Masters Degrees (English)

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Browsing Masters Degrees (English) by Subject "Afrikaner identity"

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    Born with the caul : a fictocritical revisiting of race-d and queer(ed) his/stories
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-03) Croeser, Chantelle Claire; Sanger, Nadia; Murray, Sally-Ann; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Using fictocriticism, a mode that b(l)ends creative and critical writing, in this thesis I am led on a winding journey in which I explore elusive, intersectional accounts of various kinds of queer and Queer belonging. These are stories from the margins, and they coax me to engage the unsettled relations of my own white, Queer, Afrikaner identities. In so doing I come face-to-face with personal and cultural ghosts, who emerge from disparate clusters of history, story, interview, verse, folk tale, song lyrics, and scholarship. Divided (and yet assembled) into various entries, the thesis begins by contending with the haunting loss of much of my original interview archive with Queer womxn, conducted for a previous project, material I had intended to consider again, more critically, in respect of my own conflicted autoethnographic role in the interview process. For the present study, my point of departure in addressing this now missing archive takes a specific focus on an Afrikaans folk tale known as “The Curse of Boontjieskraal” and “The Curse of the De Wets”. I inventively (re)write and (re)read this material and the speculated aftermath of the curse as a queer story, and thinking around about (B)orderlands, queerness, hospitality, Afrikaner identity, and my growing awareness of the necessarily incomplete archive, I consider what this story can tell us about the politics of inclusion and exclusion, presence and absence. Here, I also write toward expanding the term ‘queer’ beyond the umbrella term for the LGBTQIAP+ community and therefore use ‘Queer’ to signify the LGBTQIAP+ community and ‘queer’ to signify the expanded term. The second path I follow traces the spiritual powers of being gebore met die helm, meaning 'born with a caul'. Using Achmat Dangor’s short story ‘Waiting for Leila’ (2001) and Chris Barnard’s film Paljas (1998), I delve into the queer abilities of caul bearers as receptive to haunting and boundary-blurring. Seeking the experience of haunting as a means of meeting my ghosts, I use folklore as a means to consider what it might look like to retrieve the insight of my helm via the narrative power of queer Afrikaner stories. The final path is one I take with Antjie Somers, a Queer, stigmatised, witch-like figure well-known among Afrikaans people. By bringing permutations of their story into conversation with writing about outcasts like witches and Queer people, I consider the parallels that might be drawn between the experiences and knowledge of such ostracised, unconventional figures. I also consider how Antjie’s story and the story of other queer figures might be able to guide us in the present toward a powerfully recuperative language of storytelling.