Picturing South Africa : an exploration of ekphrasis in post-apartheid fiction

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South Africa's period of transition has given rise to new forms of cultural and artistic production, which bothspeak to and reflect the nation's changing social, political and ethical climate. This dissertation explores anarrative form which remains relatively uncharted in current critical conversations about post-apartheidfiction, namely ekphrasis, or the textual re-presentation of visual art. Although ekphrastic narration can betraced to the Classical antiquity, it has also emerged in seminal post-1994 texts, including Zakes Mda's TheMadonna of Excelsior (2002), Patricia Schonstein's Skyline (2000) and Ivan Vladislavić's The Exploded View(2004). Consequently, this study considers how the authors have used ekphrasis to represent the 'new' SouthAfrica, as it undergoes the precarious process of transformation.Beginning with an analysis of Mda's novel, I survey how the author employs pre-existing artworks createdby the Flemish Expressionist painter-priest, Frans Claerhout, as a means of performatively rewriting thenation's troubled past, and engaging with the contemporary context of national reinvention. Specifically, Iconsider how the transliteration of these images serves to re-imagine the identities of black women publiclyshamed and privately violated under apartheid's hegemonic ideologies. In so doing, I foreground howClaerhout's mystical protest paintings become central to the author's own narrative project of recovery,restoration and remembrance. Building on this, the chapter thereafter explores how the artworks also providerich imaginative templates which enable Mda's narrative to challenge the social fractures and dissonances ofthe post-1994 transitional period. Focusing on the artist's hybridised formal aesthetic, I suggest that theekphrasised paintings model the conditions for psychic and social transformation; consequently, theirpresence signals a need for malleability, improvisation and renewal, in order to rework the availablecategories of South African identity, and the broader socio-cultural landscape.Schonstein's Skyline, in turn, incorporates notional ekphrasis, or imaginary visual artwork, to represent SouthAfrica's new social order based on the principles of Ubuntu. Chapter Three therefore considers how theekphrastic pieces unsettle homogeneous paradigms of nationality, and serve to envision an inclusive,hospitable and multicultural public home-space. Diverging from Mda's and Schonstein's use of ekphrasis as apositive imperative toward transformation, however, Vladislavić's text offers a despairing portrayal ofcontemporary South African life. Accordingly, my final chapter explores how the fictional artworksaccentuate the shortcomings of our democracy, and reinvigorate an awareness of the marginalised livesrendered invisible within the country's increasingly globalised and culturally opaque urban spaces.These ekphrastic readings illustrate, in various ways, how South African authors have specifically drawn onthe visual arts to represent the post-apartheid condition in their own works, as the nation attempts to reinventitself in the wake of a traumatic past. Thus, the study foregrounds how this synthesis of literary and visual art lends itself to opening new or alternative dialogues, critical frameworks and self-reflective spaces incontemporary transitional narratives, and indeed, within the present historical moment.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University