Introduction

For many, jurisdiction has the reputation of being a technical matter and thus of having a rather dry appeal, and not without cause. At the same time, the study of the rules assigning jurisdiction, limiting it and seeking to handle overlaps and tensions arising in this process of allocation is a fascinating lens through which to view the macro-structure of international law, since these very rules, in manifold ways, mirror the interplay, and conflict, of the governing principles of the international legal order.

The term ‘jurisdiction’ stems from the Latin ius dicere, which literally translates as ‘speaking the law’. In its widest sense, jurisdiction therefore means an entity’s entitlement to authoritatively say ‘what the law is’. In the context of international law, two principal uses of the term must be distinguished.

In a first instance, in the domestic as well as the international realm, reference is had to the ‘jurisdiction’ of institutional bodies. This concerns the question under what conditions institutions, particularly those of a judicial or quasi-judicial character, may pronounce on what the law is. As there exists no single institution entitled to address all questions it deems fit, it is crucial to assess the reach of a body’s jurisdiction and, correspondingly, to identify the limits of its jurisdiction. These limits typically manifest themselves on the temporal, spatial, personal and subject matter level.

When one thinks of fantasy, it is often the series novel that springs first to mind. Fantasy is a very broad church, yet the series is close to being its dominant form. Why should this be? This chapter aims both to address the question of the appeal of this mode of writing within the genre and to offer a preliminary typology of the form.

Series fiction is, of course, found over the full range of literature, but most particularly within genre fiction – detective novels, historical and military novels, science fiction and fantasy – and in children's books. And in all cases, series are popular. What is the reader looking for when he or she opens a series novel? In Reading Series Fiction, Victor Watson proposed that ‘Reading a series involves a special relationship between reader and writer which the reader has made a conscious decision to sustain.’ Watson was writing about children's fiction, but his observation applies equally to fantasy, and indeed to other forms of series fiction. In writing, any author is effectively promising to provide her readers with adventure, pleasure, exploration and experience. But the series author holds out an often reassuring offer of familiarity and continuity. The series reader undertakes to stay with a group of characters or a place or a problem over a prolonged period. There is thus a commitment on both parts of the relationship. How is this relationship built and sustained? How do authors create familiarity and continuity without destroying suspense or becoming overly predictable?

A taxonomy of urban fantasy

The term urban fantasy initially referred to a group of texts – among whose early exemplars are the Borderlands series of anthologies and novels, conceived by Terri Windling, Emma Bull's War for the Oaks (1987) and Tim Powers's The Anubis Gates (1983) – in which the tropes of pastoral or heroic fantasy were brought into an urban setting. It quickly grew to encompass supernatural historical novels and overlap with the loosely defined literary phenomena known as new wave fabulism or the New Weird. It has also been retroactively extended to include virtually every work of the fantastic that takes place in a city or has a contemporary setting that occasionally incorporates a city, with the result that any particularity the term once had is now diffused in a fog of contradiction (and, it must be added, marketing noise; the writers of ‘paranormal romance’ have all but co-opted the term for the broad American readership). If it is applied to both Perdido Street Station and The Night Watch – not to mention texts as disparate as Shriek: An Afterword and War for the Oaks, Neverwhere and The Physiognomy, or Mortal Love and The Iron Dragon's Daughter – what can it possibly mean?

The elements common to all urban fantasies – a city in which supernatural events occur, the presence of prominent characters who are artists or musicians or scholars, the redeployment of previous fantastic and folkloric topoi in unfamiliar contexts – hint at a characterization if not a rigorous definition. Within those common elements, there are two fundamental strains of urban fantasy, which might be loosely differentiated as those in which urban is a descriptor applied to fantasy and those in which fantasy modifies urban.

