Freedom on a Frontier? The Double Bind of (White) Postapartheid South African Literature

The trend in analyses of postapartheid South African literature is to see a body of writing that is largely “freed from the past,” exhibiting a wide range of divergences from locked-in “struggle” writing. This article provides a differently nuanced conceptualization, arguing that some of the literature’s key dynamics are founded in “mashed-up temporalities.” The analysis borrows from Ashraf Jamal’s appropriation of art historian Hal Foster’s “future anterior” or a “will have been.” In this reading, emblematic strands of postapartheid writing are less “free from the past” than trading in an anxiety about never having begun. The body of literature in question – in this case white post-transitional writing – can be seen to be inescapably bound to the idea of the time of before, so much so that it compulsively iterates certain immemorial literary tropes such as the frontier and the journey of discovery. Further, the article suggests that much postapartheid literature written in what it calls “detection mode” – providing accounts of “crime” and other social ills – are distinguished by disjunctive continuity rather than linear or near-linear discontinuity with pre-transition literature, yet exhibit features of authorial voice and affect that place it within a distinctly postapartheid zone of author-reader interlocution

Off‐colour? Mike Nicol’s Neo‐noir ‘Revenge Trilogy’ and the Postapartheid Femme Fatale

Abstract: This article critically examines the use of noir, neo‐noir and global noir conventions in Mike Nicol’s ‘Revenge Trilogy’ of crime novels, Payback (2008), Killer Country (2010), and Black Heart (2011). Nicol invents a black femme fatale who is shown to be an ‘evil’ concentrate of all that is perceived to be corrupt under postapartheid conditions. The ‘dame’ in question, Shemina February, is portrayed in such a way that she becomes a projection of what scholars and commentators increasingly see as a corrupt, neoliberal power‐base hijacking the legacy of the South African struggle against apartheid. However, the article raises the question: why locate such a pronounced sense of political ‘evil’ in a black female character? Coming from a white writer, regardless of his credentials, such a gesture raises the possibility of dubious racial and gender typecasting in an act of (perhaps unconscious?) projection. Might the white postapartheid writer, in this way, be seeking a sacrificial object for the perceived ills of postapartheid, in much the way classic noir projected its anxieties about the displacement of (white) male agency onto ‘bad’ women after the second world war? The article offers alternate readings of Nicol’s femme fatale

From the subject of evil to the evil subject : ‘Cultural difference’ in postapartheid South African crime fiction

Abstract: This article takes up the question of “crime writing” and rejoins the debate around whether such literature stands in for the “political novel” in postapartheid South Africa. What social function might crime writing be serving? Research by political economists and cultural anthropologists suggests that acts of writing in “social detection” mode (rather than “crime writing”) serve as an allegory for occulted sociopolitical conditions. Cultural difference is seen, once again, to play a pivotal role in the legitimation of power, and writers in the detection mode are correspondingly seen to be probing the possibility of a resurgence of “bad” difference. This notion, it is argued, is a key differentiator in an otherwise murky scene in which the borderline between licit and illicit, and right and wrong, has become obscure. While many South African writers are brought into the discussion, including but not restricted to crime authors, a key novel by leading crime writer Deon Meyer is read as a case study to illustrate the more general points made in the article

Whitelier than white? : inversions of the racial gaze in white Zimbabwean writing

Abstract: This article looks at inscriptions of whiteness in selected white Zimbabwean narratives. Through a reading of Andrea Eames’ The Cry of the Go-Away Bird (2011), Alexander Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2003) and John Eppel’s Absent: the English Teacher (2009), the argument proposes that white Zimbabwean narratives situate whiteness within the context of change and marginality in Zimbabwe. The narratives deal with experiences of change and apprehensions of lived reality marked by the transfer of power from white minority to black majority rule. Our reading of The Cry of the Go-Away Bird examines how whiteness in the postcolonial Zimbabwean state is perceived through an outsider’s gaze, resulting in a kind of double consciousness within the (racialized, white) subject of the gaze. It is argued that the text depicts whites as torn between two unreconciled streams of possibility, reinforcing their sense of alienation. Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight represents whiteness as a thoroughly ephemeral experience. The meaning of whiteness is mediated through perpetual physical movement as whites travel from one point to another. Eppel’s Absent: the English Teacher affords a rethinking of whiteness as an unstable form of identity contingent on historical and political factors

The confessio of an academic Ahab: or, how I sank my own disciplinary ship

Inaugural lecture delivered on 19 November 2012.Leon de Kock matriculated at Mayfair High School, Johannesburg, in 1973. In 1974 he enrolled at the former Rand Afrikaans University, now the University of Johannesburg, to read for a BA in law, completing a BA Honours in English in 1978. After six years full time in journalism, he re-joined academia when a British Council scholarship enabled him to read Commonwealth, American and African Literature at the University of Leeds. Upon his return to South Africa from Leeds in 1984, he was appointed as lecturer in the department of English at the University of South Africa (UNISA), where he eventually became a full professor. In 2007/2008, he was appointed – after 22 years of service at UNISA – as Head of the School of Literature and Language Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, assuming the position of personal professor. At Wits he also convened and expanded the creative writing programme. In 2010 he accepted a chair in English at Stellenbosch University. He has published widely, producing 37 accredited scholarly articles to date, with more in the pipeline, as well as 10 accredited book chapters, a monograph, several book-length works of literary translation, a novel, and three volumes of poetry. He has also edited literary works. His awards include the Pringle Prize (for poetry, 1995, and for best scholarly article, 2011), the SA Translators’ Institute for Outstanding Translation (for Triomf, 2000), the SA Literary Awards (SALA) prize for literary translation, the Chancellor’s Prize for Research, UNISA (twice), and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals’ (CELJ, affiliated to the MLA) award for Best Special Issue of a journal, for Poetics Today 22 (2) 2001, South Africa in the Global Imaginary

Postapartheid as verwondingskultuur binne ’n patologiese openbare ruimte : Mark Gevisser se Lost and found in Johannesburg

Abstract: Postapartheid as a wound culture within a pathological public sphere: Mark Gevisser’s Lost and Found in Johannesburg In his work on “wound culture” and the “pathological public sphere” Mark Seltzer (1997) identifies “addictive violence” as “not merely a collective spectacle but one of the crucial sites where private desire and public space cross” in late modernity (1997:3). For Seltzer the convening of the public “around scenes of violence” (such as rushing to the scene of an accident, either an on-the-scene event or a voyeuristically experienced multimedia happening) is constitutive of so-called wound culture. The latter is the “public fascination..