Abstract
It is hypothesised and corroborated that there is a positive aesthetic interaction between the emotional pulse (Kristeva’s chora - what she calls the semiotic) and the actual symbolic meaning in the theatrical action and dramatic writing of two plays The First South African by Fatima Dike (1976) and Have You Seen Zandile? by Gcina Mhlophe, Thembi Mtshali and Maralyn Van Reenen (1985/1986).It is supposed that there is some scientific evidence for using Kristeva’s feminist psychoanalysis cross-culturally since at least defence mechanisms (particularly repression), artistic and dream symbolism, some complexes and some personality types and the method as a master-discourse in aesthetics and textual analysis can and may be validated. It should never become “psychic vivisection” - a patriarchal colonial exercise.
I have set the plays in the cross-cultural aesthetics of deconstruction and psychoanalysis as well as in their respective periods – in relation to TFSA, the heyday of apartheid, which coincided with the emergence of black consciousness as a strong movement amongst the youth. Ten years later it was clear that apartheid was either reforming itself or in such crisis that something drastic had to happen to free the black masses and black artists and intellectuals. Even though it is essentially a children’s play or a folk-play for interested adults HYSZ? may be seen as a “symptom” of a new individualism in black women who no longer regarded themselves as merely part of a largely male-led struggle for national liberation. It expresses itself not just as a children’s folk-story or fairy-tale but is a sublimation of the main author’s hard social reality manifest in her previous journalistic texts when she worked as a factory worker and a maid in a white “madam’s” house
| Date of Award | 2009 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Mike Pearson (Supervisor) & Karoline Gritzner (Supervisor) |