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Campus Fiction and Critical University Studies from Below: Disgrace, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, and the Postcolonial University at the Millennium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2022

Anne W. Gulick Open the ORCID record for Anne W. Gulick [Opens in a new window]
Anne W. Gulick*
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University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, USA
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Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Two of South African literature’s best-known titles from the turn of the twenty-first century are works of campus fiction that rarely get recognized as such. In this article I read J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) as novels whose figuration of the university is far more central to their treatment of the contradictions and ambiguities that characterize postapartheid South Africa than is generally acknowledged. In the course of narratives that seem largely focused on other things, these texts offer up a distinctly South African but also distinctly postcolonial variety of campus fiction, and a critical engagement with the neoliberal university and the conditions under which upward mobility and intellectual inquiry take shape in the twenty-first-century global south. Coetzee and Mpe suggest capacious and transformative, if also deeply ambivalent, ways of imagining an as-yet unrealized decolonial future for universities.

Keywords

South African literaturecampus fictioncritical university studiesJ. M. CoetzeePhaswane Mpestudent activism
Type
Article
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 177 - 197
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© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Although Fees Must Fall, Outsourcing Must Fall, Xenophobia Must Fall, and other movements have made their impact in no small part because they took place on university campuses across South Africa, not just in these two metropoles, and crucially not just at elite institutions, I name these cities specifically not only because of their relevance to the novels at hand but because they are the locations in which Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall originated.

2 The 2001 shooting of a University of Durban-Westville student was the first time in South African history that a campus protest had resulted in death. See Khan, Fazel, “The Struggle for a Better Education for All—UDW, 1995–2003,” in Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa, ed. Pithouse, Richard (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

3 A useful overview of these three approaches can be found in Snaza, Nathan and Singh, Julietta, “Introduction: Dehumanist Education and the Colonial University,” Social Text 146 39.1 (March 2021): 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 For early discussions of allegory in Disgrace, see Attridge, Derek, “Age of Bronze, State of Grace: Music and Dogs in Coetzee’s Disgrace ,” Novel 34.1 (2000): 98–121 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Derek Attridge, “J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: Introduction,” Interventions 4.3 (2002): 315–20; Jane Poyner, “Truth and Reconciliation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Scrutiny2 5.2 (2000): 67–77; and Isidore Diala, “Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and Andre Brink: Guilt, Expiation, and the Reconciliation Process in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Journal of Modern Literature 25.2 (2001): 50–68.

5 J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 1999), 3.

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8 Coetzee, Disgrace, 4.

9 Jeffrey Williams, “Deconstructing Academe,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 19, 2012.

10 “‘Americanization’ in its current form is a synonym for globalization, a synonym that recognizes that globalization is not a neutral process.” See Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2.

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14 Coetzee, Disgrace, 11.

15 “Not the best student but not the worst either: clever enough, but unengaged.” See Coetzee, Disgrace.

16 Coetzee, Disgrace, 14.

17 Coetzee, Disgrace, 13.

18 Coetzee, Disgrace, 5.

19 Coetzee, Disgrace, 25.

20 David Atwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-to-face with Time (New York: Penguin, 2016), 198 Google Scholar.

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22 See Kavadlo, Jesse, “Blue Angels Meet Dying Animals: Textual and Sexual Subversion in the Clinton-Era Academic Novel,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 37.2 (2004): 11–25 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Williams, “Deconstructing Academe.” Showalter briefly discusses Disgrace as a work of campus fiction in Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005).

23 Certainly, there are exceptions. Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons (New York: Picador, 2005) includes a graphic and painful account of a college student’s experience with sexual assault. Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (London: Penguin, 2005) features a student-faculty affair that at first seems merely awkward and silly only to problematize that perspective—which is also the perspective of the male faculty member—later on in the story. I thank Christian K. Anderson and Erin York for sharing their expertise in US-based campus fiction.

24 Showalter, Faculty Towers, 121. Showalter’s study came out one year before the publication of Charlotte Simmons, which, as noted previously, does deal with sexual assault. Showalter is actually one of the only critics to identify and discuss Disgrace as part of the campus fiction genre, but in her brief reading of Coetzee’s novel—alongside David Mamet’s Oleanna—she comes to similar conclusions to my own about the authors’ real interests lying elsewhere. I do, however, find her assignation of a national framework for this failure to come to terms with sexual harassment on campus in literature suggestive.