From colonial to postcolonial in Southeast Asia

In the context of Southeast Asia, ‘postcolonial’ invokes the lasting influence of several nations, languages and cultures from which this chapter singles out the narrative of writing by anglophone authors born in societies governed for varying periods, and with varying degrees of control, by Britain and the US. ‘Southeast Asia’ is a fictional name of recent provenance which was eventually adopted by the people whose region it was meant to designate as a theatre of operations during World War II: the zone located east of India, south of China and north of Australia on any map of Asia. The usefulness of the term outlasted the war and the Cold War. Currently, it refers to a group of nations comprising Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (formerly Burma), the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste (formerly East Timor) and Vietnam. The grouping is formalized in international organizations such as the ASEAN (founded in 1967), and highlights three factors: geographical proximity, shared economic interests and a history of nationhood built – with the partial exception of Thailand – from the aftermath of European (and in the case of the Philippines, Spanish and American) colonialism. Although not generally considered part of Southeast Asia, we can add the territories of Hong Kong and Macao to the comparative context of this chapter: their status as British and Portuguese colonies changed to that of Special Administrative Regions of the People’s Republic of China in 1997 and 1999 respectively, giving the use of English for creative purposes in these territories additional nuances within the idea of ‘postcolonial’ cultures and literatures.

What is now Canada and Quebec remains marked by unequal relations of difference initiated by the advent of European explorers and settlers. Instead of assuming any perceived end of coloniality such as Canadian Confederation in 1867, legislative independence with the Statute of Westminster in 1931, the establishment of Canadian Citizenship in 1947, or the patriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982, this chapter reads the postcolonial spaces of Canada as persisting in ongoing relations of power, dominance, contest, dialogue and negotiation in a field originally constituted by the moment of colonial contact. Initial settler relationships with indigenous populations, with their respective European imperial centres, and with other settlers (including here the colonies to the south, which in turn will become an imperial power) are complicated by other diasporas arriving later from everywhere on the globe, altering any previous emotional, social, economic, political and symbolic geographies of North America.

The inclusion of black, indigenous and other minority and subaltern writing from Canada appears uncontested in postcolonial studies, although this corpus certainly requires more visibility and discussion with attention to Canadian specificity. Theorists including Stephen Slemon, Linda Hutcheon, Donna Bennett, Diana Brydon and Cynthia Sugars have also argued, however, for the importance of other writing from settler nation states like Canada for postcolonial studies. That view is in keeping with the earlier suggestion by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back that the term ‘postcolonial’ should ‘cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day’.

This chapter attempts an overview of the Dutch record of settlement, and traces the development of a Dutch-language writing tradition at the Cape. Before the mid seventeenth century writing about the Cape had appeared in English, French, German, Portuguese and other European languages; but in the writing produced at the Cape itself Dutch was the dominant language until the end of the eighteenth century, when the Cape came under British rule. In the period subsequent to this, Dutch retained some official role (for example in schooling and the church) until the late nineteenth century, when the movement for the formalisation of Afrikaans and eventual replacement of Dutch started (see Chapter 13 below).

The early Cape Dutch record raises a number of issues for someone trying to understand the development of writing about, and in, South Africa. In his influential White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, J. M. Coetzee has written about the reasons for the absence of a ‘myth of a return to Eden’ in writing about the Cape (p. 2). The present chapter has a different focus, namely to examine the nature of reading and writing at the Dutch Cape (or in most cases their absence), as well as the enduring presence of this period and its archives in contemporary South African literature. For a different perspective, which deals with the Portuguese-language response to Africa, see Chapter 6 in this volume.

Travel writing in South Africa in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a highly self-conscious genre, aimed at the European elite, and closely linked to the leading intellectual and political movements of its time. Its major protagonists came from a variety of countries and many were major figures in scientific discovery. The German Peter Kolb(e)(n) (1675–1725/6) and Frenchman Nicholas Louis de La Caille (Delacaille, de la Caille, De Lacaille) (1713–62) were astronomers; the Swedes Anders Sparrman (1748–1820) and Carl Thunberg (1743–1828) were naturalists with a particular interest in botany; the Scot William Paterson (1755–1810) was a soldier and botanist; the Surinamborn Frenchman François Le Vaillant (also known as Levaillant) (1752–1824) was primarily an ornithologist. Other figures had strong links to colonial administration: Johannes de Grevenbroek was the secretary of the Dutch East India Company Political Council at the Cape in the late seventeenth century; Robert Gordon (1743–95) was of Scots origin but working for the Dutch government as a military commander at the Cape; while the Englishman John Barrow (1764–1848) was a geographer and colonial civil servant with a strong interest in land surveying. There were other important travel writers, notably the only important female figure, Lady Anne Barnard (1750–1825), wife of the British Governor in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whose work has enjoyed more attention than any of the other figures although her diaries remained unpublished until the twentieth century.

