Cultured Violence

Professor Rosemary Jolly holds appointments in the Department of English; Southern African Research Centre and Institute for Population and Public Health at Queen’s University, Canada. Her previous books include Colonization, Violence and Narration in White South African Writing: Breyten Breytenbach, André Brink and J. M. Coetzee (Ohio UP and University of the Witwatersrand P, 1996) and co-editor, with Derek Attridge, of Writing South Africa (Cambridge UP, 1997).

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Testifying in and to Cultures of Spectacular Violence1. ‘Going to the Dogs’: ‘Humanity’ in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,The Lives of Animals and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission2. The State of/and Childhood: Engendering Adolescence in Contemporary South Africa3. Spectral Presences: Women, Stigma, and the Performance of Alienation4. Men ‘Not Feeling Good’: The Dilemmas of Hypermasculinity in the Era of HIV/AIDSConclusion: Constituting DishonourBibliographyIndex

Whereas Jolly's Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing (CH, Oct '96, 34-0749) decontextualizes the fiction under investigation, removing it from the historical and sociopolitical conditions that gave rise to it so as not to "spectacularize" violence, here Jolly (English and postcolonial studies, Queens Univ., Ontario, Canada) studies fictional and factual narratives, paying attention to how writers conceive of entrenched violence against children, women, men, and animals within particular social, political, and historical circumstances--in short, how violence is "cultured." Jolly's carefully argued introduction maps out an interdisciplinary approach and links Njabula Ndebele's notion of spectacular violence with Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and symbolic violence. She goes on to place selected works of South African fiction--for example, J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and The Lives of Animals, Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples, Siphiwo Mahala's When a Man Cries, Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Futhi Ntshingila's Shameless--alongside other narratives, such as Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimony by victim-survivors and perpetrators of violence, and discourses by politicians such as Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. Of primary importance is Jolly's call for and practice of an ethics of reading that unmasks the reader's complicity in symbolic violence and subsequent task of "unculturing violence." Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. Choice, vol. 48 No 9 Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. Choice, vol. 48 No 9