This study examines how international political developments during the long 1990s (1989-2001) influenced the Poetry International Festival, focusing on both its programming and public image. It asks whether changing geopolitical conditions affected the selection of poets and the themes addressed in festival discussions. To analyse the festival's image, the study employs J & eacute;r & ocirc;me Meizoz's concept of posture, adapting it so it encompasses a set of auto- and hetero-representations of a collective actor. The analysis is based on five festival editions (1989, 1990, 1994, 2001, and 2002). The findings show that changes in the festival's auto- and hetero-representations were complex and uneven. In the early 1990s, Poetry International presented itself as a strongly politicized and activist festival, offering a 'safe haven' for dissident poets in a divided world. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not prevent Western intellectuals from reproducing Cold War - style divisions between Western Europe and other regions, particularly Central and Eastern Europe, even though non-Western voices sometimes challenged this view. In the early 2000s, the festival gradually shifted towards a more globalized and less explicitly politicized profile, reflecting broader post - Cold War trends in world poetry.

This chapter explores how Olive Schreiner’s work was received in the Dutch press between the 1890s and the 1930s. During this period, the press landscape in the Netherlands reflected the ‘pillarisation’ of Dutch society – a vertical pattern of social organisation in which political and confessional divides structured all spheres of social life, bisecting or superseding other divisions such as class. Judging by the number of records in the press archives (Delpher.nl) alone, Olive Schreiner was a recognisable figure in the Netherlands, with references to and discussion of her work and opinions in periodicals representing the range of confessional and ideological pillars in Dutch society. The chapter is based on analysis of material including book reviews and announcements, readers’ letters, reprinted excerpts from Schreiner’s works, as well as references to her as a writer and progressive intellectual. These are used to illuminate the complexities of divisions among Dutch society into pillars in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The chapter assesses Schreiner’s impact on the Dutch public and explain how the contexts in which her writing and thought were referred to influenced their interpretation, with associated implications for the public image of Schreiner.

In this article, I set out to introduce the Garment Workers Union (GWU) prose as a neglected part of Afrikaans-language literature. I offer an overview of texts written or translated by the GWU members and published in the official trade union organ Die Klerewerker/The Garment Worker. The presented workers’ reading list is divided into original Afrikaans writings and translations from English into Afrikaans. All these texts offered the newly created white working class a new identification, manoeuvring between belonging to the national imagined community of Afrikaners based on the concept of nation and whiteness, and to a transnational workers’ community based on the category of class. Looking at the impact of the Dutch and English language traditions in South Africa, I propose that the way in which European conventions made their way to Afrikaans literature, was class-based. Textsrecognized as artistic, incorporated in the Afrikaans literary canon, drew heavily on Dutch tradition. The English language turned out to be the medium that also circulated a less elitist thought. Therefore, it was English that enabled the movement of texts from Europe and the United States to South Africa that shaped the South African white working-class, including its Afrikaner part.

In this article, I examine the Garment Workers' Union's theatre as a manifestation of transnational working-class culture in the 1940s. Analysing Pageant of Unity (1940), a play in which Afrikaans and English alternate to express the equality of Afrikaans-and English-speaking workers in the face of exploitation, I offer an attempt to escape the confines of a national literature as linked to a single language. I demonstrate how the political pageant-a genre typical of socialist propaganda and international trade unionism-was adapted to a South African context. This drama is, therefore, viewed as a product of cultural mobility between Europe, the United States, and South Africa. Assuming the 'follow the actor' approach of Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory, I identify a network of interconnections between the nodes formed by human (drama practitioners and theoreticians, socialist organisers) and nonhuman actors (texts representing socialist drama conventions, in particular agitprop techniques). Tracing the inspirations and adaptations of conventions, I argue that Pageant of Unity most evidently realises the prescriptions outlined by the Russian drama theoretician Vsevolod Meyerhold whose approach influenced Guy Routh, one of the pageant's creators. Thus, I focus on how this propaganda production utilises certain features of the Soviet avant-garde theatre, which testifies to the transnational character of South African working-class culture.

