Event, Exceptionalism, and the Imperceptible: The Politics of Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup

This paper reads Nthikeng Mohlele's 2013 novel Small Things with a view to understanding a qualitative shift in South Africa's postapartheid historical consciousness: an emergent sense of being in "exile from history." This is not simply a relationship to history of being "post," but rather a melancholic attachment that cannot be fully relinquished. I use this lens to understand the dark satire of Mohlele's novel of Johannesburg flânerie and unrequited yearning, a narrative which seems to foreclose the forms of generative encounter so central to urban aesthetics in post-apartheid South Africa. My aim in this article is to distinguish the political desires in this novel both from the revolutionary energies and imaginaries of the liberation struggle, as well as from more recent and optimistic work on urbanism or the energies of the various fallist movements. By contrast to these, Mohlele's novel suggests that liberation might take traumatic and melancholic forms. I argue that this is not post-or anti-political literature, nor a literature of disillusionment, but rather the negotiation of a new relationship with political time that allows the post-apartheid subject to maintain an increasingly tenuous relationship with what David Scott calls the "allegory of emancipationist redemption." KEYWORDS Post-apartheid literature; temporality; Johannesburg There is a striking moment of uncanny political recognition in the 2015 art film Necktie Youth. The camera, which has tracked the lives of a group of wealthy "born frees" as they aimlessly navigate the northern suburbs of Johannesburg in a narcotic haze, partying, idling, musing on existential questions, alights for a brief moment on a portrait of Nelson Mandela adorning the plush walls of one of the suburban Johannesburg mansions that serve as their playground. This is not Mandela the fiery young political freedom fighter, but Mandela the old, triumphal sage, burnished into an icon. There is something unsettling about this portrait: it does not represent struggle but rather the end of struggle. One could go further: in the context of this film, whose margins are haunted by a stark and impoverished urban underclass, this Mandela signals a utopian promise betrayed. In Conscripts of Modernity, his magisterial study of The Black Jacobins, David Scott argues that C.L.R. James's study gave to the events of the Haitian revolution "the shape of an allegory of emancipationist redemption that embodies in a compelling way the CONTACT Timothy Wright

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“Alternative solutions for the alternative society”: labor and neoliberalism in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup

Jewell

2021

Safundi

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Event, Exceptionalism, and the Imperceptible: The Politics of Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup

Cited by 5 publications

References 13 publications

Economic Informality in South African Fiction

Economic Informality in South African Fiction

Ruined time and post-revolutionary allegory in Nthikeng Mohlele’s Small Things

“Alternative solutions for the alternative society”: labor and neoliberalism in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup

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