Dr Sam Naidu

Sam Naidu

Senior Lecturer

B.Journ (Rhodes), BA (Hons. Rhodes), MA (Rhodes), PhD (Rhodes & SOAS, University of London)

email address: s.naidu@ru.ac.za

Current Writing 25 (2) 2013

South African Crime Fiction

Reminder: Articles due 01 March 2013

This will be a special issue of the journal Current Writing, edited by Sam Naidu, dedicated to South African crime fiction.

Crime fiction is a burgeoning literary category in post-apartheid South Africa. In 2009 alone fifteen crime novels were published locally, of which three have been long-listed for the Sunday Times Literary awards. By 2011 the number of texts published has almost doubled and some have become international bestsellers. Authors with diverse backgrounds have penned a wide range of crime and detective novels which engage fans with compelling and inventive renditions of the genre. Some authors favour the crime thriller format, for example Deon Meyer and Margie Orford, whereas others such as Andrew Brown and Michiel Heyns have opted for the literary detective novel. Sales figures and media interest confirm the popular appeal and accessibility of this literature. Historically and globally, crime fiction’s power to entertain is firmly established. In South Africa, the significance of these novels, in cultural and literary terms is just beginning to receive scholarly attention.

Questions which need to be answered are: why is this literature so popular locally and globally; who is reading and why; are aesthetic conventions adhered to or are generic borders troubled; what perspectives are offered on a transitional society beleaguered by crime at every level; does this literature constitute narratives of trauma; and how are notions of power, knowledge, and identity explored in this literature? Of interest, particularly, is the social analysis offered by this literature, the function of psychological purging attributed to it, and the advent of popular literary criticism by practitioners (as evinced by Mike Nicol’s online Crime Beat on Books LIVE).

You are invited to submit contributions on any of the above topics but you are also welcome to explore other related topics and questions.

Please submit a 200-word abstract and a four-line biographical note to s.naidu@ru.ac.za by 1 November 2012. Articles to be submitted by 1 March 2013.

Research Interests:

South African Crime Fiction

Postcolonial feminist literature, especially prose writing by women of the South Asian diaspora, African-American slave writing, African-American women’s literature.

Oral/written interface in colonial South Africa, English transcriptions of Xhosa folktales, the publication and marketing of indigenous South African orature.

Homer and the influence of Classical western texts on contemporary literature in English.

Publications

Books:

Realising Human Rights for All: Navi Pillay, Arcadia Books, London, 2010. (See http://www.arcadiabooks.co.uk)

Chapters in Edited Books:

"Life-Writing: The Migrating Selves of Meena Alexander", eds. Singh, Jaspal, K. & Chetty Rajendra. Comparative Poetics in the Literature of Transnational Indian Writers, Northern Michigan University, 2010.

"Women Writers of the South Asian Diaspora: Towards a Transnational Feminist Aesthetic?", eds. Raghuram, Parvati et al. Tracing an Indian Diaspora: Contexts, Memories and Representations, Sage Publications, 2008.

"South Asian Diasporic Women's Short Fiction: the South African Contribution", eds. Kuortti, Joel & Mittapalli. Rajeshwar, Indian Women's Short Fiction, Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 2007.

Journal Articles:

"On Becoming an African-Asian English Academic at Rhodes University", African Sociological Review. Vol 9, No.1, 2005.

"The Myth of Authenticity: Folktales and Nationalism in the 'new' South Africa", Scrutiny 2, Vol.6, No.2, 2001.

“Three Tales of Theal: Biography, History and Ethnography on the Eastern Frontier”, English in Africa, Vol 39 No 1, 2012.

Book Reviews:

The Writing Circle by Rozena Maart and Shalom India Housing Society by Esther David. In Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing, Issue 57, Spring 2009.

"The Dinner Party" by Don Maclennan. WordStock (official publication of WordFest, project of the National Arts Festival), July 2002.

"African Short Stories: Translating Africa". Review of The Picador Book of African Stories, edited by Stephen Gray. Picador. WordStock (official publication of WordFest, project of the National Arts Festival), July 2001.

Web Publications:

"The Myth of Authenticity: Folktales and Nationalism in the 'new' South Africa", Learning Online South African Literary Encyclopaedia. Internet. www.mweblibrary.com (2001).

Conferences

AUETSA 2011 13-15 July 2011, Grahamstown. Presented a paper entitled "Detecting by Abduction: The Hermeneutics of South African Crime Fiction".

Commodifying (Post-) Colonialism GNEL/ASNEL Conference, University of Regensburg, Germany, 22-25 May 2008. I presented a paper entitled "Eroticising the Exotic: South Asian Women and Romance Fiction".

Beyong the Book Conference, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, 31 August -02 September 2007. I presented a paper entitled "Eroticising the Exotic: South Asian Women and Romance Fiction".

Gender and Skills for Career Development Conference convened by the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, held at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, 23-25 May 2007. I presented a paper entitled "On Becoming and African-Asian (Female) Academic in Post-Apartheid South Africa".

International Colloquium on Hybridity in Literature Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, Aug 2006. I gave a paper entitled "Kwathi ke kaloku ngantsomi (It happened in a fantastic tale): George McCall Theal's Hybrid Kaffir Folklore (1882)".

