Dissolved black identity in dominant critiques of black South African literature

Abstract

This paper outlines dominant views of South African English literature critics from the 19th century to the present. Against this backdrop, I examine some English texts written by blacks in order to demonstrate how attempts by some critics subjectively to strengthen some postmodern notions such as transnationalism have blurred the differences between black and white South African English fiction. I argue that in their essays black critics such as Daniel Kunene, Es’kia Mphahlele and Mbulelo Mzamane (all 1992), on the one hand, adopt a literary-historical approach to a consideration of South African literature written in English, pointing to a yet to be clearly articulated tradition of black South African English writing. On the other hand, white critics such as Ernest Pereira, Sally-Ann Murray, and Geoffrey Hutchings reveal how the South African fiction by white writers that they discuss basically shows how the writers of fiction endemically handle the South African milieu differently from the way their black counterparts do. This study seeks to show that such a differentiation is necessary, for present and future South African literary criticism to be balanced and enriched. I demonstrate that benefits of this kind of a rethinking of the humanities subsuming acknowledgement of heterogeneity in studies of South African English literature, include sustainable social cohesion.