Year: 2006
Type: editorial
Abstract: IT IS SELDOM that a conference achieves a singular symbolic significance in its own right, but this was true of the New Nation Writers Conference held in Johannesburg, December 1991.In itself it represented so much that its staging alone requires cultural and political decoding.The conference sought to enact, both symbolically and materially, a dialectical alternative to the supposedly vanishing world of apartheid.Indeed, its theme was proclaimed as "Making Literature: Reconstruction in South Africa" (New Nation 5), and the conference organizers saw themselves as encouraging a "re-making of the world" (New Nation 6).The presupposition was that apartheid had been vanquished, and that the market of symbolic goods needed reorganization.But the ironies were there for those who cared to look: formerly exiled writers were back home because the in-place neo-apartheid government had dropped the bans and relaxed restrictions as part of its own strategy to appropriate the rhetoric of liberal democracy.The cultural reconstruction and the "process towards a genuine people's culture" (New Nation 3) was, on the evidence of the conference alone, a fairly middle-class affair, while black South Africans continued to die in large numbers in political violence all around us. 1 And the deep currents of apocalyptic feeling evident at the conference were not matched by anything in the political world except promises and dubious good intentions on all sides.It was like a post-revolution conference before the revolution that would now never really occur.Nevertheless, it was something of a victory conference for those who had been banned, proscribed, suppressed, and maimed by apartheid, and who were now back home without
Author: de Kock, Leon
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1900678928