Shane Graham

The Entropy of Built Things: Postapartheid Anxiety and the Production of Space in Henrietta Rose-Innes’ Nineveh and Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City

Two recent novels reveal two interrelated clusters of postapartheid anxiety in twenty-first-century South Africa: one type is a dread of invasion, contamination, infestation, and other encroachments of the new, alien, and other. A second set of preoccupations involves subterranean spaces—basements, mines, tunnels—and a distrust of the solidity of built environments. Both Nineveh and Zoo City strip away the surface layers of Cape Town and Johannesburg and show us the layers of infrastructure, mechanization, and human labor that constitute or produce the city itself. But the two novels show us different understandings of the urban “underneath”: Beukes’ imagined Johannesburg is one in which spatial inequalities that seem chaotic, in fact structure the city and allow for social regimentation, while Rose-Innes shows us a Cape Town where spatial structures and entrenched inequality appear to be designed to ward off the intrinsic “entropy of built things.”

Layers of permanence: toward a spatial—materialist reading of Ivan Vladislavić's The exploded view

Abstract Critics of Vladislavićs early fiction have tended toward dehistoricized textual readings focusing on the authors clear preoccupation with words and word games. Such readings have often ignored or downplayed Vladislavićs equally clear interest in the material processes and socio-physical spaces that shape and enable life in the city. This essay develops a spatial-materialist interpretation of his most recent novel The exploded view, reading word games and puzzles as part of a larger attempt to map the labyrinthine geographies of the post-apartheid city. Vladislavić forges a mode of representation that can register the continual inscription and effacement of social relations onto the physical urban landscape. This narrative strategy, similar to what William Kentridge calls an aesthetic of “imperfect erasure”, operates in tandem with the trope of the “exploded view” to dissect contemporary Johannesburg and lay bare the social and economic processes that create and intersect it.

“This curious thing”: Richard Rive, the Harlem Renaissance, and the commodification of the black Atlantic

Abstract As a young man, Richard Rive was prone to mythologizing African-American culture. We see this, for instance, in his letters to Langston Hughes, where he claims Hughes and other black American writers as influences on his intellectual development. By the end of the 1960s, however, Rive had grown ironic and ambivalent toward African-American literature and toward the idea of a “common sense” kinship among Africans and African Americans. This article focuses especially on Rive’s 1969 short story “Middle Passage” and its adaptation into the 1971 radio play Make Like Slaves. These texts borrow from, and simultaneously critique, the canon of black Atlantic literature. They cast doubt on the capacity for cultural production and exchange to cross borders and generate a sense of cosmopolitan interconnection. The process of cultural exchange, Rive warns us, quickly devolves into the commodification of ethnicity. Thus, Rive makes a double move that simultaneously ratifies and qualifies South Africa’s literary kinship with the African diaspora.

Memories of empire: The Empire Exhibition in Andrea Levy’s Small Island and Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist

Two novels from the early 2000s set key scenes at the Empire Exhibition in London in 1924: Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (2002) and Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004). In both novels, the Exhibition is clearly intended to enshrine in the collective memory of British citizens a particular, museum-like vision of Britain’s history with its colonies. In part, the imperial propaganda generated by the exhibition is born out of England’s interwar anxiety about the looming breakup of its empire. It is ironic then that in both cases, the exhibits seem to evoke a very different reaction in the characters who encounter them: the presence of real people — specifically real Africans — undermines the tightly ordered fixity of the museum display. Instead it becomes another kind of memory site: messy and unpredictable, with the constant potential to expose the superficiality of colonial stereotypes and bear witness to more jagged and less flattering histories. Indeed, the same anxieties that create the need for stable memories of the past also lead to cracks in the structures of colonial domination, giving characters space to recreate their identities and their collective memories.

Review: Stefan Helgesson, "Transnationalism in Southern African Literature: Modernists, Realists, and the Inequality of Print Culture"

New York: Routledge, 2009. 164 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-415-46239-6.

Remembering to Forget: Monumental vs. Peripatetic Archiving in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit

For the first ten years of its democracy, South Africa was embroiled in a fascinating process of counter-memorialization: that is, of reconstituting public or social memory, partly through archival methods, to reflect the new national narrative of democratization and the triumph over oppression and suffering. Most obviously, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (referred to interchangeably hereafter as the Truth Commission, or TRC) spent several years gathering testimony and documentation (now warehoused at the National Archives in Cape Town) about ‘‘gross violations of human rights’’ committed during the most violent years of apartheid, struggle, and transition. The Commission held public hearings for both victims and amnesty applicants—hearings that were video-recorded, were sometimes broadcast on television and radio, and are now archived at the South African Broadcasting Company headquarters—and transcripts of all the public hearings are available on the Internet. The TRC thus dragged into the open huge caches of information that had been violently suppressed under apartheid, and brought to a climax the intense war between the shredder and the photocopier that had been waged during the six years between Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and

Albie Sachs, Indres Naidoo, and the South African Prison Memoir

Abstract Detained by security police in 1963 and again in 1965, Albie Cachs was subjected to a “self”-destroying regime of psychological torture. Over the years he repeatedly visits the prison cell in his autobiographical and polemical writings to rewrite his “self” as an oppositional political subject. In his Jail diary of 1966, his depiction of himself emerging from months of solitary confinement without making a statement is one of a resolute individual defying his captors. But in Stephanie on trial (1968), Sachs narrates how during his second detention he broke and made a statement within twenty-four hours; he is thus forced to find another basis on which to establish an oppositional identity. He does so in part through a collaborative autobiography with Indres Naidoo, whose Robben Island (1982) depicts the more communal experience of imprisonment on the island. Sachs is thus able to continually revise his identity to meet what Paul John Eakin describes as the everchanging “needs of present consciousness”.

Review: Catherine Cole, "Performing South Africa's Truth Commission: Stages of Transition"

movement; within fifteen months, BC and all of its affiliates had been banned and Biko had been murdered by the state. The Law and the Prophets is intellectual history of the first order. It is a revealing and thought-provoking study of the messiness that attended the evolution of BC, an ideology that sought first to liberate the individual, and then a people, and ultimately, helped transform South African society.

Letters, 1963–1967

The enclosed note is the “official” one, a copy of which I’ve sent to Carmel Simmons at AMSAC (a charming girl, by the way—whom Wole knows). But this letter is to express further my happiness that things have worked out O.K. for you to come over—as I hinted they would in my last letter, meaning to write more, but have been so BUSY (and out of town lecturing, too) that I didn’t get a chance. But Bill Trent, head of the United Negro College Fund booking your tour, is an old friend of mine, and was most interested from the beginning when I told him about you on my return from Rome last summer. It just took a little time to work out the details.

Letters, 1953–1954

Nxumalo, acting as assistant editor for Drum magazine, is responding to a card that Hughes had sent to the magazine, and asks Hughes if he will act as a judge for the international short story competition and choose winners from the top ten finalists. He also asks Hughes to find “some nonwhite writers in the States” to contribute to Drum.