Abstract
This special issue considers networked cultural responses loosely figured as “cultural solidarities” in the Global South, on the understanding that mid-twentieth century struggles to end colonialism were addressed within a transnational domain. It takes apartheid South Africa as its point of departure, positioning literature from South Africa within a broadly anti-colonial commons. As they consider works by Alex La Guma, Nazim Hikmet Ran, Athol Fugard, and Todd Matshikiza, among others, our contributors—Christopher J. Lee, Gül Bilge Han, Ashleigh Harris and Andrea Thorpe—question the role of aesthetic forms in constructing long-distance solidarities in a Cold War setting. Mohammad Shabangu’s assertion of the necessity of “opacity” as a counter to the recuperation of the African writer brings such questions into the present, intersecting contemporary debates on world literature. Finally, solidarity is framed in temporal rather than geographical terms in Andrew van der Vlies and Julia Willén’s dialogue on “reading for hope” in the aftermath of failed revolutionary projects.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 260-268 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Safundi |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 3 Jul 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:In closing, it is perhaps fitting to observe that the intellectual collaborations that form the body of the corpus we present here have been transnational to the core. We would like to thank Sarah Nuttall for so generously agreeing to host the conference that gave rise to these publications, “Cultural Solidarities: Colonial Modernity, Anti-Apartheid and World-Making Networks” at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, April 3–6, 2017, in Johannesburg. Thanks are also due to WiSER’s administrative team, particularly Najibha Deshmukh, for capacious hospitality. The conference constituted a collaboration between WiSER, the European Research Council Project “APARTHEID-STOPS” and the “World Literatures: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics” Research Program based at Stockholm University. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP/2007–2013) / ERC Grant Agreement no. 615564, and from the Swedish Foundation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond). Louise Bethlehem and Stefan Helgesson would like to acknowledge the generous support of their respective funding bodies. Finally, as editors of this special issue, we would like to pay tribute to the anonymous reviewers who gave so generously of their time and insights, and particularly, to thank Andrew van der Vlies and fellow editors of Safundi for giving this collection of articles the most appropriate intellectual home possible.
Funding Information:
Stefan Helgesson is professor of English at Stockholm University. His research interests include southern African literature in English and Portuguese, Brazilian literature, postcolonial theory, translation theory and theories of world literature. He is the author of Writing in Crisis: Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele and Coetzee (2004) and Transnationalism in Southern African Literature (2009), is co-editor (with Pieter Vermeulen) of Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets (2015) and (with Jayne Svenungsson) of The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibity (2018). He is currently leading the Swedish research network “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures,” funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Louise Bethlehem is associate professor in English and the Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her publications include Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and Its Aftermath (2006) and six coedited volumes prior to this one. She holds a European Research Council Grant for the project APARTHEID-STOPS. See www.louisebethlehem.com. Gül Bilge Han is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Stockholm University, Department of English. She has recently completed a book on Wallace Stevens and the theoretically significant concept of aesthetic autonomy, which is currently under review. Her publications on modernist poetry and contemporary aesthetic theory appeared in the Wallace Stevens Journal, Wallace Stevens, Poetry, and France and in Reframing Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Her current research project lies at the intersection of world literature and global modernisms where she employs the notion of transnational solidarity as a critical lens to investigate modernist and Global South responses to the historical intensification of anticolonial struggles stretching from the mid-1930s to the Cold War. If the 1960s and early 1970s count among the darkest days of the apartheid era, then this needs also to be thought of as a paradox in world history. Just as transcontinental communication and the global diffusion of Americanized consumer culture was accelerating, and just as the post-1945 wave of decolonization reached its apex and a new radical left emerged across much of the world, South Africa’s rulers barricaded themselves behind their borders to consolidate the construction of a violently racist and reactionary society. They did so with recourse to Cold War rhetoric, claiming to defend the “free world” against the onslaught of Communism and eager to maintain the appearance of being fully in sync with modernity in its western European and US versions. Yet this same “free world” would gradually, if unevenly, sever ties with South Africa. The cultural, sports, and academic boycotts of South Africa initiated in the 1960s were followed in the 1970s and 1980s by increasing waves of disinvestment. 