In 1980 the University of Cape Town offered its final-year undergraduates a specialist option entitled ‘The Book in Africa’ as part of its new African Literature programme. In his prospectus, the convenor, J. M. Coetzee, noted that it was a novel and potentially risky choice for students:

There was, indeed, much ferreting. Among other things, Coetzee encouraged students to investigate ‘the location of bookstores in the Cape Peninsula and the types of clientele they serve’; ‘the library services in the black residential areas of the Cape’; the histories and editorial policies of a number of ‘South African literary magazines’, including Bolt (1970–5), Classic (1963–71), Contrast (1960–), Izwi (1971–4), New Classic (1975–8), New Coin (1965–), Ophir (1967–76), Purple Renoster (1956–72) and Staffrider (1978–93). In addition, he suggested they might consider which ‘works by black South African writers’ the apartheid censors ‘tended to proscribe’ and which ones they ‘let through’; the ‘origin and development of the Heinemann African Writers series’; and, given the emphasis on South and West African contexts, he suggested that students might ‘compare and contrast Onitsha market literature with the South African fotoroman [photo-novel] in terms of themes and readership’.

C. L. R. James was fully aware that ‘the something new’ was on a far larger scale than the small size of the Caribbean region suggests possible. Caribbean people have made major interventions in economics, history, political science, medicine, law, cultural studies, sports and many fields of the arts. Caribbean literature, still under-appreciated on a global level, has been enormously innovatory, despite its relatively small size, enriching not only the region and its several diasporas but the entire literary world.

Defining Caribbean

We begin from diverse representations of Caribbean culture by a few highly influential postcolonial writers. For Cuban Antonio Benítez-Rojo, the Caribbean is a ‘repeating island’, postmodern, modern, dissolving and redetermining itself by turns, inevitably and deeply linked to both the plantation and to the sea. The region is ‘the natural and indispensable realm of marine currents, of waves, of folds and double-folds, of fluidity and sinuosity’. For St Lucian Derek Walcott, it is a vase once broken and made whole by patient love which glues the fragments together (by which he means elements of ancestral culture brought to the region by its diverse people). This process he describes as ‘the care and pain’ of the Antilles. But by contrast, Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul left the region rejecting his country and its then colonial culture, and writing from Britain, said Trinidad ‘was a place where things had happened and nothing showed’ and where the slave ‘has no story’.

In the early years of the twentieth century African people were confronted with the hegemony of European modernity, which had violently entered African history through the social formation of capitalism and the political systems of imperialism and colonialism. They came to the gradual realisation that colonial modernity, which was a variation of European modernity, had to be engaged with, even if principally in opposition, since modernity as a worldly experience was a ‘historical necessity’, as Jameson was to argue in several of his writings in the closing years of the twentieth century where he retroactively traced the historical passageways frommodernity to postmodernity (Postmodernism and A Singular Modernity).

Since Europeanmodernity in the form of imperialism had jettisoned African people from African history into European history, the historical challenge for them became how to revert back to African history, as Amilcar Cabral astutely observed in the revolutionary decade of the 1960s (Return to the Source). In this era of social upheaval, Cabral postulated the national liberation struggle as an effective instrument for reversion back to African history. In contrast to the moment of Cabral, in the early decades of that century, when imperialism and colonialism were hegemonic and consequently had the monopoly of power regarding state violence, many New African intellectuals sought to master the complexity of European modernity with the intent of subverting it to a form of modernity that would emerge from the democratic imperatives of African history.

