ABSTRACT
Media-specifi c analysis of the kind I am suggesting may, as I have been arguing, yield particular rewards when elaborated in (post)colonial contexts, given that such an analysis situates literature in relation to its mode of production and distribution. When applied to the literary spaces of southern Africa, such analysis inevitably gets caught up in the colonial infl ection of the media which, in turn, produces what Casanova (1999 and 2004) and Moretti (2000), with their different emphases, identify as the world literary system, marked by the dominance of western European linguistic and geographical centres over others. A recurrent theme in this chapter will therefore be that while Knopfl i and Jensma, as poets, are ‘thrown into’ a world of technologically mediated and colonially weighted signs not of their own making, the writing of poetry offers ways of entering and symbolically reinscribing this world.2 I shall later refer to their poetic strategies of reinscription as elaborations of a metropolitan imaginary.
