ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an introduction to the allegorical paradigms of Southern African modernism as a politicised aesthetic technique that was not only grounded in the work of Schreiner, but also constituted the dominant form of writing by black authors of the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. The afterlives of Oliver Schreiner's politics and aesthetics are interpreted across networks of textual and personal relationships as a way of animating African modernism in historical, literary and non-literary contexts. This is despite the fact that Nicholas Brown, in his highly influential reading of modernism and African literature of decolonisation, warns against mapping 'empirical or genetic literary history', recommending that analysis should instead be based on 'each text's relationship to history itself'. Whilst many of the writers or works discussed in this chapter have been analysed in relation to modernism, this is typically done in deference to early twentieth-century Europe as the primary locale and producer of modernist creativity.
