Comparative Literature 266 - STUDIES/S AFRICAN LIT AND FILM

Topics course. A study of South African literature and film since 1948 in their historical, social, and political contexts. How do writers and film makers of different racial and political backgrounds remember and represent the past? How do race, class, gender, and ethnicity shape the ways in which they use literature and cinema to confront and resist the racist apartheid state? How do literature, film, and other texts such as testimonies from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission function as complex cultural and political sites for understanding the interconnections among apartheid taxonomies, various forms of nationalisms, and the often hollow post-apartheid discourse of non-racial ?New South Africa?? Texts include testimonies from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, novels such as Alan Paton?s Cry the Beloved Country, Mazisi Kunene?s Mandela?s Ego, Njabulo Ndebele?s The Cry of Winnie Mandela, Nadine Gordimer?s July's People, J.M. Coetzee?s Waiting for the Barbarians, Athol Fugard?s Tsotsi and Zoe Wicomb?s You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town. We will also analyze films such as Cry the Beloved Country, Sarafina!, Tsotsi, Cry Freedom, and South Africa Belongs to Us. (E) This course examines the variety of literary and cultural expression in South Africa since the 1970s, focusing on the relations between art and political struggle. Among the topics to be discussed are the imagination of history in South African literature; the emergence of the Black Consciousness movement (and its legacies); responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Among the authors to be studied are Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coeztee, Njabulo Ndebele, Zoe Wicomb, and Zakes Mda, along with a number of contemporary poets, playwrights, and filmmakers.

Topic: The Political Imagination in Contemporary South Africa.