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

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buir.contributor.authorWright, Timothy Sean
dc.citation.epage212en_US
dc.citation.issueNumber2en_US
dc.citation.spage198en_US
dc.citation.volumeNumber45en_US
dc.contributor.authorWright, Timothy Seanen_US
dc.date.accessioned2020-02-11T11:11:36Z
dc.date.available2020-02-11T11:11:36Z
dc.date.issued2019
dc.departmentDepartment of English Language and Literatureen_US
dc.description.abstractThis paper reads Nthikeng Mohlele’s 2013 novel Small Things with a view to understanding a qualitative shift in South Africa’s post-apartheid 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.”en_US
dc.identifier.doi10.1080/02533952.2019.1619274en_US
dc.identifier.issn0253-3952
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11693/53268
dc.language.isoEnglishen_US
dc.publisherCentre for African Studiesen_US
dc.relation.isversionofhttps://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2019.1619274en_US
dc.source.titleSocial Dynamicsen_US
dc.subjectPost-apartheid literatureen_US
dc.subjectTemporalityen_US
dc.subjectJohannesburgen_US
dc.titleRuined time and post-revolutionary allegory in Nthikeng Mohlele’s Small Thingsen_US
dc.typeArticleen_US
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