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| Title: | Transculturating the sympathic imagination: unfamiliar feelings in Ivan Vladislavic |
| Author: | Gaylard, Gerald |
| Year: | 2012 |
| Periodical: | Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa (ISSN 2159-9130) |
| Volume: | 24 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Pages: | 98-108 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | literary criticism prose postcolonialism |
| About person: | Ivan Vladislavic (1957-) |
| External link: | https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2012.645364 |
| Abstract: | This paper endeavours to move towards a postcolonial transculturation of the sympathetic imagination. Utilising writing on experimental neuropsychology, recent work on sympathy and empathy, and a close reading of selected pieces by South African writer Ivan Vladislavic, it outlines some of postcolonial literature's affects. Readers of African literature typically oscillate between the allure of the exotic and ethico-political commitment on the one hand, and despair and compassion fatigue on the other. However, the work of Vladislavic uniquely functions in an unspectacular, affective dimension that locates readers within a middle ground via inciting sympathy for the specific and the mundane. The paper argues that Vladislavic's focus upon the mundane and ordinary charts new territory in that it brings together the ethico-political and the affective so that a cross-fertilisation between intellect and emotion, which the author names affective cognition or cognitive affect, can occur. It is in this relation that future postcolonial aesthetics and a thoroughgoing transculturation of the sympathetic imagination might occur. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract] |