Analiza prikaza afrikanerskog identiteta u povijesnim romanima Karela Schoemana iz postkolonijalne perspektive
Authors:   , Bandov Toni 
Published: December 2023

This dissertation analyzes the narrative strategies in five novels by the South African author Karel Schoeman, specifically the way in which they undermine key historiographical strongholds of Afrikaner nationalism, and carries out a deconstruction of the traditional Afrikaner identity. The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part includes a cultural-historical overview of the South African colonial space and the emergence of Afrikaners, their language and literature. The second part presents the theoretical assumptions of the research, and the third presents the features of the author’s aesthetics and ends with an analysis of the selected novels. In the first part, the cultural-historical context of the creation of Afrikaner by European settlers is presented, proposing the hypothesis that the rapid change from European identity to Afrikaner can be understood by understanding the South African space as a double periphery. The appropriation of Afrikaans legitimized the connection of Afrikaners with the South African space, and the historical continuity of Afrikaners as inheritors of European and Protestant identity and a strong competitor to the British identity with which they were in conflict was created by highlighting the close connection of Afrikaans with Dutch. The first phase of the new Afrikaner literature in the making is inseparable from the national project of affirming the new nation and its culture in the African space. Crucial for the understanding of the main characteristics of this phase is the dichotomy European/African, understood here as a notion privileging European and stigmatizing African cultural features. In the South African context, this dichotomy is then transposed into a racial-linguistic model, which means that in time anthropological characteristics have prevailed over cultural ones. At the same time, the stigmatization of African elements led to a self-imposed cultural exile of Afrikaners, who found themselves in a gap between their situation in the African space and their (imagined) cultural belonging to Europe. The second part of the thesis presents the theoretical framework for the analysis of selected historical novels by Schoeman. Firstly, a connection is established between the key problem of the relationship between literary fiction and historiography and the ideas of constructivist historiography, primarily the works of Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra and Linda Hutcheon. Secondly, the main features of the tradition of writing about the South African cultural space, which J. M, Coetzee criticized as 'white writing', are determined. Lastly, the post-apartheid rewriting of genre features of the farm novel is brought into connection with critical works of leading representatives of postcolonial theory (Tiffin [2006], Chatterjee [1993], Mishra & Hodge [2005]). In addition to that, the analysis also relies on leading representatives of post-apartheid criticism such as Wasserman (2000), Van Coller (2006) and Viljoen (2012). The chapter on postcolonialism presents the socio-political prerequisites for the spread of European colonialism, key demands of postcolonial criticism and main peculiarities of South African colonial history. Moreover, the thesis portrays key characteristics of the South African post-apartheid novel and its influence on the creation of a counter-discourse to the ideology of segregation and Afrikaner cultural isolationism by destabilizing well-established, ossified, essentialist categories and knowledge. Afrikaner literature in the post-colonial context can best be understood as a 'complicit' subversion of nationalist conceptions of identity, politics and history, because it opposes them 'from within', thus pointing to the internal contradictions of nationalist ideology, historical misconceptions and simplifications, untruths about the origin of language, arbitrary boundaries of Afrikaner identity, the concealment of one's own hybridization, the fragmentation of the imperial discourse and discontinuities in the creation of a coherent national narrative about Afrikaner history (Wasserman 2000b). In this respect, an important starting point for critical discourses is the colonial archive from which post-apartheid authors draw their material and motives, and discover stories and characters that disrupt and undermine nationalist myths. Through this extensive re-examination of the founding national myths in fictional texts, postapartheid authors revise the accepted historical narrative about the special position of the Afrikaner nation in the African space. In this context, the constructivist recognition that reality is formed by discourse is connected with the problematization of the methodological shortcomings of historiography, and its points of contact with literature are especially emphasized, which is suggested by the use of the term 'narrative'. These theoretical assumptions enable multiple 'discursive permeability', particularly strongly expressed in the genre of the postmodernist historical novel. In this sense, the main feature of ‘historiographic metafiction’ is its attempt of ‘placing’ itself in the historical discourse with the goal of questioning its boundaries. At the same time, historiographic metafiction maintains its distance from the methodological and narrative limitations of historiography and retains the full poetic 'autonomy' of fiction (Hutcheon 1989). The portrayal of the South African space as an empty, uninhabited, and inhospitable expanse is the product of a specific 'reading' of the space in accordance with the European interpretative model which acknowledges viability only to that form of social organization that mirrors European civilizational standards. According to Coetzee (1988: 9), such a "literature of empty landscapes" does not recognize history outside of European chronology, that is, it fails to integrate the already existent African world. It rather but retreats before it, in order to inscribe the civilizational deficiency of Africans by means of the geology of space. Coetzee therefore advocates a new type of writing, i.e. writing that represents the plurality of Africa and does not constantly reproduce discursive models seeking a surrogate for the European cultural space in a new and different colonial African space. Due to its historical role in shaping the Afrikaner way of life, the farm became an important cultural symbol, as well as a political argument in the discussion of the Afrikaner national identity, legitimizing the 'right to exist' of a people who originate from the European settler community with its