A dialectical literary canon?

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a literary canon founded on dialectical principles, using South Africa as our historical example. In order to do so, we first trace the development of dialectical thought, moving from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Karl Marx to Steve Biko; from Eurocentrism to class consciousness to Black Consciousness. Second, we plot the influence of Hegel and Marx as well as Sartre and Fanon on Biko’s elaboration of dialectics for the Black Consciousness Movement. Third, and in response to Marxist critiques of Black Consciousness, we register the moment of class consciousness that underpins Biko’s politics, especially his critique of institutions. Finally, and based on our exposition of Biko’s reading of Hegel via Marx and Sartre, we suggest a ‘polythetic’ dialectic to rework the post-Apartheid literary canon and to accommodate intersectional complexity within it. The canon, in our model, does not emerge from a settled consensus, but instead re-coalesces on every occasion that it is submitted to contestation or is approached via conflicts in the social. A transitive or dialectical canon might variously retain or negate institutionally-privileged texts while still making them momentarily visible via the ‘popular’ traditions of struggle that contest institutional privilege.

KEYWORDS:

• dialectics
• literary canon
• Steve Biko
• Marx
• Hegel
• Sartre
• Black Consciousness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel suggests that: ‘Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as this may be, their lot in their own land is even worse, since there a slavery quite as absolute exists; for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man has not yet attained a consciousness of his freedom, and consequently sinks down to a mere Thing – an object of no value’ (Hegel, 1837/2001, p. 113).

2. In The Invention of Africa (Mudimbe, 1988), V. Y. Mudimbe offers a detailed account of Herodotus’ influence on later writings about Africa (see Mudimbe, 1988, pp. 82–94).

3. Hegel also invokes the chain that binds them as an analogy for self-consciousness (see Hegel, 1807/1977, p.116).

4. Macran (1929) submits that misunderstandings circulating around Hegel’s absolutes as end-points originate with scholars’ misattribution of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis to Hegel.

5. Kimberlé Crenshaw coins ‘intersectionality’ to account for the ways in which black women’s marginalisation, exploitation and oppression – their ‘intersectional experience” – “is greater than the sum of racism and sexism’ (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 140). The legal system, she argues, currently prioritises either the category of race or gender as a determining factor, and continually focuses on class-privileged black people during court proceedings about discrimination. Though our use of intersectionality here accounts for subject-constitutions beyond the black, female (and working-class) subject, it remains in keeping with Crenshaw’s sense that single ontological categories cannot account for the complexity of embodied experience.

6. As Biko’s friend, Barney Pityana, remembers: ‘He laid his hands on some philosophical writings like Jean-Paul Sartre and made ready use of some philosophical concepts like syllogism in logic and dialectical materialism in Marxist political thought. All this by a young medical student’ (2002, unpaginated).

7. We are grateful to Aurelie Journo for bringing to our attention the influence of Sartre on Biko.

8. In fact, in a rare interview with German television that is widely available online, Biko recognizes that Black Consciousness will be superseded by socialist economics: ‘We believe it is the duty of the vanguard political movement which brings about change to educate people’s outlooks. I mean in the same way in which blacks have never lived in a socialist economic system, they have got to learn to live in one. In the same way that they have always lived in a racially-divided society, they have got to learn to live in a non-racial society. They have got many things to learn. And all this must be brought to them by the vanguard movement which is leading the revolution’ (Biko Foundation, 2011). The flaw in Biko’s thought here is that a vanguard political movement should initiate class consciousness in the masses, but Biko’s presumptions about how non-racial class consciousness may be taught do not invalidate his understanding that Black Consciousness only existed so that it might one day be replaced by socialist economics.

9. For a recent article linking Soweto Poetry to diaspora, see Nicholls (2018).

10. Booysen identifies Biko’s influence on #RhodesMustFall (2016, p. 34), and Everatt sees his thought at work in the #FeesMustFall movement (2016, p. 135). Mpofu-Walsh asserts the influence of Black Consciousness in ‘Must Fall’ campaigns in Euro-American universities (2016, p. 82).

11. Attwell provides the best account of this event, and the impact of Tiro’s assassination on literary culture (2005, pp. 137–140).

12. Not everyone agreed that Ravan Press empowered black South African writers. Author Miriam Tlali resented their editorial and pricing decisions around Muriel at Metropolitan. She went on to found Skotaville Publishers alongside Mothobi Mutloatse, ensuring black writers were under the control of black publishers (Le Roux, 2018).

13. One spurious rationale for retaining this separatist curriculum, was that ‘if an Africanized syllabus were allowed, the integrity of the English department would be undermined by a faculty invasion of francophone and germanophone African literature courses’ (Nicholls, 2012, pp. 135 n. 2).

14. Chapman (2016) has contemplated Soweto Poetry in relation to Biko’s dialectic and literary production in the Global North. He sees the dialectic as remaining bound in the second stage. By contrast, we see it as being always at work.

15. NGO, African Story Book hosts children’s stories in various African languages online while also allowing readers to write their own stories and to translate existing stories. Ashleigh Harris has emphasised that while such platforms have the potential to sustain endangered African languages and consecrate African-language literatures, they also exploit users’ creative labour (see Harris, 2019, pp. 10–11).

16. On Apartheid censorship’s effects on print culture, reading and other forms of literary culture (e.g., oral literatures/poetry) in South Africa, see Matteau-Matsha (2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hayley G. Toth

Hayley G. Toth recently gained her PhD at the University of Leeds. Her research is interested in the global histories of reading and print culture. She has articles forthcoming with Interventions and Comparative Critical Studies, and recently co-hosted a public lecture by Sara Ahmed as part of the Quilting Points seminar series and reading group based at the University of Leeds.

Brendon Nicholls

Brendon Nicholls is Acting Director of Leeds University Centre for African Studies and is author of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading (Ashgate) and Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (Routledge). He has published in Modern Fiction Studies, Research in African Literatures, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies. He has articles forthcoming in Cultural Critique and New Formations.