Rewriting Modernity | David Attwell

Subtitle: Studies in Black South African Literary History
Author: David Attwell
Publisher: University Of KwaZulu-Natal Press (2005)
ISBN-10: 1869140745
ISBN-13: 9781869140748
Condition: Very Good. The cover is rubbed and scratched with light wear to edges and small creases across the corners. Some scuffing along the spine. A few marks on the outside edges of the pages.
Binding: Softcover
Pages: 236
Dimensions: 23.0 x 15.0 x 1.4 cm
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by David Attwell
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Rewriting Modernity connects the black literary archive in South Africa-from the nineteenth-century writing of Tiyo Soga to Zakes Mda in the twenty-first century-to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.

Attwell provides a welcome complication of the linear black literary history-literature as a reflection of the process of political emancipation-that is so often presented. He focuses on cultural transactions in a series of key moments and argues that black writers in South Africa have used print culture to map themselves onto modernity as contemporary subjects, to negotiate, counteract, reinvent and recast their positioning within colonialism, apartheid and in the context of democracy.