The racist bodily imaginary: the image of the body-in-pieces in (post)apartheid culture

This paper outlines a reoccurring motif within the racist imaginary of (post)apartheid culture: the black body-in-pieces. This disturbing visual idiom is approached from three conceptual perspectives. By linking ideas prevalent in Frantz Fanon’s description of colonial racism with psychoanalytic concepts such as Lacan’s notion of the corps morcelé, the paper offers, firstly, an account of the black body-in-pieces as fantasmatic preoccupation of the (post)apartheid imaginary. The role of such images is approached, secondly, through the lens of affect theory which eschews a representational ‘reading’ of such images in favour of attention to their asignifying intensities and the role they play in effectively constituting such bodies. Lastly, Judith Butler’s discussion of war photography and the conditions of grievability introduces an ethical dimension to the discussion and helps draw attention to the unsavory relations of enjoyment occasioned by such images

Hyper-compressions: The rise of flash fiction in “post-transitional” South Africa

Blair, P. (2020). Hyper-compressions: The rise of flash fiction in “post-transitional” South Africa', The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 55(1), 38-60. Copyright © 2018. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.This article begins with a survey of flash fiction in “post-transitional” South Africa, which it relates to the nation’s post-apartheid canon of short stories and short-short stories, to the international rise of flash fiction and “sudden fiction”, and to the historical particularities of South Africa’s “post-transition”. It then undertakes close readings of three flash fictions republished in the article, each less than 450 words: Tony Eprile’s “The interpreter for the tribunal” (2007), which evokes the psychological and ethical complexities, and long-term ramifications, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Michael Cawood Green’s “Music for a new society” (2008), a carjacking story that invokes discourses about violent crime and the “‘new’ South Africa”; and Stacy Hardy’s “Kisula” (2015), which maps the psychogeography of cross-racial sex and transnational identity-formation in an evolving urban environment. The article argues that these exemplary flashes are “hyper-compressions”, in that they compress and develop complex themes with a long literary history and a wide contemporary currency. It therefore contends that flash fiction of South Africa’s post-transition should be recognized as having literary-historical significance, not just as an inherently metonymic form that reflects, and alludes to, a broader literary culture, but as a genre in its own right