Olive Schreiner and African Modernism

Abstract

African modernism' introduces a more problematic theme. What is African modernism? It is not a term that is commonly used. In fact, critics are judicious in their use of conjunctions, prepositions and punctuation to separate the two words, so that discussions revolve around Africa and modernism, modernism in Africa, or African literature after modernism. 1 On the rare occasions when the words appear alongside one another, as in a subtitle in a 2015 survey essay by Nicholas Meihuizen, a question mark is used to express doubt about its conceptual viability: 'African Modernism?'. 2 My title is unusual then, because it does not subject 'African modernism' to the usual conditions or exceptions, and so expresses (in highly condensed form)the book's central thesis: Anglophone South African literature is inaugurated and persists as modernism. The point of departure for this claim is the work of Schreiner, who, as the first South African novelist, played a formative role in the development of a distinctly South African literary practice. I argue that the key aspects of her writing -her use of experimental allegory and primitivist discourse to express anti-imperialist views -facilitate the modelling of an

“The rarest, most complex & most lately developed form of aestheticism”: Olive Schreiner, decadence, and the aesthetic education of the senses

“…16 In Ong's words, allegory's ability to support multiple interpretations within the unity of a single story populated by universalizing abstractions allowed "radical South African authors […] to acknowledge alternative paradigms of experiencethose of women, animals, black and colored Africans, and the working classeswithout obstructing the real and often unheard voices of those disenfranchized by imperialist domination." 17 Schreiner's primitivist allegories are an aesthetic strategy for challenging Victorian liberal humanism, insofar as this ideology worked to hide the figurative and literal violence of imperialist heteropatriarchy. Chuh explains that one of the ways that liberal humanism perpetuates multiple forms of oppression under the guise of Enlightenment is through an aesthetic discourse that associates primitivism with intellectual underdevelopment and local particularity.…”