Colloque

Hot Spots of the Cold War : South African Reflections of the Conflict in Angola

Monica Popescu

Membre a labase

Monica Popescu

Résumé de la communication

The war in Angola represented one of the hot spots of the Cold War Despite the length of the conflict and the number of warring parties involved, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which South African literature represented is. Black and white South African recruits were forced to participate in the protracted Border War and their traumatic experiences were reflected in literature and memoirs that have rarely attracted the attention of literary scholars. One answer to this oversight is constituted by the emphasis on postcolonial approaches that deal mostly with the internal policies of apartheid and less with the consequences of apartheid-time foreign policy. My paper will focus on texts by Etienne van Heerden (''My Cuban'' and ''My Afrikaner'') and Mark Behr (''The smell of apples''), which are indicative of the relatively marginal yet revealing position South African cultural texts hold in the scholarship focused on the Cold War. I intend to show how this post-traumatic literature defines the intersection between postcolonial studies and Cold War scholarship and the possible new directions of research opened by this nexus.

Résumé du colloque

Il s'agira du 4e colloque du GRERÉS dans le cadre de l'ACFAS. À cette occasion, il y aura le lancement du livre ''Les Récits de survivance, modalités génériques et structures d'adaptation au Réel'', sous la direction de Christiane Kègle. Québec, Presses de l'Université Laval, 2007, collection «Mémoire et survivance». Il y aura aussi lancement de deux autres ouvrages dans la collection «Mémoire et survivance» aux PUL(titres à comfirmer).