Matthew Whittle and Jade Munslow Ong, 'Earth', Global Literature and the Environment (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2025), pp.28-73

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Chapter Two of this co-authored book is entitled 'Earth'. It examines novels and plays that represent component parts of the lithosphere that humans have exploited, altered, and extracted in pursuit of economic aims. The subheadings ‘Soil’, ‘Mineral and Metal’, and ‘Oil’ appear in an order that loosely maps onto a developmental narrative of global capitalism and associated energy shifts. C. L. R. James’s play, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (written 1934, performed 1936), Arna Bontemps’ novel, Black Thunder, Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia, 1800 (1936), and Octavia Butler’s dystopian novels, The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998) engage with representations of ‘Soil’ in the Caribbean and U.S.A. by depicting the environmental and human costs of monoculture plantations; the meaningful changes brought about by slave-led resistance and revolt; and the role of Indigenous and translocated African knowledges in environmental recovery. The extraction of diamonds and gold, or ‘Mineral and Metal’, in Olive Schreiner’s Undine (1929) and Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy (1945) illustrate the destructive consequences of the mining industries for Black Africans and settler women in South Africa, and resistance to exploitation by anti-colonial, workers union, Pan-Africanist and feminist movements. Analysis of John McGrath’s Scottish-set play, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil as a pre-eminent example of ‘world literature’ and ‘petro-drama’ is established in the final section of the chapter, ‘Oil’, to represent the long history of environmental disasters caused by land dispossession, monocultural farming, extractive capitalism and the operations of the petroleum industry.

Jade Munslow Ong and Andrew van der Vlies (eds.), Olive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024)

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This collection of essays considers the significance of South African-born writer, activist and thinker Olive Schreiner in international and multidisciplinary contexts in her time – and the ongoing relevance of her work to our own. A leading writer of New Woman Fiction at the fin de siècle, Schreiner influenced generations of readers, not to mention other writers. Taken together, these essays make the argument for a ‘new’ Schreiner Studies drawing on recent developments in scholarship on global and peripheral modernisms, activist networks and intersectionality, posthumanism, memory studies and intermediality. They position Schreiner’s work and legacy as significant for understanding literary and social archives, race and gender performance, and the rise of literary modernism in the global Anglosphere.

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Contributors include: Barnita Bagchi; Heidi Barends; Emma Barnes; Dorothy Driver; Małgorzata Drwal; Jeremy Fogg and Paul Walters; Clare Gill; Nicholas Jose, Alex Sutcliffe and Mandy Treagus; Jade Munslow Ong; Sanja Nivesjö; Janet Remmington; Mark Sanders; Liz Stanley; Andrew van der Vlies; and Dan Wylie.

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Hannah Helm, Emma Barnes, Katie Barnes and Jade Munslow Ong, '"Make Them Roll in Their Graves": South African Writing, Decolonisation, and the English Literature A-Level', English in Education, 58.2 (2024), 108-122

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This article analyses the activities and early outcomes of an ongoing co-designed and co-delivered research impact project entitled ‘Decolonising the English Literature A-Level’. It draws on examples from three case studies, classroom experiences, and student and teacher feedback to show how efforts to support the decolonisation of taught content and pedagogies aimed at A-Level learners can generate benefits for students relating to knowledge and understanding; skills development; personal motivation and well-being; academic attainment; and educational and career ambitions and prospects.  

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Andrew van der Vlies, 'Common/wealth: Contested Commons and Proleptic Critique', Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 59.1 (March 2024), 43-52

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In May 1917, two South African feminist friends and critics of empire then in London sent a telegram to Field Marshal Jan Smuts, the Union of South Africa’s Defence Minister and delegate to the Imperial War Cabinet, in response to his early proposal for a Commonwealth of Nations. It read simply: “Your speech was fine”. Whether intended sincerely (as in “very fine”) or as faint praise (“fine as far as it goes, but”) is not known, but the ambiguity is fitting for an association and description with such contested associations – and one that, by some accounts, originated in the colonies (from an idea proposed by Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and South Africa’s then-Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog). It is fitting, too, that one of the cable’s authors was Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), leading novelist of the “New Woman”, advocate of sex equality, and clear-sighted critic of empire’s presumptions, rapacious designs, and gendered and ethnic biases, as well as of the race politics taking shape in South Africa at the start of the twentieth century. Even as we read Schreiner’s work today with an eye to its own prejudices and contradictions, this essay contends that it is worth considering the value of the proleptic critique it embodies for an understanding of the ongoing limitations — but also use-value — of the term “Commonwealth”, as well as of any term that might replace it. The outlines of Schreiner’s critique suggest that the term might yet encode a counter-ideal that points to an ongoing latent potential for the common to be reactivated as promise of a more equal and just division of empire’s spoils.

