Creative Writing: Collection of connected short stories set in both South Africa and Scotland
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Strathclyde
Department Name: English
Abstract
The proposed work is a book of short stories connected by their dual settings in Scotland and South Africa. The significant Scottish colonial influence on South African culture allows for my contemporary characters travelling between the two locations to interact in terms of both difference and commonalities. Thus, whilst referencing colonial history, I hope at the same time to depart from the focus on alterity that dominates the representation of postcolonial relations. This approach aims to uncover and undermine the perceived one-sidedness of influence.
The stories are linked through Glasgow's recently restored Doulton Fountain (1888); the life and work of Scottish 1820 settler, Thomas Pringle, father of South African poetry and activist for the freedom of the press issues of migration, transculturation, intersubjectivity, and miscegenation. My sources include a public sculpture representing the colony of South Africa in; David Goldblatt's The Structure of Things Then (1998) which comprises photographs of monuments, memorials and architectural structures in South Africa; and actual monuments to settlement in South Africa. It is from these structures and public sculptures that stories are extrapolated: I construct genealogies and personal histories that link with historical events, monuments, or literary histories, so that the discrete short stories form a coherent work of fiction. Settings shift between Scotland and South Africa, and the narratives, travelling between the historical and the contemporary, rely on the above as intertexts that historicise social interactions.
In constructing socio-political histories for characters who live between two cultures and who experience the metropolitan world from a nuanced, transcultural perspective, I also consider the condition of miscegenation. Glasgow's Daulton fountain represents colonial woman as racially mixed, but whilst it signified shame and denial in the colony itself, missgenation is here presented matter-of-factly, as evidence of indigenisation, with the woman's subjectivity inscribed in h, daze. Through the animation of such sculpted figures I hope to revise the way in which miscegenation is routinely depicted as an alienated condition in postcolonial writing. The physicality of sculptural sources allows me to consider racial subjectivity in terms of the body's posture and its occupation of space.
The literary context in South Africa is Andre Brink's contemporary novels that re-present colonial history, but in terms of an undifferentiated 'English' culture, Sarah Gertrude Millin's early twentieth century fictions about tainted blood, and Pringle's poetry. The project also arises from my own earlier works: the novel, Playing in the Light (2006), references travel between Cape Town and Glasgow; a critical essay, 'Arthur Norlje: reading, writing and biography' (2006), stages some of the problems of fictionalising a literary-historical figure; and 'Setting, lntertextuality and the Resurrection of the Postcolonial Author' (2005) discusses the difficulty of inserting fictional immigrant figures into an alien setting. The stories are critically informed by, amongst others, Kaja Silverman's concept of subjectivity in terms of the postural, Mieke Bal's work on focalization and the narrativisation of the visual, as well as Mary Louise Pratt's study of civility and transculturation.
I have a contract for the book of short stories with Random House, South Africa.
The stories are linked through Glasgow's recently restored Doulton Fountain (1888); the life and work of Scottish 1820 settler, Thomas Pringle, father of South African poetry and activist for the freedom of the press issues of migration, transculturation, intersubjectivity, and miscegenation. My sources include a public sculpture representing the colony of South Africa in; David Goldblatt's The Structure of Things Then (1998) which comprises photographs of monuments, memorials and architectural structures in South Africa; and actual monuments to settlement in South Africa. It is from these structures and public sculptures that stories are extrapolated: I construct genealogies and personal histories that link with historical events, monuments, or literary histories, so that the discrete short stories form a coherent work of fiction. Settings shift between Scotland and South Africa, and the narratives, travelling between the historical and the contemporary, rely on the above as intertexts that historicise social interactions.
In constructing socio-political histories for characters who live between two cultures and who experience the metropolitan world from a nuanced, transcultural perspective, I also consider the condition of miscegenation. Glasgow's Daulton fountain represents colonial woman as racially mixed, but whilst it signified shame and denial in the colony itself, missgenation is here presented matter-of-factly, as evidence of indigenisation, with the woman's subjectivity inscribed in h, daze. Through the animation of such sculpted figures I hope to revise the way in which miscegenation is routinely depicted as an alienated condition in postcolonial writing. The physicality of sculptural sources allows me to consider racial subjectivity in terms of the body's posture and its occupation of space.
The literary context in South Africa is Andre Brink's contemporary novels that re-present colonial history, but in terms of an undifferentiated 'English' culture, Sarah Gertrude Millin's early twentieth century fictions about tainted blood, and Pringle's poetry. The project also arises from my own earlier works: the novel, Playing in the Light (2006), references travel between Cape Town and Glasgow; a critical essay, 'Arthur Norlje: reading, writing and biography' (2006), stages some of the problems of fictionalising a literary-historical figure; and 'Setting, lntertextuality and the Resurrection of the Postcolonial Author' (2005) discusses the difficulty of inserting fictional immigrant figures into an alien setting. The stories are critically informed by, amongst others, Kaja Silverman's concept of subjectivity in terms of the postural, Mieke Bal's work on focalization and the narrativisation of the visual, as well as Mary Louise Pratt's study of civility and transculturation.
I have a contract for the book of short stories with Random House, South Africa.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Zoe Wicomb (Principal Investigator) |