South African Writers' Trajectory: From Colonial Modernist World View to Transatlantically Inspired Sense of Nation State

2018 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K02351
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Literature in English
• Research Institution: Tokyo Woman's Christian University
• Principal Investigator: Mizoguchi Akiko 東京女子大学, 現代教養学部, 教授 (00296203)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2019-03-31
• Keywords: 南アフリカ文学 / モダニズム / 植民地近代 / トランスアトランティック / 国家意識

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Colonial subjects had modernism forced on them without the myth of individual or cultural sovereignty. Inevitably their nationalism, in the time of colonial modernity, involved their desire to belong to a modern nation state.
My research, based on this view of modernism, mainly focused on Olive Schreiner, a white female South African writer, and Sol Plaatje (with a reference to H. I. E. Dhlomo), a black male South African writer, who both experienced the nation state-like political system in the Cape Colony in the late nineteenth century that promised the racial equality of all men before the law.
I examined and clarified the trajectory of how these writers, faced with the South African decisive move towards Apartheid (a condition of modernism), articulated their ideas of nation state during and after the Anglo-Boer War and World War I while transatlantically inspired by both white and black intellectuals of America.

Free Research Field

アフリカ英語文学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

SchreinerとPlaatjeはほぼ同時代で接点もあったが、人種やジェンダーに関連した立場の違いもあり、共通するテーマや思想的背景があるという前提で論じられることが少なかった。それをポストコロニアル的観点から定義されるモダニズム、戦争体験、White Perilという共通項を見出した上で、両者の「近代国民国家への希求」が汎アフリカニズムの影響を受け、植民地主義を内包する西洋近代そのものへの批判や、暴力に苦しむ非支配者間の平和主義的連帯を含むようになったという側面に光を当てた意義は大きく、またPlaatje研究をする上で欠かせないDhlomoの国家観も考察しえたことの意義は大きい。