Department of English

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The city that billows smoke : a spatial reading of Bulawayo in prose fiction
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Dube, Nhlanhla; Jones, Megan; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: My study investigates the ways in which Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo, is represented on the page. By reading fiction authored during the ‘lost decade’, I explore images of the city which emanate from novels and short stories from writers in Zimbabwe and abroad. I answer the question, what argument about place is being made when a character is in a particular locale? Theoretically, I deploy Geocriticism in order to show that space is made up of places. This is done by reading sections of the literary city such as the suburb, the Location and the diasporan constituency as parts of a larger whole. The fact that all narratives have to happen somewhere is at the core of the idea that the geographical location ‘where’ narratives occur, is more than just background setting and aesthetic. My exploration of the literary suburb is concerned with concepts of belonging and the racial aspects of city space. I show the importance of walking the suburb and the significance the process of losing home has in defining the 21st century suburb. Through studying the Location, I privilege the importance of places of drink and construction activities in high density living areas, to show how they indicate a spirit of place. To add to this, I also account for the diasporan view in order to see how the idea of the literary city is complicated by the act of diasporic return. Diasporic return unearths versions of the city that exist outside national borders and it highlights that Bulawayo is in conversation with other cities. My project demonstrates the existence of a Bulawayo literary city which has intricate local political realities and socio-economic conditions. This thesis also establishes that readings of the city have to take into account history, politics and geography in order to gauge the conditions under which unique literary cities are formed.
Discursive features of health worker-patient discourses in four Western Cape HIV/AIDS clinics where English is the lingua franca
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2012-12) Njweipi-Kongor, Diana Benyuei; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Anthonissen, Christine; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This is a qualitative analytical study that investigates the use of English as lingua franca (ELF) between doctors and patients with different L1 at four different HIV/AIDS clinics in the Western Cape. The study addresses a gap in medical research, especially in the field of HIV/AIDS, namely, a lack of sufficient data-driven analytical investigation into the linguistic and conversational nature of doctor-patient communication in ELF in this setting in South Africa. A literature review contextualises ELF, discourse analysis (DA), conversation analysis (CA) and genre theory providing a theoretical framework for the study. The methodology involves audio-recording and transcription of HIV/AIDS consultations conducted in ELF. From the genre perspective, the study investigates the different genres in and determines if HIV/AIDS consultations are a sub-genre of medical discourses. DA investigates what contextual, socio-cultural linguistic features characterise medical interaction in this multilingual context and what ELF linguistic strategies participants use to signal and resolve misunderstanding. CA investigates the turn organisation and turn-taking patterns in the consultations to assess participants’ contributions and identify different types of sequences that characterise them, aiming to understand how they enable the interactants play their roles as doctors and patients. The results reveal that HIV/AIDS consultations exhibit formal features of doctor-patient consultations in general and intertextually revert to other oral genres leading to the conclusion that, considering their purpose, participants and context, HIV/AIDS consultations are like all medical consultations and are a sub-genre of medical discourse. The macro analysis reveals that the interactants’ socio-cultural and multi-linguistic backgrounds do positively influence the nature of the interaction in this context as it highlights characteristic linguistic features of ELF usage like borrowing, linguistic transference from L1, the use of analogy, code-switching and local metaphors all resulting from processes of indigenisation and hybridisation. The results reveal few instances of misunderstanding, concurring with earlier studies that problems of miscommunication may be minimal when two languages and/or cultural groups interact. The micro analysis reveals that the turns in the consultation follow the pre-selection and recurrent speakership patterns and that despite the advocacy for partnership between doctors and patients in their contribution and negotiation of outcomes, the doctor unavoidably remains the dominant partner. S/he determines the course of the consultation by initiating more turns, asking most of the questions and often unilaterally deciding on topic changes. S/he has longer talking time than the patient in the sequences and the physical examination and prescription phases of the consultation while the patient is mostly portrayed almost as a docile participant yielding to the doctor’s requests and taking very little if any initiative of his/her own to communicate his/her views and desires. The study reveals instances of both patient and doctor initiated repair to resolve any misunderstanding, which improves the quality of the interaction and its outcomes such as adherence and treatment follow-up. The study further highlights the challenges faced in the field which impacted on the data, the most crucial being the complicated but necessary ethical procedures required to get participants’ consent to participate in the study.
