The ‘Staffrider’ figure and the Reading of South African Poetry

Abstract

This article revisits the figure of the ‘staffrider’ which inspired the title of the literary journal more than forty years ago. It considers how the disruptive, radical nature of this figure regains a measure of relevance in the aftermath of developments in literary theory, in particular, what is understood as the ‘linguistic turn’ with regard to language and meaning. The discussion here follows the premise that if a white aesthetic practice as a discursive construction is susceptible to a process of dismantling, then it must follow that the same can be applied to the constructed nature of a black aesthetic. These critiques must, simultaneously, trouble the claims that what has been circumscribed as a black aesthetics in poetry constitutes a homogenous counter aesthetic and, thus, a poetic tradition inspired almost exclusively by the terms of a fixed subjectivity. As a consequence, a revision of the antithesis between a black and white aesthetic is required, one which must explode the conventional schematic of South African poetry which has remained prevalent in critical scholarship up to this point. In doing so, I suggest it may be valuable to evoke the figure of the ‘staffrider’ as a productive symbol of the troubling yet always equally dynamic nature of the literary text.

Keywords: Aesthetics, deconstruction, South African poetry, Staffrider, subjectivity