Summary

Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa - from the nineteenth-century writing of Tiyo Soga to Zakes Mda in the twenty-first century - to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. Attwell provides a welcome complication of the linear black literary history - literature as a reflection of the process of political emancipation - that is so often presented. He focuses on cultural transactions in a series of key moments, and argues that black writers in South Africa have used print culture to map themselves onto modernity as contemporary subjects, to negotiate, counteract, re-invent and recast their positioning within colonialism, apartheid and in the context of democracy.