Penfold, Thomas;
(2023)
Reading emotion, reading joy: South Africa’s literary non-scenes.
African Identities
10.1080/14725843.2023.2261637.
(In press).
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Abstract
#Fallism has taken South African literature to a precipice. A growing mistrust in the country’s postcolonial politics and the continuing physical and economic oppression of black bodies – captured in the spirit of #RhodesMustFall – has led to a questioning of the rational desire to ‘put into words’. The radical social and political change required, critics imply, can no longer be adequately understood through the certainty of the written form: The path to a true decolonial future is in live art. This paper uses these suggestions as a springboard but refuses to accept the ‘death of the text’ that is implied. Rather I utilise interventions from the 1980s to once again encourage the academy to recognise the power of ‘literary non-scenes’ where the performed and the written interact. Moreover, I argue that scholars should begin to read for emotion and, in so doing, open the space for the expression of Black joy.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Reading emotion, reading joy: South Africa’s literary non-scenes |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/14725843.2023.2261637 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2023.2261637 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Keywords: | Literary non-scenes; reading for emotion; Black joy; performance; post-rainbow |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10177518 |
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