Zoë Wicomb's three fictional works -You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), David's Story (2000) and Playing in the Light (2006) -all engage with the question of a South African 'coloured' identity both under apartheid with its racialised discourse of black and white, and in the context of the postapartheid language of multiculturalism and creolisation. This essay examines the representation of 'colouredness' in Wicomb's writing in terms of the two different conceptions of cultural identity that Stuart Hall has defined: an essential cultural identity based on a single, shared culture, and the recognition that cultural identity is based not only on points of similarity, but also on critical points of deep and significant difference and of separate histories of rupture and discontinuity.
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