The period 1948–76 is arguably the most significant in Afrikaans literature, a time that coincided with greater social privileges, better education and the rapid urbanisation of white Afrikaans-speaking South Africans. The electoral triumph of Afrikaner nationalism in 1948 enhanced the place of the Afrikaans language in the civil service, the educational system and the economy. New Afrikaans publishing houses were established and sustained through favourable changes in the macro-political and economic conditions of the country, symbiotic relationships with the major Nationalist-supporting Afrikaans newspaper houses and printers, youthful entrepreneurship and, most importantly, the fostering of close relationships with the decision makers in the newly established apartheid education system for which purpose-made schoolbooks were produced (see Steyn, ‘Eerste Dekades’; ‘Nederige Begin’). It was a time of the embourgeoisement of the Afrikaner, a social change that clearly resonated in Afrikaans literature.

The cultural consequences of this political ascendancy included early attempts at stabilising and canonising Afrikaner literary culture, such as the ambitious three-volume series Kultuurgeskiedenis van die Afrikaner (Cultural History of the Afrikaner, 1948–51); a new literary history, Perspektief en Profiel (Perspective and Profile, 1951; since 1998 updated into three volumes) and a new anthology, Groot Verseboek (Great Book of Verse, 1951). The same need for stocktaking is also reflected in the comprehensive literary histories of Dekker (Afrikaanse Literatuurgeskiedenis [Afrikaans Literary History, 1935]), Antonissen (Schets van den Ontwikkelingsgang der Zuid-Afrikaansche Letterkunde [Sketch of the Development of South African Literature, 1946]) and Kannemeyer (Geskiedenis van die Afrikaanse Literatuur [History of Afrikaans Literature, 1978, 1983]).

If this chapter were charged with the task of describing twentieth-century English children's fiction, until recently a neglected category in literary histories, novels in trilogies and series would loom large. Imagine a literary history of the children's story without Joan Aiken, the Reverend W. Awdry, Enid Blyton, Susan Cooper, Brian Jacques, Michael de Larrabeiti, C. S. Lewis, Hugh Lofting, A. A. Milne, E. Nesbit, K.M. Peyton, Beatrix Potter, Philip Pullman, Arthur Ransome, J.K. Rowling, Rosemary Sutcliffe, or BarbaraWillard. Imagine never again visiting those countries of the mind where swallows and amazons rove Lakeland; where Harry, Ron, and Hermione attend Hogwarts; where descendants of British Romans witness in the dark ages the coming of a Celtic Arthur; where Mantlemass stands at the heart of Ashdown forest, persisting from the Wars of the Roses through the English CivilWar. Most readers would feel the absence of these dream countries of childhood reading, if they paused to recall the anticipation ignited by the long row of matching covers in a library or bookshop (is this the right summer to begin Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes books?), or the melancholy provoked by the end of a series (still disappointed at Narnia's rolling up like a carpet?), or the bittersweet recognition that they have gotten too grown up to enjoy a series anymore (at least until reading aloud to their own children begins).

Titles are never simple or innocent especially when they appear to be so. This holds true for the seemingly innocuous title of this chapter. For what should give us pause in the title is the innocent, commonplace conjunction. Why is ‘primitivism’ – a term that summons up colonial projects and projections and enables the West to assert its modernity and maturity – linked through the conjunction ‘and’ to ‘postcolonial literature’ which, one can justifiably assume, would reject the scandalous problems associated with the term ‘primitivism’? If, as literary and art historians have informed us repeatedly, modernist art and literature relied heavily on the resources provided by so-called primitive cultures, then surely postcolonial writers and artists would be critical of any form of primitivism that energized Western modernism? What, then, is the status of the conjunction in our title? Does it imply some kind of relation between primitivism and postcolonial literature? What sort of relation do we have here? Is it an antagonistic relation in which postcolonialism is opposed to primitivism? Or a complementary relation in which postcolonial literature finds primitivism useful as a strategic partner?

