BOBC |
Barnard, Rita. "Bitterkomix: Notes from the Post-Apartheid Underground." South Atlantic Quarterly 103. (2004): 719–54. Added by: joachim (8/12/09, 3:02 PM) Last edited by: joachim (1/15/16, 9:58 AM) |
Resource type: Journal Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed BibTeX citation key: Barnard2004 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: "Bitterkomix", Africa, Botes. Conrad, Ethnicity, Kannemeyer. Anton, South Africa, Underground Comics Creators: Barnard Collection: South Atlantic Quarterly |
Views: 19/1297
|
Attachments | URLs http://muse.jhu.ed ... 3/103.4barnard.pdf |
Abstract |
“My concerns in this essay are threefold: I am interested in what Bitterkomix has to say, quite explicitly, about South African history and about the now defunct ideologies that subtended apartheid. But I am also interested in what Bitterkomix manages to convey more implicitly and unconsciously. Read as a collective effort, with attention to both the strips and the editorial correspondence, it is a symptomatic text, rich in clues about the structure of feeling of younger Afrikaners in the first post-apartheid decade. I am interested, finally, in the particular effects and implications in the South African context of the publication’s form: a sexually explicit and deliberately offensive Afrikaans comic book, created by artists who are highly self-conscious about the history of the genre they are working in and thoroughly schooled in various traditions of visual representation, from the highbrow to the pornographic. I hope to offer a reading of Bitterkomix (a highly selective one, by necessity) that is alert to both its form and content, and that both trusts and mistrusts its contributors’ attitude of cynical truth telling.” (pp. 720–721)
|