Dr. Tony Voss Seminar Response

Dr. Tony Voss’ seminar was about his newly written chapter for the Cambridge History of South African Literature called ‘Refracted Modernisms’. Whilst Voss spoke mainly about the three writers he wrote about, Roy Campbell, N. P. Van Wyk Louw and H. I. E. Dhlomo, he briefly touched upon some issues he had with the title of his chapter and the idea of refracted modernisms. Voss did not choose the title of the chapter rather he was approached by the editors of the collection and was asked to write about three writers who would fit the bill, so to speak. In the end he chose the above mentioned three due to linking themes considered to be ‘modern’ which all appeared in their literary works. These two themes were religion and the exotic. So for instance Van Wyk Louw wrote a poem titled Heilige Petrus (Saint Peter) and Campbell wrote: ‘And God will smile to see/ The peace of many shadows on my soul’ (‘Shadows’, 1916)

Voss described a refracted modernism as a modernism that begins somewhere and changes when it gets somewhere else. So the modernism in South Africa is a refracted version of the original modernism begun in Europe. However, Voss seemed to struggle with the idea of a refracted modernism, or that these writers were even modern, even in a refracted sense. At first he spoke that the writers he was dealing with engaged with two different modernisms. That Campbell was a white South African who wrote in a European modernist style. The when he spoke about Dhlomo he mentioned that he wrote in an African modernist style (this apparently being a refracted style of the original European modernism.) Then he moved on to mention many of the aspects of these writers works that is very unmodern. So for example Van Wyk Louw wrote that “the Human comes out in the national…there is no general person” whereas modernism considers that there is a ‘general person’. He then went on to mention that modernism is a break with the past however most of these writers kept reconnecting with the past. Finally towards the end he questioned whether modernism in the colonial world was a belated form of modernism or a different form of modernism? I would like to add to this query; is it a modernism at all?

When asked are you even convinced that these writers were modernists at all even in a refracted sense, Voss answered that he wasn’t convinced. What this seems to question is the existence of refracted modernisms. How alike to the original modernism does a refracted modernism have to be to still be considered a modernism? Perhaps these refracted modernisms in fact aren’t modernisms but the beginning of maybe postmodernism? Or should they be considered to be individual –isms of their own? Is speaking of refracted modernisms the influence of colonial language, trying to tie the –isms of Western Europe’s colonial lands to the dominant -ism back then; another way of colonising the colonies?