Andrew van der Vlies

The Archive, the Spectral, and Narrative Responsibility in Zoë Wicomb's Playing in the Light

This article offers a close reading of Zoe Wicombs 2006 novel, Playing in the Light, arguing that it continues a project, evident throughout Wicombs oeuvre, of exploring the ethics of narrative in the context of the legacies of colonial discursive formations, and of testing the responsibilities of fiction in the particular historical circumstances of post-apartheid South Africa. The essay argues that Wicombs novel points to possibilities for narrative agency that actively plays host to the narratives of others. Using Jacques Derridas suggestion that a consideration of the virtual archive, that which has been suppressed from the official record, is crucial to the post-apartheid nation, the article explores the idea of the archive both as space of engagement and as metaphor to explore apartheid experience and the construction of race.This article offers a close reading of Zoë Wicombs 2006 novel, Playing in the Light, arguing that it continues a project, evident throughout Wicombs oeuvre, of exploring the ethics of narrative in the context of the legacies of colonial discursive formations, and of testing the responsibilities of fiction in the particular historical circumstances of post-apartheid South Africa. The essay argues that Wicombs novel points to possibilities for narrative agency that actively plays host to the narratives of others. Using Jacques Derridas suggestion that a consideration of the virtual archive, that which has been suppressed from the official record, is crucial to the post-apartheid nation, the article explores the idea of the archive both as space of engagement and as metaphor to explore apartheid experience and the construction of race.

Queer knowledge and the politics of the gaze in contemporary South African photography: Zanele Muholi and others

This article is concerned chiefly with work by the contemporary South African lesbian photographer and activist Zanele Muholi, drawing some comparisons with photographs by Sabelo Mlangeni and Lunga Kama. All of these photographers are concerned with the visibility of sexual minorities, the politics of the gaze, the construction of archives, the role of photography that is activist, and the generation of new ideas about community and citizenship. Muholis work, in particular, speaks to tensions between the body politic and the biopolitics of the black body, the autochthonous subject of tradition and the queer agent of utopian possibility. In teasing out some of the complexities of these tensions and their implications for audiences of the photographs, this article considers thematic concerns and formal attributes of a number of works. It interrogates, too, their implications for thinking about queer futurity in the postcolony, and what their reception reveals about the judgement – and tolerance – of the new custodians of national cultural identities in South Africa.This article is concerned chiefly with work by the contemporary South African lesbian photographer and activist Zanele Muholi, drawing some comparisons with photographs by Sabelo Mlangeni and Lunga Kama. All of these photographers are concerned with the visibility of sexual minorities, the politics of the gaze, the construction of archives, the role of photography that is activist, and the generation of new ideas about community and citizenship. Muholis work, in particular, speaks to tensions between the body politic and the biopolitics of the black body, the autochthonous subject of tradition and the queer agent of utopian possibility. In teasing out some of the complexities of these tensions and their implications for audiences of the photographs, this article considers thematic concerns and formal attributes of a number of works. It interrogates, too, their implications for thinking about queer futurity in the postcolony, and what their reception reveals about the judgement – and tolerance – of the ne...

Introduction: Annexing the global, globalizing the local

ABSTRACT The editors of this volume, by way of introducing the collective concerns of its constituent essays, engage with possible reasons for, and implications of, the continuing affective powers of literary, cinematic, dramatic, musical, and plastic art “texts” from and about South Africa for global audiences. In Part I, Patrick Denman Flanery offers a personal reflection on his earliest encounters with “South African” “cultural texts” (or their adaptations) in an American context, suggesting the nature of such texts’ emotional and aesthetic relevance to white liberal audiences in particular. In Part II, Andrew van der Vlies offers broader theoretical analyses of the idea of global mediascapes, relating this to his own ongoing encounters with South African cultural and literary material. In Part III, the editors discuss the relevance of the essays which follow to the issues themes and concerns.

On the Ambiguities of Narrative and of History: Writing (about) the Past in Recent South African Literary Criticism

As South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was in the midst of conducting Human Rights Violation hearings across the country in 1997, leading intellectual and writer Njabulo Ndebele suggested in an essay in Negotiating the Past (1998) – one of the first significant collections to examine memory and trauma in the transition – that the experiences of ordinary people, victims who had been made to feature in narratives hitherto authored by the apartheid state, were being recuperated by the TRC in what amounted to a ‘restoration of narrative’. Ndebele had, of course, famously argued at the turn of the 1990s that the daily experience of the majority of the country’s population – the ‘ordinary’, the exigencies of the quotidian – should inform an aesthetics not beholden to the spectacular narratives authored by the white government. The TRC, it seemed to him, was a forum to reveal both the extraordinary in the ordinary, and restore the possibility of a future ‘ordinary’ becoming the proper stuff of narrative in a more humane society. Poet and educationist Ingrid de Kok cautioned against expecting closure or coherence from the narrativising so occasioned by the Commission, however. In another contribution to Negotiating the Past, she suggested that the TRC could not be expected to elicit or ‘produce’ the ‘truth’; it was, rather, ‘in the multiplicity of partial versions and experiences, composed and recomposed within sight of each other, that truth “as a thing of this world”, in Foucault’s phrase, [would] emerge’. The archive, in other words, was necessarily – and inevitably – open to the future. André P. Brink, in his contribution to Negotiating the Past, suggested that the ‘silent places’ left un-examined by the TRC invited exploration, and that creative writers were perhaps the best placed to reach ‘beyond facts’ and to take up this challenge. The ‘real’, he argued, was not only merely that which is able to be excavated and represented, but actively

