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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Prose-poem-drama: 'proemdra', 'black aesthetics' versus 'white aesthetics' in South Africa
Author:Zander, HorstISNI
Year:1999
Periodical:Research in African Literatures
Volume:30
Issue:1
Pages:12-33
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:poetry
oral literature
External link:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v030/30.1zander.pdf
Abstract:Studies on African oral tradition regularly subdivide their corpus into various forms of literature, but this kind of classification seems to represent primarily an effort of Western or Western-oriented black scholars to organize their research material rather thana reflection of actual features of traditional literature. Blacks in Africa emphasize that in their tradition 'art like life is whole'. In the 1970s black authors in South Africa, influenced by Black Consciousness ideas, began to display a recurrence to traditional African concepts. A particularly clear expression of their attack on Western literary conceptions appears in the texts that were labelled 'proemdras' and that, in the final decade of the apartheid regime, assumed in several ways a programmatic status in the blacks' opposition to white aesthetics and values. In 'proemdras', in which prose, poems and drama are united, the boundary between fictional and nonfictional discourse is also under attack. The article analyses a number of these proemdras, focusing in particular on the writers Mothobi Mutloatse, Maropodi Mapalakanye, and Mtutuzeli Matshoba. Bibliogr., notes, ref. Bibliogr.
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