Ecocriticism and the oil encounter : readings from the Niger Delta
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014-04) Aghoghovwia, Philip Onoriode; Green, Louise; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The study seeks to understand the ways that environmental concerns and the phenomenon of oil production in the Niger Delta are captured in contemporary literary representations. In the thesis, I enlist several works, five poetry collections and a Nollywood video film, produced between 1998 and 2010, to investigate and analyse the different ways they engage with the effects of oil extraction as a form of violence that is not immediately apparent. Amitav Ghosh argues that representing something of such magnitude as oil modernity can only be done adequately through narratives of epic quality such as realist fiction or the historical novel. I move away from Ghosh’s assumptions to argue that the texts, poetry and video film have adequately captured the oil encounter, but not on a grand scale or through realist fiction. I situate Niger Delta representations of the oil encounter within the intellectual frame of petrocultures, a recent field of global study which explores the representational and critical domain within which oil is framed and imagined in culture. In their signification of what I call the “oil ontology”, that is, the very nature and existence of oil in the Delta, lived-experience in its actual quotidian specificity, takes precedence in the imagination of the writers that I study. I propose that the texts, in very different ways, articulate these experiences by concatenating social and environmental concerns with representations of the oil encounter to produce a petro-literary form which inflects and critiques the ways in which oil extraction, in all its social and environmental manifestations, inscribes a form of violence upon the landscape and human population in the oil sites of the Delta. I suggest that the texts articulate a place-based, place-specific form of petroculture. They emphasis the notion that the oil encounter in the Delta is not the official encounter at the point of extraction but rather the unofficial encounter with the side-effects of the oil extraction. The texts, in very different ways address similar concerns of violence as an intricate feature in the Delta, both as a physical, spectacular phenomenon and as a subtle, unseen category. They conceive of violence as a consequence of the various forms of intrusion and disruption that the logic of oil extraction instigates in the Niger Delta. I suggest that the form of eco-poetics that is articulated gives expression to environmental concerns which are marked off by an oily topos in the Delta. I maintain that in projecting an artistic vision that is sensitive to environmental and sociocultural questions, the writings that we encounter from this region also make critical commentary on the ontology of oil. The texts conceive the Niger Delta as one that provides the spatial and material template for envisioning the oil encounter and staging a critique of the essentially globalised space that is the site of oil production.
Focalization schemas, transnational formations and social remittance in the works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-03) Maritim, Eric Cheruiyot; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This work contextualises Chimamanda Adichie’s novels and collected short stories within the area of migrant transnationalism, arguing that this is an inherent feature of the content and form of the texts. Adichie’s narrative are pre-occupied with motif of migration that, in the contemporary context, is characterised by what David Harvey terms time-space compression. This has facilitated spatio-temporal disjunctures as a result of migrants’ simultaneous embeddedness in multiple cross-border localities. This work therefore contributes to the burgeoning research on transnationalism but gives it a literary dimension by narratologically exploring how border-crossing narratives which trace experiences of migrants and non-migrants, implicate transformations in worldviews of individual migrants and how these idiosyncratic transformations have far-reaching collective implications in their points of origin. This is operationalised through analytic mining of how the presented non-migrants’ and migrants’ encounters are focalised in the narratives at the points where they emigrate, where they immigrate as well as the emergent in-between spaces they inhabit as transnational persons. In tandem with seizing upon how these encounters are focalized, the postcolonial notion of liminality is adopted to account for the processes by which the characters in these transnational locations generate various agentic capacities that are trafficked to their countries of origin as social remittance. Towards this end, it reasons that, with the transnational space conceived of as a liminal space rife with possibilities for socio-politically innovating, migrant characters are veritable agents of socio-political transformation in the communities where they originate and to which they are still emotively attached and committed. Despite this optimism in approach to their transformative function, however, the less salutary implications of their transnational locations are considered.
