Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Using a New Historicist frame of analysis, whereby history is in itself a kind of text, this paper seeks to examine Maponya’s Gangsters as a fictional re-enactment of the actual experience(s) of notably black South Africans. Black consciousness artists in South Africa have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to restage the black (historically non-white) experience, thus undermining the regime by challenging its segregationist and repressive policies. Maponya is one of the black consciousness ideologues, and a forerunner of the movement in the arts. This paper views individual subversion as necessary (naturally, a backlash) under any oppressive system, and then examines the state’s assumed right to overtly or covertly contain subversive tendencies and ensure order. It locates the loose nature of the perpetrator (so-called gangsters of the play) label, and renegotiates the questions of power, representation, race, crime, subversion and containment, thus reinterpreting authorial intention(s) on issues to do with perspectives, generalizations and reductive definitions and association. The paper further problematizes the play’s reductive notion of gangsters, and reveals that humans typically have varied shades, and put on different masks. It then concludes that the theme of subversion and containment in the play is universal, and thus is not restricted (unlike other specifics in the play) to South Africa.