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Maire Tracey, Simon Stanton-Sharma, Sanja Nivesjö, Emma Barnes and Jade Munslow Ong, ‘The Making of All That Is Buried: Dialog, Chronotope and Decoloniality’, Media Practice and Education (online first, issue TBC)

This article argues for the utility of Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theories in developing dialogic and decolonial filmmaking practices. Using the example of our research-led documentary film, All That Is Buried, we challenge traditionally hierarchical structures of film production in which primary authorship lies with the Director/Producer, by implementing dialogic methods of co-creation between filmmakers, researchers and participants. We explain how Bakhtin’s work on dialogism, chronotope, transgredience, polyphony and participative thinking provides the production and filmic tools and methods to host the distinct and equal voices of the South African creatives featured in the film - Zizipho Bam, Sindiswa Busuku, Haroon Gunn-Salie, and Dizu Plaatjies - maintaining throughout a sense of shared and equal investment in the project, and ethical responsibility to the collective. All That Is Buried shows the four participants discussing their work, ideas and experiences as they move between their homes, places of work, sites of inspiration, and artistic installation in and around Cape Town over the course of a day. In both process and product, we demonstrate how our co-creative methods support, and are supported by, practices of decolonial filmmaking, and provide a model useful and replicable for capturing Arts and Humanities research on film.

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Andrew van der Vlies, '“Doing very well in South Africa”: Fiona Melrose, Karel Schoeman, and the Intertextual Afterlives of Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway', English in Africa, 50.2 (2023), 29-49

This essay examines two South African responses to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925): Fiona Melrose’s  Johannesburg (2017), and Karel  Schoeman’s Die noorderlig (published in Afrikaans in 1975). Melrose’s novel  patterns  character and plot directly on Woolf’s with allusions to her biography  and to other reworkings of the text. Schoeman’s  performs a less obvious  homage to Mrs Dalloway in its exploration of the tensions between politics  and poetics and  formal engagement with the demands of experimentation  and realism. The essay assesses these different modes of  response, points  to Woolf’s influence beyond the anglophone literary world, and positions Schoeman’s work (in  particular) as deserving greater attention from those  speaking –and writing about–English (and its inheritances) in  South Africa

Jade Munslow Ong, ‘“Too uncompromising a figure to be so disposed of”: Virginia Woolf and/on Olive Schreiner’, English Studies in Africa, 65.1 (2022), 31-45.

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In her 1925 review of an edited collection of Olive Schreiner’s letters, Virginia Woolf described Schreiner as ‘too uncompromising a figure to be so disposed of’. Prompted by this intriguing comment, this article brings Woolf’s late-1920s writings into conversation with Schreiner’s novels and letters in order to trace personal and textual connections between the two authors. Comparative analysis of Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928) reveals similarities and confluences in their novelistic structures, experimental temporalities, allegorical representations, use of natural imagery, and in the central and unifying linear motifs that are used to hold together the novel forms. Additional modernist aesthetic and political links are provided by depictions of sex- and gender-crossing characters in Orlando, The Story of an African Farm and Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926), as well as by the feminist arguments and role of ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ in From Man to Man and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). The article concludes by arguing that Woolf and/on Schreiner provides evidence towards a claim for South Africa as a pioneering site of modernist innovation, and thereby contributes to new understandings of the development of global modernisms.  

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Jade Munslow Ong, ‘Decolonising the English Literature GCE A-Level via the South African Ex-Centric’, English: Journal of the English Association, 70.270 (Autumn 2021), 244-252.

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In this snapshot article, I outline the background and context for the development of research-led teaching activities aimed at students pursuing the WJEC Eduqas GCE A-Level English Literature qualification. The aims of these activities are threefold: first, to assist students’ learning and preparation for the exam component ‘Unseen Prose’ (worth 10% of the overall qualification); second, to extend the impact of AHRC-funded research on South African literature to 16- to 18-year-old learners; and third, to mobilize the first two aims in support of decolonizing efforts in English Studies.