Like colonial subjects in other British colonies, South African writers have for centuries felt the tug of the metropole. Olive Schreiner went to London to seek a publisher for her African Farm, and almost without exception late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century South African writers followed suit. This trend has continued to the present: local publishing houses established themselves firmly enough in the years that followed World War II to offer writers a viable local market, but the prestige of publication in London or New York (and other major metropolitan centres), and the global reach that this brings, sees South African writers continuing to send their manuscripts abroad.

The writers examined herewere active from the last years of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, a period that saw a decisive shift from a situation in which there was no viable alternative to being published in Britain to one in which a writer could choose. The change was remarkable: Douglas Blackburn's turn-of-the-century novels were published and reviewed in London and Edinburgh, generated some interest in the wake of the Boer War, and then vanished almost without trace; not fifty years later, Herman Charles Bosman's Mafeking Road (1947) was released by a local publisher, remaining in print and immensely popular through half a dozen local editions and innumerable impressions before finally making an inconspicuous entry into the British and American markets in 2008.

England's seventeenth-century intellectual revolution is often taken to have launched a revolutionary approach to the truth that led, by the time of the eighteenth century, to the new genre of the novel. So far as it goes, that account cannot be gainsaid: new methods, based either on direct observation or on inference from statistical regularities, introduced a novel language and tonality for approximating the truth. Literary imitations of personally verified truth and of “political arithmetic” followed in due course: Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) illustrates both at once. A new “culture of fact” did indeed raise the threshold of credibility in many quarters. Who can doubt that the eighteenth-century emergence of the novel registered the adaptation of older literary genres, especially epic and romance, to a new standard of fact-like plausibility? This accommodation to probable characters and plots, however, by no means exhausts the variety of possible relations in the eighteenth century between narrative history and narrative fiction. Rendering the past in eighteenth-century fiction goes far beyond the novel's mimicry of eye-witness authority or political arithmetic. To take these visible elements as the essence of the early novel's treatment of matters historical serves only to eclipse its striking engagement with the methodology of writing history – in short, with historiography.

Sotho folk literature, like that of other Bantu or indigenous languages spoken in South Africa, has been in existence since time immemorial, and has been passed by word of mouth from one generation to the succeeding, until in the latter half of the nineteenth century when it was transcribed by the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, whose members arrived in Lesotho around 1833. Poetry in particular is a salient genre of this folk tradition. The literature in general is composed of a variety of genres, namely myths and legends (ditshomo), riddles (dilotho), proverbs and idioms (maele le maelana), folk-songs (dipina), hymns (dikoma), praises (dithoko) (Guma, Likoma and Form, Content and Technique), and through evolution to modern poetry (dithothokiso). Dikoma and dithoko are predominant forms of Sotho literature and perhaps the oldest recognisable form of poetry. However, they are not sui generis, as they are also found in the oral tradition of other languages, for example isiZulu and isiXhosa, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 4 of this volume.

The word dithoko (singular: thoko) is derived from the verbal root, ho roka (to praise). Later I shall illustrate how dikoma and dithoko, the oldest forms of poetry, have resonance in a later form of poetry that gained the somewhat curious term of difelats a ditsamaya naha (also written as lifela tsa litsamaea naha in the orthography of Lesotho), which literally means ‘songs of veteran travellers’. The singular of difela is sefela, which literally translates as ‘hymn’ in modern Sesotho.

Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Édouard Glissant are three creative thinkers who share something of a common Weltanschauung. Without taking the more extreme definition from Freud that the latter is the unified solution as generated from a particular perspective of all the problems of the universe, certainly the centrality of the colonial encounter with otherness forms the overt structuring factor for the worldview of each of these formidable intellectuals. However, their creative paths would take different form. The themes that stage the encounter and the timbre of the voice of otherness in the texts of these intellectuals prove to be quite different in each case. In this chapter I will consider the oeuvre of these thinkers as together forming an aesthetic corpus that anticipates the transnational aspirations of a range of postcolonial francophone writers of encounter.