Transnational Print Cultures: Books, -scapes, and the Textual Atlantic

In a wide-ranging and suggestive assessment of the implications of Oprah Winfrey’s selection of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) as the second book—after Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath—in Oprah’s revamped on-air and online Book Club in 2003, Rita Barnard suggests that, while interest in South African cultural production in the West (particularly post-1976 and pre-1994) was driven by the ‘‘vicarious sense of indignation, or moral frisson’’ it provided ‘‘in countries where politics seemed less urgent and dramatic,’’ it seems now to be the case that interest might continue to ‘‘be fed and financed to the degree that it provides images and narratives of suffering and its overcoming.’’ A number of critics have remarked on the ahistorical nature of many mainstream American representations of South Africa and reception of its cultural products: film— Barnard refers to Rob Nixon’s assessment of the reception of 1980s anti-apartheid films Cry Freedom, A Land Apart, Dry White Season—and theatre (see Loren Kruger and Jeanne Colleran on South African plays in the US) frequently peddle unhistoricized or reified and outdated snapshots as backdrops for affective representations that reflect the emotional investments of American audiences rather than necessarily engaging with any South African reality. What made the

‘YOUR PASSAGE LEAVES ITS TRACK OF … CHANGE’: TEXTUAL VARIATION IN ROY CAMPBELL'S ‘TRISTAN DA CUNHA’, 1926–1945

ne of Roy Campbell’s finest poems from the productive middle months of 1926, ‘Tristan da Cunha’, develops an analogy between the 0 poet-speaker, alienated from a colonial society he would shortly leave, and the isolated south Atlantic island, its high central cone buffeted by the wind, and its cliffs by the sea, ‘My surly heart is in your own displayed’, he declares in line 14; later, emphasizing the affinity, he asks:

Reading Banned Books

By the late 1960s, state oppression in South Africa, including the proscription of activists associated with the liberation movements and censorship of writing critical of the government by a highly efficient censorship bureaucracy, had silenced many black writers (Merrett 47 /54). By the end of 1966, for example, noted writers Masizi Kunene, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, Todd Matshikiza, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Can Temba, Dennis Brutus and Alex La Guma were all banned, and many of them in exile */ Mphahlele in Kenya, Themba in Swaziland, Modisane, Matshikiza, Maimane, La Guma and Nkosi all in London, while Peter Abrahams was in Jamaica and Alfred Hutchinson in Ghana (De Lange 13 /14). Banning or ‘listing’ under the terms of the Internal Security Act (44 of 1950) allowed for the prohibition of the publication or dissemination of any statements or writing by any member of an organisation banned by the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act, by anyone banned from attending gatherings, and by those who had left the country and were considered by the Minister of Justice to be engaged in agitation against the state from abroad (Dugard 67). Nonetheless, the work of writers already proscribed in this way was still subject to detailed reading by South African censors, in a remarkable and illuminating display of the clash of a literary hermeneutic impulse, and an instrumental, institutional anti-hermeneutics */ a refusal to recognise that the literary might exist in a different order of discourse than the political. One such writer whose work was automatically kept from South African readers, and yet also subject to repeated, detailed evaluation, was Alex La Guma. His impressive record of opposition to the apartheid state was enough to guarantee his silencing: amongst other things, he was a founding member of the Coloured political organisation SACPO, a long-standing Communist Party member, active in organising the 1955 Kliptown Congress of the People, defendant (acquitted) in the notorious 1956 /1960 mass treason trial, frequent internee and, during his exile, Chairman of the ANC in London and ANC representative in Cuba. His writing / A Walk in the Night (1962), And a Threefold Cord (1964), The Stone Country (1967, repr. 1974), A Walk in the Night and other Stories (1967, 1968, repr. 1991), In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (1972) and Time of the Butcherbird (1979) / enacted an equally determined opposition in its concern to represent the suffering and dehumanisation of South Africa’s oppressed communities. As a banned person (a ‘listed Communist’), nothing he said or wrote could be reported or read inside the country. Nonetheless, despite this pre-emptive proscription, each of La Guma’s works was read, and attentively so, by apartheid-era censors whose readings provide an exemplary study of the manner in which those charged with protecting the white republic from the ‘total onslaught’ of anti-apartheid literature, conceived the category of the ‘literary’. These reports reflect attempts to control the movement of print, to determine the lives, the meanings and significance of books in the region over a period of nearly four decades, and are indicative, too, of the peculiarly inflected anxieties about literariness which affects all postcolonial writing. I chart part of the complicated history of La Guma’s works’ publication in Nigeria, East Berlin, London and elsewhere, and of its reception history more fully in chapter five of my monograph, South African Textual Cultures. What concerns me here is a more detailed discussion of particular (and particularly) situated acts of reading of La Guma’s work than has been possible elsewhere.

