This special issue devoted to “Transmission(s)” stems from the SEPC workshop in arts and literatures held at the annual Congress of the SAES in Rennes in June 2023. It gathers ten articles that mostly read the concept of transmission against the grain by focusing on breaks, discrepancies, silences and shifts at work when norms, narratives and cultural forms are transmitted. The essays lay the emphasis, first, on the enduring disjunctions resulting from colonialism and on its diverse incarnations, from American imperialism to global North restrictions to migration and uneven globalization at large. Second, they also reflect on contemporary appropriations of pre-colonial and colonial history and culture through subaltern perspectives. By covering a wide array of artistic and literary forms, from novels to short stories, nonfiction narratives and folk tales, photography, painting and sculptures, the authors delineate the multiple transmission lines and patterns imagined by writers and artists, offering new models, contesting others, eschewing expected pathways. Particularly remarkable is the way in which they open up categories that have sometimes been fossilized by postcolonial theory when it comes to transmission, challenging simple binaries.
“Reassessing Generic Boundaries in South African Literatures” aims to examine aspects of the South African literary landscape, thirty years after the demise of apartheid, through the prism of literary genres. While the call for contributions invited an exploration of South African literary works showing an awareness of the shifting, or fluid, boundaries between various genres (fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry, realism and fantasy…), most authors have chosen to examine what is at stake in the choice between fiction and non-fiction, and in works which challenge this boundary. The topics examined range from visual culture (The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War, 2000) to literary journalism (The Chimurenga Chronic), from the novel (J. M. Coetzee, Fred Khumalo) to recent historiography. The issue also includes an interview with the writer Fred Khumalo, to offer varied perspectives on the tensions between genres in the contemporary South African landscape.
“Faults and Fault Lines” corresponds to the topic of the annual conference of the SAES (Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur) held in Clermont-Ferrand from 2 to 4 June 2022. The “Postcolonial Literatures and Arts” workshop of the SEPC (Société des Études PostColoniales) was chaired by Cédric Courtois and Elsa Lorphelin, who guest edited this issue. The five articles show how postcolonial literatures address the federating topic of "Faults and Fault Lines" in several ways. The authors’ approaches range from an exploration of fissures, fault lines, and the metaphorical possibilities they allow – among which borders and walls that can be interpreted as poetic and political lines of fracture – to the effects of such (traumatic) fault lines onto those who have gone through major historical events and have seen their society change in a dramatic manner, whether it be in what was long known as the “periphery” or in the (former) colonial centre.