‘In defence of chick-lit’: refashioning feminine subjectivities in Ugandan and South African contemporary women’s writing
- Authors: Spencer, Lynda G
- Date: 2019
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/138736 , vital:37669 , DOI: 10.1177/1464700119831544
- Description: Ugandan and South African contemporary women’s narratives reflect on the rapid pace of change in the social lives of women in two countries that are contending with the aftermath of conflict and violence. This article will interrogate how contemporary women writers such as Goretti Kyomuhendo (Whispers from Vera), Zukiswa Wanner (The Madams and Behind Every Successful Man) and Cynthia Jele (Happiness is a Four-Letter Word) are embracing chick-lit as a form of writing, while simultaneously short-circuiting this genre to create an experimental form that allows them to reflect on the realities of women and engage with the contradictions, complexities and ambiguities of contemporary feminine subjectivities.
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- Date Issued: 2019
Gender and popular imaginaries in Africa:
- Authors: Spencer, Lynda G , Ligaga, Dina , Musila, Grace
- Date: 2018
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/138860 , vital:37679 , DOI: 10.1080/10130950.2018.1526467
- Description: If we accept that many Africans’ social perceptions on a range of questions, including gender, are shaped by popular cultural productions which retain a keen pulse on the everyday, then it is important to reflect on the interface between gender and popular imaginaries. The debate on the definition of the ‘popular’ remains an open one with multiple interpretations and categories. This contestation in itself gestures towards popular culture’s inclination for ambiguity and slipperiness. As Karin Barber (2018:13) reminds us, the popular constitutes “expressive forms that are constantly emergent, ephemeral, embedded in daily life, given to extraordinary bursts of activity and rapid transformation”. For George Ogola, popular cultural forms “engage with and subject the polity to constant critique through informal but widely recognised forms of censure” (2017:2). In this special issue, we use popular imaginaries to mean the range of cultural productions, platforms, and interactions between consumers and producers - which are often interchangeable - that capture the material, the affective, as inflected and refracted in different texts, contexts and platforms.
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- Date Issued: 2018
“Having it all”?’: ”?:(re) examining conspicuous consumption and pernicious masculinities in South African chick-lit
- Authors: Spencer, Lynda G
- Date: 2018
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/138798 , vital:37673 , https://0-hdl.handle.net.wam.seals.ac.za/10520/EJC-13f7e3010
- Description: A number of South African women writers have taken up chick-lit as a form of writing that enables them to reflect on the experiences of the modern woman in post-apartheid South Africa. The protagonists portrayed in chick-lit narratives occupy ambiguous positions: they may have benefitted from feminist politics, which has opened new possibilities for them; however, underlying this emancipation is an implicit collusion with patriarchy. Chick-lit refuses to offer a clear-cut construct of women’s lives; instead, it suggests a problematic terrain that is inherently ambiguous and contradictory, simultaneously empowering and oppressing women. It depicts a realistic world where contemporary women critique patriarchy and attempt to break free of its stranglehold by finding new methods of self-realisation. In this article, I argue that as a genre chick-lit offers a space of recognition and reflection for women who share a similar world view and emotional knowledge that stems from a common historical experience.
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- Date Issued: 2018
Roundtable review: cold case: the elusive story of Julie Ward's murder
- Authors: Spencer, Lynda G
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/138894 , vital:37683 , https://doi.org/10.1080/23277408.2017.1362199
- Description: A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder by Grace Ahingila Musila is an extraordinary, captivating, thought-provoking and chilling account of the unsolved murder of Julie Ward. Musila points out that this book does not set out to reveal who murdered Julie Ward. Instead, as an academic, she is interested in examining the intertextual process between the rumours around this cold case and the evidence available in various published accounts, such as books, newspapers and court judgements.
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- Date Issued: 2017
“Not the story you wanted to hear": reading chick-lit in JM Coetzee’s Summertime
- Authors: Moonsamy, Nedine , Spencer, Lynda G
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/138915 , vital:37685 , https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2017.1390878
- Description: J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime has been widely explored – both for its controversy and merits – as engaging in “acts of genre” where the inscription of an autobiographical narrative simultaneously serves as a metatextual and ideological critique of its form. Similarly, this article is intrigued by generic instability, but our terrain lies further afield, exploring how the narrative lapses from the lofty ideals of romance to the baser “truth” of chick-lit. In Summertime, all the female characters besmirch Mr. Vincent, the biographer, for wanting to cast John Coetzee in the role of a romantic hero. Yet, their resistance results in a series of romantic failures which then situates Summertime in the generic ambit of chick-lit. In embodying a spirit that is as playful as it is critical, we suggest that Coetzee offers an opportunity to cast aside a literary critical tradition of suspicion and, in doing so, passes critical comment on how we approach a popular genre like chick-lit.
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- Date Issued: 2017
‘Abagyenda bareeba. Those who Travel, See’: Home, Migration and the Maternal Bond in Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish
- Authors: Spencer, Lynda G
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/139017 , vital:37696 , https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2016.1182319
- Description: Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish explores the migratory experiences of the main narrator-focalizer, Christine Mugisha, as she travels from Uganda to the United States of America. Although the analyses of home, exile, and migration by writers like Edward Said and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza tend to be ungendered; Baingana seems to elaborate on these concerns by reflecting on the gendered experience of travel. As Carole Boyce Davies has argued, the act of travelling and migration opens up new spaces and possibilities for black women writers as they come into contact with multiple places and cultures. In their encounters with migration, black women are able to negotiate and re-negotiate their identities. This article focuses on how Tropical Fish, interrogates complex, contradictory, ambiguous and often conflicted questions of home and migration with their concomitant issues of belonging and alienation/ estrangement and how they are intimately tied to the maternal bond.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Visible Wars and Invisible Women: interrogating women's roles during wartime in Goretti Kyomuhendo's Waiting: a novel of Uganda at war
- Authors: Spencer, Lynda G
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/138880 , vital:37682 , https://0-hdl.handle.net.wam.seals.ac.za/10520/EJC177790
- Description: Goretti Kyomuhendo's Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War explores the atrocities that ordinary people experience during wartime by placing emphasis on the private suffering and humiliation inflicted on women in the domestic space of the home. This article argues that even if women do not actively feature on the battleground, they are still inadvertently drawn into the war, which has an adverse impact on their lives. Kyomuhendo draws on the experiences of different female characters to problematize the inherently ambiguous symbolic image of the mother, and shows that the violence performed on women's bodies is a result of the interplay between two hegemonic forces, patriarchal authority and state power.
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- Date Issued: 2015
'On the fringes of society’ and ‘out of the closest’: a response to ‘Sexual/Textual Politics
- Authors: Spencer, Lynda G
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/139034 , vital:37698 , https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2014.983324
- Description: Gibson Ncube’s ‘Sexual/Textual Politics: Rethinking gender and sexuality in gay Moroccan literature’ focuses on an emerging body of gay literature that is developing within the larger framework of Moroccan literature. Ncube attempts to illustrate how the contemporary narratives of Rachid O. and Abdellah Taïa portray the quotidian experiences of minority sexualities who strive to exist in the hegemonic heteropatriarchies of Moroccan societies. These narratives challenge and destabilise the heteronormative ideals of Arab-Muslim communities and endeavour to offer alternative ways of thinking about marginalised sexualities in the public space. This analysis draws on the feminist underpinnings of Maria Pia Lara to argue that private gay narratives have the potential to re-imagine the public domain.
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- Date Issued: 2014