“I’m only grateful that it’s not a Cape Town book”, or: Zoë Wicomb, textuality, propriety, and the proprietary:

This essay considers the representation of authorship and of writing and reading in — and the manner in which various institutions of publication and reception negotiate the conditions of authorshi...This essay considers the representation of authorship and of writing and reading in — and the manner in which various institutions of publication and reception negotiate the conditions of authorship of — South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb’s first book, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987). Variously described as a short-story cycle or novel-in-stories, this deftly metafictional work offers a meditation on the gender and race-inflected difficulties of authorship under apartheid, a condition in which language, race, and propriety, the issue of the properties of the literary and the ownership of stories, are inevitably imbricated. It asks how we might better understand the conditions of Wicomb’s work in its different editions and published versions by exploring the author’s engagement with ideas of authorship and responsibility. It asks what Wicomb’s representations of the propriety and the proprietary interests involved in postcolonial authorship reveal about her own work’s fate in the world, and what questions such an analysis poses for the study of postcolonial print — and literary — cultures.

Zoë Wicomb's Queer Cosmopolitanisms

Taking as its starting point a reading of Zoë Wicombs 2009 short story “In Search of Tommie”, this paper considers the queer energies at the heart of, and the representation of ‘queer’ characters across, Wicombs oeuvre. Van der Vlies argues that the chief character of this story is usefully considered as a figure of queer potential not only because he is constructed as gay, but also because of his place at the centre of an imagined family in a non-genealogical revisioning of affiliation that is suggestive for Wicombs engagement with the cosmopolitan—figured as the opposite of the homogeneous, parochial, or ethno-centric—more broadly. The paper argues that Wicombs commitment to subversive interrogations of ideas about the nation as family, affiliation, genealogy, and reproducibility, might be said to be ‘queer’ in the sense that queer studies is concerned to reveal the operation of discourses of normalization in the everyday, and to reveal these as the locations of violence. Along the way, the essay addresses the subversive deployment of allusion and intertextuality (in this story, and more broadly), instances of homosexual identification and suggestive queering throughout Wicombs oeuvre, and the fraught engagement of queer studies with race, class, and ‘reproductive futurity’ that is keenly at issue in debates about the rights of LGBTI South Africans, and about the place of queerness in constructions of authochthony and African identity.Taking as its starting point a reading of Zoe Wicombs 2009 short story “In Search of Tommie”, this paper considers the queer energies at the heart of, and the representation of ‘queer’ characters across, Wicombs oeuvre. Van der Vlies argues that the chief character of this story is usefully considered as a figure of queer potential not only because he is constructed as gay, but also because of his place at the centre of an imagined family in a non-genealogical revisioning of affiliation that is suggestive for Wicombs engagement with the cosmopolitan—figured as the opposite of the homogeneous, parochial, or ethno-centric—more broadly. The paper argues that Wicombs commitment to subversive interrogations of ideas about the nation as family, affiliation, genealogy, and reproducibility, might be said to be ‘queer’ in the sense that queer studies is concerned to reveal the operation of discourses of normalization in the everyday, and to reveal these as the locations of violence. Along the way, the essay ad...

Zoë Wicomb, the Cape & the Cosmopolitan: An Introduction

South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb has, in two novels (Davids Story [2000] and Playing in the Light [2006]), two collections of linked stories (You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town [1987] and The One That Got Away [2008]), and a number of extraordinarily trenchant and insightful essays on South African literature and culture, established a reputation as one of the most far-sighted of contemporary postcolonial authors and critics. This essay introduces a special issue on Wicomb in relation to questions of locatedness and dislocation, home and exile, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, arising out of an international conference on Wicombs work held at the University of Stellenbosch in April 2010. Engaging with the complicated modernity of late-century and contemporary South Africa, Wicomb has long been concerned with anxieties about the ethics of speaking for, speaking over, the many voices of South Africas multiple communities, and of those who find a home in none of them. The various essays in this collection consider the issues at stake in considering Wicombs work in relation not only to the place in which much of her work is set, the Cape, but in attending, too, to the transnational and the cosmopolitan energies—and paradoxes—at work in her writing.