Beyond the limit: the social relations of madness in Southern African fiction

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented October, 198

Fugitive/Narrative: Some Starting Points

What are the topologies of fugitive/narrative, whether as a matter of experience, theory or fiction? This essay follows a number of trajectories in addressing the question. In part the exploration is prompted by the refugee crisis in many places around the world, yet the issue of the "fugitive" is not exactly identical with that. Moreover, the slash mark in fugitive/narrative suggests a complex relation between the fugitive condition and the renditions of the fictive or the literary, whose implications run all the way from the experiential to the juridical, the ethical to the existential, the linguistic to the political, the philosophical to the archetypal. The essay begins with an unexpected short story by Primo Levi, and it ends with a consideration of Jenny Erpenbeck’s remarkable novel, Go, Went, Gone, which deals with African refugees in Germany. In between, there is discussion of figures including Lukács, Adorno, Auerbach and Said, all of whom explored aspects of the "unhomed" in the world and in texts. Other questions enter in, including issues of bare life and human rights (Arendt, Agamben, Balibar). There are classical lineages (Biblical, Homer, Virgil) and current resonances, as well as issues of hosting, hospitality and hostility raised through the work of Levinas and Derrida. Etymology provides its own insights, not least in offering a revised definition of the "route" as the "broken road," with major implications for the topic. While very little can do justice to the enormity of the refugee experience, this essay on fugitive/narrative is intended as a range of "starting points" in addressing the complexities, complicities and responsibilities of our current world. The published version of the article is available at http://politicsslashletters.org/fugitivenarrative-starting-points/

“Don’t tell me this isn’t relevant all over again in its brand new same old way”: imagination, agitation, and raging against the machine in Ali Smith’s Spring

This paper explores the third novel in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, Spring. Using Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics as a conceptual frame, I analyze Smith’s rendering of a Britain grappling with Brexit in times of transnational populism. As with Autumn and Winter, Smith’s prose is saturated with intertextual borrowings from pop and “high” culture, also interrogating the links between “nanoracism” and the “immunity and community” knot (Dillet). This paper reads Spring alongside Smith’s contribution to and advocacy of the Refugee Tales project regarding the diverse discourses surrounding migration, xenophobia, and indefinite detention. Smith’s writing traces the darkness of our populist present with its rhetorical and material violence, as well as the possibilities for creative response and resistance. I argue that her seasonal quartet to date and her work with Refugee Tales aesthetically and ethically defend the principle that human dignity, both individual and collective, rests on the ability to tell stories

Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary

Bram Fischer was one of the major South African figures in the 20th century. Born into a prominent Afrikaner nationalist family, he became a Rhodes scholar and distinguished lawyer, and in 1964 led the defense of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and others in the Rivonia trial. Fischer was sentenced to life imprisonment for his own political activities against apartheid. Before his sentencing he spent nine months underground, in disguise. For a time, he was South Africa\u27s most wanted man, his cause recognised and celebrated around the world. His story concerns one of those rare lives that weave together the personal and political and revise our sense of both in a world revolving furiously around issues of identity. \u27Bram Fischer\u27 was awarded the 1999 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, South Africa\u27s premier prize for non-fiction. A new edition will be released by Jacana Media in 2013

The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary

In our current world, questions of the transnational, location, land, and identity confront us with a particular insistence. The Grammar of Identity is a lively and wide-ranging study of twentieth-century fiction that examines how writers across nearly a hundred years have confronted these issues. Circumventing the divisions of conventional categories, the book examines writers from both the colonial and postcolonial, the modern and postmodern eras, putting together writers who might not normally inhabit the same critical space: Joseph Conrad, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Charlotte Bronte, Jean Rhys, Anne Michaels, W. G. Sebald, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee. In this guise, the book itself becomes a journey of discovery, exploring the transnational not so much as a literal crossing of boundaries but as a way of being and seeing. In fictional terms this also means that it concerns a set of related forms: ways of approaching time and space; constructions of the self by way of combination and constellation; versions of navigation that at once have to do with the foundations of language as well as our pathways through the world. From Conrad\u27s waterways of the earth, to Sebald\u27s endless horizons of connection and accountability, to Gordimer\u27s and Coetzee\u27s meditations on the key sites of village, Empire, and desert, the book recovers the centrality of fiction to our understanding of the world. At the heart of it all is the grammar of identity, how we assemble and undertake our versions of self at the core of our forms of being and seeing