Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa

The questions of migration, asylum, the management of international borders, security, and "terror" are at the political heart of our age'. This statement could have been written yesterday but in fact, it was published 10 years ago, as the opening sentence of Helen Gilbert and Sophie Nield's editorial for their special issue of RiDE, 'Performance and Asylum: Embodiment, Ethics, Community' (2008, 133). In this introduction, we outline connections and disruptions according to our special issue's foregrounding terminology of 'envisioning asylum' and 'engendering crisis', before offering an overview that situates its contributions in terms of current debates, agendas and trajectories.

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I am/am I an African? A relational reading of <i>Diaspora and Identity in South African Fiction</i> by J.U. Jacobs

Flockemann

2017

Literator

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The publication of Diaspora and Identity in South African Fiction (2016) by J.U. Jacobs is a timely intervention, in that it is the first comprehensive study of South African fiction to sustain the argument that South African writing is always already diasporic. Although Jacobs’ diasporic framework undoubtedly serves as an important addition to the recent trends identified by literary scholars, his focus on 12 well-established writers (including Coetzee, Wicomb, Mda, Gordimer and Ndebele), highlights some of the gaps that need to be filled in a study of this kind. For instance, what about the younger generation of writers, including those from elsewhere in Africa who are writing about living in South Africa? How do they deal with what has been termed the new diaspora, with debates around Afropolitanism and the experiences of internal, inter-continental and trans-continental migrancy in an increasingly globalising world? Despite these shortcomings, Jacobs’ premise about the inevitably diasporic identifications that are narrativised in the 20 novels analysed here can provide a useful foundation for further scholarship on how the diasporic condition informs and is mediated in other texts. These, as I will show, range from works by a new generation of emerging writers on the one hand to the performing arts on the other hand.

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Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa

Cited by 3 publications

References 30 publications

Chapter 2: The Context for Our Place, Our Stage

Chapter 2: The Context for Our Place, Our Stage

Envisioning asylum/engendering crisis: or, performance and forced migration 10 years on

I am/am I an African? A relational reading of <i>Diaspora and Identity in South African Fiction</i> by J.U. Jacobs

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