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In a diverse and divisive South Africa, ‘identity' is likely to be a contested issue, and this module investigates some of the ways in which South African identities have been shaped, both historically and in the present, by claims of location, tradition, nationhood, literary imagination, and commercial culture. Michael Chapman's study Southern African Literatures (1998) provides a useful critical starting point against which a range of texts (novels, film, poetry, short fiction...) may be understood within contexts both sociopolitical and intellectual-critical.

This module discusses the postcolonial challenge to modernism and postmodernism.  What might the challenge be?  The Oxford academic Robert Young describes postcolonialism as a ‘mark of the West's own undoing'.  He does not mean any demise of the West; it is rather that, increasingly since major reconfigurations of the 1990s - the end of cold war politics symbolised in the collapse of the Berlin Wall; in South Africa, the end of apartheid - the new millennium will be characterised by information flows, cultural exchanges, translations, diverse experiences, border crossings, both challenging and arduous conversations across worlds.