Dance of Life

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ISBN: 9780821419939 | 0821419935
Cover: Paperback
Copyright: 5/1/2012

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In recent years, the work of Zakes Mda-novelist, painter, composer, theater director, and filmmaker-has attracted worldwide critical attention. Gail Fincham's book examines the five novels Mda has written since South Africa's transition to democracy: Ways of Dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), The Whale Caller (2005), and Cion (2007) Dance of Life explores how refigured identity is rooted in Mda's strongly painterly imagination that creates changed spaces in memory and culture. Book jacket.

Acknowledgements	p. ix
Introduction	p. xiii
Zakes Mda	p. xiii
Why 'Dance of Life'?	p. xv
Towards an ethics of performance	p. xvi
From play-writing to novel-writing	p. xviii
Written texts and oral storytelling	p. xx
Social realism or magic realism?	p. xxi
Vision/focalisation	p. xxiii
Place/setting/landscape	p. xxiv
Zakes Mda's construction of the 'cross-border' reader	p. 1
Introduction	p. 1
Maps, writers, readers and communities under apartheid	p. 1
From pre- to post-apartheid South Africa	p. 2
What is a 'South African' readership?	p. 3
The concept of ubuntu as constitutive of the cross-border writer and reader	p. 4
From 'interstitial' space to the space of novel-writing	p. 4
Refiguring temporality	p. 7
Crossing textual boundaries	p. 10
Hybridity as postcolonial strategy	p. 10
Hybridity and intertextuality in Mda's novels	p. 11
Mda's intertexts	p. 11
Finally	p. 18
'Appropriating urban space': Ways of Dying	p. 19
Introduction: Why Bakhtin?	p. 19
The social realism of Ways of Dying	p. 21
Heteroglossia and states of transition	p. 23
'That stuck-up bitch' Noria	p. 26
Carnival, grotesque realism, degradation	p. 29
'Laughing truth' and the speaking voice	p. 32
From 'the speaking voice' to intertextuality in The Heart of Redness	p. 34
Introduction	p. 34
Community and agency in The Heart of Redness and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness	p. 34
Shared terrain	p. 37
Salient contrasts	p. 41
Mda in the classroom: The Heart of Redness	p. 47
Finally	p. 58
Duplicity, plagiarism or transformation? Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness and Jeff Peires' The Dead Will Arise	p. 59
Continuities: oral storytelling	p. 65
Reversing 'barbarism' and æcivilisation'	p. 66
New directions	p. 67
Focalisation	p. 67
Reconceptualising Believers and Unbelievers	p. 69
Reading The Dead Will Arise and The Heart of Redness through Attridge's The Singularity of Literature	p. 73
Finally	p. 74
Towards a new ontology of postcolonial vision: The Madonna of Excelsior	p. 76
Introduction	p. 76
In the Trinity's studio	p. 77
Ecphrasis: turning paintings into fiction	p. 79
Women, donkeys, sunflowers	p. 83
Appropriating the Madonna motif	p. 86
Art, landscape and identity in She Plays with the Darkness, The Madonna of Excelsior and Cion	p. 89
Introduction	p. 89
She Ploys with the Darkness	p. 91
The Madonna of Excelsior	p. 94
Cion	p. 100
Imaginary homelands: Diaspora and identity in Cion	p. 105
The concept of diaspora	p. 105
Narrating identity: South Africa and the United States	p. 111
Narrating identity through the narratives of the past	p. 113
Performing identity	p. 117
Toloki takes over from the Sciolist	p. 120
Finally...	p. 124
'Our only physical and psychic home': Ecology and community in The Whale Caller	p. 125
An eco-criticism for South Africa	p. 127
Dismantling dualisms	p. 129
The sympathetic imagination/Becoming animal	p. 130
Storytelling	p. 131
Storytelling as political activism	p. 133
The sensorium of storytelling	p. 135
Stories' 'emotional hue'.	p. 138
Towards an ecological sublime	p. 140
Rethinking language	p. 142
Finally	p. 145
'The trenches are the boardrooms of South Africa': Black Diamond	p. 147
Stereotypes and formulae	p. 147
Soweto and cookery	p. 149
'Camera eye', narration: ideological considerations	p. 153
Riding the tiger	p. 155
Black Diamond and Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia	p. 156
Finally	p. 158
Some concluding thoughts	p. 159
Bibliography	p. 163
Index	p. 175
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Dance of Life

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

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