Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe's Welcome To Our Hillbrow.

A feature of contemporary South African fiction is that it explores the intricate complicities of personal, cultural and racial identities in terms of an uneasy relation to place—in both a physical and a figurative sense. Mpe's Welcome To Our Hillbrow poses a radical challenge to notions of ‘community’, of what constitutes ‘home’ in the same instant that the narrative is generated by these notions. The novel is written in the second person, which has the disorientating effect of simultaneously distancing, but engaging the reader in the implied community signalled by the ‘our’ of the novel's title. In this paper I explore Mpe's treatment of identity as a response to place as a physical and a linguistic inscription. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]