Oral Literature in South Africa: 20 Years On

Abstract

I offer a retrospective on the field of orality and performance studies in South Africa from the perspective of 2016, assessing what has been achieved, what may have happened inadvertently or worryingly, what some of the significant implications have been, what remain challenges, and how we may think of, or rethink, orality and performance studies in a present and future that are changing at almost inconceivable pace.

Keywords:

• orality
• performance
• oral literature
• literary theory
• criticism
• literary history

Notes on Contributor

Duncan Brown is Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of the Western Cape, a fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, and a fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His publications include Voicing the Text: South African Oral Poetry and Performance and Are Trout South African? Stories of Fish, People and Places.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. By far the majority of these publications are from Wits University Press, and we should acknowledge the significant role of this publisher in establishing and promoting this field of study.

2. In my later work on rap I specifically tried to account for the genre’s ‘pleasure’ and ‘play’ alongside its real engagement with social, political, and economic issues (Brown 2006: 153–86).