98914110968—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015048

DOI 10.3726/b13415

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

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About the authors

Jaspal Kaur Singh is Professor of English Literature at Northern Michigan University. Her publications include a monograph, Representation and Resistance: South Asian and African Women’s Texts at Home and in the Diaspora, and three co-edited books, Negotiating Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Turkey; Indian Writers: Transnationalisms and Diasporas; and Trauma, Resistance, Reconstruction in Post-1994 South African Writing.

Rajendra Chetty is Professor of Language Education at the University of the Western Cape. His publications include a literary biography, At the Edge: The Writings of Ronnie Govender, two books, The Vintage Book of South African Indian Writing and South African Indian Writings in English, and three co-edited books, Indias Abroad: The Diaspora Writes Back; Indian Writers: Transnationalisms and Diasporas; and Trauma, Resistance, Reconstruction in Post-1994 South African Writing.

About the book

The purpose of Narrating the New Nation is to engage with South African Indian writings through a critical examination of the oeuvre of key writers within a postcolonial theoretical framework. With the advent of democracy, South Africa has witnessed new writings which either reflected on apartheid with elements of restoration for past atrocities and centered around reflective nostalgia, or looked ahead with optimism and foregrounded new beginnings. The end of the interregnum in 1994 drove people to narrate the relationship between past, present and future, which revealed an exciting diversity and rituals of bourgeois lives or reflected upon disadvantaged and marginalized homes in townships, casbahs and ghettos. These innovative narratives attempt to conquer and spatialize different histories, while at the same time finding creative ways to assemble shattered fragments of memory. A critical question this study asks is whether South African literature continues to address themes of journey, exile, migration and identity within the major concern of place and displacement in apartheid and post-apartheid South African Indian writing, or whether the new writings foreground critical self-awareness as citizens of a democratic and neo-colonial nation-state. What analytical questions and concerns do new writings from the Global South address? This book of critical essays hopes to endorse social and cultural—race, class, gender, sexuality—analysis, problematize them, expand them, and in the end enrich South African literature. In so doing, the authors attempt to encourage a critical, creative and empowering space for a plurality of voices, minds and stories and hope to reveal how literature involves itself in the unfinished business of the collective in South African history and literature.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Resilience in Diaspora Writings of the Indian Community in South Africa

Rajendra Chetty and Jaspal Kaur Singh

Chapter One: Ethical versus Ethnic Pre-eminence: The Centrality of South African Indian Writing

Rajendra Chetty

Chapter Two: Excavating Cultural Memories: Social Justice and Social Change in Fatima Meer and Sita Gandhi’s Texts

Jaspal Kaur Singh

Chapter Three: Black Lives Matter: The Significance of Fatima Meer’s Prison Diary

Rajendra Chetty

Chapter Four: Diaspora and Imperialism: An Analysis of Ronnie Govender’s The Lahnee’s Pleasure

Rajendra Chetty←vii | viii→

Chapter Five: Apartheid and Postapartheid Literary Imagination in Ahmed Essop’s Fiction