Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire

Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire

Author: Renzo Baas

Publisher: BASLER AFRIKA BIBLIOGRAPHIEN

Published: 2019-03-28

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 3906927083

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Modern-day Namibian history has largely been shaped by three major eras: German colonial rule, South African apartheid occupation, and the Liberation Struggle. It was, however, not only military conquest that laid the cornerstone for the colony, but also how the colony was imagined, the ‘dream’ of this colony. As a tool of discursive worldmaking, literature has played a major role in providing a framework in which to ‘dream’ Namibia, first from outside its borders, and then from within. In Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire, Renzo Baas employs Henri Lefebvre’s city–countryside dialectic and reworks it in order to uncover how fictional texts played an integral part in the violent acquisition of a foreign territory. Through the production of myths around whiteness, German and South African authors designed a literary space in which control, destruction, and the dehumanisation of African peoples are understood as a natural order, one that is dictated by history and its linear continuation. These European texts are offset by Namibia’s first novel by an African, offering a counter-narrative to the colonial invention that was (German) South West Africa.


Landscapes between Then and Now

Landscapes between Then and Now

Author: Nicola Brandt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-08

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1000211592

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In Landscapes Between Then and Now, Nicola Brandt examines the increasingly compelling and diverse cross-disciplinary work of photographers and artists made during the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid and into the contemporary era. By examining specific artworks made in South Africa, Namibia and Angola, Brandt sheds light on established and emerging themes related to aftermath landscapes, embodied histories, (un)belonging, spirituality and memorialization. She shows how landscape and identity are mutually constituted, and profiles this process against the background of the legacy of the acutely racially divisive policies of the apartheid regime that are still reflected on the land. As a signpost throughout the book, Brandt draws on the work of the renowned South African photographer Santu Mofokeng and his critical thinking about landscape. Landscapes Between Then and Now explores how practitioners who engage with identity and their physical environment as a social product might reveal something about the complex and fractured nature of postcolonial and contemporary societies. Through diverse strategies and aesthetics, they comment on inherent structures and epistemologies of power whilst also expressing new and radical forms of self-determinism. Brandt asks why these cross-disciplinary works ranging from social documentary to experimental performance and embodied practices are critical now, and what important possibilities for social and political reflection and engagement they suggest.


Writing Namibia

Writing Namibia

Author: Sarala Krishnamurthy

Publisher: BASLER AFRIKA BIBLIOGRAPHIEN

Published: 2022-06-01

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 3906927415

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A rich collection of captivating and remarkable chapters, Writing Namibia Coming of Age presents research of senior academics as well as emerging scholars from Namibia. The book includes wide ranging topics in literature written in English and other Namibian languages, such as German, Afrikaans and Oshiwambo. Almost thirty years after independence, Namibia literature has come of age with new writers experimenting with different genres and varied aspects of literature. As an aesthetic object and social phenomenon, Namibian literature still fulfils the function of social conscience and as new writers emerge, there is ample demonstration that, pluri-vocal as they are, Namibian literary texts relate in a complex manner to the socio-historical trends shaping the country. The Namibian literary-critical tradition continues to paint some versions of Namibia and what we find in this new and highly welcome volume is a canvas of rich voices and perspectives that demonstrate an intricate diversity in terms of culture, language, and themes.


The Lower !Garib - Orange River

The Lower !Garib - Orange River

Author: Luregn Lenggenhager

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2023-06-30

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 3839466393

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The Lower !Garib, or Orange River, flows through the historical Namaqualand and since 1990 has formed the international border between Namibia and South Africa. The contributors to this volume focus on this hardly discussed stretch of the Orange River to understand the region's social history, geography, and economy. This book brings together scholars from Namibia, South Africa, and overseas, as well as the knowledge and analysis from people living in the region. In concise chapters and short portraits, they discuss the region's past and present from a variety of perspectives.


Writing Namibia: Literature in Transition

Writing Namibia: Literature in Transition

Author: Krishnamurthy, Sarala

Publisher: University of Namibia Press

Published: 2018-04-30

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9991642331

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Writing Namibia: Literature in Transition is a cornucopia of extraordinary and fascinating material which will be a rich resource for students, teachers and readers interested in Namibia. The text is wide ranging, defining literature in its broadest terms. In its multifaceted approach, the book covers many genres traditionally outside academic literary discourse and debate. The 22 chapters cover literature of all categories in Namibia since independence: written and performance poetry, praise poetry, Oshiwambo orature, drama, novels, autobiography, women’s writing, subaltern studies, literature in German, Ju|’hoansi and Otjiherero, children’s literature, Afrikaans fiction, story-telling through film, publishing, and the interface between literature and society. The inclusive approach is the book’s strength as it allows a wide range of subjects to be addressed, including those around gender, race and orature which have been conventionally silenced.


