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LITERaTURE
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As the University of Johannesburg has transformed and decolonised its curriculum, so too has its literary prize for English which reflects these shifts in institutional values.
By Ronit Frenkel
I
n a global cultural economy marked by uneven power relations between and within areas and nations, the authority associated with prestigious awards reflects broader concerns. Literary awards in general open questions around the value of literary texts because the assignation of value is not intrinsic, but contingent on historical construction and subjective taste. The patterns across nominated texts in literary awards therefore reveal a sort of cultural history of place, power and its current manifestations.The Booker Prize is perhaps the best known and most prestigious of the English-language literary prizes.
The recipient of this prize enters the realm of literary stardom and the sale of his or her book soars. The prevalence of Indian and South African writers among the short-listed texts necessitates a closer examination of the politics that undergirds the Booker and its relationship to these locales.
The University of Johannesburg started an English literary prize in 2006 and it has steadily gained a reputation as a prestigious intellectual prize for South African writing. The prevalence of historical bias in the cultural history of the Booker necessitates a closer examination of the politics that undergirds this much newer local award. I have chosen to discuss the Booker in relation to the University of Johannesburg’s literary prize in English because of the prominence and longevity of the Booker, thereby making it a useful construct to help us think through the dynamics of other literary awards.
Hugh Eakin (in Huggan 1997, p.412- 413) argues that the Booker, despite its multi-cultural consciousness, has done less to further the development of non-Western literatures than it has to encourage the commercialisation of what he calls ‘commodity exoticism’
in Western literary markets. The consumption of an exoticised other in the West, in the form of postcolonial literary texts, can be partly seen in the popularity of postcolonial fictions in the over developed world. Indian and South African writers have dominated the list of Booker short-listed texts from the postcolonial world with three
THE POLITICS OF LITERaRY PRIzES
An odd analytical pairing
of the Booker prize and the
University of Johannesburg’s
prize for writing in English
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V o l u m e 7 9 / 2 0 1 9 South African and five Indian writers
being nominated for the award – far in excess of any other postcolonial literatures. In addition, the only writer to win the Booker twice is South Africa’s J M Coetzee; while the award given in 1993 for the “Best of Twenty Five Years of the Booker Prize”
went to India’s Salman Rushdie for Midnight’s Children. The centrality of India and South Africa in Britain’s colonial past, with both countries designated as crucial colonial
“possessions” in their respective regions, points towards a relationship between this colonial past and the dynamics around Booker nominated texts from these countries.
India and South Africa were both strategic British colonial holdings, with India supplying sought after spices and other raw materials, and South Africa offering a way station for ships, before its diamonds and rich mineral holdings were discovered. Edward Said’s (1979) classic Orientalism has extensively covered the fascination with the
‘Orient’ in European cultural thought and, in particular, has examined how India became the epitome of Orientalist representations in Britain.
Gauri Viswanathan’s (1989) work has shown how standardised English was formed in India, rather than in England, through the colonial process. Similarly, Laura Chrisman (2000) has examined how representations of South Africa became central in creating a modern imperial identity in Britain. Renato Rosaldo’s (1989) idea of ‘imperialist nostalgia’ applied these representations to British ideas of its colonial past in the present. South Africa and India are then central in British cultural history as these various studies illustrate. This centrality in British cultural history continues, in modified form in the present, through the cultural history established by the Booker prize.
The quality of Booker prize nominated texts is not disputed here, but is rather considered in terms of a cultural political economy that values particular things from particular places. Graham Huggan refers to this as the “alterity industry” which
“involves the trafficking not only of culturally ‘othered’ artefacts but of the
institutional values that are brought to bear in their support” (1997, p 412). These institutional values offer a nostalgic view of imperial history and deliver India and South Africa to the modern British reader as exotic sites for consumption within a revisionist view of the past. “Marginality,”
“authenticity” and “resistance”
circulate as constructions that mark the postcolonial exotic as commodities in this market (Huggan 1997, p.412).
While Huggan’s (2001) later work discusses the privileging of colonial history in the thirty years of Booker history, the particular image of this history that is portrayed in Indian and South African nominated texts, adds an additional layer of meaning to such cultural history.
