He plays with the darkness: retorica picturală şi etnografia culorii în romanele scriitorului sud-african Zakes Mda
He plays with the darkness: the pictorial rhetoric and the ethnography of colour in the novels of the South-African writer Zakes Mda

Summary/Abstract: Little known in Romania, Zakes Mda is a writer who made himself noticed within the Occident even in the ’90s, being considered by some as the most important contemporary South-African writer. His versatile artistic personality with an impressive coverage (playwright, poet, novelist, painter, composer, scriptwriter, music, film, and TV producer) justifies his presence in a cultural debate regarding colours. The author of the present study performs a comprehensive analytical approach focused on the role of colour – understanding here both the stylistic valences and the cultural significancies – in Zakes Mda’s novels, all of them published in the period following the Apartheid and built around subjects fuelled by the crushing experience of racial discrimination raised to the rank of state policy. The analysis offered the author enough arguments for configuring the essential data of what she named an “ethnography of colour” for the the mosiaclike cultural space of contemporary South Africa, but also for stating that, just like the ethnographer, the novelist Zakes Mda places himself simultaneously inside and outside the African communities whose history he interprets and revalues through fictionalization.

• Details
• Contents