Preface.

Chapman, Michael

This general number considers a "current" issue: how to interpret the literature of southern Africa from contemporary perspectives of local/global interaction. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg--a novel that in its apparent marginality to South Africa's transition has puzzled critics--is returned by Popescu to the challenge not of postcolonialism, but late postcolonialism. Here the issue-driven approach of postcolonial studies is qualified by comparative literary-cultural reference, as in Steiner's treatment of Shukri's novel and, aesthetics re-asserting meaning, in Thurman's identification of political purpose in Valdislavioe's language games.

With the English language and its culture imposing hegemony on global affairs, Dimitriu and Mann in interview explore challenges beyond the monocultural mind. Questions of translation and intercultural communication inform, also, Martin's revisiting of the Bleek-Lloyd or, in its recent digital format, the less patriarchal [Lucy] Lloyd-Bleek Bushman/San archive. The San are the subject of recovery or appropriation in Van Vuuren's review, a review that raises issues of editorial intervention: the very issue pursued in Bregin's challenge to academic publishing convention in relation to 'emergent' South African voices.

The question of whose voice predominates in biographical writing--that of the biographer or the subject--is the conundrum raised by Lenta in her article on Suresh Roberts versus Gordimer. The recovery of voice and agency focuses the massive project, Women Writing Africa: a US-resourced project. Ryan surveys developments. Locating voice amid silence--Ortega-GuzmAn argues--constitutes the challenge of Vera's novel Under the Tongue.

The late Yvonne Vera not of South Africa but of Zimbabwe or southern Africa, reminds us that Current Writing is now the official journal of the Southern African Association for Commonwealth Literature and Languages (SAACLALS). The editors anticipate a fruitful association.