The concept of what of I am calling
‘a politics of loss’ seems to connect across nominated texts from India
and South Africa which portray a bleak postcolonial world for Western readers. As such, this article examines the theoretical underpinnings of the Booker, which can be read as articulating a ‘new’ version of the old
‘tensions of empire’ where a politics of loss is expected from Indian and South African literatures. Richard Todd’s formative study, Consuming Fictions:
The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (1996), establishes the role of the Booker in the commercialisation of English-language literatures. He traces the shift away from English literature in general, and examines how focus is rather placed on literature published in Britain (Todd 1997, p.83). The relationship between empire and the Booker prize is then well-established.
Eligibility for the award lies with literary
texts from the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Commonwealth with entries from Britain (The Booker was opened to American writers in a controversial recent move), while the original prize sponsors, Booker McConnell, are a multinational agribusiness with roots in the slave and colonial economies of Guyana.
Yet, the Booker also offers a platform to alert international readers to novels from diverse contexts. The Booker has played a large role in such exposure, while simultaneously situating Britain as a multicultural society through the language of literary awards (Todd 1996, p.83). This challenges ideas of British insularity through what Edward Said calls ‘literary worldliness’. The lines between Britishness and the rest of the world are negotiated through this award as the following quote from Moseley Merritt illustrates:
Reregistering a perennial complaint, Dalya Alberge observed in The Times that “none of the six novels contending for Britain’s most prestigious literary award [in 2000]
is set in modern Britain.” This refers both to the common complaint that novelists won’t write about contemporary life (or, if they do, prize juries won’t reward them for it) and to the anxiety about domination by non-English authors. (Merritt 2001, p. 441)
The ‘tensions of empire’ are reflected in debates around the Booker as Britain struggles to assert a new/old hegemony while retaining ideas of its cultural authenticity. How Britain or the West understands themselves and
‘the other’ is a topic that has been extensively explored. My question in this article is rather about what Booker nominated or winning texts from India and South Africa express about the dynamics of empire today. What does a politics of loss and depictions of unrelenting pathos articulate in this context? A few examples of Booker nominated texts can help to trace this pattern.
Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit are exceptionally well-crafted novels that depict postcolonial India and South Africa as places of bitterness and unrelenting historical determinism. A
LITERaTURE
The concept of what of I am calling ‘a
politics of loss’ seems to connect across nominated texts from India and South Africa
which portray a bleak postcolonial world for
Western readers.
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similar argument could be made about other Booker nominated texts such as J.M.Coetzee’s Disgrace or Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance or even Arundhati’ Roy’s The God of Small Things. Disgrace centres on disgraced academic David Lurie’s inability to synthesise his actions as a white male in post-apartheid South Africa, with the novel offering a gloomy portrayal of South Africa’s attempt to deal with the past; A Fine Balance is a novel of unrelenting pathos with its focus on the lack of options available to widows and the underclasses in Indira Gandhi’s India; The God of Small Things bleakly portrays an inter-caste love affair and how the logic that criminalises such relationships ultimately leads to incest as the extreme application of such thought. Graham Huggan (2001, p.xi) argues that while these writers have “capitalised on the ‘politico- exotic’ appeal of their novels, they have also succeeded in sustaining a critique of exoticism in their work;”
this ‘strategic exoticism’ is designed to both challenge readers and consciously profit from their expectations of what Britain’s former colonies offer in an ironic twist to this analysis. These texts communicate a particular idea of history and culture that I have termed postcolonial pathos, and are intimately caught up in the mechanisms of empire; these sites are represented as being overwhelmed by their histories and marked by the triumph of loss or instability over love or redemption.
Yet, these texts are also crafted by their postcolonial authors as a means of utilising this very same expectation of postcolonial pathos for their own ends.
The University of Johannesburg’s prize for writing in English is an annual South African literary award with a debut prize for previously unpublished writers and a main prize for South African writing. The prizes are not linked to a specific genre. This may make the evaluation more challenging in the sense that, for example, a volume of poetry, a novel and a biographical work must be measured against one another, but the idea is to open the prize to as many forms of creative writing as possible. This award is largely judged by academics and has gained a
reputation as a prestigious intellectual prize over the last thirteen years since its inception. It brings much needed publicity to the winning authors in South Africa’s rather small book sales market where selling 2000 copies of a book would make it a local bestseller.
