Education in Africa 
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| Title: | 'History', 'literature', and 'English': reading the Lovedale missionary record within South Africa's colonial history |
| Author: | De Kock, Leon |
| Year: | 1992 |
| Periodical: | The English Academy Review |
| Volume: | 9 |
| Pages: | 1-21 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | South Africa The Cape |
| Subjects: | black education Christian education language usage English language historiography |
| External link: | https://doi.org/10.1080/10131759285310031 |
| Abstract: | The author's position in the debate on the relationship between literature and history owes its existence to the experience of trying to 'read' - in a quasi-literary manner - textual sources inside the bulging mass of what is often referred to as the 'historical record'. The author wants to go beyond the ritualized practice of textual analysis, which confines itself to literary and canonical parameters, and to investigate the power of English in a broader, historical frame. He identifies the operations of English as discourse - an historically particular and encoded signifying system with recognizable relations to power - and relates such discourse to the 19th-century Victorian colonial order in the Eastern Cape. The study focuses on Lovedale Institution, a mission school for Africans near Alice in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, because it was one of the most important centres of colonial discursive reconstruction, in English, and a centre where autochthonous South Africans were subjected to a second order of colonization under the aegis of the discourse of 'civilization'. The author deals with various approaches in literary theory and history, how to 'read' the historical record, three functions of missionary 'knowledge', and African responses to these processes of subject construction. Bibliogr., notes, ref. |
