I am greatly indebted to Dr Glen Thompson for his advice on the history of the beach in South Africa. While there has been a small body of critical work on the South African coast, this thesis will depart from and add to the current study by providing the first extended survey of the coast in the South African literature.
A Definition of “Littoral Zone”
To do this, he considers how the coast played a contributing role in challenging the categorization and racial division of the people of South Africa. He then presents a review of published histories of South African literature to argue for the legitimacy of this study and the kind of literary history that can be written when focusing on the coast as an analytical category.
Literature Review
Literary Publications on the South African Littoral
The length of my project allows for a more comprehensive selection of works, enabling me to undertake a more expansive exploration of the coastal area in South African writing. The representations of the coastal area offered in South African writings are therefore of interest to both South African literary studies and global beach studies.
Published Histories of South African Literature
One of the only scholarship on South African coastal literature is Stephen Gray's Southern African Literature: An Introduction (1979). After this shipwreck scene, Gray's attention turns inland, leaving the coastal area unconsidered as the point of entry into and out of the 'dark' African interior.
History of the South African Beach
Vivian Bickford-Smith explores the nineteenth-century creation of the sea in Cape in. It "declared that the sea is 'the sea and the bottom of the sea within.'
Tidalectics: Method, Metaphor, Model
Thinking about wind can expand – and calibrate – the conceptual metaphor of the tide in valuable ways. In this case, the three historical parts of the project are framed by wind, and the seven chapters by tidal and wave movements.
Trialectics: A Theory
Hones argues that this simple categorization implicitly suggests that space is "something stable and fixed" ("Literary Geography" 686-7), the opposite of what social geographers assert. Therefore, a tidal reading of the littoral allows me to explore the cycle between the real (the material space of the littoral), the creative imagination (as represented in literature) and the social/cultural imagination of the coast (the image of the beach in history and society for example as space of free time [white]).
Categories of Persons
South African bodies: how bodies move, the spaces they are allowed to occupy, the identities they are supposed to claim, the relationships they must forge” (2). Jones and Dlamini argue that space in South Africa allows us to read ways in which “the body is encoded, empowered, abused and represented” (2).
The Chapters
With the fall of the Portuguese empire came the demise of their monopoly on the trade and import networks to the East. Writing settlement" 185) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.24 The wreck of the Grosvenor in 1782, the shipwreck that "looms largest in the South African literary.
Introduction
Narratives of shipwrecks support part of the disintegration of the imperial episteme represented by the Lusiads. My discussion of the Lusiads is introduced with Adamastor, an infamous figure in South African literary history and the anthropomorphized cape of the Cape of Storms.
Littoral Encounters: The Imperial Episteme
Klein argues persuasively that the rhetorical power of The Lusiads lies in Camões's "poetic projection" of his imperial vision of the "vast expanse of blue water." And yet scholars largely forego analyzes of the poem's depiction of the sea, in favor of discussions that focus on its expansionist and imperial discourse.
Flotsam: Shipwreck Narratives
Cataloguing the Littoral
In the first pages of the text, the author tries to show this. Indeed, subsequent moments in Saõ Bento's narrative return to the guiding sentiments reflected in this introductory passage.
Encounters with the Littoral
Additionally, since the ship sighted the Cape in April, this places their arrival in the fall. The movement of the ship thus changes from confusing to purposeful, underlined by the reference to latitude.
Encounters within the Littoral: Racialised Shorelines and the Disruption of Empire
For local residents, however, this perspective is challenged and the existing name of the area is given by people living in Primorje. The ambivalent representation of the coastal space reveals both the expansionist discourse and the limits of empire.
Shipwreck Shored
The key here is that Adamastor is placed in the middle of the two coastal encounters. So, he looks out at the sea and the Lusiads (the Portuguese sailors) from the perspective of the land.
Swash: The Lusiads
Thus the Lusiads present us with the categorization of the person in the coastal area as subordinate. After all, at this point in the narrative, Da Gama and his crew are guests of the Sultan of Malindi.
Conclusion
Introduction
First, narratively and narratologically, this scene constitutes a lull in the forward trajectory of the novel's plot and structure. This confluence is displayed in the language of the novel in select coastal moments, the.
Conclusion
Schreiner places his titular character on the edge of the empire, which I conceptually read as the coastal zone of. I read the coastal setting of Piet in Italy in the same way that engaged the geolocation of Kalk Bay and its history on the edge of the colony.
