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

• Published in: Ariel 2015-07, Vol.46 (3), p.55-89
• Main Author: de Kock, Leon
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anxiety; Apartheid; Authorial voice; Literary criticism; Literature; Physical restraints; Rhetorical figures; Writing
• ISSN: 0004-1327; 1920-1222; 1920-1222
• DOI: 10.1353/ari.2015.0022

The trend in analyses of postapartheid South African literature is to see a body of writing that is largely “freed from the past” and exhibits a wide range of divergences from “struggle” writing. This article provides a differently nuanced conceptualisation and argues that some of the literature’s key dynamics are founded in “mashed-up temporalities.” My analysis borrows from Ashraf Jamal’s appropriation of art historian Hal Foster’s “future anterior” or a “will have been.” In my 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—is inescapably bound to the idea of the time of before, so much so that it compulsively iterates certain immemorial literary tropes such as those of the frontier and the journey of discovery. Further, I suggest that much postapartheid literature written in what I call “detection mode”—providing accounts of “crime” and other social ills—is distinguished by disjunctive continuity rather than linear or near-linear discontinuity with pre-transition literature, yet exhibits features of authorial voice and affect that place it within a distinctly postapartheid zone of author-reader interlocution.