Global Literary Economy Workshop organized by University College London, University of London, 2005.

Young Voices - The 2004 South African Online Writers' Conference organized by LITNET. I submitted a paper entitled "Literature of the South Asian diaspora: Jayapraga Reddy's South African contribution".

Critical Traditions Colloquium, part of the Rhodes University Centenary Celebrations, held in Grahamstown, August 2004. I gave a paper entitled "On Becoming An African-Asian English Academic at Rhodes University".

AUETSA Annual Conference, a national conference held in Durban, July 2004. I presented a paper entitled "Past the Post:Configuring Transcultural Literary Aesthetics in a Post-Postcolonial World".

"Inside the Whale" The Postcolonial and Globalisation, and international conference held at University College Northampton, Nothampton, United Kingdom, July 2003. I presented a paper entitled "Jayapraga Reddy's Narratives of Enablement".

Connecting Cultures, and conference held at the University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom, April 2004. I presented a paper entitled "We Are What We Eat: Food and Identity in Prose Writing by Women of the South Asian Diaspora".

AUETSA Annual Conference, a national conference held in Potchefstroom, July 2002. I presented a paper entitled "Towards and Indian Feminist Aesthetic: Transcultural Memoirs and Short Stories of Padma Hejmadi".

Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures of the Book - an international conference held in Grahamstown, August 2001. I presented a paper entitled "Commodification and Collaboration: the struggle for authority in GM Theal's Kaffir Folklore (1882)".

Research Seminar: 19 March 2013, Department of English

English Honours Seminar Room

17h15

All welcome

Writing revolution, failing, changing gear: the manuscript revisions of Waiting for the Barbarians

Prof David Attwell

Biography: Prof Attwell is Chair of Modern Literature, Head of the Department of English and Related Literature at the Univeristy of York. He is currently on a two-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship in order to write a critical biography of J. M. Coetzee, focussing on the genesis of the major novels.

‌English Department Research Seminar
14 March 2013
17h15
The Department of English Common Room
All Welcome

Merlin in the North:
History and Prophecy in Medieval Scandinavia
Sometime between 1123 and 1139, in Oxford, a man named Geoffrey of Monmouth
finished an historical work of dubious veracity known as the 'Historia regum Britanniae'
(the 'History of the Kings of Britain'). So popular was the work that some 217
manuscripts containing it have been listed, with about a third of those dating from before
the end of the 12th century. The book was translated into a wide array of languages,
including German, Italian, French, Welsh, and Old Norse. It was a medieval bestseller,
and the foundation upon which almost all subsequent Arthurian material is based.
Embedded in the larger work was a section called the 'Prophetiae Merlini' (the
'Prophecies of Merlin').
This presentation describes and analyses the interface between Old Norse vernacular
literature and Latin historiography. It also examines the variant approaches to history and
fiction that these two traditions maintain. In doing so the presentation illuminates some
of the more interesting facets of Old Norse literature, and also some of the problems
raised by medieval translation theory.

‌

English Department Research Seminar: 28 February 2013, 17h15

Department Common Room

Frontier Fictions: Settler Stories and the Origins of White Guilt

Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (University of North Dakota)

Abstract: In this presentation, Weaver-Hightower will give an overview of her book, Frontier Fictions, which offers a comparative reading of South African, Australian, US, and Canadian books about settlement in what Mary Louise Pratt has called “the contact zone.” Weaver-Hightower will discuss her methodology and process before giving a more detailed reading of her argument, with a focus on 19^th century Anglophone South African literature. In particular, this paper will address the role of literature in managing the guilt and anxiety resulting from settlement by looking at how narratives function like defense mechanisms. This book, Weaver-Hightower will explain, comes from her attempt to address the nagging question of the sources (historical, psychological, and cultural) of what twentieth century conservatives call “white guilt.”

Biography: Rebecca Weaver-Hightower is an Associate Professor of English specializing in postcolonial studies at the University of North Dakota. Her book Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals and Fantasies of Conquest (Minnesota 2007), analyzes how island castaway tales presented fantasies that made the expansion of empire more palatable. Her current work analyzes Australian, South African, Canadian, and U.S. frontier literatures for how certain stories helped those cultures to process the guilt from the displacement of indigenous peoples during colonial settlement. She is also currently co-editing a volume on postcolonial film with Peter Hulme entitled Postcolonial Film and has recently co-edited a special journal issue on Australian literature. Weaver-Hightower has published more than a dozen essays on Caribbean, Irish, Australian, African, and British literatures and film; and she is Book Reviews editor of The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. She enjoys traveling internationally (most often to South Africa, Australia, and England) to work with dusty old books in archives and learn about the cultures of the places about which she reads and writes.

Dr Sam Naidu

Senior Lecturer

B.Journ (Rhodes), BA (Hons. Rhodes), MA (Rhodes), PhD (Rhodes & SOAS, University of London)

email address: s.naidu@ru.ac.za

Research Interests:

Publications

Books:

Chapters in Edited Books:

Journal Articles:

Book Reviews:

Web Publications:

Conferences

Oxford Award for Excellence

DAVID ATTWELL

RUSSELL COMRIE

Rebecca Weaver-Hightower

THANK YOU

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2013 SEMINARS