Introduction
My reading of False Days analyzes the coastal setting as the site of Helen's rite of passage. The particularities of casual spatial policy contrast with spatial behaviors outside the coastal area.
Real-and-Imagined Space
Beach Face: Bildung in the Littoral
Helen spends her time either at the edge of the water or lying on the beach. It is thus from the vantage point to the coast that Abrahams is able to reflect on.
Conclusion
The coastal space, as a space outside the spatial constraints of the city, is still able to offer a momentary experience of freedom from these constraints, thus exposing the impossibility of freedom. If Abrahams "casts the beach as a threshold into the journey of 'telling freedom,'" as Samuelson ("Re-telling freedom" 311) argues, then this casting is due to the beach's presence in the memoir, as it is juxtaposed with the persistent limitations of the movement that was imposed on Abraham.
Introduction
The littoral moment in Wicomb's text is located in the collection's title chapter. It is in this coastal scene that Wicomb inserts careful reminders of the story's political context.
Mating Birds
Here, the coastal space of the beach reveals the internal hypocrisy that occurs in the application of apartheid laws. For Abrahams, the sight of the ships from the shore meant that “the long night was over.
Conclusion
However, this transcendence is ultimately caught in the backwash of apartheid laws, as the behavior of Nkosi's characters is determined as criminal the moment they step outside the coastal space. Here outside the beach, the intimacy established in the coastal space is reshaped as criminal within an overdetermined racist discourse.
Introduction
The ecological nature of Livingstone's work is evident in the poet's consistent conception of man as an organism within the terrestrial biosphere, that is, man as a category within a larger biosystem. Following Elizabeth DeLoughrey's argument about "allegories of the Anthropocene," I read this romantic relationship as an allegory that considers whether the novel's most powerful critique might be to leave the environment alone.
Tidalectics and the Anthropocene
Livingston's description of the seashore as a metaphor for humanity's gap between our physical experience of the world and our spiritual affection for it is therefore a critique of disconnection. Thinking about the coast as a place of transition also disturbs ecocriticism in Livingston's poetry, since it is precisely a transition to environmental awareness.
Shoreline Change: An Ecocritical Engagement with Genre
This description of the coastline is one that scholars often use to inform their conceptual lens when reading Livingston's poetry. An interaction between the Whale Caller and Sharisha occurs on the beaches and peninsular rocks of the city, a land on the edge of the ocean.
A Littoral Zone
To this end, the poem's seaside setting offers the speaker a vantage point of ocean and land, environment and man. However, the speaker is forced to return to the present moment of the poem and offer his own.
The Whale Caller
As an allegory of the Anthropocene, this contrast is between the Whale Caller/whale and the tourist industry. A longue durée approach places the environmental critique in a much wider temporality than the immediate action of the Whale Caller.
Conclusion
A reading of The Whale Caller as allegory reveals that perhaps the real environmental critique in the novel is one that removes the "anthropo" from "Anthropocene." Compared to the global scale of resource mining and human exploitation of the environment, the whale caller's actions seem negligible, especially when placed within the longue durée of the Anthropocene.
Introduction
His movement around Cape Town provides the reader with a map of the city along with Azure. My reading of Thirteen Cents analyzes the seaside discourse in the novel as an announcement of the conclusion of the text, in which Azure imagines a huge tidal wave destroying Cape Town.
Discursive Silences
The novel uses a first-person narrative perspective that details Azure's movements throughout his daily experience and his navigation of the city. At this point I would like to expand this strategy to include the oceanic trope within the novel and the anchoring of that trope in coastal space.
Littoral Discourse
A Tidalectic Historiography
It is thus in the ship's "grave" that Sila dies a social death before she is reborn via. Often this revisiting the past becomes an oceanic trope, as Silas' memories of trauma are replaced with descriptions of the sea.
An Environment That Speaks
In the first pages of the novel, Azure tells the reader, "The streets of Sea Point are my home" (1). It is cast as Azure's family home environment, in which he is free from the predatory, violent behavior of the adults on the city streets.
Conclusion
The Lusiads, as a narrative haunted by failure, sets the tone for the coast as the site of the disaster caused by Adamastor. It speaks to the nature of the beach in South African literature itself because a linear progression in the use of the beach and how it is culturally imagined cannot be traced.
