Detective Stories During Apartheid: H.I.E. Dhlomo as a Precursor of…

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DC Field	Value
dc.identifier	ECF_article_6909
dc.title	Detective Stories During Apartheid: H.I.E. Dhlomo as a Precursor of Drum
dc.contributor.author	Fossati Marta
dc.publisher	Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Digital Publishing, Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari
dc.type	Research Article
dc.language.iso	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://edizionicafoscari.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/il-tolomeo/2021/1/detective-stories-during-apartheid-hie-dhlomo-as-a/
dc.description.abstract	This article aims to contribute to the discussion of English-language crime fiction by black South African writers before 1994 by exploring H.I.E. Dhlomo’s relatively overlooked contribution to the genre in the first decade of apartheid. In particular, I intend to close read three detective stories written between the late 1940s and the early 1950s by Dhlomo, namely “Village Blacksmith Tragicomedy”, “Flowers”, and “Aversion to Snakes”, and compare them with the more celebrated stories published by Arthur Maimane in the popular magazine Drum a few years later. Notwithstanding their different re-elaboration of the tropes of crime fiction, I argue that both Dhlomo and Maimane resorted to this productive strand of popular literature to reassert a claim to knowledge denied to Africans, saturating their texts with new local meanings and exceeding Western genre conventions.
dc.relation.ispartof	Il Tolomeo
dc.relation.ispartof	Vol. 23 \| December 2021
dc.issued	2021-12-20
dc.dateAccepted	2021-09-10
dc.dateSubmitted	2021-06-29
dc.identifier.issn
dc.identifier.eissn	2499-5975
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.identifier.doi	10.30687/Tol/2499-5975/2021/23/018
dc.peer-review	yes
dc.subject	Crime fiction
dc.subject	Crime fiction
dc.subject	Detective stories
dc.subject	Detective stories
dc.subject	Dhlomo
dc.subject	Dhlomo
dc.subject	Drum
dc.subject	Drum
dc.subject	South Africa
dc.subject	South Africa

Research Article
open access peer reviewed

Detective Stories During Apartheid: H.I.E. Dhlomo as a Precursor of Drum

Marta Fossati Università degli Studi di Milano, Italia

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abstract

This article aims to contribute to the discussion of English-language crime fiction by black South African writers before 1994 by exploring H.I.E. Dhlomo’s relatively overlooked contribution to the genre in the first decade of apartheid. In particular, I intend to close read three detective stories written between the late 1940s and the early 1950s by Dhlomo, namely “Village Blacksmith Tragicomedy”, “Flowers”, and “Aversion to Snakes”, and compare them with the more celebrated stories published by Arthur Maimane in the popular magazine Drum a few years later. Notwithstanding their different re-elaboration of the tropes of crime fiction, I argue that both Dhlomo and Maimane resorted to this productive strand of popular literature to reassert a claim to knowledge denied to Africans, saturating their texts with new local meanings and exceeding Western genre conventions.

Published

Dec. 20, 2021

Accepted

Sept. 10, 2021

Submitted

June 29, 2021

Language

Keywords: South Africa • Dhlomo • Drum • Detective stories • Crime fiction

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/Tol/2499-5975/2021/23/018

Copyright: © 2021 Marta Fossati. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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