Acting Like a White Woman: Cynthia Jele's Black South African Chick Lit Novel Happiness Is a Four-Letter Word (2010) as New Weltliteratur

Abstract

"This article explores the question of what Jele’s novel might reveal about the institutionalization of a minor genre in world literature, which has a reputation for being both elitist and 'a white male affair in large part' (Damrosch, “What Is World Literature?” 10). ... After discussing some of Happiness’s paratexts, its circulation, and relation to an often obscured Black genre genealogy, I turn to a close reading with a particular focus on its multilingualism and complex intersections of gender and race. I argue that by interspersing the English dialogue with phrases from other languages and by critically examining the ideal of white femininity in postapartheid South Africa, Jele skillfully weaves ‘the minor’ into ‘the major.’ She does so both at the levels of language-for example, South African languages such as Sotho and Zulu within the supposedly homogeneous English literary language; and subject matter - for example, local themes such as affirmative action policies in South Africa alongside the supposedly universal chick lit formula of ‘having it all.’"