Skip to main content

Tina Steiner

Stellenbosch University, English, Faculty Member

Followers

334

Following

105

Co-authors

9

Public Views

Address: Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

less

InterestsView All (12)

Uploads

Papers by Tina Steiner

The world-making of archipelagic thought in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's The Dragonfly Sea

Literature, Critique, and Empire Today (formerly The Journal of Commonwealth Literature), 2025

This article explores the concept of the archipelago as a geographical reality and a figure of th... more This article explores the concept of the archipelago as a geographical reality and a figure of thought in relation to Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's novel The Dragonfly Sea (2019). It demonstrates how the long history of maritime connections between Kenya and China are rendered narratively as both proximate and distant, connected yet separate. Owuor's novel is set in the Lamu archipelago in the Indian Ocean close to the northern coast of Kenya, to which it belongs. The narrative showcases Pate Island as a microcosm of archipelagic complexity, where cosmopolitan accommodation toward strangers coexists with conditions characterized by protective insularity and social strictures. An attentiveness to the environmental and geopolitical nature of the archipelago reveals the narrative's critique of China's (neo-)imperial pursuits in Kenya and its alternative social imaginaries that think Pate-as-world in order to foreground embedded, localized knowledge of environmental care for the island and its surrounding sea.

Book Chapter: Temporalities of Proximity: Three Anecdotes

In this chapter present three brief vignettes, extracted from larger narrative works by Jennifer ... more In this chapter present three brief vignettes, extracted from larger narrative works by Jennifer Makumbi, Leila Aboulela and Noni Jabavu, to think about temporal dimensions of proximity. Commonly understood as primarily concerning spatial arrangements, i.e., nearness in place, I argue that proximity as a practice implies an understanding of temporality.

A Conversation with Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, 2024

Can you tell us a bit about our journey of becoming a writer: how did you know this was what you ... more Can you tell us a bit about our journey of becoming a writer: how did you know this was what you wanted to spend your time doing? What were the difficulties and what the milestones? I have heard you speak of your friend who was fabulously persistent in convincing you to enrol in a creative writing programme in the UK, would you tell us about her? JNM: I am not one of those authors who knew they wanted to become writers from childhood. There were a lot of books around me but there were no authors to emulate and look up to. But I was a storyteller, and I was an avid reader. So, even when I wrote plays as a teenager, I did not think of myself as a writer. It was not until I started to teach English that I began writing fiction. The major problem was how do you tell family you have travelled to Britain to study Creative Writing? And I did not have funding. I worked and paid my fees which were steep because I was an international student. Yes, a friend Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies is co-published by NISC Pty (Ltd) and Informa Limited (trading as Taylor & Francis Group)

Euryclea's Greeting: Literary and Linguistic Palimpsests in Abdulrazak Gurnah's Oeuvre

PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2023

My encounter with Kiswahili was as a native speaker born into it in our house in Malindi. Many pe... more My encounter with Kiswahili was as a native speaker born into it in our house in Malindi. Many people in Malindi spoke a smattering of Arabic as well, and some spoke it fluently. My father was a fluent speaker. My mother could not speak a word except the words that had somehow smuggled their way into Swahili. From other houses you could hear the sound of Kutchi or Somali, or the inflection of Kingazija. (Gurnah, "Learning" 28) Growing up in in the 1950s and 1960s in Malindi, the part of Zanzibar Town close to the harbor, Abdulrazak Gurnah was exposed to a cosmopolitan web of cultural life. Reflecting on this later, he remarks that this created an enduring sense that "contradictory cultural traditions felt negotiable" ("Learning" 29). He began learning Arabic in Qur'an school, called choni, at Mzikiti Barza, which he attended from the age of five, before starting Darajani primary school, where he learned the Roman alphabet. He went on to a school known as King George VI Secondary School until it was renamed Lumumba College in January 1964 (Lodhi). Gurnah describes his encounter at school with English-at least initially-as "casual and instrumental" ("Learning" 29), remembering having to recite Shakespearean sonnets (30) and to learn passages from Dickens's Little Dorrit by heart (Gurnah, "Books"). Swahili literature 1-encountered formally in school and through storytelling by his mother and "grannies and aunties" at home-was as much a staple as were "complex narrative traditions in the Qur'an school, in commentaries on the Qur'an, in the Mawlid and in Qasidas" (Gurnah, "Learning" 29). Gurnah's favorite book as a child was an abridged Kiswahili translation in four volumes of Alfu Leila u Leila (A Thousand and One Nights)-a text that