Born of the Sun

Born of the Sun

Author: Gillian Cross

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780192751515

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Paula is thrilled when her explorer father pulls her out of school to climb the mountains of Peru. But as they penetrate the jungle, her father's decisions no longer seem sound, and their native guide dies as a result. Why won't he turn back?


Licentious Fictions

Licentious Fictions

Author: Daniel Poch

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-12-24

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 0231550464

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Nineteenth-century Japanese literary discourse and narrative developed a striking preoccupation with ninjō—literally “human emotion,” but often used in reference to amorous feeling and erotic desire. For many writers and critics, fiction’s capacity to foster both licentiousness and didactic values stood out as a crucial source of ambivalence. Simultaneously capable of inspiring exemplary behavior and a dangerous force transgressing social norms, ninjō became a focal point for debates about the role of the novel and a key motor propelling narrative plots. In Licentious Fictions, Daniel Poch investigates the significance of ninjō in defining the literary modernity of nineteenth-century Japan. He explores how cultural anxieties about the power of literature in mediating emotions and desire shaped Japanese narrative from the late Edo through the Meiji period. Poch argues that the Meiji novel, instead of superseding earlier discourses and narrative practices surrounding ninjō, complicated them by integrating them into new cultural and literary concepts. He offers close readings of a broad array of late Edo- and Meiji-period narrative and critical sources, examining how they shed light on the great intensification of the concern surrounding ninjō. In addition to proposing a new theoretical outlook on emotion, Licentious Fictions challenges the divide between early modern and modern Japanese literary studies by conceptualizing the nineteenth century as a continuous literary-historical space.


The Colonising Camera

The Colonising Camera

Author: Wolfram Hartmann

Publisher: Juta and Company Ltd

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9781919713229

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Richly illustrated with black and white photographs, this book brings together provocative and exciting new material on Namibia's colonial past. An eight-page colour section looks at how present day Namibians view themselves. It includes contributions from the editors, Wolfram Hartman, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes, as well as Michel Bollig, Jan Bart Gewald, Robert Gordon, Brent Harris, Paul Landau, Rick Rohde, Margo Timm and Marion Wallace.


A Private Life

A Private Life

Author: Ran Chen

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2004-05-12

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0231506910

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From one of China's most celebrated contemporary novelists comes this riveting tale of a young woman's emotional and sexual awakening. Set in the turbulent decades of the Cultural Revolution and the Tian'anmen Square incident, A Private Life exposes the complex and fantastical inner life of a young woman growing up during a time of intense social and political upheaval. At the age of twenty-six, Ni Niuniu has come to accept pain and loss. She has suffered the death of her mother and a close friend and neighbor, Mrs. Ho. She has long been estranged from her tyrannical father, while her boyfriend—a brilliant and handsome poet named Yin Nan—was forced to flee the country. She has survived a disturbing affair with a former teacher, a mental breakdown that left her in a mental institution for two years, and a stray bullet that tore through the flesh of her left leg. Now living in complete seclusion, Niuniu shuns a world that seems incapable of accepting her and instead spends her days wandering in vivid, dreamlike reveries where her fractured recollections and wild fantasies merge with her inescapable feelings of melancholy and loneliness. Yet this eccentric young woman—caught between the disappearing traditions of the past and a modernizing Beijing, a flood of memories and an unknowable future, her chosen solitude and her irrepressible longing—discovers strength and independence through writing, which transforms her flight from the hypocrisy of urban life into a journey of self-realization and rebirth. First published in 1996 to widespread critical acclaim, Chen Ran's controversial debut novel is a lyrical meditation on memory, sexuality, femininity, and the often arbitrary distinctions between madness and sanity, alienation and belonging, nature and society. As Chen leads the reader deep into the psyche of Ni Niuniu—into her innermost secrets and sexual desires—the borders separating narrator and protagonist, writer and subject dissolve, exposing the shared aspects of human existence that transcend geographical and cultural differences.


The Eternal Audience of One

The Eternal Audience of One

Author: Rémy Ngamije

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-06-14

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1982164433

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"Reminiscent of Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon, this "gorgeous, wildly funny and, above all, profoundly moving and humane" (Peter Orner, author of Am I Alone Here) coming-of-age tale follows a young man who is forced to flee his homeland of Rwanda during the Civil War and make sense of his reality"--