This ‘general’ issue covers a spectrum of authors and works. Subtitled ‘Text and Reception in Southern Africa’, Current Writing is also a journal of SAACLALS (the Southern African Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies). Hence, a commitment also to wider, postcolonial concerns.
An article on literature of the Nigerian Civil War – the author resides in Pakistan – sits alongside reflections by an author in the UAE on J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Jesus trilogy’, a trilogy set in a Spanish-speaking country (in South America?) by a Nobel laureate from South Africa, who now lives in Australia. Issues of climate change – a global concern – are considered in novels from outside Africa while an interview with an academic and sculptor on his conceptual art exhibition enters the terrain of postcolonial literary theory.
Three books of literary and cultural criticism, reviewed by a South African-based academic, are written by three authors who are not South African. (One is from Malawi.) An article on a novel set in Italy and other North Atlantic locations is written by a South African and discussed by a South African, both of whom live in Australia. A white South African comments on a work by a South African of Muslim descent while two South Africans – one of South African Indian descent, the other of Dutch/Afrikaans descent – compare Muslim courtship conventions in South Africa and Canada with courtship conventions in Jane Austen’s fiction.
I, of Scottish ancestry – like both my parents, born in South Africa – know more of South African literature than of Scottish literature. Of no consequence, really, but to add to the wonderful multicultural medley of this issue.
I have arranged the articles simply in the alphabetical order of their contributors.
Submissions are invited for Current Writing 2 (2023) by April 2023 and for the two issues of the journal in 2024 (submissions by October 2023 and April 2024, respectively).
Editor-in-Chief