Keeping Alienation at Bay: Abdulrazak Gurnah's Wit

Convivial Worlds. Writing Relation From Africa, 2021

The language of food: ingestion, expulsion and registers of repair in Alibhai-Brown's The Settler's Cookbook

Journal of the African Literature Association, 2022

Food preparation, eating practices and various expressions of conviviality associated with food a... more Food preparation, eating practices and various expressions of conviviality associated with food are not only shaped by social contexts, ideas of community and gendered divisions of labor; they are also generative of new ways of connecting people and foodstuffs in the crucible of migration. I explore the complex role of recipes and food in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s (2008) memoir The Settler’s Cookbook. A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food which intersperses recipes with an account of her childhood in Kampala, her family’s dispersion before Idi Amin’s expulsion orders and her migration to the UK. This paper argues that food as both material reality and as metaphor functions in this text to map the possibilities and limitations of individual and communal agency. It suggests that engaging with food, cooking and the composition of recipes needs to take into account not only representations which emphasize gendered realities of constraint but also attend to idiosyncratic expressions of the interior life of emotions and desires that testify to feminist explorations of agency, creativity and registers of pleasure and repair.

Free e-prints available here:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PY7FZZT7BWXFBYFTECDE/full?target=10.1080/21674736.2022.2072258

'African Contrasts': Noni Jabavu's Travelogue

Foundational African Writers: Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi & Es'kia Mphahlele, 2022

Scheherazade's Achievement(s): Practices of Care in Fatema Mernissi's Memoir, Dreams of Tresspass, and her Creative Non-Fiction Scheherazade goes West

English in Africa, 2020

Ports as Portals: D.D.T. Jabavu's Voyage to the World Pacifist Meeting in India

English Studies in Africa 62 (1), 2019

Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu’s travelogue of his four-month-long trip to India to attend the 1949 Wo... more Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu’s travelogue of his four-month-long trip to India to attend the 1949 World Pacifist Meeting contributes to the rich archive of thinking about the intellectual and political flows of influence between Africa and India. Existing scholarship on African-Asian encounters has focused prominently on the trajectory from Asia towards Africa and hence exhibits a tendency to minimize African agency. This article offers a brief reading of the English translation of D. D. T. Jabavu’s travelogue E-Indiya nase East Africa (published in 1951 in isiXhosa) in order to reflect on his particular brand of transnationalism, which deeply informed his contribution to South African politics in the first half of the 20th century. A keen observer of the landscapes and waterscapes around him, Jabavu’s sense of embeddedness in local and translocal networks – rather than the space of the nation – contributes to an understanding of transnational historiography of southern African studies. The article focuses on selected passages to suggest that with historical hindsight, the travelogue offers much beyond Jabavu’s gradualism which has relegated him marginal in the dominant narrative of anti-apartheid nationalism. Jabavu engaged in the quixotic and often painstaking labour of developing alternative intellectual and political networks in the pursuit of equality. In these networks, ports function as significant literal and figurative sites of exit and entry.

Keywords: World Pacifist Meeting of 1949, D. D. T. Jabavu, travelogue, networks of solidarity, conferencing, India, Fort Hare, Gandhian politics of non-violent resistance

Temporal Aftermaths and Ruined Spaces in the African Metropolis, Cairo in the Crime Fiction of Parker Bilal.pdf

