Rewriting Modernity

Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africafrom the nineteenth-century writing of Tiyo Soga to Zakes Mda in the twenty-first centuryto international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. David Attwell provides a welcome complication of the linear black literary historyliterature as a reflection of the process of political emancipationthat is so often presented. He focuses on cultural transactions in a series of key moments and argues that black writers in South Africa have used print culture to map themselves onto modernity as contemporary subjects, to negotiate, counteract, reinvent, and recast their positioning within colonialism, apartheid, and the context of democracy.