unique language and customs, and pointing to the continuity of their presence in the unoccupied African expanse. As a result, the farmer's novel performed a double legitimizing function in the Afrikaner social space. Firstly, it established a connection between the Afrikaner and the land – a connection perceived as supernatural and realized through possession, which is how the political and cultural connection of the Afrikaner and Africa was articulated. Secondly, it sowed the ideological seeds of Afrikaner nationalism, based on strict racial segregation in public space, which arose from naturalized and internalized racial exploitation on the farm. In the third part of the thesis, the analyses of selected novels are preceded by an ideologicalpoetic placing of the author within the post-apartheid literary context. The prevailing narrative features of Schoeman's 'fictional historiography' arise from activating micro-histories of socially marginalized characters and groups (domestic servants, slaves, women, non-whites like Grikwa and Baster), whose oral testimonies undermine adopted collective ideas and thereby correct the nationalist narrative about the past. The past that is irretrievably lost and remains unattainable is the thematic backbone of the analyzed novels. In narration, this is reflected by a (physical or imaginary) 'return' to the mythical space of the farm as a focal point of national mythology and cultural identity. The farm therefore represents a suitable scene for criticism of and a confrontation with the past. The 'literary farm' in Schoeman's novels is, on the one hand, a key place for the deconstruction of Afrikaner identity, and on the other hand, the scene for the dismantling of Afrikaner political paternalism. The space of the farm as a space of fenced and domesticated nature is exposed in Schoeman's novels as an identity 'retreat' from the real, historical and geographical space of Africa, which is collectively referred to as a ‘reflex of closure’. In the analyses of the novels, the emphasis is on the critical dissolution of key myths of the Afrikaner 'collective memory' and symbolic strongholds of cultural identity: 1) The novel Skepelinge. Aanloop tot 'n roman (2017) represents a strong condemnation of European 'civilization' because it exposes the policies of segregation and violence as artifacts originating from the main 'cultural' centers of Europe. This novel marks Schoeman’s discussion with traditional Afrikaner historiography and the disclosure of a (biased) representation of the colonial past; deconstructs national myths created by a selective and politicized reading of colonial archives, and thus revises established ideas about the Dutch colonial presence on the Cape of Good Hope. The novel especially emphasizes the devastating effects of new social dynamics on non-whites and provides examples of the historiographically tabooed 'mutation' of the white population, which rapidly linguistically and culturally hybridized in the first phase of colonization, and only later became 'Europeanized' again. 2) The Voices-trilogy [Stemme] develops a counter-narrative to the myth of Afrikaners as the moral victors of the Boer Wars, and presents the farm in a negative light as a space of oppression, backwardness, plunder, silence, patriarchy, and provincial culture. The narrative world of the trilogy is revealed as an allegorical journey through the colonial archive. In the novel, a series of oral testimonies – otherwise deprived of their place in canonized national history – undermine attempts at a (nationalist) reconstruction of the past. Geography and chronology are intertwined in the meta-historiographical assumption of the past as 'another country', represented by spatial metaphors of an inaccessible, remote, and isolated place. The 'landscape' becomes an active place where traces of the past can be discerned; it is resistant to change and exposes previous 'erasures' or manipulations, which characterizes it as a palimpsest. On the metafictional level, his narrative model also criticizes the traditional historiographic division between the textual record that guarantees empirical verifiability and the immaterial 'voice', i.e. oral testimony, which historiography discredits as a subjective and unreliable source for the reconstruction of the past. 3) In the novel Na die geliefde land [Promised Land] (1972), post-revolutionary South Africa is a dystopian scene of the most gruesome collective fears mediated by Afrikaner nationalism. It is depicted as a society of 'reverse racism', in which Afrikaners are a minor, marginalized and politically disenfranchised community. In the depiction of the imagined future of the Afrikaner world, the motifs of the traditional farmer's novel are apostrophized, but in a parody mode, which is why it is interpreted as their "dystopian revision" (Wasserman 2000: 5). In the novel, the socio-political marginalization of Afrikaners is a consequence of their own loyalty to the failed project of racial segregation and the struggle for complete domination of land and resources. In conclusion, the thesis shows that the selected Schoeman's novels thematically and ideologically adhere to the requirements of post-apartheid literary criticism. Schoeman's research into the past critically revises national history by exposing historiographical manipulations, prevents a single vision of history and opens the space for the search for new identities and inclusive narratives beyond the categories of racial hierarchy and political dominance. However, Schoeman remains firmly anchored in the 'Afrikaner world' primarily because he doubts the survival of the Afrikaner culture he knows. He therefore takes on the role of a chronicler of the disintegration of 'European culture' in Africa. Schoeman's exploration of the past also functions as 'critical mourning' of the farm as a key (ethnic) phenomenon of Afrikaner culture and a symbolic space once dominated by Afrikaners and Afrikaans. After the fall of apartheid, that space irretrievably becomes a part of the past and turns into something anachronistic, foreign, and disdainful. At the same time, Schoeman's idea of narrative 'preservation from oblivion' is connected with Loots (2011) and Taljaard-Gilson’s diagnosis (2013) on post-apartheid Afrikaner prose, which – due to the emphasized awareness of a certain change – not only revises national history, but also assumes the function of 'critical nostalgia'. The authors of post-apartheid prose use the space of the narrative as an 'archival container' for Afrikaner customs, norms, dialects and gestures threatened with extinction; reflect post-apartheid anxiety and uncertainty, and actively confront the fact that Afrikaners in the 'new country' represent a linguistic and ethnic minority.