However, in a South African context, consumption practices of texts have a different resonance and literary prizes do not automatically catapult a text or its author into literary stardom as is the case with the Booker prize. Some critics such as Corina van der Spoel (cited in Meintjies, 2015), commenting on the country’s low book sales, have controversially said that black South Africans do not buy books. While her position betrays
racist stereotyping of black people being less brainy and therefore less likely to read than others, it is also based on a lack of understanding of how poorer communities that are still racially marked in South Africa operate.
Isabel Hofmeyr’s (1994) work on orality and literacy has shown how, in the context of impoverished communities where buying a book is a luxury and where some older community members are not fluent readers, one person would purchase a book and then read aloud to a large group of people and circulate it thereafter. In effect, one book is purchased but an uncountable number of people will then ‘read’ it in some form. I am drawing on this argument
because I do not believe it is possible to account for popular books in South Africa only through conventional book sale figures. This is further complicated by e-book sales which cannot be traced by place, and are also easy to pirate and share.
The consumption figures of books can then only tell us a small part of what makes up popular texts in South Africa. Social media, new media, public discourse and the accoutrements of public culture (like when large numbers of people can be seen carrying a particular book because it has become trendy, such the phenomenon around Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia) all need to factor into an understanding of South Africa’s written literary culture.
While Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia won the University of Johannesburg’s debut literary prize for 2009, its popularity cannot be linked to the debut prize that it won as no other debut winners have had the same effect. The book was marketed well with its minimalist pink cover with only plain text on its cover but its broad appeal can, I believe, rather be connected to its iconoclastic if controversial content.
Eusebius McKaiser (2009) describes this book as follows:
What does it mean for black South Africans to remember life under apartheid with fondness?
This is the question Jacob Dlamini explores in his debut book aptly entitled Native Nostalgia…It is worth reflecting on his main claim – which will surely stimulate debate in the months ahead – that many black South Africans harbour nostalgic memories of life under Verwoerd's government.
His key premise is that life within South African townships during apartheid was rich and complex, contrary to widespread descriptions of them as mere sites of socioeconomic depravity. Life happened in the township both despite apartheid and in complex relation to apartheid. Fond recollections by blacks are not an inadvertent legitimation of an immoral political system. Of course, fear of being seen to retrospectively endorse apartheid explains why a book like Dlamini's might not have
LITERaTURE
Mda’s setting is significant in that it marks a shift in South African writing where
many writers are setting their works outside of South Africa
and entering debates on human rights from
a particular South
African experience.
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V o l u m e 7 9 / 2 0 1 9 been written before – it invites a lazy
accusation that the writer wishes apartheid had never ended.
Both Native Nostalgia and McKaiser’s reading of it point to a text that was able to articulate something anathema to the dominant narratives of the mid 2000s: Dlamini was describing ordinary life in Kathlehong during the late apartheid years in ways that reveal the resilience of Black South Africans in a complex text that is not nostalgic for an abhorrent system, but is rather nostalgic for the community that cohered in opposition to it. In a sense, Dlamini also reveals what was lost in the mid 2000s when the magic of the first government of Nelson Mandela dissipated and became the ordinary governance of the Thabo Mbeki years.
It is through Dlamini’s depiction that the idea of nostalgia also being about the present (in that something from the past that was valuable has been lost) took form for a young generation of South Africans who were coming to understand both the past and present in different ways.
Imraan Coovadia’s High-Low In Between won the Main category prize of the same year with a story about corruption in the health care sector and a portrayal of South Africa’s large diaspora in relation to notions of ‘home’. Coovadia’s text heralded the beginning of South African public cultures becoming aware of irregularities in state institutions and the criminal activity that was emerging on its margins such as the selling of human organs from poor patients at state hospitals. Both Coovadia and Dlamini reflect discourses that were not dominant at the time, but rather revealed nascent narratives that contributed to a more layered and open public discourse.
