Shakespeare’s plays have been translated into various languages around the world and have become a part of global literary and theatrical culture. South Africa, with its rich history of cultural and political struggle, has had a particularly interesting relationship with Shakespeare’s works in translation. In this article, we review the literature on the translation of Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar into the Xitsonga language. We identify patterns in the translation, point out problems thereof and link translation work to transformation efforts. While the dominant view is that the translation of Shakespeare’s plays into African languages participates in the colonial projects of cultural appropriation, exploitation and domination, we argue in this article that such translation can also engender a process of transculturation in literary texts and the transformation of the field of African language literature in South Africa.

This article examines linguistic disabilities in Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1838‒1839), focusing on the character Smike and his unrelenting struggle to overcome emotional and social crises through communication. In Dickens’s text, Smike is an 18-year-old boy portrayed as weak, ill and slow-witted, suffering from speech dysfluency or stuttering, though not pervasive. While stuttering is associated with Smike’s existential struggles and breathless grappling with life, this article suggests that his speech dysfluency evolves into a mode of resistance against the oppressive material culture of mid-Victorian society. Smike’s stuttering transforms into a rich linguistic mechanism that exposes the double standards of the Victorian public and the persistent gap between reality and fiction. When performing the Apothecary in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Smike speaks fluently, thus embodying the liberating power and the subjective experience of the theatrical space. Shakespeare’s play provides Smike with a powerful return to eloquent self-expression, a space where his language flows effortlessly. This article, accordingly, explores the impact of Shakespeare’s theatre on Smike’s linguistic performance and development, showing the grotesque nature of a mid-Victorian culture that continually linked human subjects to their physical utility.

This article investigates and argues for a method of writing that I call “actualism” because of its intimate relationship with the layers of actual, embodied existence. Actualism also extends to what I call “slurrealism”, which “slurs” a realistic mode of writing through lyrically-driven critical/creative textual practices. I use both actualism and slurrealism in my creative and critical writing. Writing is part of my dialogue, uncertainty, critique and imaginative encounter with the self, and a space where the “I” is frequently shattered or dispersed. This mode of writing is centred on an acknowledgement of life as dynamic; a search for a style that incorporates the layered nature of reality, the constant transformation of language(s) and an admiration for a variety of poetic styles that at times appear opposed (such as surrealism, symbolism, realism, imagism). Actualism transcends realism, incorporating dreams, visions, the intangible and spectral. The actual occurs in the meeting place of the practical and the transcendental. The word emphasises “act” and therefore foregrounds writing as an act that actualises something into existence. Writing is also activism; it occurs when something is activated through “my-the” body. This activism is not only a cultural-political practice exercised and released into social spheres, but also an activity of moving between the unseen and the seen.

Mike Flanagan’s 2018 Netflix series adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) is the latest of many screen homages to this haunted-house tale that remains a harrowing portrayal of the loss of sanity caused by stifling social conventions underpinned by the repressive gender ideologies of 1950s America. This article revisits Jackson’s novel to focus on her use of the haunted mind as a haunted house trope, a prominent feature of the Gothic since the eighteenth century that retains purchase in contemporary permutations of it. Drawing on Bachelard’s concept of the oneiric house and Freud’s theory of the uncanny, this article focuses on the gendering of the trope in Jackson’s portrayal of the protagonist Eleanor Vance’s progressive psychic disintegration following the death of her invalid mother, whose caretaker she had been.

The Namashudra community, formerly derogatorily referred to as Chandal, endured untouchability in colonial Bengal. Following the partition, in West Bengal, they initiated a revolutionary literary movement to articulate and transmute long-suppressed sorrow into a mode of resistance. It not only breaks the prevalent assumption that Dalit literature does not exist in Bangla but also serves as a challenge to the pervasive myth of Bengal being a casteless society. The article modestly endeavours to explore the intricate issues of caste within the narrative of Manohar Mouli Biswas's work Surviving in My World: Growing Up Dalit in Bengal (2015), which is a translation of his Bengali book Amar Bhubone Ami Beche Thaki (2013). The article seeks to explore how the aspects of caste, politics, and hegemony work within the text, and how existential exclusion is sincerely articulated through the literary expressions of the Bengali Dalit author. Additionally, the study has undertaken an in-depth textual analysis of Biswas's writings to investigate how he uses his works to establish an identity for his community.

In this article, I argue that pioneer African writing (in the frame of the empire writing back) hinges its anti-colonial aesthetics and politics on what I see as the African natural world—a space of nonhuman–human entanglement ruled by the natural order of things. In confronting colonial discourse, the writers, in most cases, resort to deploying the natures (I prefer the plural form) and the nonhuman elements of their traditional societies, which constitute what many scholars see as the cultural context of their writing in postcolonial reading practice. By way of shifting the paradigm, I propose an ecocentric reading practice that unbundles the notion of cultural context to reveal its heavy reliance on the African natural world. The recourse to natures, I argue, is a decolonial strategy, in that the writers deploy the natural world to counter the Western civilisation imposed on their epistemological order. In the end, the natural world remains the forte of the African writer in presenting a civilisation that claims to be more all-embracing (of humans and their nonhuman others) than the Western one with emphasis on human exceptionalism. I then read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino as illustrations of how African writers of the colonial moment anchor their counter-discourse on the African natural world. It is hoped that this reading practice will inspire a revisionist reading of African literature that places indigenous ecology at the centre of decolonial philosophy and practice.