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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | 'Forget maps': documenting global apartheid and creating novel cartographies in Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret |
Author: | Jayawardane, M. Neelika |
Year: | 2014 |
Periodical: | Research in African literatures |
Volume: | 45 |
Issue: | 1 |
Pages: | 1-23 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | literature novels apartheid imperialism race relations national identity |
About person: | Ishtiyaq Shukri (1968-) |
External link: | http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v045/45.1.jayawardane.pdf |
Abstract: | In The Silent Minaret, South African-born writer Ishtiyaq Shukri links apartheid-era obsessions with classifying and immobilizing people with the anxieties of the post-9/11 world, where nations in the geopolitical West similarly attempt to categorize and restrict threatening 'dark bodies.' By examining the psychological, intellectual, and political journey of the novel's main character, Issa Shamsuddin, from apartheid South Africa to Britain at the commencement of the Global War on Terror, the author of the article explores whether literature, learning, and friendships can prompt us to re-educate ourselves through investigating subsumed versions of history, thus playing an important part in transforming our political alignments. Issa details the particularities of both Dutch and British colonial history and specifies the positions that South Africa occupied as it transitioned from a simple watering station for the Dutch East India Company (the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) to a colony of strategic importance. The narrative does not solely focus on South African dilemmas about race and national identity. Instead, it historicizes the dynamics of intercultural relations in South Africa in order to illustrate how the methodologies employed by previous European imperial ventures remain globally relevant and pertinent to the present, including the role that empire plays in racializing difference and bureaucratizing its demarcations. Shukri, then, uses South Africa and its history to comment on twenty-first-century imperial ventures and the effects that these new wars will leave on both those who inhabit the lands on which they are waged and those in whose name they take place. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [ASC Leiden abstract] |