The Cambridge History of South African Literature is an accomplishment. From the outset, its editors, David Attwell and Derek Attridge, announce its ambitions of being the ‘most fully representative collection of historical scholarship on the country's extensive literary production yet to have been published’ (p. 12). And, indeed, it is perhaps the most comprehensive anthology of writing about South African literatures yet, including 39 essays spanning over five centuries of the nation's literary history. The essays are authored by leading scholars, among them Laura Chrisman, Rita Barnard, Leon de Kock, Andrew van der Vlies, Russell H. Kaschula, Malvern van Wijk Smith, and Elleke Boehmer.
Such an ambitious project must necessarily employ a loose, unconstraining notion of literature in South Africa, recognizing the violence that a national narrative of literary production is likely to commit. Attwell and Attridge thus accept Andries Oliphant's definition of South African literature as ‘consisting of all the literatures in the languages spoken within the borders of South Africa as specified in the Constitution of 1996’ (pp. 9–10). How to achieve an inclusive analysis of such a vast swathe of literary production is another question altogether, and the text employs a number of strategies to do so.
Perhaps most importantly, the anthology does not evade or whitewash differences in its pursuit of unity. While recognizing the presence of a national narrative or mythology and a unifying history, the text maintains that this only means that ‘South Africans generally understand what they disagree about’ (p. 5). The text thus points to the histories that make a shared conversation about South African literatures possible, even if that conversation must necessarily be a rambunctious one full of disagreements.
The text succeeds largely in capturing these disagreements as well as intersections because it is attentive to the complexity of South Africa's literary heritage. The reader is introduced to a multifaceted array of literatures including indigenous folk tales, praise poetry, and black and European writing in English and Afrikaans. Importantly, most authors do not categorize these different narrative genres into autonomous domains, recognizing how different narrative traditions, both indigenous and European, influence, infiltrate, challenge, or even ignore each other. As the editors note, such a recognition demands a multilingual approach, for ‘communally defined traditions do travel across the language barriers in South Africa: biblical allegory finds its way into African nationalist historical fiction; Shakespearean tragedy shows up in radio drama in isiZulu; praise poetry migrates into imperial romance; oral tales migrate into modernist short stories; the Anglo-American lyric enters Soweto poetry etc.’ Multilingual in its attention, the anthology ‘takes the view that the story of each of the country's literatures appears in a different light when viewed in the context of others’ (p. 4).
Linked to this strategy is the ceding of authorship to a collective. For example, Leon de Kock's wonderful essay, ‘Questions of translation’, explores a rich intertextuality in which multiple authors produce texts within multiple cultural contexts. More than one essay shows that multicultural influence is unmistakable in both generic and rhetorical terms, pointing to how authors trade literary forms and, importantly, to how indigenous literary forms influence European literatures. The anthology provides a rich understanding of a shared literary system that is bigger than the sum of its unique yet intersecting parts. This recognition of multiple authors working within numerous genres and drawing on various cross-cultural influences illuminates the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial connections that make up South African modernity. The text does not conceptualize these connections merely as abstractions, vividly locating them in the mission classroom, colonial kitchen, political meeting, frontier courtroom, shebeen, apartheid jail, radio studio, or suburban writers' group. See, for instance, Daniel Roux's wonderful essay on prisons in the apartheid-era literary imagination.
The text's structure performs the complexities of multiple, intersecting temporalites and modernities. For one, it avoids forming a single developmental narrative. The text's chronological mid-sections are bookended by two segments that range across historical periods in broad comparative scope. The first on oral texts is particularly illuminating, bringing indigenous African oratures into conversation with European literary production. This is a sphere that is often overlooked or analyzed solely in terms of how European missionaries transformed oral production. The final section comparatively considers themes such as women's writing, the history of the book, and diasporic connections. The four chronological parts, titled ‘Exploration, early modernity and enlightenment at the Cape, 1488–1820’, ‘Empire, resistance and national beginnings, 1820–1910’, ‘Modernism and transnational culture, 1910–1948’, and ‘Apartheid and its aftermath, 1948 to the present’ allow for particular foci as well as overlaps and cross-period connections.
Ambitiously conceptualized and wonderfully realized, The Cambridge History of South African Literature provides a unique and valuable addition to the field of scholarship on South African literatures.