1 “Severing ties,” of course, comes in many varieties. If the international community reduced the degree of South Africa’s imbrication with a global economy of tangible as well as intangible goods, the apartheid regime itself accelerated throughout this period a process of intellectual and cultural attrition in the domestic arena, single-mindedly severing ties with progressive forces: the post-Sharpeville repressive deep freeze of the 1960s led to draconian censorship, police clamp downs, successive bannings, and political trials of dissidents from across the racial spectrum. In the cultural domain, an entire generation of mainly black writers, intellectuals, artists, and musicians found themselves relegated to silence within the borders of the country. Significant numbers were forced into exile—there to reclaim their voices from the other side of an abyss: the “rift” of displacement. 2 This period of attrition would increasingly produce a sense of isolation and stasis, memorably described as a state of “waiting” by the anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano, and as an “interregnum” in a famous 1982 essay by Nadine Gordimer, where she drew on formulations by Gramsci. 3 South Africa under apartheid, accordingly, was often thought of as existing in a time warp, multiply disconnected from the outside world, waiting for history to happen. Which it eventually did. Much evidence in support of this description could be garnered, yet the present intervention is motivated by a set of alternative assumptions. The high tide of decolonization, as already mentioned, saw the proliferation of exceedingly far-reaching networks and increased transnational mobility. Apartheid’s exilic diaspora itself travelled far and wide, establishing contacts and presences in Africa and beyond, interweaving in this way with other networks. As the cultural mediators of resistance to apartheid were propelled into the world beyond the borders of South Africa, they influenced and were influenced by a wide array of political imaginaries. Anti-apartheid resistance adjoined black nationalisms and internationalisms in the diaspora; African nationalism and continental panafricanism; cosmopolitanism and communism; tricontinentalism, to invoke Robert Young’s phrase, as well as the cultural circuitry of the Black Atlantic, to draw on Paul Gilroy’s well-known paradigm. 4 “Residing at the intersection of the African, Atlantic and Indian worlds, South Africa was an outlier of the mid-twentieth century,” Ryan M. Irwin has observed. “Its controversial policies sharpened views about the past, present and future of European colonialism, and pushed intellectuals and diplomats alike to think more thoroughly about their attitudes toward freedom, paternalism and world order in the post-war years.” 5 Transnational approaches to Cold War history increasingly recognize that the staggered unraveling of colonialism, alongside the anachrony of its perpetuation in the South African case, indelibly shaped the emergent post-WWII political order. One highly salient feature of this order, easily forgotten today, was its capacity to charge every patch of the globe with potential strategic significance. 6 This, in turn, generated funding from both sides of the East-West divide not only for arms and political interventions, but also for numerous cultural initiatives, not least in the form of journals and conferences. The CIA secretly channeled funds to a wide number of cultural activities in the 1960s, including journals such as The New African and The Classic; comparable support was issued by Cuba, the GDR, and the Soviet Union; the Nordic countries provided the political and cultural wings of anticolonial and antiapartheid movements with substantial backing. 7 The Cold War was a time, in other words, of an unprecedented internationalism, enabled materially by the strength of the era’s contending economies, and technologically by air travel, airmail, the printing press and audiovisual media. This internationalism, too, is part of the story of apartheid. Or, to phrase it the other way around, the story of Cold War cultural internationalism also incorporates diverse versions of “South Africa.” Even if South Africa and its (anti-)apartheid diaspora is accorded a certain centrality in this special issue, one of a series of interrelated volumes exploring networked cultural responses loosely figured as “cultural solidarities” across literary and cultural-studies-based paradigms, respectively, 8 the intended effect of the combination of topics we present here is precisely to defamiliarize established narratives of South Africa—that could indeed be called isolationist, in their own way—by juxtaposing them with explorations of other internationalist trajectories in the Cold War era, such as those linking the USSR and India, or Turkey and Africa. In this way, the instances we foreground contribute to the exploration of the synchronicity as well as the enmeshing of apartheid South Africa with developments elsewhere. They do so, moreover, with a specific focus on the entanglement of literature and cultural production more generally with the urgencies of the time. Consider, for instance, how the US state department enlisted black jazz ambassadors including Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington for government-sponsored international jazz tours from the mid-1950s onward, in a deliberate attempt to deflect international criticism of US racism, as Penny M. Von Eschen has convincingly demonstrated. With America in the throes of a political and cultural revolution that had put the black freedom struggle at the center of American and international politics, the prominence of African American jazz artists was critical to the music’s potential as a Cold War weapon, With America in the throes of a political and cultural revolution that had put the black freedom struggle at the center of American and international politics, the prominence of African American jazz artists was critical to the music’s potential as a Cold War weapon, she writes. 