Table Of Content
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South African Writers
and the Politics of Place
Rita Barnard
3
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnard, Rita.
Apartheid and beyond : South African writers and the politics
of place / Rita Barnard.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-----
ISBN---
. South African literature (English)—History and criticism. . Politics
and literature—South Africa—History—th century. . Apartheid in literature.
. Place (Philosophy) in literature. . South Africa—In literature.
. South Africa—Politics and government—– I. Title.
PR..B
.'—dc
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
M
y work on this project was funded by the Research Foundation of the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, which granted me a number of summer research
fellowships to travel to South Africa, and also by the School of Arts and Sciences
of the University of Pennsylvania, which awarded me its faculty research fellow-
ship and enabled me to do some uninterrupted writing in –. I am grateful
for this support.
Thanks are also due to audience members at various other institutions where
I presented early versions of this work. The insightful comments of members of
the academic community at Dartmouth College, Duke University, Edinburgh
University, Oxford University, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the University
of Warwick, the University of the Western Cape, the University of the Witwa-
tersrand, the University of York, and the Wesleyan Humanities Center made this
a much better book than it would otherwise have been. I owe a great debt of
gratitude to many friends and colleagues who supported me in diffi cult times,
including Nina Albert, Roger Allen, Nancy Armstrong, Richard Begam, Lee Cas-
sanelli, Joe Clarke, Eric Cheyfi tz, Stuart Curran, Joan Dayan, Thadious Davis, Jane
Drucker, JoAnne Dubil, Lars Engle, Jim English, Penny Fielding, Sanjay Krish-
nan, Henrika Kuklick, Ignacio Lopez, John Marx, Michael Valdez Moses, Lydie
Moudileno, Molly Mullin, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Michèle Richman, Don Shojai,
Paola Splendore, and the late, inimitable Paul Korshin. Without the advice and
encouragement of a number of South African expatriates in the United States
vi Acknowledgments
and Britain, I would have given up long ago. I think with great affection of all of
them, especially Derek Attridge, Grant Farred, Jeremy Foster, Neil Lazarus, Carol
Muller, Rob Nixon, Mark Sanders, Andrew van der Vlies, and, way back in my
grad school days, Kay-Robert and Desirée Volkwyn. My friends and colleagues in
the South African academy, including David Attwell, Kosie de Villiers, Kai Easton,
Joan Hambidge, Michiel Heyns, Eva Hunter, Margaret Lenta, Freddie Marais,
Achille Mbembe, David Medalie, Sarah Nuttall, Stan Ridge, Marilet van Reenen,
and Ingrid Winterbach inspired me and helped to keep me more or less up to date
with South African developments. Cherryl Walker generously shared some of her
superb unpublished work on land reform with me. Cousin Dries van Heerden,
the last Boer socialist, was always a source of hopeful insight into the new South
Africa, as were my siblings, Sari, Mientjie, and Faan Barnard. The generosity, loy-
alty, and companionship of my uncle Barnie and my auntie Inge Barnard have
brightened up my life for the past thirty years. They must share much of the credit
for whatever I have managed to achieve since I arrived at Stellenbosch in ,
eager for change.
My students at Penn and Brown, including Ijeoma Akunyili, Jeff Allred, Bindi
Bhagat, Alice Brittan, Chris Dacus, Jon Eburne, Rob Faunce, Gregg Flaxman,
Jennifer Glaser, Jonathan Goldman, Matthew Hart, Stephanie Harzewski, Stephen
Hock, Chris Hunter, Darren Jaspan, Joshua Karetny, Carmen Lamas, Lars Larson,
Jacob Leland, Matthew Merlino, Cindy Port, Monica Popescu, Thangam Ravin-
dranathan, Mark Sample, Deborah Shapple, Sara Sjolund, Shivani Tibrewala, Jonah
Willihnganz, and dozens of others equally talented and dear were my staunch-
est supporters and my liveliest companions over the past ten years. The brilliant
members of the Mods and Latitudes research groups at Penn, where I presented
my work-in-progress on Coetzee and Mda, were an especially valuable source of
conversation and criticism. My research assistants Andrew Lynn and Ian Duncan
were skilled, diligent, and patient beyond their years. I would also like to thank
my three South African literature students at the Bread Loaf School in rainy, beau-
tiful southeast Alaska: Ben Foley, Eder Williams, and Karen Reyes. I will always
appreciate their imaginative reach and remember the time they “did a Toloki”—
picked bunches of wildfl owers from all over the city of Juneau—to celebrate the
conclusion of our work together. Dumela, friends! The Women’s Studies faculty
and staff at Penn made sure that I got my last chapter done. Demie Kurz, Ania
Loomba, Janice Madden, Ann Matter, Luz Marin, Anne Norton, Susan Sidlaus-
kas, and many others gave my work-in-progress the fi nest critical attention and
offered sisterly support in the fi nal stages of writing this book. Thanks, fi nally, to
Susan Chang, Elissa Morris, and Shannon McLachlan, editors at Oxford Univer-
sity Press, for their patience and professionalism.
Dana Phillips offered rigorous proofreading and stubborn love. Though I
feared throughout the years of writing this book that we would end up in the
poorhouse, I always knew that with him there the place would be neat and clean,
and full of cool music and clever words.
I gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint, in revised form, the follow-
ing articles:
Acknowledgments vii
“Dream Topographies: J. M. Coetzee and the South African Pastoral.” South
Atlantic Quarterly (Winter ): –. © by Duke University Press.
“Coetzee’s Country Ways.” Interventions (): –. © by Taylor
& Francis Ltd.
“Disgrace and the South African Pastoral.” Contemporary Literature (Summer
): –. © by the University of Wisconsin Press.
Warm thanks and acknowledgments are also due to Duke University Press
and to Novel: A Forum on Fiction for allowing me to incorporate brief parts of the
following essays into chapter :
“The Place of Beauty: Refl ections on Elaine Scarry and Zakes Mda,” in
Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, ed. Sarah Nuttall (Durham: Duke
University Press, ), –.
“On Laughter, the Grotesque, and the South African Transition: Zakes Mda’s
Ways of Dying.” Novel (Summer ): –.
I am grateful, fi nally, to Craig Fraser for allowing me to use his beautiful pho-
tograph from Shack Chic: Art and Innovation from South African Shack-Lands (Cape
Town: Quivertree, ) as the cover image for this book.
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Editions Cited xi
Introduction
One: Dream Topographies
Two: Leaving the House of the White Race
Three: Of Trespassers and Trash
Four: A Man’s Scenery
Five: Beyond the Tyranny of Place
Six: The Location of Postapartheid Culture
Notes
Index