English in Africa, 2018

Literary narratives of Cairo imagine the complex social, economic and political life of its inhab... more Literary narratives of Cairo imagine the complex social, economic and political life of its inhabitants as constituted by the spatial and temporal dimensions of contested urban spaces. This article investigates urban spatio-temporal cartography in the crime fiction of Parker Bilal, the pseudonym of the well-known Anglo-Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub, and the way in which his narratives portray crime in contemporary Cairo at the beginning of the 21st century. I argue that the first novel of Bilal’s/Mahjoub’s Makana series, Golden Scales (2012), presents contradictory and conflicting temporalities, with one strand of the narrative gesturing forward and with linear momentum towards the 2011 revolution and another narrative strand presenting the present, in David Scott’s term, as “ruined time”, resulting in a crisis of arrested teleology. This temporal paradox sheds light on an African metropolis as a contested space: it becomes the shifting ground of a society caught up in government repression, crime, revolution and the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. Despite its revolutionary potential, the narrative renders the metropolis a space where the future becomes unimaginable.

Introduction: Indian Ocean Trajectories

Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, 2018

The Stranger's Gaze: Defamiliarizing the Local in Hawa J. Golakai's Crime Novels

In a trajectory similar to that of author Hawa J. Golakai, the protagonist and principal investig... more In a trajectory similar to that of author Hawa J. Golakai, the protagonist and principal investigating journalist of the crime thrillers The Lazarus Effect and The Score, Voinjama “Vee” Johnson, leaves her native Liberia during the second civil war in the 1990s and eventually finds herself in Cape Town. As an African migrant woman investigator, Vee occupies in-between spaces, which sharpens her perception of South African society. Both novels defamiliarize the social landscape of the Western Cape by employing various narrative devices to foreground the unsettled and unsettling perspective of the parvenu. Through an analysis of the use of Liberian Pidgin as well as tones of irony, sarcasm and humour, this paper discusses Golakai’s unique contribution to South African/African crime writing and the way in which it gestures towards a transnational, boundary–crossing perspective that exposes reified structures of relation.

A Vagabond on the Road: The Pressure of Genre in Nadifa Mohamed's Black Mamba Boy

African Studies, 2016

ABSTRACT This article argues that Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope offers an insightful concept... more ABSTRACT
This article argues that Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope offers an insightful conceptual tool to read Nadifa Mohamed’s debut novel Black Mamba Boy and particularly its depiction of time-space in relation to the representation of her protagonist, who functions in the text as an exceptional adventure hero and as representative of the young Somali men who fought for Mussolini and perished during the Second World War. The novel can be read as an adventure of Jama’s travels across eastern Africa on a quest to find his father and as a historical account of the impact of the war on the region. These two aims, overtly identified by Mohamed, result in narrative strands that put different emphases on the representation of chronotopic space-time; the former – what we could call the adventure tale – foregrounds space and the protagonist’s movement through space while the latter offers important commentary on the way in which this story’s particular historical past writes the colonial present, that is, it focuses more on time and its impact on the characters. Black Mamba Boy interweaves the adventure tale with the historical narrative to tell a fascinating story of migration, loss and survival.

Key words: Second World War in East Africa, Italian colonialism, Somali migration, adventure chronotope, historical narrative, Nadifa Mohamed

Traversing Social Landscapes: Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi and the Question of Community

English in Africa, Dec 2014

"Dwelling-in-Travel": Of Ships, Trains and Planes in M.G. Vassanji's Fiction

Journal of Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, Nov 14, 2014

M.G. Vassanji’s prominent thematic concerns of movement, diaspora, memory, and the formation of m... more M.G. Vassanji’s prominent thematic concerns of movement, diaspora, memory, and the formation of migrant subjectivities can be traced and apprehended by paying close attention to the intersecting paths across the Indian Ocean, across railroad tracks into various East African territories and across the invisible lines of international air travel around the globe. The journeys of the characters in Vassanji’s narratives propel them into a world with shifting borders and regimes that become navigable and inhabitable, albeit with serious limitations at times, by particular modes of transport. These modes also come to stand for specific historical periods in Indian Ocean Africa, that is, the ship connects and thus produces Africa as the Western edge of the Indian Ocean World prior to and during the colonial era, the railway connects the littoral to the interior and brings thousands of Indians to East Africa, while the plane, particularly when airfares become more widely accessible in the 1960s, coincides with the establishment of the nation-state. This article investigates the representation of different modes of transport and the kinds of journeys and forms of belonging that they enable.
Keywords: East African literature, transport networks, Indian Ocean narratives, nostalgia

