Introduction: Conjectures on South African literature

“I’m not Afropolitan — I’m of the Continent”: A conversation with Yewande Omotoso

“…Rather than implying an absolute break with the past, Graham Pechey maintains that "postapartheid" is "a condition that has contradictorily always existed and yet is impossible of realisation: always existed, because apartheid as a politics of permanent and institutionalised crisis has from the beginning been shadowed by its own transgression or supersession; impossible of realisation, because the proliferating binaries of apartheid discourse will long outlive any merely political winning of freedom" (Pechey, 1994: 153). More recently, literary critics have employed the terms "post-post-apartheid" (Chapman, 2009) and "post-transitional literature" (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010) to characterize the country's literary present in terms of evolving trends that differ from apartheid themes but also from the literary engagement with the nation-building project of the 1990s. Rather than advocating an absolute break with the past, Frenkel notes that "the post-transitional can be read as a palimpsestic concept […] in that it enables a reading of the new in a way in which the layers of the past are still reflected through it" (Frenkel, 2013: 29).…”

“A Sense of an Absent Future.” Pervading Post-apartheid South African Literature: Re-conceptualisations of Temporality in André Brink’s Transitional Writings

“…While pondering the developments in South african literature beyond 2000 Chapman (2009: 3) classifies the question of how to cope with the notion and practice of difference as the key pursuit of cultural debate since the 1990s, the conundrum at the heart of not only post-apartheid debate, but also crucial to the modern-day discussions concerning post-colonialism or post-modernism, thus not only in South africa, but also globally. Given the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, which still wishes to perceive itself as predominantly white and bourgeois, or the north american debate concerning the uS own increasing and heterogeneous minorities, the topicality of the issues concerning approach to difference and sameness has indeed attained global dimensions.…”

Hyper-compressions: The rise of flash fiction in “post-transitional” South Africa

“…Certainly, the short story is “less subject to the pressure of being interpreted as national allegory (or at least, state-of-the-nation report) than the novel” (Barnard, 2012: 666). While it might equally be argued that these very characteristics suited the short story to multifarious subversions of apartheid’s grand narrative, Chapman’s and Titlestad’s contentions are further complicated by periodization of the after-apartheid into two phases: a “transitional” period encompassing the “pre-post-apartheid” negotiations of 1990–1994 (Clingman, 2012: 647) and a “post-apartheid” decade of declining optimism; followed by a “post-transitional” (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010), or “post-postapartheid” (Chapman, 2009), period of disillusionment emerging from the early 2000s as “transition” increasingly looked “a rhetorical strategy […] to positively connote an evolution and to mask and justify a social, economic, or political ‘lack’” (Popescu, 2010: 161–2). For Leon de Kock this was “plot loss writ large: most obviously, the loss of what had been celebrated so widely as the rainbow nation, or the miraculous Mandela revolution, or even just a half-decent, nonpartisan democracy administered by accountable civil servants” (2015: n.p.).…”