Werkwinkel, 2010, vol. 5(2)
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Item Gábor Pusztai An der Grenze: Das Fremde und das Eigene, dargestellt an Werken der deutschen und der niederländischen Kolonialliteratur in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts von C.W. Koch, H. Grimm, M.H. Székely-Lulofs und W. Walraven(Department of Dutch and South African Studies, Faculty of English, 2010) Surynt, IzabelaRecenzja: Gábor Pusztai An der Grenze: Das Fremde und das Eigene, dargestellt an Werken der deutschen und der niederländischen Kolonialliteratur in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts von C.W. Koch, H. Grimm, M.H. Székely-Lulofs und W. Walraven Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang Verlag, 2007 221 pp. ISBN 978-3-631-54249-1Item Hans den Besten, Frans Hinskens & Jerzy Koch (reds) Afrikaans: Een drieluik(Department of Dutch and South African Studies, Faculty of English, 2010) Conradie, JacRecenzja: Hans den Besten, Frans Hinskens & Jerzy Koch (reds) Afrikaans: Een drieluik Amsterdam: Stichting Neerlandistiek VU Münster: Nodus Publikationen, 2009 255 pp. ISBN/EAN: 978-90-8880-010-8, 978-3-89323-758-6Item Aspects of Violence Reflected in South African Geographical Names(Department of Dutch and South African Studies, Faculty of English, 2010) Meiring, BarbaraThe toponymic landscape of any country is a window that reflects the historical, cultural, political and most social variables of society. This article is based on one aspect of society, namely violence, that is detectable in the place names of South Africa. While the country is in the process of building a nation with a diverse collection of building blocks due to the different languages and cultures present in the country, there exists a vast number of place names that directly or indirectly by association not only reflect this diversity, but have the potential to divide and obstruct efforts to obtain the social cohesion necessary to form a South African nation. However, history cannot be erased by the mere changing of a place name to another name which is more acceptable to a certain community. Aspects of violence in names reflect the ordeals and suffering of people who were exposed to wars and other forms of violence like natural disasters and environmental dangers. In this article a few examples are shown to illustrate that toponyms are not meaningless, but are rich in historical data that is often overlooked when the names of these villages, settlements, towns, historical sites, post-offices, etc. are used in everyday communication. The discussion on aspects of violence will finally be contrasted by a short discussion on aspects of peace and well-being also reflected in other South African place names.Item Twins, Albinos and Vanishing Prisoners: A Mozambican Theory of Political Power(Department of Dutch and South African Studies, Faculty of English, 2010) Granjo, PauloIn coherence with old ethnographic references, twins and albinos are still seen, in southern Mozambique, as the result and the cause of cosmic calamities. They were struck by lightning bolts inside their pregnant mothers, and they will dry the land unless they are buried under special conditions, or just ‘vanish’ from the Earth. The special conditions imposed on their lives and deaths were extrapolated, in recent decades, to depict an unexpected category of people: the political prisoners who vanished from colonial jails, or were sent by the post-indepen ence state to ‘re-education camps.’ However, this was not the case of the ‘unproductive’ urbanites who disappeared under domestic exile in the Niassa region. The beliefs about twins and albinos were used in order to express a local moral statement about political power: it is socially threatening to jeopardise the established power; but it is illicit, for a legitimate power, to take unfair decisions about the people under its responsibility.Item Violence and Complicity in J. M. Coetzee's Works(Department of Dutch and South African Studies, Faculty of English, 2010) Cichoń, Anna IzabelaThe aim of the paper is to examine J.M. Coetzee’s treatment of violence in his fiction and to trace the strategies he applies in his books. The perspective of over three decades of his writing that we now have makes it possible to discern an evolution of his representations of atrocities and his rendition of and response to the problems he has formulated in his critical essays on violence published in Doubling the Point. A recognizable feature of Coetzee’s fiction is the theme of complicity of those who are not directly involved in the actual crimes committed by others but who, on various levels, have their share in the oppression and who must cope with their sense of guilt and shame. The works discussed in the paper – Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, Age of Iron and Elizabeth Costello – do not exhaust the complexity of Coetzee’s explorations of aggressiveness but they seem to illustrate important transitions in his oeuvre. The transformations include both modulations of thematic concerns related to violence and modifications of textual devices applied by Coetzee.Item ‘The Rediscovery of the Extraordinary’: A Question of Power by Bessie Head(Department of Dutch and South African Studies, Faculty of English, 2010) Borzaga, MichelaThrough a re-reading of Bessie Head’s A Question of Power, this article aims at criticising the way trauma has been conceptualised in the West and recently appropriated by postcolonial literary studies. It argues that to be traumatised means not so much to be haunted by a traumatic event as to inhabit a whole world with its own forces and rules. Elizabeth, the main character in the novel, is not mad as has been argued by many critics: she is deeply traumatised. The apartheid system has attacked her identity in an existential way, disrupting her relation to the polis and to herself. She is doubly colonised: from the apartheid institutions outside and by the perpetrators she has internalised inside. Trauma is thus conceived as a sort of implosion, as a painful, dialectical struggle between different temporalities, multiple contradictory worlds that translate into extraordinary, spectacular phenomena both at the level of the psyche as well as of the body.Item Guns and Horses, c 1750 to c 1850: Korana – People or Raiding Hordes?(Department of Dutch and South African Studies, Faculty of English, 2010) Leśniewski, MichałThe aim of the present article is to discuss the question of identity of the Korana, one of many groups of mixed African/European culture which roamed South African Highveld during the first half of the 19th century. Among the scholars there is growing interest in frontier communities, such as Bastaards, Griquas and other Oorlam groups and the role they played in South African history and politics during the first decades of the 19th century. One of those communities were the Korana. But one of the problems the contemporary scholars have is the diversity of those communities. There were several predatory groups which roamed the Highveld: Oorlams, Bastaards, Griqua, Hartenaars, Korana and Bergenaars. They were very similar in their pedigree and shared many elements of material culture. Therefore specialists tend to define Korana by their lifestyle. But obviously such a definition is very wide, and in fact too inclusive. In this article author tries to point to other options, of creating more exact definition, of this community.