Interview: A Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah

English Studies in Africa, 2013

The Indian Ocean Travels of Sheikh Yusuf and Imam Ali Ali: literary representations in Ishtiyaq Shukri’s Silent Minaret and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit

Social Dynamics, 2012

This article investigates the narrative function of prominent Muslim travellers (both historical ... more This article investigates the narrative function of prominent Muslim travellers (both historical and fictional) across the Indian Ocean to South Africa in the seventeenth and nineteenth century respectively. Ishtiyaq Shukri, author of The Silent Minaret, juxtaposes the figure of Sheikh Yusuf with the protagonist Issa Shamsuddin of the narrative present to critique contemporary politics, both in post-apartheid South Africa and in the global North and its ‘war on terror’. Sim- ilarly, Achmat Dangor’s novel Bitter Fruit sheds light on the difficult choices faced by the main protagonist, Michael Ali, by drawing on the migration narra- tive of the Sufi Imam Ali Ali from India to South Africa in the 1890s. Both authors highlight the continuous history of imperial pursuits in the Indian Ocean world and their devastating effects in the past and the narrative present.
Keywords: Indian Ocean travel; Sheikh Yusuf; literary representations of Muslim diaspora in South Africa; Ishtiyaq Shukri; Achmat Dangor

Writing on and over communal boundaries: East African Asian subjectivities in Sophia Mustafa’s "In the Shadow of Kirinyaga"

Sophia Mustafa (1922–2005), Tanzanian novelist and political activist of South Asian origin, was ... more Sophia Mustafa (1922–2005), Tanzanian novelist and political activist of South Asian origin, was highly critical of an identity politics that privileges ethnic identity over national affiliation. This article investigates her complex engagement with East African Asian subjectivities in her novel, In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (2001). With a keen eye to capture communal identity in the early part of the twentieth century, her fiction provides a ‘critical ethnography’ that interrogates minority identity construction within and beyond East African colonies and the emerging independent nation-state. Mustafa’s portrayal of East African Asian community life in careful detail while occupying a political position critical of some aspects of this life, makes her narrative a fascinating testing ground for interrogating nationalism and the status of minorities within state structures. In the journeys of her characters across East Africa and to India, narrow definitions of belonging are contrasted with more cosmopolitan conceptions of movement and travel.

Writing “Wider Worlds”: The Role of Relation in Abdulrazak Gurnah's Fiction

Research in African Literatures, 2010

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction offers an opportunity to engage with the heterogeneity of East Africa... more Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction offers an opportunity to engage with the heterogeneity of East African coastal regions and their place within the Indian Ocean World, which Gurnah traces through an imaginary geography of transregional/transnational movements and encounters. This article offers a reading of Gurnah’s fiction and in particular his latest novel, Desertion (2005), through the lens of theories of relation as formulated by Martin Buber and Édouard Glissant in order to highlight the importance of encounters across various boundaries. I argue that Gurnah’s fiction, against the backdrop of colonial and nationalist ways of mapping, seeks to re-define “Africa” through glimpses of relational spaces that escape the dystopic politics of exclusion and violence caused by nationalism and notions of ethnicity.

Of cracked lenses: cultural translation, opacity and the African novel

Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, 2010

This article investigates the function of different languages in African fictional texts by focus... more This article investigates the function of different languages in African fictional texts by focusing on the kinds of social relationships expressed by narratives that tell their stories bilingually, or even multilingually. I argue that the layers of different languages within a text invite translation, both literally and figuratively. Alongside the postcolonial reading, which interprets the juxtapositions of different languages by stressing the contestatory function of re-placing language, the reading advanced by this article explores such devices as forms of cultural
translation. Cultural translation, it is argued, can account for the counterdiscursive reading that analyses relations of power; it can also account for a reading that foregrounds less hierarchical forms of address and thus expresses the quest for alternative subjectivities and relationships. The latter, the article suggests
by adapting Judith Butler’s theory of an ethics of opacity, is gestured towards in narratives whenever the limits of intelligibility or translatability are exposed.