As you may have been able to tell from my uncharacteristically laconic posts, I spent most of the weekend happily away from my laptop and research. At one point on Saturday M, her sister, their friend, and I flagged down a minibus taxi on West Street near Aliwal and piled in the back as it boomed with Tupac Shakur's "It Ain't Easy." I couldn't help but smile - it's a song whose pleasing melody and tone challenges its lyrics that speak of difficulty - in that moment the melody of my day was also pleasing, despite my own challenging thoughts about my research and my scramble to reach conclusion here before I depart at the end of the month. I have noticed those pleasing moments more and more in this past week since M, Mrs. Gambushe, and I returned from the Mpumalanga province; although Durban remains an often unknown city to me, I finally feel as though I've mastered the smaller things (like taking a minibus taxi - which has a language of communication completely unto itself) that make me feel settled here.
I know that over the next couple of weeks, however, my feeling of bilocation (that experience of being in two different places at once) will swell as I make more plans for what I need to do "once I'm back." I've never been entirely comfortable with the feeling - I know before I left Urbana in January it was nearly overwhelming, in part I suspect because one of the two places I felt as though I was occupying was entirely unknown to me except through writing and photographs. I have been thinking about this idea of bilocation in relation to my own experience, but also for a composition course I will be teaching in the fall (besides the Writing With Video course I have written about previously). For the first time I will be teaching Rhetoric 243, an intermediate expository writing course, and I have chosen the topic of "Travel Writing and the Construction of Difference" for its topic. The class will focus less on general interest travel writing that may classify itself more as "informative" (such as those found in Lonely Planet guides or magazines such as Budget Traveler), although it will certainly consider the function of and desire for those genres of travel writing within US culture. Instead I hope we will critically examine a selected history of travel writing (including maps and travel-photography) and criticism that identifies its functions to construct differences, to psychologize the self, and its complicity with or challenge to imperialist projects. I certainly welcome any recommendations for readings for the class.
In my recent reading, I purchased a collection of writings about the "new South Africa" entitled At Risk: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa. Unfortunately, it is not easily available to US readers, although it contains several outstanding essays from writers who are, as editors McGregor and Nutall argue, writing after the traumatic histories that emerged in the wake of 1994 and are now writing in a wave that draws "into the open the idea that freedom is not what they thought it would be; that it has brought unanticipated challenges" (10). One essay in particular, "Why Am I Here?", written by Achille Mbembe and translated by Maureen Anderson, stands out. Finding himself an outsider in South Africa, but identifying himself as an African (Cameroonian to be specific) who too had to watch the disappointing post-colonial transition of his country into independence, Mbembe's description of South Africa speaks of the implications of the past in our present that extends into our futures. In a section of his essay, he writes,
“Here, in effect, is what distinguishes South Africa from other African nations – the fact that from an empirical point of view, this nation is, strictly speaking, a diasporic nation, a meeting of nations, accidental and brutal to be sure, but a meeting nevertheless. The country’s successive regimes long tried to efface that Africanness. At times they dreamed of making South Africa an English county and, at other times, the Holy Land for a particular ethnic group foolish enough to believe in its election by God and, in so doing, willing to wear the mask of death and to set in motion an incalculable violence – a force for harm, carelessness and neglect. Indeed, the concept of racial supremacy, long dominant in South African life, was not just the very antithesis of liberty. It was the manifestation of a malady of the mind – racism. As was to be expected, this denial of liberty and rights for the majority, all in the name of the survival of a single race, fed its social struggles. These social struggles were modern from start to finish because their central stake was freedom” (167-8).
In his description of SA as a "diasporic nation," I start to see connections between the individual phenomena of bilocation and how it could figure as a national phenomena, at least during English colonialist period and apartheid when some officials in SA would try to view it as existing at once in Africa and in Europe.
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