남부 아프리카의 구전문학과 현대적 전유의 가능성

Oral literature in Southern Africa and its' Contemporary Appropriation

Southern Africa is characterised by complex intersections of orality and literacy. Almost all oral cultures on the subcontinent have been influenced by their contact with the literate cultures of the colonial settlers. Further, oral texts which have survived, such as the songs and stories of the /Xam or the izibongo of Shaka and Dingane, have undergone significant modifications through the processes of transcription and translation. As regards the twentieth-century poets and story-tellers, many of them can and do write, and the threads of orality and literacy intertwine in their work. Theorists as diverse as Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and Spivak have all written about the silencing, whether actual or effective, of the colonized in the process of colonization. While aLmost all coLonial occupation involved the physical and discursive subjection of indigenous peopLes, the destruction of social orders, and the ruthless suppression of dissent, even a cursory acquaintance with oral and popular performance genres from colonial and postcoloniaL societies suggests that the attempts to silence the other were far from successful: the colonized have continued to speak, often in unofficial ways and from unofficial spaces, but also from the centres of their societies. Oral literature played a great role in it.