Browsing by Author "Jeftha, Caryn"

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    Considering coloureds : detangling representations of coloured women in Post-Apartheid South Africa
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-03) Jeftha, Caryn; Oppelt, Riaan; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Coloured identity remains a contentious and complex topic in contemporary South African conversations. As an academic area of study, topics based on coloured identity and culture have been written since the 19th century, with historiographies and descriptions progressing from essentialist configurations to postcolonial explorations. Prior to the 1980s, ‘common knowledge’ posited coloured people primarily as products of miscegenation, and arguments for ‘coloured’ to be conceived of as a cultural identity is a recent framework of consideration. A surge in academic and public interests regarding coloured cultural history and identity has grown alongside South African literary traditions that focus on narrative modes linked to autobiography and confessive writing, with a market for ‘coloured’ stories having swelled in the last decade. Authors have provided a burst in texts that document, index and revise historical narratives attached to colouredness. This research sets out to explore the value of texts that pivot on coloured stories, with specific attention to coloured femininities and representations thereof, through reading the novels Eve and What Will People Say?, along with the film Ellen: The Story of Ellen Pakkies. Spurred on by the current social moment where bold retellings of painful pasts are encouraged, this study charts the intersections of intimacy that underpin hidden histories and repressed topics, notions of shame and dignity in coloured self-identification, as well as the value of memory studies in writing, reading and sharing stories entangled with living coloured.