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James Gifford deposited “Per omnia saecula saeculorum” or “Inkaba yakho iphi?”: Indigeneity in Alex La Guma and Aidan Higgins in the group
LLC Indigenous Literatures of the United States and Canada on MLA Commons 7 years, 5 months ago
This article argues for an overlapping notion of indigeneity in Alex La Guma’s In the Fog of the Seasons’ End and Aidan Higgins’ Langrishe, Go Down articulated using critical Aboriginal Studies while exploring the materialist emergence of identity. The key tension, then, is not between both authors’ progressive politics nor the real differences between their Irish and South African settings—the tension is the in-betweenness of their shared difficulty articulating a form of indigeneity and artistic expression that does not conflict with a materialist history and the theoretical precepts of their anticolonial visions. This is to say, both La Guma and Higgins work to express a metaphysical localist understanding of indigeneity while retaining the characteristically materialist notions of decolonization of the 1960s. Rather than a faulty logic, this understanding of colonialism and indigeneity is plural and reflects the “in-between” nature of their experiences.