Whose teaching whom?: interrogating subjectives in the teaching of literature in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This paper focuses on the notion of reflexivity in teaching South African literature, particularly at institutions of higher learning. In the context of deconstructing and producing literary texts within the current South African landscape, the aim was to highlight the critical role of academic 'intellectuals' in the interrogation of their subjectivities when engaging with students from different 'racial' backgrounds and different socio-economic contexts. In other words, the seminar focuses on the ways 'white' academics, in post-legalised apartheid South Africa, may fail to account for the ways their own socialization 'racially' results in discourses of privilege in their teaching and producing of South African literature - with human costs for both themselves, the students they engage and the readerships they attract and how this lack of interrogation inadvertently maintains and reproduces 'white' supremacist thinking and behaviour.