ABSTRACT This article explores points of contact between Olive Schreiner and Aletta Jacobs, two prominent first-wave feminists, presenting a case study of cultural mobility from South Africa to the Netherlands. Utilizing the histoire croisée approach, this contribution discusses the reception of Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour in the Netherlands. It argues that the profile of Aletta Jacobs, who translated the text into Dutch, was decisive in forming Dutch public’s reactions to the book. Schreiner, however, an influential South African writer and social theorist, was a radical voice among both South African and European feminists and her social vision was not entirely compatible with Jacobs’s views. This article proposes that reviews of Schreiner’s book in Dutch socialist and feminist press reflect the tensions between these two movements which played out in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and do not take into account Schreiner’s actual non-European perspective and her global approach to social processes where gender, class, and race function as intersecting concepts.

This paper discusses the drama Die Offerande ['The Sacrifice'] (1941) by Hester Cornelius, in which the Soviet aesthetic of socialist realism was grafted onto an Afrikaner cultural setting. To outline the context in which the play was created and performed, this contribution elaborates on the representation of Soviet socialism in the South African trade union periodical Klerewerker/Garment Worker, where the play was published. It aims to demonstrate that this propaganda play renders the socialist realist principle of narodnost (i. e. inclusion of a national folk element) by incorporating motifs characteristic of the Afrikaans farm novel, references to the historical events on which the Afrikanerdom founding myth is based, and characters representing 'typical' Afrikaners. Moreover, this article argues that the play's plot is reminiscent of the socialist realist novel master plot which illustrates the protagonist's transition from political immaturity to political awareness and his becoming the New Man. The important modification which Cornelius introduced was that she cast women in the main roles, so her play propagates the working-class New Woman.

In this article I investigate transtextuality in Vrou en feminist (Woman and Feminist, 1921) by Marie du Toit in order to demonstrate how she grafted first-wave transnational feminism onto the Afrikaans context. Du Toit’s book is approached as a space of contact between progressive European and North American thought and a South African, particularly Afrikaner, mindset. Du Toit relied on a multiplicity of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discourses to support her argument that Afrikaner women become part of the feminist movement. Due to the numerous quotations from scientific papers and literary fiction, mostly English but also Dutch, her book can be described as a heteroglot text. Utilizing the histoire croisée approach, I discuss Du Toit’s text on the macro and micro scale: I locate it in a historical perspective as a literary document and focus on the ways in which diverse voices intersect and converse with one another. I argue that the book was an unsuccessful attempt at inviting the Afrikaans reader into a transnational imagined community of suffragettes because of prejudice against the English language and culture. English sources, which Du Toit extensively quoted, deterred potential Afrikaans supporters, and consequently prevented transfer of feminist thought. Even though she also supported her views with some texts in Dutch in wanting to appeal to her reader’s associations with a more familiar Dutch culture, this tactic was insufficient to tip the balance.

In this chapter I present an overview of the most prominent trends in South African working-class literature from the beginning of the 20th century until 1994. Since its emergence, South African working class was a heterogeneous formation which encompassed diverse ethnicities, both of European and non-European origin. Each of them created its own literature and culture, using various languages, incorporating traditional elements and means of expression, and merging them with borrowed foreign discourses and literary devices belonging to the repertoire of socialist literature that had been created mostly in the Soviet Union, the USA and other European countries. Consequently, South African working-class literature can be conceived of as conglomerate of heteroglot hybrid forms and manifestations of a subversive counter-discourse of protest literature. The forms presented here include writings of European socialists commenting on South African situation, novels utilizing the Jim goes to Joburg plot pattern, drama incorporating the Soviet socialist realism and references to the Afrikaans farm novel, Afrikaans folk tunes functioning as protest songs, and black workers praise poetry based on tribal oral conventions. As a carrier of a new working-class identity, this literature promoted a modern urban model which, nevertheless, relied on the continuity with local rural traditions.

What seems to be a typical feature of Boer women’s personal texts which refer to the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) is the militant rhetoric of protest against the British aggression. Met die Boere in die Veld (“With the Boers in the Veld”) by Sarah Raal is a perfect example of this trend. Yet, her case is unique, because she actually spent a part of the war in the veld, fighting side by side with her brothers, which definitely was not a traditional place for a woman during a military conflict. Her memoirs were published for the first time in the 1930s, reprinted a number of times, and re-issued in 2000 in two language editions— Afrikaans and English (significantly under a new title, The Lady who Fought). An additional introduction was added to both new editions, which suggests a new role of the heroine and a new meaning of her story. This paper discusses how Raal’s original foreword and the new introduction influence the reader’s response to the text. Additionally, attention is drawn to the role of other paratextual elements of the book and the matter of translation. Having taken into account political and gender discourses operating as a context for every reading, the text undergoes re-interpretations. Consequently, the book, once an anti-British Afrikaner nationalist propaganda story, turns into a popular adventure tale about a brave Boer girl, a story about an exceptional woman, a proto-feminist who transgresses the conventional gender roles, or into a universal pacifist protest. In the 2000 edition pacifist and feminist aspects come to the foreground, and this way the old story becomes a suitable read for the modern post-apartheid reader.