9 Cultural production cannot be understood as an add-on or an afterthought in such cases. Working in a very different register from the hegemon’s instrumentalization of culture, we contend that it is rather the case that the affective resonance of aesthetic forms is a crucial enabler of long-distance solidarities. Thinking along these lines, there is an argument to be made for the centrality of South African writers such as Alan Paton, Es’kia Mphahlele, Alex La Guma, and Nadine Gordimer, as well as singers and musicians such as Miriam Makeba or Hugh Masekela, in fostering the anti-apartheid cause in Europe and North America. Makeba, Masekela, Mphahlele, and La Guma are in fact cultural brokers many times over since their deep involvement in continental African circuits, in the case of the first three, or in Afro-Asian ones, in the case of La Guma, provides evidence of crucially underexplored axes of translocal cultural exchange that bypass or reposition metropolitan concerns. 10 That these non-metropolitan dimensions of their careers have sometimes been occluded (with the exception of Mphahlele) is very much part of the point that we are making. Against this occlusion, we provide some potential correctives. Christopher J. Lee’s careful contextualization in this volume of La Guma’s 1983 “Report to the 25th Anniversary Conference of the Afro-Asian Writers Association,” which we offer as a primary source and equally as a testament to cultural solidarity, makes the institutional infrastructure and the ideological commitments of various counterpublics that actively contested Western liberal internationalism freshly visible once more. La Guma both promoted and was sustained by a matrix of literary production pivoting on Lotus magazine, a trilingual quarterly journal issued by the Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA) which he served in his capacity as a member of the editorial committee, and then, beginning in 1976, assistant editor in chief. Lotus magazine, the institutional structures, and political imaginaries in which it was embedded were no less salient for the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet Ran, as Gül Bilge Han’s contribution to this volume demonstrates. For all that the institutional dimensions of these networks deserve to be examined anew, as Lee’s and Han’s interventions richly show, formal innovations must not be overlooked. “Literary forms involved in the making of solidarities play an active part in the constitution of global cultural itineraries,” Han observes, and goes on to point to Hikmet’s elaboration of a “cross-generic form” that intertwines the “informative language of the news” with a heightened emotive style of address characteristic of the lyric. Solidarity is discursively encoded twice over through the realistic and expressive features of the text, even as the poet foregrounds the geographical coordinates of his vision of solidarity. The creation of “solidaristic links beyond their immediate political and national settings,” Han reminds us, enables the construction of “alternative assemblages between different localities and places of resistance.” Such affirmation of individual and collective agency, bound up as it is with the enunciation of “utopian aspirations oriented toward the future,” serves in the context of this special issue to frame far more than Hikmet’s intricate weaving together of Turkey and Africa. Andrea Thorpe’s article further develops an understanding of how literature itself, through activating the imagination and through forming repositories of intertextual allusions, images, and values, enabled transnational solidarities. Literature transformed the metropolitan center of London into a shared virtual space for South Africans, even before they inhabited its physical space as exiles and migrants of varying kinds. For Todd Matshikiza, J. M. Coetzee, and Peter Abrahams alike, this lent an uncanny quality to the experience of traveling to a city that had already been encountered numerous times imaginatively, producing a double exposure of anticipation and (often contradictory) experience. In the post-1945 period, South African writers in London would nonetheless move beyond the confines of their primary literary conditioning. As Thorpe puts it, their “encounters with modernism both in South Africa and in exile in metropolises such as London enabled resistance and informed the development of the South African literary field,” demonstrating once again how cultural practice has the capacity to provide alternative strategies of world-making, proceeding not only from textual juxtapositions of spaces, but also from the fact of having lived sequentially in one space and then another. London can, in this way, house aspirations that only partly coincide with the city’s metonymic function as a marker of