Other winners of the University of Johannesburg’s prize for writing in English highlight changing conceptions of South Africa and its relation to the world. Zakes Mda’s Rachel’s Blue (2013), for instance, does away with the stark divisions between good and bad that characterised much writing under apartheid and many post-911 American texts. Eckhard Smuts says, “One of the novel's strongest accomplishments is the ease
with which Mda has transplanted his sensitivity to such issues – and to their human impact – from the more familiar South African setting of his earlier work to the apparently fertile grounds of the American Midwest.”
The novel was written as a response to the legal situation that persists in many American states where the father of a child conceived as the result of rape can claim paternal rights. The novel is a damning critique on inequality and archaic legalities within larger debates on human rights as they relate to the poor and disenfranchised. Mda’s setting is significant in that it marks a shift in South African writing where many writers are setting their works outside of South Africa and entering debates on human rights from a particular South African experience of systemic change and the ability to overcome immoral laws. This perspective is a valuable one in that it allows South African writers to penetrate other contexts in ways that extend meaning, much like Trevor Noah’s extraordinary commentary on American public cultures of the present from his seat on The Daily Show in Los Angeles.
Other winning or nominated texts also reveal a young generation of black South African writers who are invested in imbuing present understandings with a synthesis of African traditional beliefs systems as a panacea for many contemporary psychological ills. Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home (2013), Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), and Mohale Mashigo’s The Yearning (2016), all deal with different sorts of violence and traditional healing systems as a mechanism for healing them. All the texts briefly mentioned form a pattern in The University of Johannesburg’s prize for writing in English that reflects a value on texts that articulate innovative narratives, unearth buried narratives or give voice to nascent narratives in innovative ways.
There is also, however, another pattern connected to this prize that reflects the bias of previous panels.
As this prize is chaired by the Head of the English department at the University of Johannesburg who then also chooses the panellists, the prize reflects the politics of the place. As I
have coordinated the logistics of the prize through changing administrations for most of the last thirteen years, my subjective view on these shifts comes into play in this analysis. The early years of the prize saw the dominance of white writers as prize winners, with Ivan Vladislavic and Craig Higginson both winning awards twice and therefore reflecting the entrenchment of the institutional values of the past.
As the University of Johannesburg has transformed and decolonised its curriculum, so too has its literary prize for English which reflects these shifts in institutional values. The patterns across nominated and prize winning texts in literary awards therefore reveals a sort of cultural history, making the University of Johannesburg’s prize for writing in English a good barometer of the cultural history of both the country and the institutional values of one of its foremost public universities.
While the Booker prize reveals its relationship to questions of empire and Britain’s colonial past delivering an exoticised postcolonial subject to its readers, the University of Johannesburg’s prize for writing in English reveals the pattern of decolonisation that the University has undergone as well as emerging trends in South African letters. ■
References
Hofmeyr, Isabel (1994) We Spend our Years as a Tale that is Told: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom. Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Huggan, G. 1997. ‘Prizing ‘otherness:’ A short history of the booker’ Studies in the Novel, vol. 29, no. 3, Fall pp.412 – 433.
Huggan, G. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic. Marketing the Margins Routledge, London.
McKaiser, Eusebius. “Remembering Apartheid with Fondness.” Eusebius McKaiser reviews Jacob Dlamini’s book.(https://www.politicsweb.co.za/news-and-analysis/
remembering-apartheid-with-fondness).
Meintjies, Frank (2015) ‘Sharp criticism levelled at SA’s book industry and its bias against black writing.’ Sideview, 14 June. Available at: http://narratingchange.blogspot.
co.za/2015/06/sharp-criticism-levelled-at-sas-book.html (accessed 1 March 2017).
Merritt, M. Summer 2001. ‘The Booker Prize for 2000’
Sewanee Review, vol. 109, no.3. pp. 438 – 446.
Rosaldo, R. 1989. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis Beacon Press, Boston.
Said, E.1979. Orientalism Vintage, New York.
Strongman, T. 2002. The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire Rodopi, Amsterdam.
Smuts, Eckard. “Mda in the Midwest” (2015).
Available from: http://slipnet.co.za/view/reviews/mda-in- the-midwest/
Todd, R. 1996. Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today Bloomsbury, London.
Viswanathan, G.1989. Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule in India Columbia University Press, New York.
