Inventing Xhosa Voice: Thomas Pringle's “Makanna's Gathering”
Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Summary This article examines the informing conditions and conventions of Thomas Pringle's poem “Makanna's Gathering”. I argue that despite its ostensible endorsement of Xhosa retaliation against colonial rule, the poem exhibits an obvious unease about Xhosa alterity that it attempts to contain by casting this threat within the conventions, borrowed from Walter Scott's novelistic treatment of gypsies, of the “wild” picturesque. Contrary to a received consensus that the poem is manifestly anti-colonial, I argue that, considered in the full implication of its context, it must be understood as an exhibit in the spectacle of empire rather than an indictment of it.
Source: Journal of Literary Studies
Author: Matthew Shum
Institution: University of KwaZulu-Natal
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $388
OpenAlex ID: W2063007607