Re-Imagining the Other: The Politics of Friendship in Three Twenty-First Century South African Novels (original) (raw)
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Reconciling Racial Revelations in Post-Apartheid South African Literature
Research in African Literatures, 2016
Offering a reading of Mongane Wally Serote’s Revelations (2010) alongside other recent novels by black South African writers, this essay answers calls for more careful analyses of the roles that race plays within post-apartheid literature and culture. As it questions the shift away from a concern with institutional racism and white supremacy that is evident in much contemporary South African criticism, the essay contends that post-apartheid literature is not only racially marked, but also continues to produce knowledge on racial inequality, racial ideology, and resistance. In the process, it illustrates that grappling with colorblindness challenges pervasive understandings of nonracialism, reconciliation, and post-1994 literature. Revelations portrays nonracialism and reconciliation as necessary and inevitable, yet shows that the discourses are in conflict with demands for equality and justice. Concurrently veiling and revealing paradoxes inherent in South Africa’s dominant racial discourses from within, Serote’s novel demonstrates that enforcing colorblindness is an act of epistemic violence: not even at the diegetic level is nonracialism achievable.
Indigenous, Aboriginal, Fugitive and Ethnic Groups Around the Globe, 2019
This chapter explores representations of diasporic black African foreigners' identities in David Mutasa's novel, Nyambo Dze Joni (Stories from Johannesburg) (2000), and in Welcome to Our Hillbrow (1999), written by the South African author, Phaswane Mpe. The two novels expose the hypocrisy of the South African officials and masses who scapegoat African black foreigners for crimes ranging from snatching of local jobs, taking local girls and drug peddling. For most African black foreigners and some local black South African citizens, diasporic experience in the new nation is a paradoxical physical space and spiritual experience in which stories of milk, honey and bitter bile might be authorised to capture the fact of being doubled as both potential subject and citizen. Despite experiencing bare lives characterised by nervousness and precarities, most black African foreigners in Johannesburg or Joni command, recall and deploy multiple identities whenever required to confront the ugly underbelly of the physical and verbal violence of xenophobia. Thus, an irony inherent in African diasporic experiences is that most black foreigners appear to retain some semblance of humanity and organise their worlds relatively creatively, and becoming successful by immigrants' standards, in the most hostile circumstances.
‘For Whom There Is Hope’: Imagining Freedom in Selected Post-apartheid South African Fiction
Journal of African languages and literary studies, 2022
Following the election of Nelson Mandela as the first black president of South Africa and the formation of the first majority government of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1994, it was generally assumed that new bonds between South Africa's white and black races would be forged and a new economic and social order would be established. Hence, the new government promised to lead the transition towards an all-inclusive society that would be a reflection of the linguistic, ethnic and cultural diversity of the country. This larger dream was enshrined, in part, in the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that was expected to provide a sense of moral and ethical direction for the country. This article interrogates K. Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2007) and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) to uncover the extent to which the different races and classes aspire towards a hopeful and inclusive 'non-racial' ethical future. Reading the Rainbow nation alongside its images of nation building and inclusive development, this article builds upon dominant national symbols that portray social, economic, cultural and political reforms in the country. The four texts are evaluated on the basis of the suggested intimated freedoms in those for 'whom there is hope' in the 'new' South Africa. Locating the place of ethics in contemporary South African literature, the article interrogates the images of the
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2016
The presence of African migrants in South African society is a complex and sensitive topic that manifests itself in interesting ways in contemporary South African literature. The topic is complex firstly because the immigration South Africa is experiencing is so diverse: it ranges from economic migration from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, to Zimbabwean refugees fleeing famine and seeking asylum in neighbouring South Africa, to the gold and platinum mines' employment of migrant labour from countries like Mozambique, Botswana, or Lesotho. Today one can no longer broach the topic of migration from African countries to South Africa without evoking xenophobic violence-it reached a notorious peak in Alexandra, close to Johannesburg, in 2008 1 and, more recently, another wave of violence broke out in April 2015. The violent nature of this xenophobia and the fact that it targets only African migrants, will lead me to