Ungovernable Women of Southern AfricaThe Non-conformist Writing of Olive Schreiner, Noni Jabavu, and Bessie Head
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Lesley Cowling [1] ; Shelley Roberts [1]
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[1] University of the Witwatersrand
University of the Witwatersrand
City of Johannesburg, Sudáfrica
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- Localización: The Routledge Companion to World Literary Journalism / John S. Bak (ed. lit.), Bill Reynolds (ed. lit.), 2023, ISBN 978-0-367-35524-1, págs. 59-73
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
From the late 1800s to the mid-twentieth century, three women writers emerged from Southern Africa to become global voices. Between them, Olive Schreiner (born in 1855), Noni Jabavu (1919), and Bessie Head (1937) lived through colonialism, war, apartheid, and independence. Despite being from different race groups, communities, and generations, they shared a journalistic orientation in drawing from local conditions to write for larger publics. This chapter argues that, although they wrote in a range of genres, all three used key tactics of literary journalism. These included immersion in community and environment, personal experience, close attention to detail, and characterization. They chronicled the lives, conditions, and humanity of Southern African inhabitants from marginalized, settler, and Indigenous communities at a time when colonial or apartheid narratives erased them from view. In doing so, they countered imperial discourses of an empty land of largely primitive inhabitants, and inaugurated discussions about race, nation, and culture. Schreiner, Jabavu, and Head also offered alternative accounts of women’s experience, expressing a powerful non-conformism in their writings and in their lives, and demonstrating tenacious independence of thought in times of social conservatism.