the metropole. If Thorpe reads how South African writers respond to the call of metropolitan imaginaries of London, Ashleigh Harris adopts an inverse perspective as she approaches South African literature within a global frame. Her focus is on the spatial trope of the island, which in Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s The Island, and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, she argues, both illustrates the isolation of the apartheid regime and refuses to confine apartheid within South Africa’s borders. The island serves as a means to capture the presumed exceptionalism of South Africa in which the apartheid’s fetishistic disavowal of Robben Island is paralleled by the wider disavowal of South Africa as implicated in global structures of racism. Harris’ reading of apartheid “in and of the world,” as seen through South African texts, draws attention not only to the ethico-political responsibilities of anti-apartheid literature’s global readership, but also to its status as world literature. As this special issue’s contributors each show, solidarity demands not only forms of identification or fusion between distinct actors and movements, but also the construction of alternative forms of interaction and exchange between them. The notion of solidarity as relation allows us to acknowledge that it is characterized by tensions and ambiguities of closeness and distance, belonging and unbelonging, recognition and disavowal—positions that derive from the ethical and political alignments of the discretely positioned subjects involved in the act of solidarity. 11 The coexistence of these conflicting impulses in the formation of cultural solidarities renders solidarity itself an open-ended and porous rather than a static and predetermined process. While, ideally, the notion of solidarity implies non-hierarchical relationships, not all claims to solidarity denote assertions of shared alliance between groups on an equal plane. Some of the more problematic modalities of solidarity include for instance liberal configurations of suffering, that is to say, affective solidarities steeped in feelings of sympathy and compassion toward the vulnerable or the oppressed. The case of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country provides a clear example of such a tendency within the corpus of apartheid-era South African literature. In a series of important interventions, Andrew van der Vlies has elucidated the “hypercanonical” status of this work, reflected in modes of reception that generated extensive literary criticism and translations as well as adaptations of the novel for mass print circulation, for the Broadway stage, and for cinema. 12 Through its re-versioning in the US, Van der Vlies points out, the novel effectively became a morality tale for its times. Its implied socio-religious and actively anti-Communist suggestions for the amelioration (by whites) of the conditions of a (black) population suffering from discrimination, purposeful under-development, and neglect had an obvious appeal for (white) mid-century American readers in the early years of the Cold War implied socio-religious and actively anti-Communist suggestions for the amelioration (by whites) of the conditions of a (black) population suffering from discrimination, purposeful under-development, and neglect had an obvious appeal for (white) mid-century American readers in the early years of the Cold War he argues. 13 Writing from a related position in the pages of this journal just over a decade ago, Rita Barnard drew attention precisely to the longevity of such constructions of the novel. Her reading of the imbrication of Cry, the Beloved Country within the media ecology surrounding Oprah Winfrey shows it to have become a repository of “images and narratives of suffering and its overcoming” 14 whose particular utility derives partly from Winfrey’s own “therapeutic biography,” in Eva Illouz’s phrase, 15 and partly from triumphalist narratives of South Africa’s democratic transition—one that crucially preceded Jacob Zuma’s ascendancy, we might observe in retrospect. Based on Van der Vlies’s and Barnard’s precedents, the lines of connection spun around Paton’s work can be said to exemplify what Sally J. Scholtz has called “parasitical solidarity.” 16 Grounded on vertical rather than horizontal relations, such modalities fail to meet the demands of solidarity to generate collective bonds or common responsibilities. The literary and cultural solidarities we explore in this special issue operate instead to complicate if not resist the assimilative pressure of such hierarchical codes; unlike the case of parasitical solidarities, their political and cultural engagements enable the construction of transnational and mobile solidarities based on mutual interplay and relation that exceed the confines of fixed boundaries whether spatial, geographical, or temporal. Such resistance is never effortless as Mohammad Shabangu’s contribution to this volume shows. His intervention crosses a contemporary variant of the ideological and commercial recuperation that we have seen to be at work in rendering Paton’s text a cipher for depoliticized liberal humanist responses to racialized oppression in South Africa. Shabangu explores how works of literature penned by “displaced African nationals” are pervasively required to become a cipher for “Africa” itself. “As displaced African nationals who are inevitably called upon to disavow or reaffirm their positionality in the world literary marketplace, in other words, as ‘African migrant’ writers,” these men and women display their resistance to recuperation through what Shabangu calls an “affinity for writerly self-determination, which finds its trace in their literary productions.” His contribution contests the explicit and implicit demands that require African writers to obey what Aaron Bady has termed (in passing, and with reference to Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go) the “ethnographic imperative” 17 —that is to say, the requirement that they conform to a set of identitarian expectations that precede any discrete act of writing by an African author in world literary space. Against this, the “double-bind” of the African writer’s interpellation, Shabangu champions “opacity” as well as the formal capacity of the texts he analyzes to invoke “the perpetual interpretive gap between sign and meaning” that he names their “spiritual component.” Opacity as an aesthetic strategy stands in an intriguingly complex relationship to Pheng Cheah’s reminder that “since one cannot see the universe, the world, or humanity, the cosmopolitan optic is not one of perceptual experience but of the imagination.” 18 Cheah articulates this in affirmation of literature’s capacity to open and extend the imagined world; rephrased in our terms, we might say that transnational solidarities are dependent on the work of the cultural imagination—not just in order to be effective, but to be generated at all. (An assumption clearly shared by the Cold War protagonists who were prepared to fund such initiatives.) However, to understand the ambiguities of this process, it also needs to be approached skeptically—as Shabangu does—as well as far more inclusively than merely in literary terms alone. The notion of the aesthetic needs also to be extended to journalism, radio and television as forms that work precisely upon the senses and the imagination, producing in this way conceptions of the distant other that, in turn, can be refashioned as well as challenged by writers, filmmakers, playwrights, photographers, musicians, and other artists. Where the contributions to this special issue have focused on distinctly “literary” articulations of solidarity, its sequel (Safundi 20.2/3, “Cultural Solidarities: Apartheid and itineraries of expressive culture”) juxtaposes literature with other forms of expressive culture to pose questions, and elicit responses, that accommodate the aesthetic in this expanded sense. As a coda of sorts to this issue’s contributions, Andrew van der Vlies and Julia Willén’s dialogue is concerned more with the temporalities than the geographies of solidarity and forward-looking political change. Moving from the synchronicity of radical political thinking in Chile and South Africa in the early 1970s to the overarching question of how to retrieve hope in the face of disillusionment and violent political backlashes, Van der Vlies and Willén invoke a range of thinkers from Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, to Reinhart Koselleck, David Scott, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. In their different ways, each of these theorists has challenged conventional conceptions of “universal” history, drawing our attention instead to the density, entanglement and multiplicity of historical time. Famously, Benjamin posited the “now-time,” with its weak messianic capacity to introduce radical change at any given moment, in contradistinction to the empty, homogenous time of universal history. Both Van der Vlies and Willén refer to Nadine Gordimer as one of the keenest observers of the unfolding now-time in South Africa, always full of promise as well as the possibility of failure. Gordimer’s temporal sensibility, which for a period had been obscured by the mixed, or indeed often negative critical reception of her late work, emerges here as a key resource for rekindling the “utopian energies” that were so much in abeyance during the era of Jacob Zuma’s presidency in South Africa. In closing, it is perhaps fitting to observe that the intellectual collaborations that form the body of the corpus we present here have been transnational to the core. We would like to thank Sarah Nuttall for so generously agreeing to host the conference that gave rise to these publications, “Cultural Solidarities: Colonial Modernity, Anti-Apartheid and World-Making Networks” at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, April 3–6, 2017, in Johannesburg. Thanks are also due to WiSER’s administrative team, particularly Najibha Deshmukh, for capacious hospitality. The conference constituted a collaboration between WiSER, the European Research Council Project “APARTHEID-STOPS” and the “World Literatures: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics” Research Program based at Stockholm University. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP/2007–2013) / ERC Grant Agreement no. 615564, and from the Swedish Foundation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond). Louise Bethlehem and Stefan Helgesson would like to acknowledge the generous support of their respective funding bodies. Finally, as editors of this special issue, we would like to pay tribute to the anonymous reviewers who gave so generously of their time and insights, and particularly, to thank Andrew van der Vlies and fellow editors of Safundi for giving this collection of articles the most appropriate intellectual home possible.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Keywords
- Apartheid
- Cold War
- decolonization
- solidarity
- world literature