A defining moment: literary history and the theme of encounter

In considering this material historically I am reminded of Walter Benjamin’s idea that:

Introduction

Scholars working at the interstices of the religious, the literary and the postcolonial have concerned themselves almost exclusively with the role and representation of Christianity. Occasionally confessional in tone, historians of various stripes have detailed the religion’s global dispersion and assessed the continental, regional and local impact of different Christian denominations, focusing upon their evangelizing agendas and missionary wings. Some accounts examine the work of individual clerics and ecclesiastical institutions, while others analyse vying forms of scriptural interpretation and understanding during and after empire and colonization, as well as the innovative Christian critiques of Europe’s overseas legacy that constitute so-called ‘liberation’ and ‘local’ theologies. A few commentators have subjected Christian scriptures, literary classics and theological categories, as well as church publications and missionary writings, to critical interrogation from decidedly nontheological perspectives and for expressly non-theological ends. And still others have explored the ways in which the Christian figures in the representation and misrepresentation of identity and power in encounters, conflicts and occasional accommodations between colonizer and colonized. In addition, drawing variously upon such resources, a handful of critics writing under the banner ‘postcolonial’ have gathered close readings of particular plays, poems, novels and instances of other literary genres into collections of scholarly essays focused upon particular theological or religious themes, tropes or topoi.

Literature and history

The aim of this chapter is to give a selective overview of Afrikaans literature after 1976. It is customary in South African literary historiography to accept that literary histories are shaped by contextual as well as aesthetic factors and to use historical transitions as reference points for the periodisation of literature. It has also been argued that ‘there is a growing consensus for a common periodization of contemporary South African literature which would use the dates of Sharpeville, Soweto, and the idea of the interregnum to guide the organisation of the field’ (Loflin, ‘Periodization in South African literatures’). This is confirmed by the general practice in Afrikaans literary historiography: Ampie Coetzee (Letterkunde en Krisis [Literature and Crisis], 1990) and J. C. Kannemeyer (Die Afrikaanse Literatuur 1652–2004 [Afrikaans Literature 1652–2004], 2005) as well as the writers of the overviews in the different volumes of the collaborative literary history Perspektief en Profiel (Perspective and Profile, 1998, 1999, 2005), edited by H. P. van Coller, use these dates as reference points in their description of Afrikaans literary history.

Afrikaans literature after 1976 can be divided into two phases, even though certain discontinuities and overlaps occur. The first phase starts in 1976 when the Soweto uprising against the enforced use of Afrikaans in schools signalled the beginning of a more concerted resistance against the apartheid government. The ensuing stigmatisation of Afrikaans deeply affected Afrikaans literature and led Afrikaans authors to comment on the compromised status of the language in which they wrote.

South African history is characterized by multiple colonialisms and migrations which were different in the ways they operated and in their impact on the societies and cultures of the region. The large-scale movement of people, the rise and fall of polities, the logic of imperial control by direct and indirect means, and the history of resistance against such control – all were present before the arrival of European settlers in the seventeenth century. Dutch, French and German settlers and their descendants, who over time came to speak Dutch in its creolized local form, Afrikaans, were, in 1806, effectively recolonized by Britain. Large numbers of slaves were imported over centuries from other parts of Africa, Madagascar, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, adding to the mix. The advent of self-rule in 1910, the triumph of the National Party in 1948, or the declaration of the republic in 1961, moments which elsewhere might be iconically postcolonial, in South Africa meant the entrenchment of white power and an extension of internal colonial-style control and exploitation. South Africa thus presents a particular set of challenges to those seeking to describe it as ‘postcolonial’.

The variegated nature of South African colonialism is evident in its literatures. Writing in English and Afrikaans exhibits features similar to those of the literatures of other settler countries, for example in their transactions with European literary traditions, or in a preoccupation with the relations between identity and landscape. But South Africa differs dramatically from other settler colonies in that its settlers never outnumbered its indigenous inhabitants.