Migrants, migration and migrancy: Migrant experiences of South Africa in contemporary African literature
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Date
2022
Authors
Motahane, Nonki
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of the Free State
Abstract
Recent years have seen a steady increase in mass migration of Africans within and outside the continent. In the African continent, South Africa is among the top immigrant receiving countries. The post-1994 political dispensation’s notion of the of the “rainbow nation” created an impression of diversity that attracted inward mobilities. However, in recent years, as the South African economy stuttered and anti-immigrant rhetoric by the media and senior politicians increased, the reception and assimilation of immigrants in South Africa has been less than enthusiastic. In the discourse on migration in South Africa, xenophobic violence has become the single most important manifestation of the relationship between the locals and migrants. It is important, therefore, to explore the literary interventions in the urgent process of re-establishing new knowledges about South Africa’s so-called “migrant crisis”. This study enters the conversation on migrant experiences of South Africa, by exploring literary representations of the country as a diasporic space. The primary concern of this thesis is to use a literary critical approach to examine the potential contribution of migrant narratives of South Africa in re-discoursing epistemological methods of knowing, seeing, telling, and reading migrants, migration and migrancy in contemporary South Africa. My analysis invokes a triangulation of migration, space, gender, border and identity theories to explore various ways through which such narratives respond, re-imagine and re-constitute the realities of the current social, political, and economic precarity in the country. I demonstrate how literature is a new site of encountering this precarity, which may help us to understand it in new ways. The study uses a variety of literary genres; novels, short stories, poetry, and auto/biographies to offer different representations of the state of social cohesion and the discourse of African (dis)unity in the context of the recent return of radical nationalism and the discourse of borders. I focus on the narrative strategies, form, motifs, and other forms inherent to literature to analyse themes of belonging, (un)home, abjection, precarity, settlement, gender, Othering, and human rights. A key finding of this study is that through modes of representations, most of the texts deconstruct and radically transform some of the subject matters in the (re)construction of South Africa as a trans-African host space.
Description
Dissertation (Ph.D. (English))--University of the Free State, 2022
Keywords
Migrants, migration, migrancy, African literature, South Africa, "migrant crisis", Trans-African, mobility, migrant Identities