Present imperfect : contemporary South African writing PDF
Preview Present imperfect : contemporary South African writing
PRESENT IMPERFECT Present Imperfect Contemporary South African Writing ANDREW VAN DER VLIES 1 OUPCORRECTEDPROOF–FINAL,23/3/2017,SPi 3 GreatClarendonStreet,Oxford,OX26DP, UnitedKingdom OxfordUniversityPressisadepartmentoftheUniversityofOxford. ItfurtherstheUniversity’sobjectiveofexcellenceinresearch,scholarship, andeducationbypublishingworldwide.Oxfordisaregisteredtrademarkof OxfordUniversityPressintheUKandincertainothercountries ©AndrewvanderVlies2017 Themoralrightsoftheauthorhavebeenasserted FirstEditionpublishedin2017 Impression:1 Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthispublicationmaybereproduced,storedin aretrievalsystem,ortransmitted,inanyformorbyanymeans,withoutthe priorpermissioninwritingofOxfordUniversityPress,orasexpresslypermitted bylaw,bylicenceorundertermsagreedwiththeappropriatereprographics rightsorganization.Enquiriesconcerningreproductionoutsidethescopeofthe aboveshouldbesenttotheRightsDepartment,OxfordUniversityPress,atthe addressabove Youmustnotcirculatethisworkinanyotherform andyoumustimposethissameconditiononanyacquirer PublishedintheUnitedStatesofAmericabyOxfordUniversityPress 198MadisonAvenue,NewYork,NY10016,UnitedStatesofAmerica BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData Dataavailable LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2016958127 ISBN 978–0–19–879376–2 Printedandboundby CPIGroup(UK)Ltd,Croydon,CR04YY LinkstothirdpartywebsitesareprovidedbyOxfordingoodfaithand forinformationonly.Oxforddisclaimsanyresponsibilityforthematerials containedinanythirdpartywebsitereferencedinthiswork. For my mother and for Patrick, and in memory of my father. Preface PresentImperfectisastudyofaffect,temporality,andforminwritingfrom postapartheid South Africa. Put another way, this book explores how contemporary literature, for the most part fiction, from one of late- twentieth-century history’s most affectively charged locations—stage for thespectacleofdehumanizingracialdiscrimination,siteandoccasionfor vicarious global investments in the performance of struggle, liberation, andreconciliation—engageswiththeaftermathofapartheid. South Africans had much to celebrate on the occasion of the first democratic, universal-suffrage elections in late April 1994, the culmin- ation of a long struggle against centuries of colonial and subsequently white-minorityrule thathadmadeapartheida bywordforracism. There were great expectations for the multi-racial democracy that Desmond Tutu memorably named the ‘Rainbow Nation’. Hopes were high that thisdecolonizationwouldbedifferent,thatitwouldnotdevolve,asithad doneelsewhereinAfrica,intoaversionofwhathadcomebefore,that(as NeilLazarusputit)‘ournationalliberationfrontwouldnotserve,onceit becamethepartyinpowerafterdecolonization,tocoveroveritstracesand disavow both its heritage and its historic responsibility; our leaders, our “menofthepeople”(and“womenofthepeople”)wouldnotbecome,as elsewhereonthecontinent,thepuppetsofinternationalcapital’.1 And yet, perhaps inevitably, much of the hopefulness of the early post- transition years has faded. South Africans now find themselves, in Achille Mbembe’sdiagnosis,miredin‘thebloodymiasmaoftheZumayears,these yearsofstagnation,rent-seekingandmediocrityparadingasleadership,[...] as institutions after institutions crumble under the weight of corruption, a predatorynewblackéliteandthecynicismofformeroppressors’.2Ifthepoor hoped that the Age of Zuma might yield more than had accrued to them throughtheMandelaandMbeki(andMotlanthe)administrations’accom- modationswithneoliberaleconomics,theyweretobefurtherdisappointed. Indeed,itmightbesaidthatlifeinthepostapartheidnationhascometobe characterized, for many, by a profound experience of disappointment— disappointment that the liberation struggle failed to deliver the equality of opportunity and shared access to the country’s wealth that was promised, thatthepricepaidbymanyforreconciliation,aguidingprincipleofNelson Mandela’spresidency,mayhavebeentoohigh. SimilarbadfeelingscanofcoursebereadintoSouthAfricanhistoryandin the literature that explores its lived experience from the moment of first viii Preface contact—in relation to promises to autochthonous peoples betrayed by European settlers, through proto-Afrikaner reactions to British hegemony (the end of slaveholding, the annexation of the Dutch Republics, the Boer War),tothedespair,grief,andoutrageofblackSouthAfricans,deniedtheir landinthewakeoftheNativesLandActin1913andtheirdignityunderthe dehumanizingapartheidlawsenactedafter1948.Varietiesofdisappointment and the dysphoric feelings associated therewith thus have a past in South Africa; all involve feeling trapped in an imperfect present that is not as the futurewasimagined,apresentbeyondwhichitmightbeastruggletosee. Thisbookdevelopsfrommysensethatdisappointmentisasignificant structure