25 Menand, Louis, The Marketplace of Ideas (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 2010), 64 Google Scholar.

26 Abigail Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation,” August 18, 2019 (https://abolitionjournal.org/abolitionist-university-studies-an-invitation/).

27 See, for example, Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2012). Kyla Wazana Tompkins makes a similar point in relation to contemporary “state of the humanities” discourse: “It does not seem clear to me that the questions the profession is asking about the state of the ‘field’ are necessarily the same questions minority scholars and people invested in minority literatures are or should be asking. The world is burning and let’s be blunt: despite incremental movements forward, the disproportional work of English as a literary field has always been and continues to be to uphold white supremacy, often through their investments in an Anglo Saxonist origin narrative, which have often been used to guard the distribution of resources, learning and ideas to students and faculty, namely the withholding of lines, of tenure, of curricular distribution, and through the mis-apportionment of social, cultural and actual capital and value to minority colleagues, minority fields, to minority students and to minority spaces.” Tompkins, Kyla Wazana, “The Shush,” PMLA 136.3 (May 2021): 418–19Google Scholar. Disaffection with the contemporary university is a different experience depending on one’s subject-position; the “critical academic” described by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten crafts an ostensibly oppositional stance to the institution that nonetheless is premised on a certain entitlement within and fidelity to that institution that is neither available nor desirable to those who inhabit the university on different terms. See Harney, Stefano and Moten, Fred, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, England: Minor Compositions, 2011), 39 Google Scholar. In a passage from her most recent work whose resonance with David Lurie’s own reading of his situation in Coetzee’s novel is rather pronounced, Sara Ahmed draws a connection between a certain style of (white male) academic criticality and the problem of sexual harassment in the university: “The figure of the complainer,” she writes, “is treated as a symptom of a more generalized structure of violence, whether institutional, managerial, or neoliberal. When complaints against academics are made, they can pass themselves off very quickly as the ones being forced, being forced out or being forced into compliance by a disciplinary regime.” Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 204. Melanie herself is not visible as a complainer—she never appears in person and has no voice in the process—but that absence is precisely what allows David to imagine himself as victimized by institutional bureaucracy.

28 Coetzee, Disgrace, 51.

29 In an op-ed for the New York Times reflecting on Donald Trump’s defense of Brett Kavanaugh, the nominee for the US Supreme Court who was accused by Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford of sexually assaulting her when they were both in high school, Kate Manne describes the response of Trump and other public officials to Kavanaugh’s situation as himpathy: “the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior.” Kate Manne, “Brett Kavanaugh and America’s ‘Himpathy’ Reckoning,” New York Times, September 26, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/opinion/brett-kavanaugh-hearing-himpathy.html. Manne’s fuller account of this term appears in her 2017 book, where she discusses Brock Turner, the Stanford student found guilty of raping an unconscious classmate behind a dumpster: “The excessive sympathy that flows to perpetrators like Brock Turner both owes and contributes to insufficient concern for the harm, humiliation, and (more or less lasting) trauma they may bring to their victims. And it both owes to and contributes to a tendency to let historically dominant agents get away with murder—proverbially and otherwise—vis-à-vis their historical subordinates. In the case of male dominance, we sympathize with him first, effectively making him into the victim of his own crimes. For, if someone sympathizes with the rapist initially, insofar as he loses his appetite or swimming scholarship, then he will come to figure as the victim in the story.” Manne, Kate, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 197 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Manne in fact makes reference to Disgrace in the introductory pages of her book, citing David’s denial that what he is doing to Melanie counts as rape (Down Girl, 5–6).

30 Manne, Down Girl, 53.

31 Ahmed, Sara, “Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects),” The Scholar and Feminist Online 8.3 (2010)Google Scholar (http://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/print_ahmed.htm).

32 Atwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, 197–98.

33 Coetzee, Disgrace, 32.

34 Coetzee, Disgrace, 4–5.

35 Coetzee, Disgrace, 21.

36 For a brief but excellent analysis of how Disgrace stages a critique of a Freirean “nonhierarchical educational model, in which teachers are no longer authoritative figures, is no longer revolutionary; in fact, it fits in quite well with a neoliberal model of education intent on undermining faculty governance and turning the university over to a business model,” see Dalleo, Raphael, “The Work of Teaching Literature in the Age of Mechanical Education,” PMLA 131.5 (2016), 1472 Google Scholar. Dalleo’s is one of the very few readings of Disgrace that attends to the novel’s comment on the university, and it deeply informed and inspired my own thinking on the subject.

