Exploring The Novels of Zakes Mda

Lecture series presented by Associate Professor Gail Fincham, Department of English, University of Cape Town

This lecture series will reflect on the work of Zakes Mda, novelist, painter, composer, theatre director and film-maker. It will survey five of his novels, written in the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid South Africa. It will argue that his novels are hybrids, composed of African responses to modernity that derive from an oral culture, as well as European multi-generic responses to modernity. Mda undermines the dualistic thinking characteristic of the western heritage, whether between the past and the present, the human and the non-human, the living and the dead, the rural and the urban. His fictional characters orchestrate a reconfigured subjectivity that is simultaneously political, social and aesthetic. His explorations of refigured identity are also rooted in a painterly imagination and the first lecture will discuss the paintings of Frans Claerhout with which The Madonna of Excelsior is in dialogue. Lecture two will include a discussion of quilt making designs that influenced Cion.

LECTURE TITLES
1. The novels of Zakes Mda: Ways of Dying and The Madonna of Excelsior
Download podcast: https://vula.uct.ac.za/access/content/group/6e2ca09f-6e0c-4496-86ff-53c4...
2. The Heart of Redness, The Whale Caller and Cion
Download podcast: https://vula.uct.ac.za/access/content/group/6e2ca09f-6e0c-4496-86ff-53c4...

Recommended Reading

Mda, Z. 2009. Cion. Johannesburg: Penguin.
Mda, Z. 2006. The Whale Caller. South Africa: Penguin.
Mda, Z. 2003. The Heart of Redness. New York: Picador, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Mda, Z. 2002. The Madonna of Excelsior. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fincham, G. 2011. The Novels of Zakes Mda in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Cape Town: UCT Press & Columbus: Ohio State University Press.