Introduction: South African and African Modernism – Beyond a Century, Beyond the Provisional

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Acknowledgement

I am deeply grateful to Michael Titlestad’s generous assistance over the last 18 months: I hope this special issue rewards his trust, patience and sharp eye in some small measure. My thanks also to the contributors for their intellectual energy and professionalism throughout the project. A final debt of thanks is owed to the anonymous reviewers and the staff at Taylor & Francis.

Notes

1 Voorslag means ‘whiplash’. In the editorial preface to the first volume, Maurice Webb promised that Voorslag ‘will … keep in contact with contemporary thought in Europe and America’ (in Gardner and Chapman, Voorslag 1, 3).

2 Particularly relevant in this regard is the AHRC-funded ‘South African Modernism Research Project: 1880–2020,’ led by Jade Munslow Ong.

3 For an excellent counter-narrative about artistic autonomy as a means rather than a bar for the self-realization of African and other world modernisms, see Peter J. Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics.

4 In his ‘Little Review Calendar’, Ezra Pound designated 1922 as Year 1 of a post-Christian era.

5 During its inaugural decade in the 1960s, English Studies in Africa carried articles on Eliot, Faulkner, Joyce, Foster, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Lawrence, Mann, and Yeats. This focus on the ‘men of 1914’ carried into the 1970s, though there is a gradual decline in contributions on modernism after 1980.

6 Galgut remarks in an interview with Mark Gevisser: ‘the roots of the book lie in modernism … . [M]ost of the people celebrated as the great modernist writers were the writers that spoke most loudly and clearly to me when my writing consciousness was being shaped.’ Njabulu Ndebele recounts his experimentation with Joycean stream of consciousness in an interview with Bernth Lindfors (230).