van een historische omslag in de verbeelding van erotiek

This article focuses on literary texts published in the Klerewerker/Garment Worker, the periodical of the Garment Workers’ Union. The GWU which was an organisation consisting mainly of Afrikaner female workers, was established in 1930 in Johannesburg, against the background of economic and social changes in South Africa, which can be collectively described as modernisation. It is argued that the Klerewerker/Garment Worker, while striving to spread the ideology of socialism amongst working class women, has created — by modifying the Volksmoeder [Mother of the Nation] ideal rooted in the Afrikaner nationalist tradition — a modern model of femininity. Moreover, the literary forms employed in the periodical constituted a parallel line to the development of the canonical literature in Afrikaans, even though they were discredited by critics as socialist propaganda.

This article focuses on literary texts published in the Klerewerker/Garment Worker, the periodical of the Garment Workers' Union. The GWU which was an organisation consisting mainly of Afrikaner female workers, was established in 1930 in Johannesburg, against the background of economic and social changes in South Africa, which can be collectively described as modernisation. It is argued that the Klerewerker/Garment Worker, while striving to spread the ideology of socialism amongst working class women, has created - by modifying the Volksmoeder [Mother of the Nation] ideal rooted in the Afrikaner nationalist tradition - a modern model of femininity. Moreover, the literary forms employed in the periodical constituted a parallel line to the development of the canonical literature in Afrikaans, even though they were discredited by critics as socialist propaganda. In the analysis of selected short stories and dialogues written by GWU activists the focus is placed on recurring motifs and literary conventions applied by the authors and aims they tried to achieve. It is concluded that these texts can be viewed as a counter-discourse to the dominant unifying attempts in the Afrikaans literature created in the 1930s and 1940s. The discussed instances of working class literature, free of limitations imposed by the dominant middle class literary taste, can be viewed as a form which temporarily offered a relative independence of expression to the Afrikaner women. Furthermore, these texts give an insight into how movements foreign to the canonical literature of the period, such as socialism and feminism, were present in the cultural and social debate.

This contribution focuses on how the paratext (e.g. introduction, title, illustrations, footnotes) influences the interpretation of personal documents (ego-documents). As a result of the interaction mediated by the paratext between the reader and the book a space appears where one may find various accumulated discourses. In this chapter, the issue is discussed on the basis of selected female ego-documents that refer to the period of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). The discussion focuses on the role of the reader's cultural background, and on political and social conditions in the interpretation of such texts.

This paper discusses similarities in the working of mechanisms responsible for the creation of idealized representations of women in South African (or Afrikaner) and Polish national mythologies. It is argued that in both cases two realisations of a patriotic attitude can be observed. The first of them, South African volksmoeder or Polish Matka Polka, is perceived as the dominant and neutral one. It defines the embodiment of female virtues as prescribed by social norms. The other one, the Amazon, refers to a rebellious woman warrior who constitutes a disturbing mixture of both stereotypically female and male features. The attention is drawn to the role of literature in the forming and preserving of these models. Furthermore, the discussion focuses on the question whether the Amazon can be perceived as a model of a proto-feminist.

This paper is intended to present the general concept of my PhD thesis, scope of research and applied methodology. The study focuses on a number of autobiographical texts (diaries, journals, memoirs etc.) written by female authors, which refer to the period of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). The choice of texts implies two major theoretical aspects, namely autobiographical writing and gender criticism. The emphasis is put on the position of the woman within political, social and cultural discourses, and the way history and military conflicts are described form such a perspective. Since the texts which fall into the scope of the project are already well known to the public as historical documents, the study is meant to shift the stress to their literary aspect, and as such involves the application of literary methodology. To this end I plan to take a closer look at the language, rhetoric, stylistic devices and discourses, and their appropriation for the purposes of the Afrikaner nationalist propaganda.