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The article discusses three contemporary works about and by first- and second-generation South African exiles. In Lauretta Ngcobo's collection of memoirs, Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South Afric...

Within the larger context of intertextuality in contemporary South African works of fiction, the article focuses on Michiel Heyns's novel, Invisible Furies, whose characters, plot trajectories, nar...

Zoe Wicomb’s third novel, October (2014), provides the most searching revision of the notion of home in contemporary South African fiction. Taking as its point of departure the epigraphs from Tony ...

The article traces the continuity between Zakes Mda's storytelling in his works for the theatre and his fictional works. This is especially evident in the performative character of his novels: his fictional protagonists are performers and artists of various kinds, and some kind of indigenous cultural, religious or artistic performance is usually foregrounded in his novels. His novel, The Sculptors of Mapungubwe (2013), is the latest stage in his larger fictional project of imaginatively mapping southern Africa. In a narrative that draws on different epistemological realms and modes of storytelling, Mda recreates the physical and human geography of the precolonial Kingdom of Mapungubwe in Limpopo, its social hierarchy, cosmogony and historical context. Continuing with his narrative formula of having twinned protagonists, Mda considers, with reference to the half-brother sculptors, Chata and Rendani, the role of the artist in society and the relationship between art and national identity. Traditional and in...

The renewed outbreak of xenophobic attacks in March and April 2015 in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town, the killings, looting, and burning of homes and shops, and the flight of thousands of foreign Africans to refugee camps, have brought to the fore not only the question of the African diaspora in South Africa, but also into focus the notions of home and homeland in a diasporic context. In Shadows, for which she was awarded the Herman Charles Bosman Prize in 2014, Zimbabwean writer Novuyo Rosa Tshuma presents the dislocations of life in present-day Zimbabwe and the relocation and double displacement of the Zimbabwean diasporic community in South Africa. The text, comprising a novella, ‘Shadows’, and five other stories, is best approached as a story cycle, the individual narratives being linked not only by the theme of diaspora but also by a number of recurring diasporic situations, figures, and tropes. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary diaspora theory, including the African and intra-African diaspora, as well as current research on Zimbabwe and its diaspora, this article examines the ambiguous diasporic concepts of home and belonging, and inclusion and exclusion, with reference to Tshuma’s fictional depiction of daily township life in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe with its food queues, depleted resources, and crashed economy, as well as in the marginal world of the presentday Zimbabwean diaspora in Johannesburg with its police corruption and brutal exploitation of illegal immigrants. The article considers the psychogenic condition known as ‘conversion disorder’, which Tshuma foregrounds in one of the stories, as a metaphor for understanding the paradoxical diasporic identification with, and alienation from, home, community, and home country in Zimbabwe as well as in the unaccommodating host country, South Africa.

The essay considers four novels, written post-1990, that structure their fictional negotiation of the past by employing as protagonist/narrator the figure of a stricken and dying old white woman who recalls her personal story in the context of the national history: Karel Schoeman's This Life (1993), J M Coetzee's Age of Iron (1990), Andre Brink's Imaginings of Sand (1996), and Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006). The stories of these old women are told at the discursive intersections of memory, gender and race, and individually and together they revise the story of South Africa before, and for, the advent of democracy. Taking as its point of departure the pseudo-autobiographical form of these novels, the essay examines the role of memory in the narrative construction of self and identity, the self as discursive subject, and collective memories in relation to contesting nationalisms. The essay concludes with a more extensive discussion of Agaat, which exemplifies many of the issues discussed in the first th...

J. M. Coetzee's autobiographical novel/ fictional autobiography, Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life (2009. London: Harvill Secker), engages more fully and more self-reflexively than any of his other works with the knotty question of his identity as a white South African.This essay argues that in a characteristically elaborate narrative construct he both avows and disavows his Afrikaner as well as his English cultural roots. The essay begins by contextualizing Summertime in the current critical discourse on South African identity, and then suggests that the rhetorical figure of chiasmus provides a way of understanding the cruciform logic that underpins much of Coetzee's thinking and writing, and of engaging with the cultural cross-over between English and Afrikaner cultural filiation and affiliation that he foregrounds in works such as Boyhood, Slow Man, Diary of a Bad Year, and Summertime. In the cruciform exchanges between Coetzee's biographer Vincent and his interlocutors in Summertime, questions a...

The essay analyses the figurative mapping in Sally‐Ann Murray's first novel, Small Moving Parts (2009), which is a coming‐of‐age novel about the young Halley Murphy who grows up in the suburb of Umbilo in Durban in the 1960s. The essay begins by analysing the narrative topography of Durban in the 1960s in terms of J. Hillis Miller's notion of “topotropography”, with special reference to what Miller calls “atopical” or unplaceable/unmappable places. Against the background of the main Western philosophical conceptions of the self, the essay then analyses the way Halley's developing sense of herself is mapped in the narrative, and pursues the analogy between, on the one hand, the philosophical problem of a unified and diachronic sense of self that persists despite gaps in consciousness, and, on the other hand, the narrative paradox of a coherent narrative topography of the self being mapped despite zones of absence. Absences, losses and gaps – personal, social, historical and linguistic – are a dist...

Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel, Paradise (1994), provides a narrative reversal and revision of Conrad's canonical text, Heart of Darkness (1902), self-consciously returning its colonial gaze from a postcolonial position. The article begins with the contrived narrative optic of reversal in Conrad's novella, and proceeds to examine the similar narrative structure of privileged and obstructed sightlines, and gazes knowingly and unknowingly returned, in Paradise, showing the intertextual relationship between the two works. Paradise narratively re-maps Conrad's colonial route to an African ‘heart of darkness’, but from the east coast of Africa westwards, and both recreates and subverts the ‘topotropography’ of Conrad's work and reconfigures the darkness at its heart. Gurnah's narrative about the last of the great East African trading caravans retraces one of the major trading routes from the coast into the interior around the Great Lakes, which in the nineteenth century had become one of the axes of the sl...

The tension between the insistent binarism of Marlow's discourse on darkness and the cautionary self‐reflexivity of the frame narrator in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) has remained a feature of writing about Congo up to the present day: King Leopold's Ghost (1998) by Adam Hochschild; The Poisonwood Bible (1998) by Barbara Kingsolver, and A Passage to Africa (2001) by George Alagiah. The patriarchal discourse of the American missionary, Nathan Price, is central to Kingsolver's novel. However, Price's voice is only heard reported — and subverted — in the narratives of his family members, who bear out the truth that “to resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy”. The article considers, in the light of a theory of cross‐cultural discourse, whether Kingsolver's novel, despite its self‐reflexive analysis of English as hegemonic language, and its engagement with the various linguistic and epistemological worlds of the Congo — Lingala...

Summary This article approaches Michael Ondaatje's novel. The English Patient [1992](1993b), via its pre‐texts, the autobiographical memoir, Running in theFamily [1982](1993a), and the novel, In the Skin of a Lion [1987](1988). The article first analyses Ondaatje's interpellation as postcolonial subject in Running in the Family and views the generic hybridity of the work in terms of the cultural hybridity of its autobiographical and biographical subjects. The narrative exemplifies the intertextual mode that characterises Ondaatje's writing. In In the Skin of a Lion, through the fragmented and contrapuntal narratives of the marginalised characters, Ondaatje illustrates how inhabiting a dominant discourse through mimicry (Bhabha) is a complex strategy of appropriation and resistance. The ostentatious intertextuality of The English Patient, it is argued, exhibits “postcolonial impatience”: the tension between recognition by postcolonial subjects of the imperialistic narratives by which they are constrained, ...

This article considered the literary representation of young South Africans coming of age within a post-apartheid, multicultural context and forging for themselves a modern identity across a divide between, and also within, cultures. They identify themselves with the global West, but also subscribe to indigenous African values, whilst recognising how they themselves have been damaged by corrupted cultural practices. Postcolonial theories of identity-formation – Said’s argument that post-imperial cultures are all hybrid and heterogeneous, Bhabha’s interstitial ‘third space’ where postcolonial identities are produced through processes of negotiation and translation, Hall’s theory that cultural identity is based on differences and discontinuities rather than on fixed essences, De Kock’s notion of a ‘cultural seam’ or site where cultures both differ and converge and difference and sameness are sutured together, Nuttall’s notion of entanglement, and Clingman’s theory of the transitive self – are used for understanding how young South Africans are shown in recent writing as having been shaped by traditional cultural practices and also damaged by cultural malpractices. Texts chosen for discussion are Adam Ashforth’s Madumo, about witchcraft, Russell Kaschula’s short story,‘Six teaspoons of sweetness’ and Gcina Mhlope’s short story, ‘Nokulunga’s wedding’, both of which deal with ukuthwala [forced marriage abduction] and, finally, Thando Mgqolozana’s novel, A man who is not a man, which deals with the consequences of a botched traditional circumcision. The article argued that self-reflexive critical and imaginative engagement by young people with the cultures that have formed – and deformed – them is a mark of the true coming-of-age of postcolonial and post-apartheid writing.

Zoë Wicomb’s three fictional works – You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), David’s Story (2000) and Playing in the Light (2006) – all engage with the question of a South African ‘coloured’ identity both under apartheid with its racialised discourse of black and white, and in the context of the postapartheid language of multiculturalism andcreolisation. This essay examines the representation of ‘colouredness’ in Wicomb’s writing in terms of the two different conceptions of cultural identity that Stuart Hall has defined: an essential cultural identity based on a single, shared culture, and the recognition that cultural identity is based not only on points of similarity, but also on critical points of deep and significant difference and of separate histories of rupture and discontinuity.The politics of South African ‘coloured’ identity in Wicomb’s works reveals a tension between, on the one hand, acceptance of the complex discourse of colouredness with all its historical discontinuities, and, on the other, the desire for a more cohesive sense of cultural identity, drawn from a collective narrative of the past. In David’s Story the possibility of an essential cultural identity as an alternative to the unstable coloured oneis considered with reference to the history of the Griqua ‘nation’ in the nineteenth century. And in Playing in the Light the alternative to colouredness is examined with reference to those coloured people under apartheid who were light enough to pass for white and crossed over, reinventing themselves as white South Africans. The essay approachescoloured identity through the lens of postcolonial diaspora theory, and more specifically, diasporic chaos theory.