Zitationsvorschlag
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Dieses Werk steht unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International.
Identifier (Buch)
Veröffentlicht
Unlikely Comrades? South Africa, Poland, and the Solidarity of ‘Implicated Subjects’
ABSTRACT The chapter investigates how a number of white South African writers have attempted to negotiate their subject position(s), as well as their forms of ‘entrapment’ in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, by studying and commenting on the works of selected Polish writers. While discussing a variety of works by Lionel Abrahams, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, and Stephen Watson, as well as their ‘dialogue’ with the likes of Zbigniew Herbert and Czesław Miłosz, the chapter argues that the latter writers and their oeuvre have been deliberately prioritised by South African authors due to their perceived implication and entanglement in the long history of violence taking place in Central European ‘bloodlands.’ A comparative and transnational analysis undertaken in this study postulates the existence of a South African–Polish ‘literary’ comradeship/solidarity—one that cuts through national, ethnic, and geographical boundaries and finds the raison d’être of its struggle not in the same enemy but in an acknowledgement of one’s implication, namely, an indirect and involuntary participation in past and present injustices.
KEYWORDS comradeship, Poland, South Africa, the implicated subject, transnationalism