Politics of the family in contemporary East and West African women's writing
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015-12) Ng'umbi, Yunusy Castory; Viljoen, Shaun; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Spencer, Lynda Gichanda; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study explores narratives by African women from East and West Africa. It specifically examines how twenty-first century African women writers from the selected regions represent the institution of family in a way that challenges their older generation writer counterparts and Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi’s theory of black womanism. While accentuating the various ways in which the family trope is revisited in contemporary narratives (using African feminism and post-colonial approaches) the study benefits from the argument that the changes in the institution of the family in contemporary women’s writing should be understood in terms of the socio-cultural, political and economic milieu of these regions, Africa and the global context generally. One of the notable forces behind these changes (apart from colonialism) is the change in gender politics: the understanding of gender roles and responsibilities, as well as social, political and economic instabilities, emigration, refugeeism, and the diaspora. Through a comparative approach, this study shows that contemporary women writers do not disavow history; rather they lean on the shoulders of their literary ‘grandmothers’ and ‘mothers’ to vocalise what is expected of the post-colonial nation. Their narratives appear to suggest a shift in approaching a literary text by emphasizing the importance of family in the making of the geo-political nation. In addition, they subvert traditional ways of looking at the gender dichotomy between men and women by embracing what Chielozona Eze calls a third-wave global feminism (a revisited form of black womanism advocated by Ogunyemi) which challenges patriarchal power at home and opens avenues where men and women compete equally and equitably in socio-cultural, economic and political struggles.
Zimbabwe women writers from 1950 to the present : re-creating gender images
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-03) Mkwesha, Faith; Samuelson, Meg; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Department of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: My thesis focuses on Zimbabwean women as writers and thus on women as producers, contesters and negotiators of gendered images, and the ways in which they write gender identities in and of the nation. I have selected Zimbabwean women-authored texts written in English, from 1950 to 2015. The fictional texts are set in five historical periods – pre-colonial and colonial incursions and the first chimurenga (war) from 1890-1897, colonial rule from 1898-1966, the second chimurenga 1966-1978, independence and the first two decades of self-rule from 1980-1999, and the third chimurenga? and the Zimbabwe crisis from 2000 to the present – each of which is marked by important gender (re)configurations. My delineation of the five historical periods refers to the setting, not production, of the primary texts. The periodization approach makes evident the significant shifts in gender relations and roles in the home and the nation, and the ways in which narratives by women writers reproduce, inscribe, recreate, subvert or contest these gendered positions. Also, organizing primary texts according to their temporal setting depicts how gendered images are composed in each era, which is then revisited by later generations of writers to re-create the images. The women writers revisit the past to raise pertinent issues about the present state of the nation. I argue for the duality of gender, because this perspective makes evident how gendered subjects are produced, showing that women’s identities and roles are shaped in relation to those of men and vice versa. I argue for the category of woman in Chapter 1, and read the texts as fictional narratives written by women because this approach shows how Zimbabwean women writers contest and challenge gender images created by settlers and nationalists from different ideological perspectives, and hold up mirrors to their gendered societies, while constructing new self-images along with new constructions of masculinity. Throughout the thesis I read closely the texts as laboratories where gender is conceived, practised, tested, discarded, and re-defined. In the Introduction Chapter 1, I also argue for the interconnectedness of sex, race, ethnicity, class and politics in the constitution of gender subjectivities. Using the house trope, the quest motif and the filth trope I analyse themes of inclusion, exclusion and belonging. There are seven chapters: Chapter 1 the introduction, Chapter 2 focuses on the woman-hero and the weeping hunter, Chapter 3 focuses on the questing rebellious modern woman and the ineffective husband, absent father, jealous husband and possessive boyfriend, Chapter 4 redefines the concept of hero to inscribe women liberation heroines in the nation, while challenging the authenticity of the self-glorifying nationalist male hero, Chapter 5 focuses on liberated genders, Chapter 6 focuses on the resilient woman and the vulnerable man, and Chapter 7 is the Conclusion. The questions with which I approach the five historical moments represented in my primary texts are: How do women writers renegotiate, contest and re-inscribe gendered images located in these five historical periods? What role do women as writers and characters play in the construction and redefinition of their images and those of their male counterparts? What kind of alternative avenues open up for writers to represent women’s interests? In what ways do these representations of gender participate in the (re)imagining of the nation?

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Browsing Department of English by browse.metadata.advisor "Bangeni, Nwabisa"

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