E3W Literature | University of Texas

David Attwell
Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005
236 pages
$22.95

Reviewed by Tyler Fleming

During the 1990s, South Africa embarked on a new era of its national history. Outlawed political groups such as the African National Congress and South African Communist Party were unbanned; political prisoners, most notably Nelson Mandela, were released; the nation’s first “free” elections were held; and out of these elections a new “constitutionally-defined, non-racial democracy” was established that reflected South Africa’s black majority. From the ashes of a racist regime emerged a “new South Africa” that boasted commitment to protecting human rights, forgiveness of past injustices and a government that addressed the demands of the populace at large. Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History by David Attwell emerges from the decades-long conversations among writers, scholars and intellectuals on how to study and analyze South African culture following the fall of apartheid. Attwell insists that postcolonial theory can carry South Africanist scholars only so far, due to the country’s exceptional and unique past, and he argues that South Africanist scholars need “to reinvent it (postcolonial theory) on our own terms and thereby re-enter an international conversation in which we could not fully participate during apartheid.”

In reinventing the postcolonial approach to South African literature, Attwell’s analysis is structured in part by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s concept of transculturation. Ortiz’s theory contends that in a country such as Cuba, that possesses so many cultures and peoples, individuals need to come to terms with their identity and how they fit into the nation where they reside. Similar to Cuba, South Africa possesses a diverse amount of religious, educational, ethnic, racial, class and regional identities. Due to this diversity, as South Africa emerged from apartheid, each group underwent a different and particular process of figuring how it fit into the new South African society, and Attwell aims to demonstrate that transculturation is “an historical and archival reality of black print culture in South Africa.”

Rewriting Modernity argues that African intellectuals particularly needed to come to terms with the teachings of missionary educations, the implementation of apartheid, life in exile and the arrival of majority rule following apartheid. Though neglecting to provide a confined definition of modernity itself, Attwell traces how black South African writers struggled with their place in the inherently racist South African society, and he believes that a key function of black South African writers was to “translate modernity into South African terms, to wrest its promises away from corruption and give them new meaning.” Through written literature African intellectuals explored what it meant to be black in a South Africa since the introduction of written language by missionaries. Their writing allowed them to “articulate their experience of modernity” despite modernity’s promises to Africans being mostly “fraudulent and inherently contradictory” due to colonial rule’s and later apartheid’s privileging of select groups (mainly white Europeans and their descendents).

Rather than a comprehensive history or generic analysis of South African literature, Rewriting Modernity uses six “key episodes” as windows onto larger debates and topics that emerged over the past two centuries. Attwell argues “that the use by black intellectuals of print culture has been crucial to their establishing themselves as modern subjects, in direct opposition to the identities ascribed to them in colonial and apartheid ideology.” Each key phase addressed in Rewriting Modernity illustrates how transculturation occurred and what gains came out of each phase. The six main phases that Attwell examines are: the Tiyo Soga’s establishment of “Afrocentric consciousness” in South Africa; the birth of written literature by the mission-educated Africans of the mid-nineteenth century and their insurgence against missionary teaching that considered African culture as primitive and doomed to extinction; the rivalry between H.I.E. Dhlomo and B. Wallet Vilikazi that centered on the future of written Zulu literature; the impact of exile on Es’kia Mphahlele’s writings; the shift in forms of poetry from written to spoken during the Soweto era of the 1970s; and black writing’s “experimentalism” taking place in the post-apartheid era. Collectively these phases allow Attwell to provide a comprehensive history of black South African literature while demonstrating how African writers dealt with the modern society presented to them.

Each chapter of Rewriting Modernity displays the diverse and ever-evolving views of African writers in their struggles with their situations of colonialism, apartheid or exile. In chapter four, for instance, the audience learns the inner turmoil facing Mphahlele through his travels while in exile and ultimately how this surfaced in both his fiction and critical writings. While in South Africa, Mphahlele’s writing was influenced by writers, particularly African Americans, within the African diaspora. However, as his time outside of his home country goes on, Mphahlele absorbs more and more of the literary traditions of his host countries, such as Nigeria, France and the US Thus the reader witnesses the acquisition of “diasporic thinking” by this writer turned refugee. His absorption of and struggles with aspects of negritude, Pan-African identity and the imagined Africa pushed so often by African American writers become clear. Additionally, the chapter provides key insight concerning Mphahlele’s personal longing to return home and ultimately the feelings that propelled him to break the cultural boycott by returning to South Africa in 1977. In this kind of case history, Attwell allows the reader to grasp the personal as well as creative dilemmas of the South African writer forced by circumstances of history to write from outside of his or her homeland.

Rewriting Modernity’s concluding chapter may be its most original contribution to the literary criticism of black South African writing. Prior to the end of apartheid, black writing was inherently political, as writers attacked, protested and exposed the inequality that came with apartheid. Attwell analyzes the shift South African literature underwent and still is undergoing since the creation of the “new South Africa” as apartheid fades from reality to memory. He argues that the recent works of writers like Njabulo Ndebele and Zakes Mda present “an experimentalism in which a process of epistemological recovery and revision is fully under way.” Attwell demonstrates that Ndebele’s use of both realism and experimentalism in his various writings and Mda’s presentation of the struggles of the Xhosa people against both colonial rule in mid-nineteenth century and majority rule in the twenty-first century in The Heart of Redness (2003) indicate a new shift in black South African writing. This shift is one moving away from dealing with resistance to an emboldened racist regime and toward encountering a new modernity with the onset of majority rule. For Mda, this new modernity hinges on the past and seems a mode where traditional and contemporary along with past and present fuse together creating today’s modern South African. Thus the reader witnesses once again the repositioning and revaluating of modernity by African writers on their own “South African terms.”

Rewriting Modernity represents a major academic shift for Attwell, who received his doctorate in English from the University of Texas at Austin. His work has previously centered on the career of J.M. Coetzee, the white South African Nobel prize winning fiction writer. With Rewriting Modernity, Attwell demonstrates his depth and versatility as a scholar by moving beyond Coetzee’s work to South African writing in general (and on his own terms). Rewriting Modernity is a major contribution to South African literary critique and will surely be considered such for decades to come.