Acknowledgements
Zakes Mda
Why ‘Dance of Life’ ?
Towards an ethics of performance
From play-writing to novel-writing
Written texts and oral storytelling
Social realism or magic realism?
Vision/focalisation
Place/setting/landscape
Maps, writers, readers and communities under apartheid
From pre- to post-apartheid South Africa
What is a ‘South African’ readership?
From ‘interstitial’ space to the space of novel-writing
Refiguring temporality
Hybridity as postcolonial strategy
Mda’s intertexts
Finally…
Introduction: Why Bakhtin?
The social realism of Ways of Dying
Heteroglossia and states of transition
‘That stuck-up bitch’ Noria
Carnival, grotesque realism, degradation
‘Laughing truth’ and the speaking voice
Community and agency in The Heart of Redness andJoseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Shared terrain
Salient contrasts
Mda in the classroom: The Heart of Redness
Finally…
Duplicity, plagiarism or transformation? Zakes Mda’s The Heart ofRedness and Jeff Peires’ The Dead Will Arise
Continuities: oral storytelling
Reversing ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilisation’
Focalisation
Reconceptualising Believers and Unbelievers
Reading The Dead Will Arise and The Heart of Redness throughAttridge’s The Singularity of Literature
Introduction
In the Trinity’s studio
Ecphrasis: turning paintings into fiction
Women, donkeys, sunflowers
Appropriating the Madonna motif
Introduction
She Plays with the Darkness
The Madonna of Excelsior
Cion
The concept of diaspora
Narrating identity: South Africa and the United States
Narrating identity through the narratives of the past
Performing identity
Toloki takes over from the Sciolist
Finally…
Chapter Seven: ‘Our Only Physical and Psychic Home’
An eco-criticism for South Africa
Dismantling dualisms
The sympathetic imagination/Becoming animal
Storytelling
Storytelling as political activism
The sensorium of storytelling
Stories’ ‘emotional hue’
Towards an ecological sublime
Rethinking language
Finally…
Stereotypes and formulae
Soweto and cookery
‘Camera eye’ narration: ideological considerations
Riding the tiger
Black Diamond and Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia
Finally…
Some Concluding Thoughts
Bibliography
Index