South African Khoisan Literature in the Context of World Literary Discourse

Abstract

I demonstrate how South African Khoisan literature enriches literary discourse in the global context, using the criteria of strangeness, cross-cultural dialogue and social cohesion. I consider the spatial-cultural inflections of Khoisan literary art from the theoretical perspective of Maurice Halbwachs’s 1950 concept of space and collective memory. I compare Khoisan and Northern Sotho folktales within the global and Southern African contexts. I intend to foreground how distinctively Khoisan discourses on postcolonial experiences find literary expression, adopting Tomaselli and Muller’s (1992:478) observation that ‘cultures are distinguished in terms of differing responses to the same social, material and environmental conditions.’ I argue that intercultural dialogue that an appreciation of strangeness may unlock, promotes social cohesion that would otherwise not be achieved.