explore the term "afrophobia," as perhaps more appropriate than "xenophobia" as it is the African migrant who is labelled and identified as other. This seems paradoxical in the light of the African National Congress's Pan-African ideals embodied in its rallying cry of the struggle years, Mayibuye iAfrika ("Africa return")-calling for both a return to and a return by Africawhich led to the expectation that formerly oppressed South Africans would welcome their fellow Africans. Difference and diversity as reasons for celebration (rather than hatred and segregation as in the apartheid past), were furthermore embodied by the "Rainbow Nation," a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and widely employed by President Nelson Mandela. When Thabo Mbeki became president in 1998, he introduced the concept of the African Renaissance: there was to be a cultural and economic renaissance in Africa, led by South Africa. If South Africa during apartheid had been Eurocentric, South Africa was now claiming its new identity as part of the African continent. The "Rainbow Nation" and the "African Renaissance," it must be pointed out, are terms used by the governing elite, to define the new nation as African. A counter-discourse emerged however-a national chauvinist narrative that places South Africa apart from Africa. According to this discourse, the self is South African and the other: African. 2 Migration is furthermore a sensitive topic because of the controversy surrounding the actual number of documented and undocumented migrants present in South Africa; inaccurate data is accompanied by the fear of South Africa being invaded by African migrants. Darshan Vigneswaran, in an article entitled "Undocumented migration: risks and myths (1998-2005)" identifies three myths related to migration in South Africa and calls this myth of an invasion "the most troubling myth." 3 The fact that "the available data do not allow any firm estimates of even the most basic indicators, such as the percentage of South Africa's population that is foreign" 4 leads to the systematic stereotyping of African foreigners as being a threat to the South African economy, but also to South Africans in general. Another myth Vigneswaran identifies is the idea that migration started at the end of apartheid when the electric fence that formed part of the border to the north, formerly set on lethal mode, was switched off. In reality the 1 "In a fortnight, citizens murdered more than 60 people, raped dozens, wounded close to 700 and displaced more than 100 000." Loren B Landau ed., (2011), Exorcising the Demons Within,
This essay analyses the rhetoric of racialised South African discourse. It inquires into apartheid's imagined identity of the 'Afrikaner' and the use of the Bible in the construction of Israel's identity (real or imagined). The imaginary character of Israel's identity enables one to explain South African identity discourse in terms of an unequal dialogue where identity can be overridden as was the case during the colonial period where equality and inequality were created simultaneously. For the postapartheid state, it means that racism can enter through the back door when culture is made to fulfil the role biology once played. What has become crucial in a discourse that replicates old racist polarities, is to refuse the founding concepts of the problematic, i.e. an essentialist identity in favour of a constructedness of identity.
Negotiating memory and nation building in new South African drama
2009
This thesis examines the representation of trauma and memory in six post-Apartheid plays. The topic is explored through a treatment of the tropes of racial segregation, different forms of dispossession as well as violence. The thesis draws its inspiration from the critical and self-reflexive engagements with which South African playwrights depict the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The dramatists are concerned with the contested nature of the TRC as an experiential and historical archive. Others explore the idea of disputed and seemingly elusive notions of truth (from the embodied to the forensic). Through the unpacking of the TRC, as reflected in three of the plays, the thesis argues that apart from the idea of an absolute or forensic truth, the TRC is also characterised by the repression of truth. Furthermore, there is a consideration of debates around amnesty, justice, and reparations. Underpinning the politics and representations of trauma and memory, the thesis also interrogates the concomitant explorations and implications of identity and citizenship in the dramas. In the experience of violence, subjugation and exile, the characters in the dramas wrestle with the physical and psychological implications of their lived experiences. This creates anxieties around notions of self and community whether at home or in exile and such representations foreground the centrality of memory in identity construction. All these complex personal and social challenges are further exacerbated by the presence of endemic violence against women and children as well as that of rampart crime. The thesis, therefore, explores the negotiation of memory and identity in relation to how trauma could be mitigated or healing could be attained. The thesis substantially blurs the orthodox lines of differentiation between race and class, but emphasises the centrality of the individual or self in recent post-Apartheid engagements.
Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa
Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2013
(alk. paper) 1. South african fiction (english)-21st century-history and criticism. 2. South african fiction (english)-20th century-history and criticism. 3. South african fiction (english)-east indian authors-history and criticism. 4. east indians-Foreign countries-intellectual life. 5. east indian diaspora in literature. 6. identity (Psychology) in literature. 7. Group identity in literature. i. Title.
Imagined pasts, suspended presents: South African literature in the contemporary moment
2009
Scholarship on Post-Apartheid South African literature has engaged in various ways with the politics of identity, but its dominant mode has been to understand the literature through an anxious rupture-continuation paradigm in which the Apartheid past manifests itself in the present. However, in the contemporary moment, there are writers whose texts attempt to forge new paths in their depictions of identities both individual and collective. These texts are useful in contemplating how South Africans experience belonging and dislocation in various contexts.
Beyond protest: Ethics of reconciliation in post-Apartheid South African white writing
Writing examines the politics and poetics of reconciliation in South Africa by comparing the defining (or, at least the initiating) document the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (TRC) with the ways in which concepts of "racial harmony" are presented in the post-apartheid novels of white authors like J.M.Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Antje Krog, and Andre Brink. South Africa's complex racial history dating back to the colonial times, the consequent internalization of imposed racial identities within resistance movements, and the institutionalization of racist practices through state policies mean that its effort to move beyond racism suffers from a perpetual lag-effect. The intertwining of race and colonialism also means that eradication of racism must account for colonial history. Racial reconciliation, under the circumstances, is an openended, dynamic, spatially and temporally sensitive process. By defining reconciliation as a dynamic process I identify a discrepancy between the celebration of the end of apartheid as end of racism in South Africa and the sedimentation of past racist practices in the present social and political structures. My dissertation uses postcolonial and race theory, primarily Goldberg's Foucauldian concept of race and Spivakean ethics, to explore how moving beyond apartheid and the nation's complex racist colonial past places signal demands on representation politics. Central to my argument is my claim that imaginative literature needs to be recognized as vital to reconciliation and to the reconceptualization of historical process required if reconciliation is to be a successful, ongoing project. I explore reconciliation as policy and practice-a policy and practice that literature, particularly white literature, critiques and supports. For the white authors, beneficiaries of the persisting white supremacy, reconciliation involves, among other things, aesthetic strategies used to map the limits of empathy for the non-white other. Chapter 1 charts the central claims, the theoretical framework, and the historical context of my project. In Chapter 2 I examine the TRC's Final Report through the lens of the theoretical and historical framework of the first chapter to explore ethics as a temporal, rhetorical, and textual construct, and the TRC as the primary site of that construction. In Chapter 3 I argue that J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace presents reconciliation as an irony where acknowledging the impossibility of understanding the other, especially in relations marked by historical power imbalance and violence, opens the possibility of ethical relations. Chapter 4 argues that Andre Brink's post-apartheid novels use magic realism to challenge the possibility of recovering an authentic past as the basis of justice. My final chapter compares Nadine Gordimer's None to Accompany Me with Antje Krog's Country of My Skull to discuss the role of women in patriarchal conceptions of reconciliation. A brief epilogue explores the more universal currency of my conception of racial reconciliation. iii DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to my grandmother, the Late Tapatee Roy to the rest of the world, and Amma to me. Your stories about your traumatic experiences during the 1947 Partition, on the lazy Thursday afternoons of my childhood, first made me realize the power of narratives.