37 Sara Ahmed, “Against Students,” The New Inquiry, June 29, 2015 (https://thenewinquiry.com/against-students/).

38 Coetzee, Disgrace, 32.

39 Myambo, Melissa Tandiwe, “Capitalism Disguised as Democracy: A Theory of ‘Belonging,’ Not Belongings, in the New South Africa,” Comparative Literature 63.1 (2011): 64–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Nuttall, Sarah, “City Forms and Writing the ‘Now’ in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30.4 (2004): 743 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Neville Hoad, “Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS Blues: The Intellectual, the Archive, and the Pandemic,” Public Culture 17.1 (2005): 101–27; and Emily S. Davis, “Contagion, Cosmopolitanism, and Human Rights in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” College Literature 40.3 (2013): 99–112.

42 I invoke the term decolonial here as used and defined by Walter Mignolo and Madina V. Tlostanova: “not anticolonial, but moving away from the colonial” (17), “decolonial thinking and decolonial option are always already delinked form modernity and post-modernity. [The decolonial] brings to the foreground a silenced and different genealogy of thought” (33). See Mignolo, and Tlostanova, , Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2012)Google Scholar. Although I find Mignolo and Tlostanova’s definition of the anticolonial too narrow to account for the intellectual and political capaciousness of that twentieth-century project and its resonances for the present day, the overlap between their conception of the decolonial and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s argument about indigenous research and its investment in methodologies that are similiarly “delinked” from those of the imperial university lead me to make use of this term as a descriptor for Mpe’s project, particularly in light of his decision to pursue training as a traditional healer during the final years of his life. See Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2012)Google Scholar, and Attree, Lizzy and Mpe, Phaswane, “Healing with Words: Phaswane Mpe Interviewed by Lizzy Attree,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40.3 (2004): 147 Google Scholar. This interview also appears in Mpe, Brooding Clouds (Johannesburg: Picador, 2008), Kindle edition.

43 “The Freedom Charter: Adopted at the Congress of the People, Kliptown, South Africa, on 26 June 1955,” Aluka Digital Library (http://psimg.jstor.org/fsi/img/pdf/t0/10.5555/al.sff.document.nuun1969_05_final.pdf).

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46 Mpe, Phaswane, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 18 Google Scholar.

47 Achille Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive,” 2015 (https://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf).

48 King, “Stumbling Toward Racial Inclusion,” 82.

49 Nuttall, “Literary City,” 214. Nuttall’s comment here is in reference to Niq Mhlongo’s 2004 Dog Eat Dog.

50 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 11.

51 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 12.

52 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 13.

53 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow.

54 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow.

55 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 14.

56 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 10.

57 Mpe, Brooding Clouds, “Occasion for Brooding.”

58 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 15.

59 Mpe, Brooding Clouds, “Occasion for Brooding.”

60 Williams, Jeffrey, “The Pedagogy of Debt,” College Literature 33.4 (2006): 161 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Williams, “The Pedagogy of Debt,” 165.

62 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 100.

63 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 106.

64 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 105.

65 Jaji, Tsitsi, “Conclusion: Reading in Transition,” in South African Writing in Transition, ed. Barnard, Rita and van der Vlies, Andrew (London: Bloomsbury 2019), 262 Google Scholar.

66 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 30.

67 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 56.

68 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow.

69 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 57.

70 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow.

71 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow.

72 See Attree and Mpe, Healing with Words,” 2004.

73 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 31.

74 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 94.

75 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 95.

76 Césaire, Aimé, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” trans. Jeffers, Chike, Social Text 28.2 (2010): 152 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 64.

78 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 66.

79 Brooding Clouds offers up a slightly more nuanced, if no less critical, portrait of Terror, whose affinity with Black power places him at a generational move from his classmates. Refentse’s refusal to stand with Terror is also less honorable here because it results in Terror—whose stance in class is selfishly motivated, but not completely unprincipled—being subjected to corporal punishment.

80 Myambo, “Capitalism Disguised as Democracy,” 74.

81 See Poyner, Jane, “Writing Under Pressure: A Post-Apartheid Canon?” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44.2 (2008): 103–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Davis, “Contagion, Cosmopolitanism, and Human Rights in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” 107.

84 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons,” 63.