In Black South African Autobiography After Deleuze: Belonging and Becoming in Self-Testimony, Kgomotso Michael Masemola uses Gilles Deleuzeâs theories of immanence and deterritorialization to explore South African autobiography as both the site and the limit of intertextual cultural memory. Detailing the intertextual turn that is commensurate with belonging to the African world and its diasporic reaches through the Black Atlantic, among others, this book covers autobiographies from Peter Abrahams to Esâkia Mphahlele, from Ellen Kuzwayo to Nelson Mandela. It proceeds further to reveal wider dimensions of angst and belonging that attend becoming through transcultural memory. Kgomotso Michael Masemola successfully marshalls Deleuzean theories in a sophisticated re-reading that makes clear the autobiographersâ epistemic access to wor(l)ds beyond South Africa.
KGOMOTSO MICHAEL MASEMOLA, PhD (University of Sheffield, 2006), is Professor of English Literature at the University of South Africa (UNISA), Pretoria. Besides contributing book chapters to such works as The Oxford History of the Novel in English (2016), he has published articles and is the editor of Strategies of Representation in Auto/biography (2014).
Introduction:
The Nomadic Routes of Black South African Autobiography
1 Topologies of Collocation: The Problematic of Representation in Black South African Autobiography
2 Of Belonging and Becoming: Black Atlantic Cultural Memory in the Early Autobiographies of Peter Abrahams and Esâkia Mphahlele
3 The âWorldlinessâ of the Wilderness Text: The Aporetic Experience of Exile in Mphahleleâs The Wanderers and N. Chabani Manganyiâs Mashanguâs Reverie
4 Between the Double Temporality of Tinseltown and Sophiatown: Cultural Memory in Miriam Makebaâs Makeba: My Story and Bloke Modisaneâs Blame Me on History
5 The Individuated Collective Utterance: Lack, Law, and Desire in the Autobiographies of Ellen Kuzwayo and Sindiwe Magona
6 Demonstrating the Democratic Ideal in the Idea of Aporetic Autobiography: Nelson Mandelaâs Long Walk to Freedom and Mamphela Rampheleâs A Life
Conclusion: Autobiography All the Same? The Assemblage of Cultural Memory, the Semblance of History,
and the Dissemblance of the Other
Works Cited
Index
All interested in Anglophone South African Autobiography and cultural memory (including researchers, institutes, academic libraries, public libraries, specialists, post-graduate students and undergraduate students).