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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The power to name the real: the politics of the worker testimony in South Africa
Author:Coullie, Judith LütgeISNI
Year:1997
Periodical:Research in African Literatures
Volume:28
Issue:2
Pages:132-144
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:black workers
autobiography
biographies (form)
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/3820448
Abstract:This essay focuses on worker testimonies, a subgenre of autobiography, published in South Africa in the late 1970s and 1980s. These testimonies comprise brief life stories of mostly semiliterate or illiterate black South Africans, and are usually written and compiled by researchers cum editors. The questions addressed in the essay are: who has the power to name the real in these quasi-autobiographical texts? Can the subaltern speak (through the intellectual)? The author agrees with Jill Arnott who argues that self-representation is never simple reportage: 'There is always a gap between the I that experiences and the I who in the re-telling of the experience represents that self'. She further argues that this oft-theorized 'gap' is not stable or fixed or even predictable: there are degrees of mediation. In this context she makes a distinction between autobiographical texts that are largely or even partially biographical, with researcher as narrator, and those that inscribe the autobiographical subject as narrator. Her conclusion is that worker testimonies are an important generic development because of their contribution to the creation of new knowledges which reinforce the struggle for democracy by fragmenting from grassroots the grand narratives of history and sociology. Bibliogr., note, ref.
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