offeelingincontemporarySouthAfrica.Thisisan observation neither new nor singular (disappointment is in the air), but there is somethingalittledifferentthistimearound,Ibelieve.Ifdisappointment isastructuringaffect,Iargue,itshouldalsobeunderstoodasatemporal condition. As feeling, in the sense of the term that is most familiar, disappointmentconnotesthefrustrationoftheexpectationof—anddesire for—somethingdifferent.3Inthissense,SouthAfricansaredisappointed becausetheirleadersarecorrupt,inequalitiespersist,andthegapbetween richandpoorgrowseachyear.However,inameaningnowobsolete,but close to that of undoing or frustrating something determined or appointed,todisappointoncealsomeant‘tofail tokeeporcomplywith (anengagement);tofailtofulfilanappointment’.4SouthAfricansexistin thistemporalstateofdisappointment—ordis-appointment—becausethey have missed the appointment they were promised with a better future, with democracy and the promise of equality, the putative fruits of revo- lution.Thattheywereledtobelievethattheappointmenthadbeenkept, theclaimimplicitinthepresentationofthecountryaswholly‘New’,asan unprecedented ‘Rainbow Nation’, makes postapartheid disappointment (andallofitsassociatedbadfeelings)distinctive. Present Imperfect does not track the representation of a uniformly expressed or understood affect or experience, nor are the works about which I writerepresentative of the same shared sense of disappointment, either as bad feeling or missed appointment. Disappointment serves instead to focus and direct my engagement with a range of negative feelingsthatarealsoexperiencesoftemporaldisjuncture,includingstasis, impasse, boredom, disaffection, and nostalgia. I use disappointment as a category description, emphasizing variously its suggestions of affective or temporaldislocationastheworksinquestion,andtheirculturalcontexts, demand. As such, what the chapters that follow offer is a cohesive approachratherthanasingleargument. Attuned to the sometimes elusive workings of the writerly, Present Imperfect asks what thinking about affect and temporality together Preface ix might unlock for the reader, the scholar, and the student of present-day South African writing, and of postcolonial and contemporary world literaturemorebroadly.ItaddresseskeyquestionsinSouthAfricanstudies abouttheevolvingcharacterofthehistoricalperiodinwhichthecountry nowfindsitself:thelongtransitionthathasfollowedtheendofapartheid. It also looks outward, making a case for the key place of South African writinginglobalconversations.Itdoesthisbothbyfollowingintertextual conversations that the works under discussion themselves frequently pursue,andbytestingtheusefulnessofconceptualframesnotfrequently consideredinthestudyofSouthAfricanwriting.Iaminterestedinwhat the payoffs might be when we follow these already global conversations andread‘local’literaryworkswith(oralongside)suchglobalframes.One payoff is that mobilizing the energies of a turn to affect in recent literary andcultural-studiesscholarshipallowsustounderstandaspoliticalthose feelings—and especially bad feelings—that might otherwise seem merely personal or private. Rather than a sign of its evacuation, these feelings indexa potentialtoreinvigoratethepolitical.Anotherpayoffistounder- stand how literature, and especially the novel, might provide spaces in whichimaginativeopeningsoutofthepresentuncertainaftermathofthe endofapartheidaremadevisible. This book traces such openings in work by key fiction writers of the contemporary moment, specifically J.M. Coetzee, Marlene van Niekerk, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, and Ingrid Winterbach, as well as in the last work of the late Nadine Gordimer and in debut novels by younger writers Songeziwe Mahlangu and Masande Ntshanga. Several of these authors (Coetzee, Gordimer) have established international reputations; some (Wicomb, Vladislavić, Van Niekerk) have rising profiles; others (Winterbach, Mahlangu, Ntshanga) are still relatively unknown outside of South Africa. Van Niekerk and Winterbach both write in Afrikaans, and in discussing their work I hope toaid the expansion of the canon of contemporary South African writing visible to international anglophone readers. I mobilize readings of writing marked in various ways as ‘South African’ but which also contest such labels in order to complicate the contoursof‘WorldLiterature’asitisdevelopinginthepresentmoment— as category, discipline, and pedagogy. What South African writers have to say continues to reverberate in a world that becomes, perversely, more like the country every year: more unequal, but also concerned with the legacies—and in some cases the resurgence—of restrictive and exclusionaryideologies,andatthewhimofnon-stateactorsandspecula- tivecapital.Thisis,inconsequence,alsoabookaboutthediscontentsof neoliberalism, aboutthepoliticalenergiesofreading,andaboutthe fates ofliteratureinourtroubledpresent.
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